She went back to her room, and dozed and woke several times. One
o'clock had been the hour of his return on the last occasion; but it
passed now by a long way, and Fitzpiers did not come. Just before dawn
she heard the men stirring in the yard; and the flashes of their
lanterns spread every now and then through her window-blind. She
remembered that her father had told her not to be disturbed if she
noticed them, as they would be rising early to send off four loads of
hurdles to a distant sheep-fair. Peeping out, she saw them bustling
about, the hollow-turner among the rest; he was loading his
wares--wooden-bowls, dishes, spigots, spoons, cheese-vats, funnels, and
so on--upon one of her father's wagons, who carried them to the fair
for him every year out of neighborly kindness.
The scene and the occasion would have enlivened her but that her
husband was still absent; though it was now five o'clock. She could
hardly suppose him, whatever his infatuation, to have prolonged to a
later hour than ten an ostensibly professional call on Mrs. Charmond at
Middleton; and he could have ridden home in two hours and a half.
What, then, had become of him? That he had been out the greater part of
the two preceding nights added to her uneasiness.
She dressed herself, descended, and went out, the weird twilight of
advancing day chilling the rays from the lanterns, and making the men's
faces wan. As soon as Melbury saw her he came round, showing his alarm.
"Edgar is not come," she said. "And I have reason to know that he's
not attending anybody. He has had no rest for two nights before this.
I was going to the top of the hill to look for him."
"I'll come with you," said Melbury.
She begged him not to hinder himself; but he insisted, for he saw a
peculiar and rigid gloom in her face over and above her uneasiness, and
did not like the look of it. Telling the men he would be with them
again soon, he walked beside her into the turnpike-road, and partly up
the hill whence she had watched Fitzpiers the night before across the
Great White Hart or Blackmoor Valley. They halted beneath a half-dead
oak, hollow, and disfigured with white tumors, its roots spreading out
like accipitrine claws grasping the ground. A chilly wind circled
round them, upon whose currents the seeds of a neighboring lime-tree,
supported parachute-wise by the wing attached, flew out of the boughs
downward like fledglings from their nest. The vale was wrapped in a
dim atmosphere of unnaturalness, and the east was like a livid curtain
edged with pink. There was no sign nor sound of Fitzpiers.