The Woodlanders by Thomas Hardy (small books to read .txt) 📕

They walked about the Abbey aisles, and presently sat down. Not a soul was in the building save themselves. She regarded a stained window, with her head sideways, and tentatively asked him if he remembered the last time they were in that town alone.

He remembered it perfectly, and remarked, “You were a proud miss then, and as dainty as you were high. Perhaps you are now?”

Grace slowly shook her head. “Affliction has taken all that out of me,” she answered, impressively. “Perhaps I am too far the other way now.” As there was something lurking in this that she could not explain, she added, so quickly as not to allow him time to think of it, “Has my father written to you at all?”

“Yes,” said Winterborne.

She glanced ponderingly up at him. “Not about me?”

“Yes.”

His mouth was lined with charactery which told her that he had been bidden to take the hint as to the future which she had been bidden to give. The unexpected discovery sent a scarlet pulsation through Grace for the moment. However, it was only Giles who stood there, of whom she had no fear; and her self-possession returned.

“He said I was to sound you with a view to⁠—what you will understand, if you care to,” continued Winterborne, in a low voice. Having been put on this track by herself, he was not disposed to abandon it in a hurry.

They had been children together, and there was between them that familiarity as to personal affairs which only such acquaintanceship can give. “You know, Giles,” she answered, speaking in a very practical tone, “that that is all very well; but I am in a very anomalous position at present, and I cannot say anything to the point about such things as those.”

“No?” he said, with a stray air as regarded the subject. He was looking at her with a curious consciousness of discovery. He had not been imagining that their renewed intercourse would show her to him thus. For the first time he realized an unexpectedness in her, which, after all, should not have been unexpected. She before him was not the girl Grace Melbury whom he used to know. Of course, he might easily have prefigured as much; but it had never occurred to him. She was a woman who had been married; she had moved on; and without having lost her girlish modesty, she had lost her girlish shyness. The inevitable change, though known to him, had not been heeded; and it struck him into a momentary fixity. The truth was that he had never come into close comradeship with her since her engagement to Fitzpiers, with the brief exception of the evening encounter on Rub-Down Hill, when she met him with his cider apparatus; and that interview had been of too cursory a kind for insight.

Winterborne had advanced, too. He could criticise her. Times had been when to criticise a single trait in Grace Melbury would have lain as far beyond his powers as to criticise a deity. This thing was sure: it was a new woman in many ways whom he had come out to see; a creature of more ideas, more dignity, and, above all, more assurance, than the original Grace had been capable of. He could not at first decide whether he were pleased or displeased at this. But upon the whole the novelty attracted him.

She was so sweet and sensitive that she feared his silence betokened something in his brain of the nature of an enemy to her. “What are you thinking of that makes those lines come in your forehead?” she asked. “I did not mean to offend you by speaking of the time being premature as yet.”

Touched by the genuine loving-kindness which had lain at the foundation of these words, and much moved, Winterborne turned his face aside, as he took her by the hand. He was grieved that he had criticised her.

“You are very good, dear Grace,” he said, in a low voice. “You are better, much better, than you used to be.”

“How?”

He could not very well tell her how, and said, with an evasive smile, “You are prettier;” which was not what he really had meant. He then remained still holding her right hand in his own right, so that they faced in opposite ways; and as he did not let go, she ventured upon a tender remonstrance.

“I think we have gone as far as we ought to go at present⁠—and far enough to satisfy my poor father that we are the same as ever. You see, Giles, my case is not settled yet, and if⁠—Oh, suppose I never get free!⁠—there should be any hitch or informality!”

She drew a catching breath, and turned pale. The dialogue had been affectionate comedy up to this point. The gloomy atmosphere of the past, and the still gloomy horizon of the present, had been for the interval forgotten. Now the whole environment came back, the due balance of shade among the light was restored.

“It is sure to be all right, I trust?” she resumed, in uneasy accents. “What did my father say the solicitor had told him?”

“Oh⁠—that all is sure enough. The case is so clear⁠—nothing could be clearer. But the legal part is not yet quite done and finished, as is natural.”

“Oh no⁠—of course not,” she said, sunk in meek thought. “But father said it was almost⁠—did he not? Do you know anything about the new law that makes these things so easy?”

“Nothing⁠—except the general fact that it enables ill-assorted husbands and wives to part in a way they could not formerly do without an Act of Parliament.”

“Have you to sign a paper, or swear anything? Is it something like that?”

“Yes, I believe so.”

“How long has it been introduced?”

“About six months or a year, the lawyer said, I think.”

To hear these two poor Arcadian innocents talk of imperial law would have made a humane person weep who should have known what a dangerous structure they were building