He thereupon told Winterborne, as with great relief, the story of how he won away Giles’s father’s chosen one—by nothing worse than a lover’s cajoleries, it is true, but by means which, except in love, would certainly have been pronounced cruel and unfair. He explained how he had always intended to make reparation to Winterborne the father by giving Grace to Winterborne the son, till the devil tempted him in the person of Fitzpiers, and he broke his virtuous vow.
“How highly I thought of that man, to be sure! Who’d have supposed he’d have been so weak and wrong-headed as this! You ought to have had her, Giles, and there’s an end on’t.”
Winterborne knew how to preserve his calm under this unconsciously cruel tearing of a healing wound to which Melbury’s concentration on the more vital subject had blinded him. The young man endeavored to make the best of the case for Grace’s sake.
“She would hardly have been happy with me,” he said, in the dry, unimpassioned voice under which he hid his feelings. “I was not well enough educated: too rough, in short. I couldn’t have surrounded her with the refinements she looked for, anyhow, at all.”
“Nonsense—you are quite wrong there,” said the unwise old man, doggedly. “She told me only this day that she hates refinements and such like. All that my trouble and money bought for her in that way is thrown away upon her quite. She’d fain be like Marty South—think o’ that! That’s the top of her ambition! Perhaps she’s right. Giles, she loved you—under the rind; and, what’s more, she loves ye still—worse luck for the poor maid!”
If Melbury only had known what fires he was recklessly stirring up he might have held his peace. Winterborne was silent a long time. The darkness had closed in round them, and the monotonous drip of the fog from the branches quickened as it turned to fine rain.
“Oh, she never cared much for me,” Giles managed to say, as he stirred the embers with a brand.
“She did, and does, I tell ye,” said the other, obstinately. “However, all that’s vain talking now. What I come to ask you about is a more practical matter—how to make the best of things as they are. I am thinking of a desperate step—of calling on the woman Charmond. I am going to appeal to her, since Grace will not. ’Tis she who holds the balance in her hands—not he. While she’s got the will to lead him astray he will follow—poor, unpractical, lofty-notioned dreamer—and how long she’ll do it depends upon her whim. Did ye ever hear anything about her character before she came to Hintock?”
“She’s been a bit of a charmer in her time, I believe,” replied Giles, with the same level quietude, as he regarded the red coals. “One who has smiled where she has not loved and loved where she has not married. Before Mr. Charmond made her his wife she was a play-actress.”
“Hey? But how close you have kept all this, Giles! What besides?”