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

she might have thought of days earlier yet⁠—days of childhood⁠—when her mouth was somewhat more ready to receive a kiss from his than was his to bestow one. However, all that was over. She had felt superior to him then, and she felt superior to him now.

She wondered why he never looked towards her open window. She did not know that in the slight commotion caused by their arrival at the inn that afternoon Winterborne had caught sight of her through the archway, had turned red, and was continuing his work with more concentrated attention on the very account of his discovery. Robert Creedle, too, who travelled with Giles, had been incidentally informed by the hostler that Dr. Fitzpiers and his young wife were in the hotel, after which news Creedle kept shaking his head and saying to himself, “Ah!” very audibly, between his thrusts at the screw of the cider-press.

“Why the deuce do you sigh like that, Robert?” asked Winterborne, at last.

“Ah, maister⁠—’tis my thoughts⁠—’tis my thoughts!⁠ ⁠… Yes, ye’ve lost a hundred load o’ timber well seasoned; ye’ve lost five hundred pound in good money; ye’ve lost the stone-windered house that’s big enough to hold a dozen families; ye’ve lost your share of half a dozen good wagons and their horses⁠—all lost!⁠—through your letting slip she that was once yer own!”

“Good God, Creedle, you’ll drive me mad!” said Giles, sternly. “Don’t speak of that any more!”

Thus the subject had ended in the yard. Meanwhile, the passive cause of all this loss still regarded the scene. She was beautifully dressed; she was seated in the most comfortable room that the inn afforded; her long journey had been full of variety, and almost luxuriously performed⁠—for Fitzpiers did not study economy where pleasure was in question. Hence it perhaps arose that Giles and all his belongings seemed sorry and common to her for the moment⁠—moving in a plane so far removed from her own of late that she could scarcely believe she had ever found congruity therein. “No⁠—I could never have married him!” she said, gently shaking her head. “Dear father was right. It would have been too coarse a life for me.” And she looked at the rings of sapphire and opal upon her white and slender fingers that had been gifts from Fitzpiers.

Seeing that Giles still kept his back turned, and with a little of the above-described pride of life⁠—easily to be understood, and possibly excused, in a young, inexperienced woman who thought she had married well⁠—she said at last, with a smile on her lips, “Mr. Winterborne!”

He appeared to take no heed, and she said a second time, “Mr. Winterborne!”

Even now he seemed not to hear, though a person close enough to him to see the expression of his face might have doubted it; and she said a third time, with a timid loudness, “Mr. Winterborne! What, have you forgotten my voice?” She remained with her lips parted in a welcoming smile.

He turned without surprise, and came deliberately towards the window. “Why do you call me?” he said, with a sternness that took her completely unawares, his face being now pale. “Is it not enough that you see me here moiling and muddling for my daily bread while you are sitting there in your success, that you can’t refrain from opening old wounds by calling out my name?”

She flushed, and was struck dumb for some moments; but she forgave his unreasoning anger, knowing so well in what it had its root. “I am sorry I offended you by speaking,” she replied, meekly. “Believe me, I did not intend to do that. I could hardly sit here so near you without a word of recognition.”

Winterborne’s heart had swollen big, and his eyes grown moist by this time, so much had the gentle answer of that familiar voice moved him. He assured her hurriedly, and without looking at her, that he was not angry. He then managed to ask her, in a clumsy, constrained way, if she had had a pleasant journey, and seen many interesting sights. She spoke of a few places that she had visited, and so the time passed till he withdrew to take his place at one of the levers which pulled round the screw.

Forgotten her voice! Indeed, he had not forgotten her voice, as his bitterness showed. But though in the heat of the moment he had reproached her keenly, his second mood was a far more tender one⁠—that which could regard her renunciation of such as he as her glory and her privilege, his own fidelity notwithstanding. He could have declared with a contemporary poet⁠—

“If I forget,
The salt creek may forget the ocean;
If I forget
The heart whence flows my heart’s bright motion,
May I sink meanlier than the worst
Abandoned, outcast, crushed, accurst,
If I forget.

“Though you forget,
No word of mine shall mar your pleasure;
Though you forget,
You filled my barren life with treasure,
You may withdraw the gift you gave;
You still are queen, I still am slave,
Though you forget.”

She had tears in her eyes at the thought that she could not remind him of what he ought to have remembered; that not herself but the pressure of events had dissipated the dreams of their early youth. Grace was thus unexpectedly worsted in her encounter with her old friend. She had opened the window with a faint sense of triumph, but he had turned it into sadness; she did not quite comprehend the reason why. In truth it was because she was not cruel enough in her cruelty. If you have to use the knife, use it, say the great surgeons; and for her own peace Grace should have contemned Winterborne thoroughly or not at all. As it was, on closing the window an indescribable, some might have said dangerous, pity quavered in her bosom for him.

Presently her husband entered the room, and told her what a wonderful sunset there was to be seen.

“I have not noticed it. But I have seen somebody out there that we