It was past midnight when Grace arrived opposite her father’s house, now again temporarily occupied by her husband, unless he had already gone away. Ever since her emergence from the denser plantations about Winterborne’s residence a pervasive lightness had hung in the damp autumn sky, in spite of the vault of cloud, signifying that a moon of some age was shining above its arch. The two white gates were distinct, and the white balls on the pillars, and the puddles and damp ruts left by the recent rain, had a cold, corpse-eyed luminousness. She entered by the lower gate, and crossed the quadrangle to the wing wherein the apartments that had been hers since her marriage were situate, till she stood under a window which, if her husband were in the house, gave light to his bedchamber.
She faltered, and paused with her hand on her heart, in spite of herself. Could she call to her presence the very cause of all her foregoing troubles? Alas!—old Jones was seven miles off; Giles was possibly dying—what else could she do?
It was in a perspiration, wrought even more by consciousness than by exercise, that she picked up some gravel, threw it at the panes, and waited to see the result. The night-bell which had been fixed when Fitzpiers first took up his residence there still remained; but as it had fallen into disuse with the collapse of his practice, and his elopement, she did not venture to pull it now.
Whoever slept in the room had heard her signal, slight as it was. In half a minute the window was opened, and a voice said “Yes?” inquiringly. Grace recognized her husband in the speaker at once. Her effort was now to disguise her own accents.
“Doctor,” she said, in as unusual a tone as she could command, “a man is dangerously ill in One-chimney Hut, out towards Delborough, and you must go to him at once—in all mercy!”
“I will, readily.”
The alacrity, surprise, and pleasure expressed in his reply amazed her for a moment. But, in truth, they denoted the sudden relief of a man who, having got back in a mood of contrition, from erratic abandonment to fearful joys, found the soothing routine of professional practice unexpectedly opening anew to him. The highest desire of his soul just now was for a respectable life of painstaking. If this, his first summons since his return, had been to attend upon a cat or dog, he would scarcely have refused it in the circumstances.
“Do you know the way?” she asked.
“Yes,” said he.
“One-chimney Hut,” she repeated. “And—immediately!”