Her father turned away. He could hardly bear to see his whilom truthful girl brought to the humiliation of having to talk like that.
That night carking care sat beside Melbury’s pillow, and his stiff limbs tossed at its presence. “I can’t lie here any longer,” he muttered. Striking a light, he wandered about the room. “What have I done—what have I done for her?” he said to his wife, who had anxiously awakened. “I had long planned that she should marry the son of the man I wanted to make amends to; do ye mind how I told you all about it, Lucy, the night before she came home? Ah! but I was not content with doing right, I wanted to do more!”
“Don’t raft yourself without good need, George,” she replied. “I won’t quite believe that things are so much amiss. I won’t believe that Mrs. Charmond has encouraged him. Even supposing she has encouraged a great many, she can have no motive to do it now. What so likely as that she is not yet quite well, and doesn’t care to let another doctor come near her?”
He did not heed. “Grace used to be so busy every day, with fixing a curtain here and driving a tin-tack there; but she cares for no employment now!”
“Do you know anything of Mrs. Charmond’s past history? Perhaps that would throw some light upon things. Before she came here as the wife of old Charmond four or five years ago, not a soul seems to have heard aught of her. Why not make inquiries? And then do ye wait and see more; there’ll be plenty of opportunity. Time enough to cry when you know ’tis a crying matter; and ’tis bad to meet troubles half-way.”
There was some good-sense in the notion of seeing further. Melbury resolved to inquire and wait, hoping still, but oppressed between-whiles with much fear.
CHAPTER XXX.
Examine Grace as her father might, she would admit nothing. For the present, therefore, he simply watched.
The suspicion that his darling child was being slighted wrought almost a miraculous change in Melbury’s nature. No man so furtive for the time as the ingenuous countryman who finds that his ingenuousness has been abused. Melbury’s heretofore confidential candor towards his gentlemanly son-in-law was displaced by a feline stealth that did injury to his every action, thought, and mood. He knew that a woman once given to a man for life took, as a rule, her lot as it came and made the best of it, without external interference; but for the first time he asked himself why this so generally should be so. Moreover, this case was not, he argued, like ordinary cases. Leaving out the question of Grace being anything but an ordinary woman, her peculiar situation, as it were in mid-air between two planes of society, together with the loneliness of Hintock, made a husband’s neglect a far more tragical matter to her than it would be to one who had a large circle of friends to fall back upon. Wisely or unwisely, and whatever other fathers did, he resolved to fight his daughter’s battle still.
Mrs. Charmond had returned. But Hintock House scarcely gave forth signs of life, so quietly had she reentered it. He went to church at Great Hintock one afternoon as usual, there being no service at the smaller village. A few minutes before his departure, he had casually heard Fitzpiers, who was no church-goer, tell his wife that he was going to walk in the wood. Melbury entered the building and sat down in his pew; the parson came in, then Mrs. Charmond, then Mr. Fitzpiers.