Men were so strange. The thought took away from her all her former reticence, and made her action bold. She started from her seat. If the little breach, quarrel, or whatever it might be called, of yesterday, was to be healed up it must be done by her on the instant. She crossed into the orchard, and clambered through the gap after Giles, just as he was diminishing to a faun- like figure under the green canopy and over the brown floor.
Grace had been wrong--very far wrong--in assuming that the letter had no reference to herself because Giles had turned away into the wood after its perusal. It was, sad to say, because the missive had so much reference to herself that he had thus turned away. He feared that his grieved discomfiture might be observed. The letter was from Beaucock, written a few hours later than Melbury's to his daughter. It announced failure.
Giles had once done that thriftless man a good turn, and now was the moment when Beaucock had chosen to remember it in his own way.
During his absence in town with Melbury, the lawyer's clerk had naturally heard a great deal of the timber-merchant's family scheme of justice to Giles, and his communication was to inform Winterborne at the earliest possible moment that their attempt had failed, in order that the young man should not place himself in a false position towards Grace in the belief of its coming success.
The news was, in sum, that Fitzpiers's conduct had not been sufficiently cruel to Grace to enable her to snap the bond. She was apparently doomed to be his wife till the end of the chapter.
Winterborne quite forgot his superficial differences with the poor girl under the warm rush of deep and distracting love for her which the almost tragical information engendered.
To renounce her forever--that was then the end of it for him, after all. There was no longer any question about suitability, or room for tiffs on petty tastes. The curtain had fallen again between them. She could not be his. The cruelty of their late revived hope was now terrible. How could they all have been so simple as to suppose this thing could be done?
It was at this moment that, hearing some one coming behind him, he turned and saw her hastening on between the thickets. He perceived in an instant that she did not know the blighting news.
"Giles, why didn't you come across to me?" she asked, with arch reproach. "Didn't you see me sitting there ever so long?"
"Oh yes," he said, in unprepared, extemporized tones, for her unexpected presence caught him without the slightest plan of behavior in the conjuncture. His manner made her think that she had been too chiding in her speech; and a mild scarlet wave passed over her as she resolved to soften it.
"I have had another letter from my father," she hastened to continue. "He thinks he may come home this evening. And--in view of his hopes--it will grieve him if there is any little difference between us, Giles."
"There is none," he said, sadly regarding her from the face downward as he pondered how to lay the cruel truth bare.
"Still--I fear you have not quite forgiven me about my being uncomfortable at the inn."
"I have, Grace, I'm sure."
"But you speak in quite an unhappy way," she returned, coming up close to him with the most winning of the many pretty airs that appertained to her. "Don't you think you will ever be happy, Giles?"
He did not reply for some instants. "When the sun shines on the north front of Sherton Abbey--that's when my happiness will come to me!" said he, staring as it were into the earth.
"But--then that means that there is something more than my offending you in not liking The Three Tuns. If it is because I-- did not like to let you kiss me in the Abbey--well, you know, Giles, that it was not on account of my cold feelings, but because I did certainly, just then, think it was rather premature, in spite of my poor father. That was the true reason--the sole one.
But I do not want to be hard--God knows I do not," she said, her voice fluctuating. "And perhaps--as I am on the verge of freedom--I am not right, after all, in thinking there is any harm in your kissing me."
"Oh God!" said Winterborne within himself. His head was turned askance as he still resolutely regarded the ground. For the last several minutes he had seen this great temptation approaching him in regular siege; and now it had come. The wrong, the social sin, of now taking advantage of the offer of her lips had a magnitude, in the eyes of one whose life had been so primitive, so ruled by purest household laws, as Giles's, which can hardly be explained.
"Did you say anything?" she asked, timidly.
"Oh no--only that--"
"You mean that it must BE settled, since my father is coming home?" she said, gladly.
Winterborne, though fighting valiantly against himself all this while--though he would have protected Grace's good repute as the apple of his eye--was a man; and, as Desdemona said, men are not gods. In face of the agonizing seductiveness shown by her, in her unenlightened school-girl simplicity about the laws and ordinances, he betrayed a man's weakness. Since it was so--since it had come to this, that Grace, deeming herself free to do it, was virtually asking him to demonstrate that he loved her--since he could demonstrate it only too truly--since life was short and love was strong--he gave way to the temptation, notwithstanding that he perfectly well knew her to be wedded irrevocably to Fitzpiers. Indeed, he cared for nothing past or future, simply accepting the present and what it brought, desiring once in his life to clasp in his arms her he had watched over and loved so long.
