The man returned, met Fitzpiers in the lane, and told him the thing was
done. Fitzpiers went back to his house musing. Why had he carried out
this impulse--taken such wild trouble to effect a probable injury to
his own and his young wife's prospects? His motive was fantastic,
glowing, shapeless as the fiery scenery about the western sky. Mrs.
Charmond could overtly be nothing more to him than a patient now, and
to his wife, at the outside, a patron. In the unattached bachelor days
of his first sojourning here how highly proper an emotional reason for
lingering on would have appeared to troublesome dubiousness.
Matrimonial ambition is such an honorable thing.
"My father has told me that you have sent off one of the men with a
late letter to Budmouth," cried Grace, coming out vivaciously to meet
him under the declining light of the sky, wherein hung, solitary, the
folding star. "I said at once that you had finally agreed to pay the
premium they ask, and that the tedious question had been settled. When
do we go, Edgar?"
"I have altered my mind," said he. "They want too much--seven hundred
and fifty is too large a sum--and in short, I have declined to go
further. We must wait for another opportunity. I fear I am not a good
business-man." He spoke the last words with a momentary faltering at
the great foolishness of his act; for, as he looked in her fair and
honorable face, his heart reproached him for what he had done.
Her manner that evening showed her disappointment. Personally she
liked the home of her childhood much, and she was not ambitious. But
her husband had seemed so dissatisfied with the circumstances hereabout
since their marriage that she had sincerely hoped to go for his sake.
It was two or three days before he visited Mrs. Charmond again. The
morning had been windy, and little showers had sowed themselves like
grain against the walls and window-panes of the Hintock cottages. He
went on foot across the wilder recesses of the park, where slimy
streams of green moisture, exuding from decayed holes caused by old
amputations, ran down the bark of the oaks and elms, the rind below
being coated with a lichenous wash as green as emerald. They were
stout-trunked trees, that never rocked their stems in the fiercest
gale, responding to it entirely by crooking their limbs. Wrinkled like
an old crone's face, and antlered with dead branches that rose above
the foliage of their summits, they were nevertheless still
green--though yellow had invaded the leaves of other trees.