Mr. Fitzpiers’s dwelling7, on the contrary, was small, cottage-like, and comparatively modern. It had been occupied, and was in part occupied still, by a retired8 farmer and his wife, who, on the surgeon’s arrival in quest of a home, had accommodated him by receding9 from their front rooms into the kitchen quarter, whence they administered to his wants, and emerged at regular intervals10 to receive from him a not unwelcome addition to their income.
The cottage and its garden were so regular in their arrangement that they might have been laid out by a Dutch designer of the time of William and Mary. In a low, dense11 hedge, cut to wedge-shape, was a door over which the hedge formed an arch, and from the inside of the door a straight path, bordered with clipped box, ran up the slope of the garden to the porch, which was exactly in the middle of the house front, with two windows on each side. Right and left of the path were first a bed of gooseberry bushes; next of currant; next of raspberry; next of strawberry; next of old-fashioned flowers; at the corners opposite the porch being spheres of box resembling a pair of school globes. Over the roof of the house could be seen the orchard12, on yet higher ground, and behind the orchard the forest-trees, reaching up to the crest13 of the hill.
Opposite the garden door and visible from the parlor14 window was a swing-gate leading into a field, across which there ran a foot-path. The swing-gate had just been repainted, and on one fine afternoon, before the paint was dry, and while gnats15 were still dying thereon, the surgeon was standing16 in his sitting-room17 abstractedly looking out at the different pedestrians18 who passed and repassed along that route. Being of a philosophical19 stamp, he perceived that the chararter of each of these travellers exhibited itself in a somewhat amusing manner by his or her method of handling the gate.
As regarded the men, there was not much variety: they gave the gate a kick and passed through. The women were more contrasting. To them the sticky wood-work was a barricade21, a disgust, a menace, a treachery, as the case might be.
The first that he noticed was a bouncing woman with her skirts tucked up and her hair uncombed. She grasped the gate without looking, giving it a supplementary22 push with her shoulder, when the white imprint23 drew from her an exclamation24 in language not too refined. She went to the green bank, sat down and rubbed herself in the grass, cursing the while.
“Ha! ha! ha!” laughed the doctor.
The next was a girl, with her hair cropped short, in whom the surgeon recognized the daughter of his late patient, the woodman South. Moreover, a black bonnet25 that she wore by way of mourning unpleasantly reminded him that he had ordered the felling of a tree which had caused her parent’s death and Winterborne’s losses. She walked and thought, and not recklessly; but her preoccupation led her to grasp unsuspectingly the bar of the gate, and touch it with her arm. Fitzpiers felt sorry that she should have soiled that new black frock, poor as it was, for it was probably her only one. She looked at her hand and arm, seemed but little surprised, wiped off the disfigurement with an almost unmoved face, and as if without abandoning her original thoughts. Thus she went on her way.
Then there came over the green quite a different sort of personage. She walked as delicately as if she had been bred in town, and as firmly as if she had been bred in the country; she seemed one who dimly knew her appearance to be attractive, but who retained some of the charm of being ignorant of that fact by forgetting it in a general pensiveness26. She approached the gate. To let such a creature touch it even with a tip of her glove was to Fitzpiers almost like letting her proceed to tragical27 self-destruction. He jumped up and looked for his hat, but was unable to find the right one; glancing again out of the window he saw that he was too late. Having come up, she stopped, looked at the gate, picked up a little stick, and using it as a bayonet, pushed open the obstacle without touching28 it at all.
He steadily29 watched her till she had passed out of sight, recognizing her as the very young lady whom he had seen once before and been unable to identify. Whose could that emotional face be? All the others he had seen in Hintock as yet oppressed him with their crude rusticity30; the contrast offered by this suggested that she hailed from elsewhere.
Precisely31 these thoughts had occurred to him at the first time of seeing her; but he now went a little further with them, and considered that as there had been no carriage seen or heard lately in that spot she could not have come a very long distance. She must be somebody staying at Hintock House? Possibly Mrs. Charmond, of whom he had heard so much — at any rate an inmate32, and this probability was sufficient to set a mild radiance in the surgeon’s somewhat dull sky.
Fitzpiers sat down to the book he had been perusing33. It happened to be that of a German metaphysician, for the doctor was not a practical man, except by fits, and much preferred the ideal world to the real, and the discovery of principles to their application. The young lady remained in his thoughts. He might have followed her; but he was not constitutionally active, and preferred a conjectural34 pursuit. However, when he went out for a ramble35 just before dusk he insensibly took the direction of Hintock House, which was the way that Grace had been walking, it having happened that her mind had run on Mrs. Charmond that day, and she had walked to the brow of a hill whence the house could be seen, returning by another route.
Fitzpiers in his turn reached the edge of the glen, overlooking the manor-house. The shutters36 were shut, and only one chimney smoked. The mere38 aspect of the place was enough to inform him that Mrs. Charmond had gone away and that nobody else was staying there. Fitzpiers felt a vague disappointment that the young lady was not Mrs. Charmond, of whom he had heard so much; and without pausing longer to gaze at a carcass from which the spirit had flown, he bent39 his steps homeward.
Later in the evening Fitzpiers was summoned to visit a cottage patient about two miles distant. Like the majority of young practitioners40 in his position he was far from having assumed the dignity of being driven his rounds by a servant in a brougham that flashed the sunlight like a mirror; his way of getting about was by means of a gig which he drove himself, hitching41 the rein42 of the horse to the gate post, shutter37 hook, or garden paling of the domicile under visitation, or giving pennies to little boys to hold the animal during his stay — pennies which were well earned when the cases to be attended were of a certain cheerful kind that wore out the patience of the little boys.
On this account of travelling alone, the night journeys which Fitzpiers had frequently to take were dismal43 enough, a serious apparent perversity44 in nature ruling that whenever there was to be a birth in a particularly inaccessible45 and lonely place, that event should occur in the night. The surgeon, having been of late years a town man, hated the solitary46 midnight woodland. He was not altogether skilful47 with the reins48, and it often occurred to his mind that if in some remote depths of the trees an accident were to happen, the fact of his being alone might be the death of him. Hence he made a practice of picking up any countryman or lad whom he chanced to pass by, and under the disguise of treating him to a nice drive, obtained his companionship on the journey, and his convenient assistance in opening gates.
The doctor had started on his way out of the village on the night in question when the light of his lamps fell upon the musing20 form of Winterborne, walking leisurely49 along, as if he had no object in life. Winterborne was a better class of companion than the doctor usually could get, and he at once pulled up and asked him if he would like a drive through the wood that fine night.
Giles seemed rather surprised at the doctor’s friendliness50, but said that he had no objection, and accordingly mounted beside Mr. Fitzpiers.
They drove along under the black boughs52 which formed a network upon the stars, all the trees of a species alike in one respect, and no two of them alike in another. Looking up as they passed under a horizontal bough51 they sometimes saw objects like large tadpoles53 lodged55 diametrically across it, which Giles explained to be pheasants there at roost; and they sometimes heard the report of a gun, which reminded him that others knew what those tadpole54 shapes represented as well as he.
Presently the doctor said what he had been going to say for some time:
“Is there a young lady staying in this neighborhood — a very attractive girl — with a little white boa round her neck, and white fur round her gloves?”
Winterborne of course knew in a moment that Grace, whom he had caught the doctor peering at, was represented by these accessaries. With a wary56 grimness, partly in his character, partly induced by the circumstances, he evaded57 an answer by saying, “I saw a young lady talking to Mrs. Charmond the other day; perhaps it was she.”
Fitzpiers concluded from this that Winterborne had not seen him looking over the hedge. “It might have been,” he said. “She is quite a gentlewoman — the one I mean. She cannot be a permanent resident in Hintock or I should have seen her before. Nor does she look like one.”
“She is not staying at Hintock House?”
“No; it is closed.”
“Then perhaps she is staying at one of the cottages, or farm-houses?”
“Oh no — you mistake. She was a different sort of girl altogether.” As Giles was nobody, Fitzpiers treated him accordingly, and apostrophized the night in continuation:
“‘She moved upon this earth a shape of brightness,
A power, that from its objects scarcely drew
One impulse of her being — in her lightness
Most like some radiant cloud of morning dew,
Which wanders through the waste air’s pathless blue,
To nourish some far desert: she did seem
Beside me, gathering58 beauty as she grew,
Like the bright shade of some immortal59 dream
Which walks, when tempests sleep, the wave of life’s dark
stream.’”
The consummate60 charm of the lines seemed to Winterborne, though he divined that they were a quotation61, to be somehow the result of his lost love’s charms upon Fitzpiers.
“You seem to be mightily62 in love with her, sir,” he said, with a sensation of heart-sickness, and more than ever resolved not to mention Grace by name.
“Oh no — I am not that, Winterborne; people living insulated, as I do by the solitude63 of this place, get charged with emotive fluid like a Leyden-jar with electric, for want of some conductor at hand to disperse64 it. Human love is a subjective65 thing — the essence itself of man, as that great thinker Spinoza the philosopher says — ipsa hominis essentia — it is joy accompanied by an idea which we project against any suitable object in the line of our vision, just as the rainbow iris66 is projected against an oak, ash, or elm tree indifferently. So that if any other young lady had appeared instead of the one who did appear, I should have felt just the same interest in her, and have quoted precisely the same lines from Shelley about her, as about this one I saw. Such miserable67 creatures of circumstance are we all!”
“Well, it is what we call being in love down in these parts, whether or no,” said Winterborne.
“You are right enough if you admit that I am in love with something in my own head, and no thing in itself outside it at all.”
“Is it part of a country doctor’s duties to learn that view of things, may I ask, sir?” said Winterborne, adopting the Socratic {Greek word: irony} with such well-assumed simplicity68 that Fitzpiers answered, readily,
“Oh no. The real truth is, Winterborne, that medical practice in places like this is a very rule-of-thumb matter; a bottle of bitter stuff for this and that old woman — the bitterer the better — compounded from a few simple stereotyped69 prescriptions70; occasional attendance at births, where mere presence is almost sufficient, so healthy and strong are the people; and a lance for an abscess now and then. Investigation71 and experiment cannot be carried on without more appliances than one has here — though I have attempted it a little.”
Giles did not enter into this view of the case; what he had been struck with was the curious parallelism between Mr. Fitzpiers’s manner and Grace’s, as shown by the fact of both of them straying into a subject of discourse72 so engrossing73 to themselves that it made them forget it was foreign to him.
Nothing further passed between himself and the doctor in relation to Grace till they were on their way back. They had stopped at a way-side inn for a glass of brandy and cider hot, and when they were again in motion, Fitzpiers, possibly a little warmed by the liquor, resumed the subject by saying, “I should like very much to know who that young lady was.”
“What difference can it make, if she’s only the tree your rainbow falls on?”
“Ha! ha! True.”
“You have no wife, sir?”
“I have no wife, and no idea of one. I hope to do better things than marry and settle in Hintock. Not but that it is well for a medical man to be married, and sometimes, begad, ‘twould be pleasant enough in this place, with the wind roaring round the house, and the rain and the boughs beating against it. I hear that you lost your life-holds by the death of South?”
“I did. I lost in more ways than one.”
They had reached the top of Hintock Lane or Street, if it could be called such where three-quarters of the road-side consisted of copse and orchard. One of the first houses to be passed was Melbury’s. A light was shining from a bedroom window facing lengthwise of the lane. Winterborne glanced at it, and saw what was coming. He had withheld74 an answer to the doctor’s inquiry75 to hinder his knowledge of Grace; but, as he thought to himself, “who hath gathered the wind in his fists? who hath bound the waters in a garment?” he could not hinder what was doomed76 to arrive, and might just as well have been outspoken77. As they came up to the house, Grace’s figure was distinctly visible, drawing the two white curtains together which were used here instead of blinds.
“Why, there she is!” said Fitzpiers. “How does she come there?”
“In the most natural way in the world. It is her home. Mr. Melbury is her father.”
“Oh, indeed — indeed — indeed! How comes he to have a daughter of that stamp?”
Winterborne laughed coldly. “Won’t money do anything,” he said, “if you’ve promising79 material to work upon? Why shouldn’t a Hintock girl, taken early from home, and put under proper instruction, become as finished as any other young lady, if she’s got brains and good looks to begin with?”
“No reason at all why she shouldn’t,” murmured the surgeon, with reflective disappointment. “Only I didn’t anticipate quite that kind of origin for her.”
“And you think an inch or two less of her now.” There was a little tremor80 in Winterborne’s voice as he spoke78.
“Well,” said the doctor, with recovered warmth, “I am not so sure that I think less of her. At first it was a sort of blow; but, dammy! I’ll stick up for her. She’s charming, every inch of her!”
“So she is,” said Winterborne, “but not to me.”
From this ambiguous expression of the reticent81 woodlander’s, Dr. Fitzpiers inferred that Giles disliked Miss Melbury because of some haughtiness82 in her bearing towards him, and had, on that account, withheld her name. The supposition did not tend to diminish his admiration83 for her.
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1
pretension
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| n.要求；自命，自称；自负 | |
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manor
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| n.庄园，领地 | |
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manorial
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| adj.庄园的 | |
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snug
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| adj.温暖舒适的，合身的，安全的；v.使整洁干净，舒适地依靠，紧贴；n.（英）酒吧里的私房 | |
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domain
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| n.(活动等)领域，范围；领地，势力范围 | |
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unaware
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| a.不知道的，未意识到的 | |
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dwelling
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| n.住宅，住所，寓所 | |
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retired
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| adj.隐退的，退休的，退役的 | |
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receding
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| v.逐渐远离( recede的现在分词 )；向后倾斜；自原处后退或避开别人的注视；尤指问题 | |
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intervals
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| n.[军事]间隔( interval的名词复数 )；间隔时间；[数学]区间；（戏剧、电影或音乐会的）幕间休息 | |
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dense
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| a.密集的，稠密的，浓密的；密度大的 | |
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orchard
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| n.果园，果园里的全部果树，(美俚)棒球场 | |
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crest
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| n.顶点；饰章；羽冠；vt.达到顶点；vi.形成浪尖 | |
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14
parlor
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| n.店铺，营业室；会客室，客厅 | |
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15
gnats
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| n.叮人小虫( gnat的名词复数 ) | |
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standing
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| n.持续，地位；adj.永久的，不动的，直立的，不流动的 | |
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17
sitting-room
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| n.（BrE）客厅，起居室 | |
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18
pedestrians
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| n.步行者( pedestrian的名词复数 ) | |
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19
philosophical
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| adj.哲学家的，哲学上的，达观的 | |
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musing
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| n. 沉思，冥想 adj. 沉思的, 冥想的 动词muse的现在分词形式 | |
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21
barricade
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| n.路障，栅栏，障碍；vt.设路障挡住 | |
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supplementary
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| adj.补充的，附加的 | |
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imprint
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| n.印痕，痕迹；深刻的印象；vt.压印，牢记 | |
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24
exclamation
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| n.感叹号，惊呼，惊叹词 | |
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25
bonnet
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| n.无边女帽；童帽 | |
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26
pensiveness
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| n.pensive（沉思的）的变形 | |
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27
tragical
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| adj. 悲剧的, 悲剧性的 | |
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28
touching
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| adj.动人的，使人感伤的 | |
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29
steadily
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| adv.稳定地；不变地；持续地 | |
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30
rusticity
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| n.乡村的特点、风格或气息 | |
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31
precisely
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| adv.恰好，正好，精确地，细致地 | |
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32
inmate
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| n.被收容者；(房屋等的)居住人；住院人 | |
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33
perusing
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| v.读（某篇文字）( peruse的现在分词 )；（尤指）细阅；审阅；匆匆读或心不在焉地浏览（某篇文字） | |
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conjectural
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| adj.推测的 | |
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35
ramble
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| v.漫步，漫谈，漫游；n.漫步，闲谈，蔓延 | |
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36
shutters
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| 百叶窗( shutter的名词复数 )； （照相机的）快门 | |
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37
shutter
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| n.百叶窗；(照相机)快门；关闭装置 | |
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38
mere
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| adj.纯粹的；仅仅，只不过 | |
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39
bent
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| n.爱好，癖好；adj.弯的；决心的，一心的 | |
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40
practitioners
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| n.习艺者，实习者( practitioner的名词复数 )；从业者（尤指医师） | |
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41
hitching
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| 搭乘； （免费）搭乘他人之车( hitch的现在分词 )； 搭便车； 攀上； 跃上 | |
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42
rein
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| n.疆绳，统治，支配；vt.以僵绳控制，统治 | |
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43
dismal
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| adj.阴沉的，凄凉的，令人忧郁的，差劲的 | |
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44
perversity
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| n.任性；刚愎自用 | |
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45
inaccessible
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| adj.达不到的，难接近的 | |
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46
solitary
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| adj.孤独的，独立的，荒凉的；n.隐士 | |
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47
skilful
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| (=skillful)adj.灵巧的，熟练的 | |
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48
reins
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| 感情，激情； 缰( rein的名词复数 )； 控制手段； 掌管； （成人带着幼儿走路以防其走失时用的）保护带 | |
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49
leisurely
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| adj.悠闲的；从容的，慢慢的 | |
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50
friendliness
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| n.友谊，亲切，亲密 | |
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51
bough
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| n.大树枝，主枝 | |
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52
boughs
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| 大树枝( bough的名词复数 ) | |
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53
tadpoles
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| n.蝌蚪( tadpole的名词复数 ) | |
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54
tadpole
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| n.[动]蝌蚪 | |
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55
lodged
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| v.存放( lodge的过去式和过去分词 )；暂住；埋入；（权利、权威等）归属 | |
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56
wary
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| adj.谨慎的，机警的，小心的 | |
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evaded
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| 逃避( evade的过去式和过去分词 )； 避开； 回避； 想不出 | |
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gathering
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| n.集会，聚会，聚集 | |
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immortal
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| adj.不朽的；永生的，不死的；神的 | |
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consummate
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| adj.完美的；v.成婚；使完美 [反]baffle | |
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quotation
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| n.引文，引语，语录；报价，牌价，行情 | |
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62
mightily
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| ad.强烈地；非常地 | |
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63
solitude
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| n. 孤独; 独居,荒僻之地,幽静的地方 | |
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64
disperse
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| vi.使分散；使消失；vt.分散；驱散 | |
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subjective
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| a.主观(上)的，个人的 | |
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iris
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| n.虹膜，彩虹 | |
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miserable
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| adj.悲惨的，痛苦的；可怜的，糟糕的 | |
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68
simplicity
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| n.简单，简易；朴素；直率，单纯 | |
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stereotyped
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| adj.(指形象、思想、人物等)模式化的 | |
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70
prescriptions
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| 药( prescription的名词复数 )； 处方； 开处方； 计划 | |
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71
investigation
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| n.调查，调查研究 | |
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72
discourse
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| n.论文，演说；谈话；话语；vi.讲述，著述 | |
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73
engrossing
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| adj.使人全神贯注的，引人入胜的v.使全神贯注( engross的现在分词 ) | |
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74
withheld
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| withhold过去式及过去分词 | |
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75
inquiry
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| n.打听，询问，调查，查问 | |
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76
doomed
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| 命定的 | |
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77
outspoken
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| adj.直言无讳的，坦率的，坦白无隐的 | |
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78
spoke
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| n.（车轮的）辐条；轮辐；破坏某人的计划；阻挠某人的行动 v.讲，谈（speak的过去式）；说；演说；从某种观点来说 | |
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79
promising
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| adj.有希望的，有前途的 | |
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80
tremor
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| n.震动，颤动，战栗，兴奋，地震 | |
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81
reticent
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| adj.沉默寡言的；言不如意的 | |
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82
haughtiness
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| n.傲慢；傲气 | |
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83
admiration
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| n.钦佩，赞美，羡慕 | |
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