The troubled Grace took the letter to her father, who now continued for
long hours by the fireless summer chimney-corner, as if he thought it
were winter, the pitcher of cider standing beside him, mostly untasted,
and coated with a film of dust. After reading it he looked up.
"You sha'n't go," said he.
"I had felt I would not," she answered. "But I did not know what you
would say."
"If he comes and lives in England, not too near here and in a
respectable way, and wants you to come to him, I am not sure that I'll
oppose him in wishing it," muttered Melbury. "I'd stint myself to keep
you both in a genteel and seemly style. But go abroad you never shall
with my consent."
There the question rested that day. Grace was unable to reply to her
husband in the absence of an address, and the morrow came, and the next
day, and the evening on which he had requested her to meet him.
Throughout the whole of it she remained within the four walls of her
room.
The sense of her harassment, carking doubt of what might be impending,
hung like a cowl of blackness over the Melbury household. They spoke
almost in whispers, and wondered what Fitzpiers would do next. It was
the hope of every one that, finding she did not arrive, he would return
again to France; and as for Grace, she was willing to write to him on
the most kindly terms if he would only keep away.
The night passed, Grace lying tense and wide awake, and her relatives,
in great part, likewise. When they met the next morning they were pale
and anxious, though neither speaking of the subject which occupied all
their thoughts. The day passed as quietly as the previous ones, and
she began to think that in the rank caprice of his moods he had
abandoned the idea of getting her to join him as quickly as it was
formed. All on a sudden, some person who had just come from Sherton
entered the house with the news that Mr. Fitzpiers was on his way home
to Hintock. He had been seen hiring a carriage at the Earl of Wessex
Hotel.
Her father and Grace were both present when the intelligence was
announced.
"Now," said Melbury, "we must make the best of what has been a very bad
matter. The man is repenting; the partner of his shame, I hear, is
gone away from him to Switzerland, so that Chapter of his life is
probably over. If he chooses to make a home for ye I think you should
not say him nay, Grace. Certainly he cannot very well live at Hintock
without a blow to his pride; but if he can bear that, and likes Hintock
best, why, there's the empty wing of the house as it was before."