He then gave her a few directions bearing upon his professional engagements and other practical matters, concluding without a hint of his destination, or a notion of when she would see him again. He offered to read the note to Felice before he closed it up, but she would not hear or see it; that side of his obligations distressed her beyond endurance. She turned away from Fitzpiers, and sobbed bitterly.
“If you can get this posted at a place some miles away,” he whispered, exhausted by the effort of writing—“at Shottsford or Port-Bredy, or still better, Budmouth—it will divert all suspicion from this house as the place of my refuge.”
“I will drive to one or other of the places myself—anything to keep it unknown,” she murmured, her voice weighted with vague foreboding, now that the excitement of helping him had passed away.
Fitzpiers told her that there was yet one thing more to be done. “In creeping over the fence on to the lawn,” he said, “I made the rail bloody, and it shows rather much on the white paint—I could see it in the dark. At all hazards it should be washed off. Could you do that also, Felice?”
What will not women do on such devoted occasions? weary as she was she went all the way down the rambling staircases to the ground-floor, then to search for a lantern, which she lighted and hid under her cloak; then for a wet sponge, and next went forth into the night. The white railing stared out in the darkness at her approach, and a ray from the enshrouded lantern fell upon the blood—just where he had told her it would be found. She shuddered. It was almost too much to bear in one day—but with a shaking hand she sponged the rail clean, and returned to the house.
The time occupied by these several proceedings was not much less than two hours. When all was done, and she had smoothed his extemporized bed, and placed everything within his reach that she could think of, she took her leave of him, and locked him in.
CHAPTER XXXVII.
When her husband’s letter reached Grace’s hands, bearing upon it the postmark of a distant town, it never once crossed her mind that Fitzpiers was within a mile of her still. She felt relieved that he did not write more bitterly of the quarrel with her father, whatever its nature might have been; but the general frigidity of his communication quenched in her the incipient spark that events had kindled so shortly before.
From this centre of information it was made known in Hintock that the doctor had gone away, and as none but the Melbury household was aware that he did not return on the night of his accident, no excitement manifested itself in the village.
Thus the early days of May passed by. None but the nocturnal birds and animals observed that late one evening, towards the middle of the month, a closely wrapped figure, with a crutch under one arm and a stick in his hand, crept out from Hintock House across the lawn to the shelter of the trees, taking thence a slow and laborious walk to the nearest point of the turnpike-road. The mysterious personage was so disguised that his own wife would hardly have known him. Felice Charmond was a practised hand at make-ups, as well she might be; and she had done her utmost in padding and painting Fitzpiers with the old materials of her art in the recesses of the lumber-room.