 Chapter 7 of The Woodlanders Kaleidoscopic dreams of a weird alchemist surgeon, grammar Oliver Skeleton, and the face of Giles Winterborne brought Grace Melbury to the morning of the next day. It was fine. A north wind was blowing, that not unacceptable compromise between the atmospheric cutlery of the eastern blast and the spongy gales of the west quarter. She looked from her window in the direction of the light of the previous evening, and could just discern through the trees the shape of the surgeon's house. Somehow in the broad practical daylight that unknown and lonely gentleman seemed to be shorn of much of the interest which had invested his personality and pursuits in the hours of darkness, and as Grace's dressing proceeded he faded from her mind. Meanwhile, Winterborne, though half assured of her father's favour, was rendered a little restless by Miss Melbury's behaviour. Despite his dry self-control he could not help looking continually from his own door towards the timber merchants, in the probability of somebody's emerging therefrom. His attention was at length justified by the appearance of two figures, that of Melbury himself and Grace beside him. They stepped out in a direction towards the densest quarter of the wood, and Winterborne walked contemplatively behind them, till all three were soon under the trees. Although the time of bare boughs had now set in there were sheltered hollows amid the Hintock plantations and copses in which a more tardy leave-taking than on windy summits was the rule with the foliage. This caused here and there an apparent mixture of the seasons, so that in some of the dels that they passed by, hollyberries in full red were found growing beside oak and hazel whose leaves were as yet not far removed from green, and brambles whose verger was rich and deep as in the month of August. To Grace these well-known peculiarities were as an old painting restored. Now could be beheld that change from the handsome to the curious which the features of a wood undergo at the ingress of the winter months. Angles were taking the place of curves and reticulations of surfaces. A change constituting a sudden lapse from the ornate to the primitive on Nature's canvas and comparable to a retrogressive step from the art of an advanced school of painting to that of the Pacific Islander. The orn followed, and kept his eye upon the two figures as they threaded away through these silven phenomena. Mr. Melbury's long legs and gaiters drawn up to the bone at the ankles, his slight stoop, his habit of getting lost in thought, and arousing himself with an exclamation of, ah! Accompanied was an upward jerk of the head, composed of personages recognisable by his neighbours as far as he could be seen. It seemed as if the squirrels and birds knew him. One of the former would occasionally run from the path to hide behind the arm of some tree, which the little animal carefully edged around, Parry Pasu, with Melbury and his daughter's movement onward, assuming a mock manner, as though he were saying, Ho-ho! you're only a timber-merchant and carry no gun. They went noiselessly over mats of starry moss, rustled through interspersed tracts of leaves, skirted trunks with spreading roots, whose mossed rinds made them like hands wearing green gloves, elbowed old elms and ashes with great forks, in which stood pools of water that overflowed on rainy days, and ran down their stems in green cascades. On older trees still than these, huge lobes of fungi grew like lungs. Here, as everywhere, the unfulfilled intention, which makes life what it is, was as obvious as it could be among the depraved crowds of a city slum. The leaf was deformed, the curve was crippled, the taper was uninterrupted, the lichen ate the vigor of the stalk, and the ivy slowly strangled to death the promising sapling. They dived amid beaches under which nothing grew, the younger boughs still retaining their hectic leaves that rustled in the breeze, with the sound almost metallic, like the sheet-iron foliage of the fabled jarn-vid wood. Some flecks of white and graces drapery had enabled Giles to keep her and her father in view till this time, but now he lost sight of them, and was obliged to follow it by ear, no difficult matter, for on the line of their course every wood-pigeon rose from its perch with a continued clash, dashing its wings against the branches with well-knife force enough to break every quill. By taking the track of this noise he soon came to a style. Was it worthwhile to go further? He examined the doughy soil at the foot of the style, and saw among the large sole and heel tracks an impression of a sleight-er kind from a boot that was obviously not local, for winter-born knew all the cobbler's patterns in that district because there were very few to know. The mud-picture was enough to make him swing himself over and proceed. The character of the woodland now changed. The bases of the smaller trees were nibbled bare by rabbits, and at diverse points heaps of fresh-made chips and the newly-cut stool of a tree stared white through the undergrowth. There had been a large fall of timber this year which explained the meaning of some sounds that soon reached him. A voice was shouting intermittently in a sort of human bark which reminded Giles that there was a sale of trees and faggots that very day. Melbury would naturally be present. Thereupon winter-born remembered that he himself wanted a few faggots, and entered upon the scene. A large group of buyers stood round the auctioneer, or followed him when between his pauses he wandered on from one lot of plantation produce to another, like some philosopher of the peripathetic school delivering his lectures in the shady groves of the Lyceum. His companions were timber-dealers, yeomen, farmers, villagers, and others—mostly woodland men—who on that account could afford to be curious in their walking-sticks, which consequently exhibited various monstrosities of vegetation—the chief, being corkscrew shapes in black and white torn, brought to that pattern by the slow torture of an encircling wood-bind during their growth, as the Chinese have been said to mould human beings into grotesque toys by continued compression and infancy. Two women wearing men's jackets and their gowns conducted in the rear of the halting procession a pony-cart containing a tapped barrel of beer, from which they drew and replenished horns that were handed round with bread and cheese from a basket. The auctioneer adjusted himself to circumstances by using his walking-stick as a hammer, and knocked down the lot on any convenient object that took his fancy, such as the crown of a little boy's head, or the shoulders of a bystander who had no business there except to taste the brew. A proceeding which would have been deemed humorous, but for the air of stern rigidity which that auctioneer's face preserved, intending to show that the eccentricity was a result of that absence of mind which is engendered by the press of affairs, and no freak of fancy at all. Mr. Melbury stood slightly apart from the rest of the parapethetics, and Grace beside him, clinging closely to his arm, her modern attire, looking almost odd where everything else was old-fashioned, and throwing over the familiar garniture of the trees a homeliness that seemed to demand improvement by the addition of a few contemporary novelties also. Grace seemed to regard the selling with the interests which attaches to memories revived after an interval of obliviousness. Winterborn went and stood close to them. The timber-merchant spoke and continued his buying. Grace merely smiled. To justify his presence there, Winterborn began bidding for timber and faggots that he did not want, pursuing the occupation in an abstracted mood, in which the auctioneer's voice seemed to become one of the natural sounds of the woodland. A few flakes of snow descended, at the sight of which a robin alarmed at these signs of imminent winter, and seeing that no offence was meant by the human invasion, came and perched on the tip of the faggots that were being sold, and looked into the auctioneer's face, while waiting for some chance crumb from the bread-basket. Standing a little behind Grace, Winterborn observed how one flake would sail downward and settle on a curl of her hair, and how another would shoot her shoulder, and another the edge of her bonnet, which took up so much of his attention that his biddings proceeded incoherently, and when the auctioneer said, every now and then, with the knot towards him, "'Yours, Mr. Winterborn!' he had no idea whether he had bought faggots, poles, or logwood. He regretted with some causticity of humour that our father should show such inequalities of temperament as to keep Grace tightly on his arm to-day, when he had quite lately seemed anxious to recognise their betrothal as a fact, and thus musing and joining in no conversation with other buyers except when directly addressed. He followed the assemblage hither and thither, till at the end of the auction, when Giles for the first time realised what his purchases had been. Hundreds of faggots and diverse lots of timber had been set down to him, when all he had required had been a few bundles of spray for his odd man Robert Creedle's use in baking and lighting fires. Business being over, he turned to speak to the timber-merchant, but Melbury's manner was short and distant, and Grace, too, looked vexed and reproachful. Winterborn then discovered that he had been unwittingly bidding against her father and picking up his favourite lots in spite of him. With a very few words they left his spot and pursued their way homeward. Giles was extremely sorry at what he had done, and remained standing under the trees, all the other men having strayed silently away. He saw Melbury and his daughter pass down a glade without looking back. While they moved slowly through it, a lady appeared on horseback in the middle distance, the line of her progress converging upon that of Melbury's. They met. Melbury took off his hat, and she reigned in her horse. The conversation was evidently in progress between Grace and her father and this equestrian, in whom he was almost sure that he recognised Mrs. Charmond, less by her outline than by the livery of the groom, who had halted some yards off. The interlocutors did not part till after a prolonged pause, during which time much seemed to be said. When Melbury and Grace resumed their walk, it was with something of a lighter tread than before. Winterborn then pursued his own course homeward. He was unwilling to let coldness grow up between himself and the Melbury's for any trivial reason, and in the evening he went to their house. Drawing near the gate, his attention was attracted by the sight of one of the bedrooms, blinking into a state of illumination. In it stood Grace, lighting several candles, her right hand elevating the taper, her left hand on her bosom, her face thoughtfully fixed on each wick as it kindled, as if she saw, in every flame's growth, the rise of a life to maturity. He wondered what such unusual brilliancy could mean to-night. On getting indoors he found her father and stepmother in a state of suppressed excitement, which at first he could not comprehend. "'I am sorry about my biddings today,' said Giles. I don't know what I was doing. I have come to say that any of the lots you may require are yours.' "'Oh, never mind, never mind,' replied the timber-merchant, with a slight wave of his hand. I have so much else to think of that I nearly forgot it. And just now, too, there are matters of a different kind from trade to attend to, so don't let it concern you.' As the timber-merchant spoke, as it were, down to him from a higher moral plane than his own, Giles turned to Mrs. Melbury. "'Grace is going to the house to-morrow,' she said quietly. She is looking out her things now. But dare say she is wanting me this minute to assist her?' Thereupon Mrs. Melbury left the room. Everything is more remarkable than the independent personality of the tongue now and then. Mr. Melbury knew that his words had been a sort of boast. He decried boasting, particularly to Giles, yet whenever the subject was Grace his judgment resigned the ministry of speech in spite of him. Winterborne felt surprise, pleasure, and also a little apprehension at the news. He repeated Mrs. Melbury's words. "'Yes,' said parental pride. Not sorry to have dragged out of him, what he could not in any circumstances have kept in.' Coming home from the woods this afternoon we met Mrs. Charmond out for a ride. She spoke to me on a little matter of business, and then got acquainted with Grace. It was wonderful how she took to Grace in a few minutes, and that free masonry of education made them close at once. Early enough she was amazed at such an article, ha, could come out of my house. At last it led to Mrs. Grace being asked to the house, so she's busy hunting up her frills and four-belows to go in. As Giles remained in thought without responding Melbury continued, but I'll call her downstairs. "'No, no, don't do that, since she's busy,' said Winterborne. Melbury, feeling from the young man's manner that his own talk had been too much at Giles, and too little to him, repented at once. His face changed, and he said in lower tones with an effort. Is she's yours, Giles, as far as I'm concerned?' "'Thanks, my best thanks. But I think, since it's all right between us about the biddings, that I'll not interrupt her now. I'll step homeward, and call another time.' On leaving the house he looked up at the bedroom again. Grace, surrounded by a sufficient number of candles to answer all purposes of self-criticism, was standing before a chivalr glass that her father had lately bought expressly for her use. She was bonneted, cloaked, and gloved, and glanced over her shoulder into the mirror, estimating her aspect. Her face was lit with the natural elation of a young girl hoping to inaugurate on the morrow an intimate acquaintance with a new, interesting, and powerful friend. CHAPTER VIII. The inspirating appointment which had led Grace Melbury to indulge in a six-candle illumination for the arrangement of her attire, carried her over the ground the next morning with a springy tread. Her sense of being properly appreciated on her own native soil seemed to brighten the atmosphere and her ridge around her, as the glow-worm's lamp irradiates the grass. Thus she moved along, a vessel of emotion going to empty itself on she knew not what. Twenty minutes walking through copses, over a style, and along an upland lawn, brought her to the verge of a deep glen, at the bottom of which Hintock House appeared immediately beneath her eye. To describe it as standing in a hollow, would not express the situation of the manor-house, it stood in a hole, notwithstanding that the hole was full of beauty. From the spot which Grace had reached, a stone could easily have been thrown over or into the birds-nested chimneys of the mansion. Its walls were surmounted by a battlement parapet, but the gray-led roofs were quite visible behind it, with their gutters, laps, rolled, and skylights, together with in-sized letterings and shoe-patterns cut by idlers thereon. The front of the house exhibited an ordinary manorial presentation of Elizabethan windows, mullioned and hooded, worked in rich snuff-coloured freestone from local quarries. The asher of the walls, where not overgrown with ivy and other creepers, was coated with lichen of every shade, intensifying its luxurience with its nearness to the ground, till below the plinth it merged in moss. Above the house to the back was a dense plantation, the roots of whose trees were above the level of the chimneys, the corresponding high-ground on which gray stood was richly grassed with only an old tree here and there. A few sheep lay about, which, as illuminated, looked quietly into the bedroom windows. The situation of the house, prejudicial to humanity, was a stimulus to vegetation, on which account an endless shearing of the heavy-armed ivy was necessary, and a continual lopping of trees and shrubs. It was an edifice built in times when human constitutions were damp-proof, when shelter from the boisterous was all that men thought of in choosing a dwelling-place, the insidious being beneath their notice, and its hollow sight was an ocular reminder, by its own fitness from modern lives, of the fragility to which these have declined. The highest architectural cunning could have done nothing to make Hintock House dry and salubrious, and ruthless ignorance could have done little to make it unpicturesque. It was vegetable nature's own home, a spot to inspire the painter and poet of still life, as they did not suffer too much from the relaxing atmosphere, and to draw groans from the gregariously disposed. Grace descended the green escarpment by a zigzag path into the drive, which swept round beneath the slope. The exterior of the house had been familiar to her from childhood, but she had never been inside, and the approach to knowing an old thing in a new way was a lively experience. It was with a little flutter that she was shown in, but she reculated that Mrs. Sharman would probably be alone. Up to a few days before this time that lady had been accompanied in her comings, staying's and going's by a relative, believed to be her aunt. Laterally, however, these two ladies had separated, owing it was supposed to a quarrel, and Mrs. Sharman had been left desolate. Being presumably a woman who did not care for solitude, this deprivation might possibly account for her sudden interest in Grace. Mrs. Sharman was at the end of a gallery, opening from the hall when Miss Melbury was announced, and saw her through the glass doors between them. She came forward with a smile on her face, and told the young girl it was good of her to come. Ah! You have noticed those. She said, seeing that Grace's eyes were attracted by some curious objects against the walls. They are mantraps. My husband was a connoisseur in mantraps, and spring-guns and such articles, collecting them from all his neighbours. He knew the histories of all these, which gin had broken a man's leg, which gun had killed a man. That one, I remember his saying, had been set by a game-keeper in the track of Anatori's poacher, but the keeper, forgetting what he had done, went that way himself, received a charge into the lower part of his body, and died of the wound. I don't like them here, but I've never yet given directions for them to be taken away. She had it playfully. Mantraps are of rather ominous significance where a person of our sex lives, had they not? Grace was bound to smile, but that side of woman in this was one which her inexperience had no great zest in contemplating. They are interesting, no doubt, as relics of a barbarous time happily passed. She said looking thoughtfully at the varied designs of these instruments of torture, some with semicircular jaws, some with rectangular, most of them with long, sharp teeth, but a few with none, so that their jaws looked like the blank gums of old age. Well, we must not take them too seriously," said Mrs. Charmant, with an indolent turn of her head, and they moved on inward. When she had shown her visitor different articles in cabinets that she had deemed likely to interest her, some tapestries, wood carvings, ivories, miniatures, and so on, always with a mienne of listlessness, which might either have been unconstitutional or partly owing to the situation of the place, they sat down to an early cup of tea. Will you pour it out, please? Do," she said leaning back in her chair, and placing her hand above her forehead while her almond eyes, those long eyes so common in the angelic legions of early Italian art, became longer, and her voice more languishing. She showed that oblique mannered softness which is perhaps most frequent in women of darker complexion, and more emphatic temperament than Mrs. Charmant's was, who lingeringly smiled their meanings to men rather than speak them, who in vagal rather than prompt, and take advantage of currents rather than steer. I am the most inactive woman when I am here," she said. I think sometimes I was born to live and do nothing, nothing, nothing but float about as we fancy we do sometimes in dreams, but that cannot be really my destiny, and I must struggle against such fancies. I am so sorry you do not enjoy exertion. It is quite sad. I wish I could tend you, and make you very happy. There is something so sympathetic, so appreciative in the sound of Grace's voice, that it impelled people to play havoc with our customary reservations and talking to her. It is tender and kind of you to feel that, said Mrs. Charmant. Perhaps I have given you the notion that my languor is more than it really is, but this place oppresses me, and I have a plan for going abroad a good deal. I used to go with a relative, but that arrangement has dropped through. Regarding Grace, with a final glance of criticism, she seemed to make up her mind to consider the young girl's satisfactory, and continued. Now I am often impelled to record my impressions of times and places. I have often thought of writing a new sentimental journey, but I cannot find energy enough to do it alone. When I am in different places in the south of Europe, I feel a crowd of ideas and fancies thronging upon me continually, but to unfold writing materials, take up a cold, steel pen, and put these impressions down systematically on cold, smooth paper. That I cannot do. So I have thought that if I could always have somebody at my elbow, with whom I am in sympathy, I might dictate any ideas that come into my head, and directly I had made your acquaintance the other day, it struck me that you would suit me so well. Would you like to undertake it? You might read to me, too, if desirable. Will you think it over, and ask your parents if they are willing? Oh, yes, said Grace. I am almost sure that I would be very glad. You are so accomplished here. I should be quite honored by such intellectual company. Grace, modestly blushing, deprecated any such idea. Do you keep up your lucubrations at little Hintock? Oh, no, lucubrations are not unknown at little Hintock, but they are not carried on by me. What, another student in that retreat? There is a surgeon come lately, and I have heard that he reads a great deal. I see his light sometimes, through the trees late at night. Oh, yes, said Doctor. I believe I was told of him. It is a strange place for him to settle in. It is a convenient centre for practice, they say, but he does not confine his studies to medicine, it seems. He investigates theology, and metaphysics, and all sorts of subjects. What is his name? Fitzpiers. He represents a very old family, I believe. The Fitzpierses of Buckbury Fitzpiers. Not a great many miles from here. I am not sufficiently local to know the history of the family. I was never in the county till my husband brought me here. Mrs. Sharman did not care to pursue this line of investigation. Whatever mysterious merit might attach to family antiquity, it was one which, though she herself could claim it, her adaptable, wandering, veldberger-like nature, had grown tired of caring about, a peculiarity that made her a contrast to her neighbours. It is a rather more important to know what the man is himself than what his family is, she said, if he is going to practice upon us as a surgeon. Have you seen him? Grace had not. I think he is not a very old man, she added. Has he a wife? I am not aware that he has. Well, I hope he will be useful here. I must get to know him when I come back. It will be very convenient to have a medical man, if he is clever, in one's own parish. I get dreadfully nervous sometimes living in such an outlandish place, and Sherton is so far to send to. No doubt you feel hintocked to be a great change after watering-place life. I do, but it is home. It has its advantages and its disadvantages. Grace was thinking less of the solitude than of the attendant's circumstances. They chatted on for some time, Grace being quite set at her ease by her entertainer. Mrs. Sherman was far too well practised a woman not to know that to show a marked patronage to a sensitive young girl, who would probably be very quick to discern it, was to demolish her dignity, rather than to establish it in the young girl's eyes. So being violently possessed with her idea in making use of this gentle acquaintance, ready and waiting at her own door, she took great pains to win her confidence at starting. Just before Grace's departure the two chanced to pause before a mirror which reflected their faces in immediate juxtaposition, so as to bring into prominence their resemblances and their contrasts. Both looked attractive as glanced back by the fateful reflector, but Grace's countenance had the effect of making Mrs. Sherman's appear more than her full age. There were complexions which set off each other to great advantage, and there are those which antagonise, the one killing or damaging its neighbour unmercifully. This was unhappily the case here. Mrs. Sherman fell into meditation and replied abstractedly to a cursory remark of her companions. However, she parted from a young friend in the kindliest tones, promising to send and let her know as soon as her mind was made up on the arrangement she had suggested. When Grace had ascended nearly to the top of the adjoining slope she looked back, and saw that Mrs. Sherman still stood at the door, meditatively regarding her. Often during the previous night, after his call on the Melbury's, Winterborne's talk ran upon Grace's announced visit to Hintock House. Why could he not have proposed to walk with her part of the way? She had been told him that she might not, on such an occasion, care for his company. He was still more of that opinion when standing in his garden next day. He saw her go past on the journey, with such a pretty pride in the event. He wondered if her father's ambition, which had purchased for her the means of intellectual light and culture far beyond those of any other native in the village, would conduce to the flight of her future interests above and away from the local life which was once to her the movement of the world. Nevertheless, he had her father's permission to win her if he could, and to this end it became desirable to bring matters soon to a crisis, if he ever hoped to do so. If she should think herself too good for him, he could let her go and make the best of his loss, but until he had really tested her he could not say that she despised his suit. The question was how to quicken events towards an issue. He thought and thought, and at last decided that as good a way as Annie would be to give a Christmas party and ask Grace and her parents to come as chief guests. These ruminations were occupying him when there became audible a slight knocking at his front door. He descended a path and looked out, and beheld Marty South dressed for outer door work. "'Why didn't you come, Mr. Winterborne?' she said. I'd been waiting there hours and hours, and at last I thought I must try to find you.' "'I bless my soul, I quite forgot,' said Giles. What he had forgotten was that there was a thousand young fir trees to be planted in a neighbouring spot, which had been cleared by the wood-cutters, and that he had arranged to plant them with his own hands. He had a marvellous power of making trees grow, although he would seem to shovel in the earth quite carelessly. There was a sort of sympathy between himself and the fir, oak, or beech that he was operating on, so that the roots took hold of the soil in a few days. When, on the other hand, any of the journeymen planted, although they seemed to go through an identically similar process, one quarter of the trees would die away, during the ensuing August. Hence Winterborne found a light in the work, even when, as at present, he contracted to do so on portions of the woodland in which he had no personal interest. Marty, who turned her hand to anything, was usually the one who performed the part of keeping the trees in a perpendicular position while he threw in the mould. He accompanied her towards the spot, being stimulated yet further to proceed with the work, but the knowledge that the ground was close to the wayside along which Grace must pass, on her return from Hintock House. "'You were cold in the head, Marty,' he said as he walked. "'That comes from cutting off your hair.' "'You suppose it do?' "'Yes, there's three headaches going on in my head at the same time.' "'Three headaches?' "'Yes, a rheumatic headache in my pawl, a sick headache over my eyes, and a misery headache in the middle of my brain. However, they came out, for I thought you might be waiting and grumbling like anything if I was not there.' The holes were already dug, and they set to work. Winterborne's fingers were endowed with a gentle, conjurious touch and spreading the roots of each little tree, resulting in a sort of caress, under which the delicate fibres all lay themselves out in their proper directions for growth. He put most of these roots towards the south-west, for, he said, in forty years' time, when some great gale is blowing from that quarter, the trees will require the strongest holdfast on that side to stand against it and not fall. "'How they sigh directly we put them upright, though while they're lying down they don't sigh at all,' said Marty. "'Do they?' said Giles. "'I never know, is there?' She erected one of the young pines into its hole, and held up her finger. The soft, musical breathing instantly set in, which were not to cease night or day until the grown tree should be felled, probably long after the two planters should be felled themselves. "'It seems to me,' the girl continued, as if they sigh because they are very sorry to begin life in earnest, just as we be.' "'Just as we be?' he critically looked at her. "'You ought not to feel like that, Marty.' Her only reply was turning to take up the next tree, and they planted on through the great part of the day, almost without another word. Winterborne's mind ran on his contemplated evening party, his abstraction being such that he hardly was conscious of Marty's presence beside him. From the nature of their employment, in which he handled the spade and she merely held the tree, it followed that he got good exercise and she got none. But she was a heroic girl, and though her outstretched hand was chill as a stone, and her cheeks blue, and her cold worse than ever, she would not complain while he was disposed to continue work. But when he paused, she said, Mr. Winterborne, can I run down the lane and back to warm my feet? "'Oh, yes, of course,' he said, awakening in you to her existence. Though I was just thinking what a mild day it is for this season. Now, I warrant that cold of yours is twice as bad as it was. You had no business to chop that hair off, Marty. It serves you almost right. Look here. Cut off home at once. I run down the lane and be quite enough. No it won't. You ought not to have come out to-day at all. But I should like to finish that. Marty, I tell you, go home," he said preemptively. I can manage to keep the rest of them upright with a steak or something. She went away without saying any more. When she had gone down the orchard a little distance, she looked back. Giles suddenly went after her. Marty, it was for your own good that I was rough, you know, but warm yourself in your own way. I don't care. As she had run off he fancied he discerned a woman's dress through the holly-bushes which divided a coppice from the road. It was Grace, at last, on her way back from the interview with Mrs. Charmond. He threw down the tree he was planting, and was about to break through the belt of holly when he suddenly became aware of the presence of another man, who was looking over the hedge on the opposite side of the way upon the figure of the unconscious Grace. He appeared as a handsome and gentlemanly personage of six or eight and twenty. And was quizzing her through an eyeglass. Seeing that Winterborne was noticing him, he let the glass drop with a click upon the rail which protected the hedge and walked away in the opposite direction. Giles knew in a moment that this must be Mr. Fitzpiers. When he was gone, Winterborne pushed through the hollies and emerged close beside the interesting object of the contemplation. CHAPTER IX He regarded her with a slight smile, weighing not her speech, but the question whether he should tell her that she had been watched. He decided in the negative. You have been to the house, he said, but I need not ask. The fact was that there shone upon Miss Melbury's face a species of exultation, which saw no enviring details nor his own occupation, nothing more than his bare presence. Why need you not ask? Your face is like the face of Moses when he came down from the mount. She reddened a little and said, How can you be so profane, Giles Winterborne? And how can you think so much of that class of people? Well, I beg pardon, I didn't mean to speak so freely. How do you like her house and her? Exceedingly, I had not been inside the wall since I was a child when it used to be led to strangers before Mrs. Sharman's late husband bought the property. She's so nice, and Grace fell into such an abstracted gaze at the imaginary image of Mrs. Sharman and her niceness that it almost conjured up a vision of that lady in mid-air before them. She's only been here a month or two, it seems, and cannot stay much longer because she finds it so lonely and damp in winter. She's going abroad. Only think she would like me to go with her. Giles's features stiffened a little at the news. Indeed, what for? But I can't keep you standing here. Oi! Robert! He cried to a swaying collection of clothes in the distance, which was the figure of Creedle, his man. Go on filling in there till I come back. I'm a common, sir, I'm a common. Well, the reason is this. Continued she as they went on together. Mrs. Sharman has a delightful sight to her character, a desire to record her impressions of travel like Alexander Dumas and Mary and Stern and others. But she cannot find energy enough to do it herself, and Grace proceeded to explain Mrs. Sharman's proposal at large. My notion is that Mary's style would suit her best because he writes in that soft, emotional, luxurious way she has, said Grace musingly. Indeed, said Winterborne, with mock awe. Suppose you talk over my head a little longer, Miss Grace Melbury. Oh! I didn't mean it, she said, repentently, looking into his eyes. And as for myself, I hate French books, and I love dear old Hintock and the people in it, fifty times better than all the continent. But the scheme, I think it an enchanting notion, don't you, Giles? It is well enough in one sense, but it will take you on away, he said, mollified. Only for a short time we should return in May. Well, Miss Melbury, it is a question for your father. Winterborne walked with her nearly to her house. He had awaited her coming, mainly with the view of mentioning to her his proposal to have a Christmas party. But homely Christmas gatherings in the venerable and jovial Hintock style seemed so primitive and uncouth beside the lofty manners of her converse and thought that he refrained. As soon as she was gone he turned back towards the scene of his planting, and could not help saying to himself as he walked, that this engagement of his was a very unpromising business. Her outing to-day had not improved it. A woman who could go to Hintock house and be friendly with its mistress, enter into the views of its mistress, talk like her, and dress not much unlike her, why she would hardly be content with him, a yo-man, now immersed in tree-planting, even though he planted them well. And yet she is a true-hearted girl, he said, thinking of her words about Hintock. I must bring matters to a point, and there is an end of it. When he reached the plantation he found that Marty had come back, and dismissing Creedle, he went on planting silently with the girl as before. Suppose Marty, he said after a while, looking at her extended arm, upon which old scratches from briars show themselves purple in the cold wind. Suppose you know a person, and want to bring that person to a good understanding with you. Do you think a Christmas-party of some sort is a warming-up thing, and likely to be useful in hastening on the matter? Is there to be dancing? There might be, certainly. Will he dance with Shea? Well, yes. Then it might bring things to a head, one way or the other. I won't be the one to say which. It shall be done, said Winterborne, not to her, though he spoke the words quite loudly. And as the day was nearly ended, he added, Here, Marty, I'll send the man up to plant the rest to-morrow. I've other things to think of just now. She did not inquire what other things, for she had seen him walking with Grace Melbury. She looked towards the western sky, which was now a glow like some vast foundry wherein new worlds were being cast. Across it the bare bow of a tree stretched horizontally, revealing every twig against the red, and showing in dark profile every beck and movement of three pheasants that were settling themselves down on it in a row to loosed. It'll be fine to-morrow, said Marty, observing them with the vermilion light of the sun in the pupils of her eyes, for they are accruped down nearly at the end of the bow. If they were going to be stormy, they'd squeeze close to the trunk. The weather is almost all they have to think of, isn't it, Mr. Bourne, and so they must be lighter-hearted than we. May dare say they are, said Winter Bourne? Before taking a single step in the preparations, Winter Bourne with no great hopes went across that evening to the timber-merchants to ascertain if Grace and her parents would honour him with their presence. Having first to set his nightly jins in the garden to catch the rabbits that ate his winter-greens, his call was delayed till just after the rising of the moon, whose rays reached the Hintock houses but fitfully as yet on account of the trees. Melbury was crossing his yard, on his way to call on someone at the larger village, but he readily turned and walked up and down the path with the young man. Giles, in his self-deprecatory sense of living, on a much smaller scale than the Melbury's did, would not for the world imply that his invitation was to a gathering of any importance, so he put it in the mild form of, can you come in for an hour, when you have done business, the day after to-morrow, and Mrs. and Miss Melbury, if they have nothing more pressing to do? Melbury would give no answer at once. No, I can't tell you to-day, he said, I must talk it over with the women. As far as I am concerned, my dear Giles, you know I'll come with pleasure, and by how do I know what Grace's notions may be? You see, she has been away among cultivated folks a good while, and now this acquaintance with Mrs. Charmond. Well, I'll ask her, I can say no more. When winter-borne was gone, the timber-merchant went on his way. He knew very well that Grace, whatever her own feelings, would either go or not go according as he suggested, and his instinct was, for the moment, to suggest the negative. His errand took him past the church, and the way to his destination was either across the church-yard or alongside it, the distances being the same. For some reason or other he chose the former way. The moon was faintly lighting up the gravestones and the path and the front of the building. Suddenly Mr. Melbury paused, turned in upon the grass, and approached a particular head-stone, where he read, in memory of John winter-borne, with a subjoint date and age, it was the grave of Giles's father. The timber-merchant laid his hand upon the stone and was humanised. Jack, my wronged friend, he said, I'll be faithful to my clan of making amends to him. When he reached home that evening he said to Grace and Mrs. Melbury, who were working at a little table by the fire, Giles wants us to go and spend an hour with him the day after to-morrow, and I'm thinking that as to Giles who asked us, we'll go. They assented without the mure, and accordingly the timber-merchant sent Giles the next morning an answer in the affirmative. Winter-borne, in his modesty, or indifference, had mentioned no particular hour in his invitation, and accordingly Mr. Melbury and his family, expecting no other guests, chose their own time which chanced to be rather early in the afternoon, by reason of the somewhat quicker dispatch than usual of the timber-merchant's business that day. To show their sense of the unimportance of the occasion they walked quite slowly to the house, as if they were merely out for a ramble and going to nothing special at all, or at most intending to pay a casual call and take a cup of tea. At this hour store and bustle pervaded the interior of Winterborne's domicile from cellar to apple loft. He had planned an elaborate high tea for six o'clock or thereabouts, and a good roaring supper to come on about eleven. Being a bachelor of rather retiring habits, the whole of the preparations devolved upon himself and his trusty man and familiar Robert Creadle, who did everything that required doing, from making Giles's bed to catching moulds in his field. He was a survival from the days when Giles's father held a homestead, and Giles was a playing-boy. These two, with a certain deletoriousness, which appertain to both, were now in the heat of preparation in the bake-house, expecting nobody before six o'clock. Winterborne was standing before the brick-oven in his shirt-sleeves, tossing in torn sprays and stirring about the blazing mass with a long-handled, three-pronged, bielzy-bub kind of fork. The heat shining out upon his streaming face and making his eyes like furnaces, the torn's crackling and sputtering, while Creadle, having rinsed the pastry-dishes in a row on the table till the oven should be ready, was pressing out the crust of a final apple-pie with a rolling pin. A great pot boiled on the fire, and through the open door of the back-kitchen a boy was seen seated on the fender, emptying the snuffers and scouring the candlesticks, and a row of the latter standing upside down on the hob to melt out the grease. Looking up from the rolling pin, Creadle saw passing the window, first the timber-merchant, in his second best suit, Mrs. Melbury, in her best silk, and Grace, in the fashionable attire which, in part, brought home with her from the Continent, she had worn on her visit to Mrs. Charmonds. The eyes of the three had been attracted to the proceedings within by the first illumination which the oven threw out upon the operators and their utensils. Lord, Lord, if they'd been come already, said Creadle. No. Hey! said Giles, looking around aghast, while the boy in the background waved a reeking candlestick in his delight. As there was no help for it, winter-born went to meet them in the doorway. My dear Giles, I see we have made a mistake in the time, said the timber-merchant's wife, her face lengthening with concern. Oh! it's not much difference. I hope you'll come in. But this means a regular rendezvous, said Mr. Melbury, accusing me, glancing around and pointing towards the bake-house with a stick. Well, yes, said Giles, and knocked great Hintock band, and dancing surely. I told three of them they might drop in if they had nothing else to do. Giles mildly admitted. Now, why the name didn't you tell it was going to be a serious kind of thing before? How should I know what folk mean if they don't say? Now, shall we come in, or shall we go home and come back along in a couple of hours? I hope you'll stay, if you be so good as not to mind. Now you are here. I shall have it all right and tidy in a very little time. I ought not to have been so backward. Giles spoke quite anxiously for one of his undemonstrative temperament, for he feared that if the Melbury's once were back in their own house, they would not be disposed to turn out again. "'Tis we ought not to have been so forward. That's what is," said Mr. Melbury, testily. "'Don't keep us here in the sitting-room. Lead us on to the bake-house, man. Now we are all here. We'll help you get ready for the rest. Here, Mrs., take off your things and help him out in his home, or he won't get it done to-night. I'll finish heating the oven, and set you free to go and skiver up them ducks.' His eye had passed with pitiless directness of criticism, into yet remote recesses of winter-born's awkwardly-built premises, where the aforesaid birds were hanging. "'And I'll help finish the tarts,' said Grace cheerfully. "'I don't know about that,' said her father, "'it isn't quite so much in your line as it is in your mother-in-law's and mine.' "'Of course I couldn't let you, Grace,' said Giles, with some distress. "'I'll do it,' of course,' said Mrs. Melbury, taking off her silk train, hanging it up to a nail, carefully rolling back her sleeves, pinning them to her shoulders, and stripping Giles of his apron for her own use. So Grace pottered idly about, while her father and his wife helped in the preparations. A kindly pity of his household-management which winter-born saw in her eyes, whenever he caught them, depressed him much more than her contempt would have done. Creedle met Giles at the pump after a while, when each of the others was absorbed in the difficulties of a cuisine based on utensils, cupboards, and provisions that were strange to them. He groaned to the young man in a whisper. "'This is a brookle-head-master, a much-affirred, who did taunt in a cum so soon.' The bitter placidity of winter-born's look adumbrated the misgivings he did not care to express. "'Have you got the celery ready?' he asked quickly. "'Now, that's a thing I never could mind. No, not if you'd paid me in silver and gold, and I don't care who the man is, I say that a stick of celery that isn't scrubbed with the scrub on brush is not clean. "'Very well, very well, I'll attend to it. You go and get them comfortable indoors.' He hastened to the garden, and soon returned, tossing the stalks to Creedle, who was still in a tragic mood. "'If you'd ammoured, do you say, Master?' he said. "'This cattle wouldn't have happened to us.' Everything being at last on the way, the oven set, and all done that could ensure the supper turning up ready, at some time or other, Giles and his friends entered the parlour, where the melburies again dropped into position as guests. Though the room was not nearly so warm and cheerful as the blazing bake-house, others now arrived, among them Farmer Baughtry and the Hollow Turner, and he went off very well. Grace's disposition to make the best of everything, and to wink at deficiencies in Winterborne's ménage, was so uniform and persistent that he suspected her of seeing even more deficiencies than he was aware of. That suppressed sympathy which had showed in her face ever since her arrival, told him as much too plainly. "'This mudlin' style of housekeeping is what you've not lately been used to, I suppose?' He said when they were a little apart. "'No, but I like it. It reminds me so pleasantly that everything here in dear old Hintock is just as it used to be. The oil is not quite nice, but everything else is.' "'The oil?' "'On the chairs, I mean, because it gets on one's dress. Still, mine is not a new one.' Giles found that creel in his ale to make things look bright, had smeared the chairs with some greasy kind of furniture polish, and refrained from rubbing it dry in order not to diminish the mirror-like effect that the mixture produced has laid on. Giles apologised and called creel, but he felt that the fates were against him. CHAPTER X The supper-time came, and with it the hot-bake from the oven laid on a snowy cloth fresh from the press, and reticulated with foals, as in Flemish last supper's. Creedle and the boy fetched and carried with amazing alacrity the latter to mollify his superior and make things pleasant, expressing his admiration of Creedle's cleverness when they were alone. I suppose the time when you learned all those known things, Mr. Creedle, was when he was in the militia. Well, yes, I see the world at that time somewhat, certainly, and many ways of strange, dash in life. Not but that Giles has worked hard in helping me to bring things to such perfection to-day—Giles, as I, though he's master—and not that I should call on master by rights, for his father grow'd upside by side with me, as if one mother had twinned us and been unourishing. I suppose your memory can reach a long way back into history, Mr. Creedle. Ah, yes, ancient days, when there was battles and famines and hang-fairs and other pumps, seemed to me as yesterday. Ah, many as a patriarch have seen come and go in this parish. There, he's calling for more plates. Lord, why can't turn their plates bottom-upward for pudding, as they used to do in former days? Meanwhile in the adjoining-room Giles was presiding in a half-unconscious state. He could not get over the initial failures in his scheme for advancing his suit, and hence he did not know that he was eating mouthfuls of bread and nothing else, and continually snuffing the two candles next to him till he had reduced them to mere glimmers drowned in their own grease. Creedle now appeared with a specially prepared dish, which he served by elevating the little three-legged pot that contained it, and tilting the contents into a dish, exclaiming simultaneously, "'Draw back, gentlemen, the ladies, please!' A splash followed. Grace gave a quick involuntary nod and blink, and put her hand kerchief to her face. "'My good heavens, what did you do that for, Creedle?' said Giles sternly, and jumping up. "'Did we do it when they bane here, master?' mildly expossulated Creedle, in an aside audible to all the company. "'Well, yes, but,' replied Giles, he went over to Grace, and hoped none of it had gone into her eye. "'Oh, no,' she said. Only a sprinkle on my face. It was nothing.' "'Kiss it, and make it well,' gallantly observed Mr. Baugh-tree.' Miss Melbury blushed. The timber-merchant said quickly, "'Oh, it is nothing. She must bear these little mishaps. But there could be discerned in his face something which said, "'I ought to have foreseen this.'" Giles himself, since the untoward beginning of the feast, had not quite liked to see Grace present. He wished he had not asked such people as Baugh-tree and the Hollow-Turner. He had done it in the dearth of other friends, that the room might not appear empty. In his mind's eye, before the event, they had been the mere background or padding of the scene, but somehow in reality they were the most prominent personages there. After supper they played cards, Baugh-tree and the Hollow-Turner monopolizing the new packs, for an interminable game, in which a lump of chalk was incessantly used, a game those two always played wherever they were, taking a solitary candle and going to a private table in a corner, with the mien of persons bent on weighty matters. The rest of the company on this account were obliged to put up with old packs for their round game, that had been lying by in a drawer ever since the time that Giles's grandmother was alive. Each card had a great stain in the middle of its back, produced by the touch of generations of damp and excited toms, now fleshless in the grave, and the kings and queens wore a decayed expression of feature, as if they were rather an impecuniously thrown race of monarchs hiding in obscure slums than real legal characters. Every now and then, the comparatively few remarks of the players at the round game were harshly intruded on by the measured jingle of farmer Baugh-tree and the Hollow-Turner from the back of the room, and I will hold no wager with you that all these marks are thirty-two, accompanied by wrapping strokes with a chalk on the table, then an exclamation, an argument, a dealing of the cards, then the commencement of the rhymes anew. The timber merchant showed his feelings by talking with a satisfied sense of weight in his words, and by praising the party in a patronizing tone, when Winterborne expressed his fear that he and his were not enjoying themselves. Oh, yes, yes, pretty much. What handsome glasses those are! I didn't know you had such glasses in the house. Now, Lucy, to his wife, you ought to get some like them for ourselves. And when they had abandoned cards and Winterborne was talking to Melbury by the fire, it was the timber merchant who stood with his back to the mantle in the proprietary attitude, from which post of vantage he critically regarded Giles as person, rather as a superficialist than as a solid, with ideas and feelings inside it, saying, what a splendid coat that one is, you have on Giles, I can't get such coats, you dress better than I. After supper there was a dance, the band's men from great Hintock having arrived some time before. Grace had been away from home so long that she had forgotten the old figures, and hence did not join in the movement. Then Giles felt that it was all over. As for her, she was thinking, as she watched the gyrations, of a very different measure that she had been accustomed to tread with a bevy of silk-like creatures in the muslin, in the music-room of a large house, most of whom were now moving in scenes widely removed from this, both as regarded place and character. A woman she did not know came and offered to tell her fortune with the abandoned cards. Grace assented to the proposal, and the woman told her tale unskilfully, for what of practice, as she declared. Mr. Melbury was standing by, and exclaimed contemptuously, Tell her fortune, indeed. Our fortune has been told by many science, what you call them, phrenologists. She can't teach her anything new. She's been too far among the wise ones to be astonished at anything she can hear among us folks in Hintock. At last the time came for breaking up, Melbury and his family being the earliest to leave, the two car-players, still pursuing their game doggedly in the corner, where they had completely covered Giles's mahogany table with chalk scratches. The three walked home, the distance being short and the night clear. Well, Giles is a very good fellow, said Mr. Melbury as they struck down the lane under boughs which formed a black filigree in which the stars seemed set. Certainly he is, said Grace quickly, and in such a tone as to show that he stood no lower, if no higher, in her regard than he had stood before. When there were opposite an opening through which, by day, the doctor's house could be seen, they observed a light in one of his rooms, although it was now about two o'clock. The doctor's not at bed yet, said Mrs. Melbury. Hard study no doubt. Said her husband. One would think that, as he seems to have nothing to do about here by day, he could at least afford to go to bed early at night, and to just astonish, you know, little we see of him. Melbury's mind seemed to turn with much relief to the contemplation of Mr. Fitzpiers after the scene of the evening. It is natural enough, he replied, but what can a man of that sort find to interest him in Hintock? I don't expect he'll stay here long. His mind reverted to Giles's party, and when they were nearly home, he spoke again, his daughter being a few steps in advance. It is hardly the line of life for a girl like Grace, as of what she's been accustomed to. I didn't foresee that in sending her to boarding school and letting her travel and what not, to make her a good bargain for Giles. I should really be spoiling her for him. Eh! It is a thousand pitties. But we ought to have her. We ought. At this moment the two exclusive chalk-mark men, having at last really finished their play, could be heard coming along in the rear, vociferously singing a song to march time, and keeping vigorous steps to the same, in far-reaching strides. She may go, ho, she may go, ho, she may go to the devil for me. The timber-merchant turned indignantly to Mrs. Melbury. That's the sort of society we've been asked to meet, he said. For us old folk it didn't matter, but for Grace. Giles should have known better. Meanwhile, in the empty house from which the guests had just cleared out, the subject of their discourse was walking from room to room surveying the general displacement of furniture, with no ecstatic feeling, and rather the reverse, indeed. At last he entered the bake-house, and found there Robert Creedle sitting over the embers, also lost in contemplation. Winterborne sat down beside him. Well, Robert, you must be tired. You better get on to bed. Aye, aye, Giles, what do I call you, a master, he would say. But it is well to think the day is done, when it is done. Winterborne had abstractedly taken the poker, and with a wrinkled forehead was plowing abroad the wood embers and the broad hearth, till it was like a vast scorching Sahara, with red-hot boulders lying about everywhere. Do you think it went off well, Creedle? He asked. The victuals did, that I know, and the drink did, that I steadfastly believe. From the holler sounds of the barrels, good honest drink, where the headiest mead I ever brewed, and the best wine that berries could rise to, and the brinkest hawnor and cleave cider ever rung down, leaving out the spice and spirits I put into it. While that egg-flip would have passed through muslin, so little cordled to her, it was good enough to make any king's heart merry. Aye, to make his whole carcass smile. Still, I don't deny that I am afraid some things didn't go well with he and his. Creedle nodded in the direction which signified where the melburys lived. I'm afraid, too, that it was a failure there. If so, to a doom to be so, not but what that snail might as well have come upon anybody else's plate as hoarse. What snail? Well, master, there was a little one upon the edge of her plate when I brought it out, and so it must have been in a few leaves of winter green. How did the juice to the snail get there? That I don't know, no more than the dead, but there my gentleman was. But, Robert, of all places that was where he shouldn't have been. Well, does his native home come to that, and where else could we expect him to be? I don't care who the man is, snails and caterpillars will always lurk in close to the stump of cabbages in that tantalizing way. He wasn't alive, I suppose, said Giles with his shudder on Grace's account. Oh, no, he was well-boiled, I warned him well-boiled. Not forbid that live snails should be seeded on any plate of victuals that serve by Robert Creadle, but lord there, I don't mind to myself, them small ones, for they was born on cabbage, and they've lived on cabbage, and so they must be made a cabbage. But she, the closed-mouthed little lady, she didn't say a word about it, though to have made good small conversation as to the nature of such creatures, especially as wit ran short among us sometimes. Oh, yes, it is all over, murmured Giles to himself, shaking his head over the glooming plain of embers, and lining his forehead more than ever. You know, Robert, he said, that she's been accustomed to servants, and everything superfined these many years. How then could she stand their ways? Well, all I can say is, then, that she ought to hob a knob elsewhere. They shouldn't have scolded her so monstrous high, or else that you're a man shouldn't give randies, nor if they do give them only to their own race. Perhaps that's true, said Winterborne, rising and yawning assay. But how could he, with any self-respect, obstruct Winterborne's suit at this stage, and nullify a scheme he had laboured to promote, who was indeed mechanically promoting at this moment? A crisis was approaching, mainly as a result of his contrivances, and it would have to be met. But here was the fact which could not be disguised. Since seeing what an immense change her last twelve months of absence had produced in his daughter, after the heavy sum per annum that he had been spending for several years upon her education, he was reluctant to let her marry Giles Winterborne, indefinitely occupied as woodman, cider-merchant, apple-farmer, and what not, even were she willing to marry him herself. She will be his wife, if you don't upset her notion that she's bound to accept him as an understood thing, said Mrs. Melbury. Bless ye, she'll soon shake down here in Hintock, and be content with Giles's way of living, which he'll improve with what money she'll have from you. Tis the strangeness after her gentile life that makes her feel uncomfortable at first. Why, when I saw Hintock the first time, I thought I never could like it. But things gradually get familiar, and stone floors seem not so very cold and hard, and the hootin' of the owl is not so very dreadful, and loneliness is not so very lonely after a while. Yes, I believe ye, that's just it. I know Grace will gradually sink down to our level again, and catch our manners, and ways of speaking, and feel a drowsy content in being Giles's wife. But I can't bear the thought of dragging down to that old level as promising a piece of maidenhood has ever lived, in a fit to ornament a palace where, that I've taken so much trouble to lift up, fancy her white hands getting redder every day, and her tongue losing its pretty up-country coil in talking, and her bounden walk becoming the regular Hintock shale and womble. She may shale, but she never wamble, replied his wife decisively. When Grace came downstairs, he complained of her lying in bed so late. Not so much moved by a particular objection to that form of indulgence as discomposed by these other reflections. The corners of her pretty mouth dropped down a little. He used to complain just as when I was a girl, she said, but I am a woman now, and can judge for myself, but that is not it, it is something else. Instead of sitting down, she went outside the door. He was sorry. The petulance that relatives show towards each other is in truth directed against that intangible casualty which had shaped the situation, no less for the offenders than the offender, but is too elusive to be discerned and cornered by poor humanity in irritated mood. Melbury followed her. She rambled on to the paddock where the white frost lay, and where starlings and flocks of twenties and thirties were walking about, watched by a comfortable family of sparrows perched in a line along the string-course of the chimney, preening themselves in the rays of the sun. In coming to breakfast, my girl, he said, and as to joys, use your own mind. Whatever pleases you will please me. I am promising, father, and I cannot help thinking that in honor I ought to marry him, whenever I do marry. We had a strong suspicion that some were in the bottom of our heart. There pulsed an old simple indigenous feeling favorable to jiles, though it had become overlaid with implanted tastes. But he would not distinctly express his views on the promise. Very well, he said, but I hope we shall not lose you yet. Come into breakfast. What did you think of the inside of Hintock House the other day? I liked it much. Different from friend Winterbarnes. She said nothing. But he who knew her was aware that she meant by her silence to reproach him with drawing-cruel comparisons. Mrs. Charmond asked you to come again. When did you say? She thought Tuesday, but would send the day before to let me know if it suited her. And with his subject upon their lips they entered to breakfast. Tuesday came, but no message from Mrs. Charmond, nor was there any on Wednesday. In brief a fortnight slipped by without a sign, and it looked suspiciously as if Mrs. Charmond were not going further in the direction of taking up Grace at present. Her father reasoned thereon. Immediately after his daughter's two indubitable successes with Mrs. Charmond, the interview in the wood and the visit to the house, she had attended Winterbarnes' party. No doubt the out-and-out joviality of that gathering had made it a topic in the neighbourhood, and that everyone at present, as his guests had been widely spoken of, Grace, with her exceptional qualities, above all. What then so natural that Mrs. Charmond should have heard the village news, and become quite disappointed in her expectations of Grace at finding she kept such company? Full of this post-hoc argument, Mr. Melbury overlooked the infinite throng of other possible reasons and unreasons for a woman changing her mind. For instance, while knowing that his Grace was attractive, he quite forgot that Mrs. Charmond had also great pretensions to beauty. In his simple estimate an attractive woman attracted all around. So it was settled in his mind that her sudden mingling with the villagers at the unlucky Winterbarnes was the cause of her most grievous loss as he deemed it in the direction of Hintock House. To the thousand pitties he would repeat to himself, I am ruining her for conscience's sake. It was one morning later on, while these things were agitating his mind, that curiously enough something darkened the window just as they finished breakfast. Looking up they saw Giles in person mounted on horseback and straining his neck forward, as he had been doing for some time to catch their attention through the window. Grace had been the first to see him, and involuntarily exclaimed, There he is, and a new horse. On their faces as they regarded Giles were written their suspended thoughts and compound feelings concerning him. But he had read them through those old pains. But he saw nothing. His features just now were, for a wonder, lit up with a red smile at some other idea. So they rose from breakfast and went to the door, Grace with an anxious, wistful manner, her father in a reverie, Mrs. Merbury, placid and inquiring. We have come out to look at your horse, she said. It could be seen that he was pleased at their attention, and explained that he had ridden a mile or two to try the animal's paces. I bought her, he added, with warmth so severely repressed as to seem indifference, because she had been used to carry a lady. Still, Mr. Merbury did not brighten, Mrs. Merbury said. And is she quiet? Winter-born assured that there was no doubt of it. I took care of that. She's five and twenty, and very clever for her age. Well, get off and come in, said Merbury brusquely, and giles dismounted accordingly. This event was the concrete result of Winter-born's thoughts during the past week or two. The want of success with his evening party he had accepted in as philosophic a mood as he was capable of. But there had been enthusiasm enough left in him one day at Sherton Abbas Market to purchase this old mare, which had belonged to a neighbouring parson with several daughters, and was offered him to carry either a gentleman or a lady, and to do odd jobs of carting and agriculture at a pinch. This obliging quadruped seemed to furnish giles with a means of reinstating himself in Merbury's good opinion as a man of considerateness by throwing out future possibilities to grace. The latter looked at him with intensified interest this morning. In the mood which is altogether peculiar to woman's nature, and which, when reduced into plain words, seems as impossible as the peniturability of matter, that of entertaining a tender pity for the object of her own unnecessary coldness. The imperturbable poise which marked Winter-born in general was enlivened now by a freshness and animation that set a brightness in his eye and on his cheek. Mrs. Melbury asked him to have some breakfast, and he pleasurably replied that he would join them, with his usual lack of tactical observation, not perceiving that they had all finished the meal, that the hour was inconveniently late, and that the note piped by the kettle denoted it to be nearly empty, so that fresh water had to be brought in, trouble taken to make it boil, and a general renovation of the table carried out. Neither did he know, so full was he of his tender ulterior object in buying that horse, how many cups of tea he was gulping down one after another, nor how the morning was slipping, nor how he was keeping the family from dispersing about their duties. Then he told throughout the humorous story of the horse's purchase, looking particularly grim at some fixed object in the room, a way he always looked when he narrated anything that amused him. While he was still thinking of the scene he had described, grace rose and said, I have to go and help my mother now, Mr. Winter-born. Hm? He exaculated, turning his eyes suddenly upon her. She repeated her words with a slight blush of awkwardness, whenupon Giles, becoming suddenly conscious, too conscious, jumped up saying, to be sure, to be sure, wished him quickly good morning, and bolted out of the house. Nevertheless he had, upon the whole, strengthened his position, with her at least. Time, too, was on his side, far as her father saw with some regret. Already the homeliness of Hintock life was fast becoming a faced from her observation as a singularity, just as the first strangeness of a face from whom we have for years been separated, insensibly passes off with renewed intercourse, and tones itself down to simple identity with the liniments of the past. Thus Mr. Merbury went out of the house, still unreconciled to the sacrifice of the gem he had been at such pains in mounting. He feigned, could hope, in the secret nether chambers of his mind, that something would happen before the balance of her feeling had quite turned in Winter-born's favour, to relieve his conscience and preserve her on her elevated plane. He could not forget that Mrs. Charmond had apparently abandoned all interest in his daughter, as suddenly as she had conceived it, and was as firmly convinced as ever that a comradeship which Grace had shown with Giles and his crew by attending his party, had been the cause. Matters lingered on thus, and then, as a hoop by gentle knocks on this side and on that, is made to travel in specific directions, the little touches of circumstance in the life of this young girl, shaped the curves of her career. CHAPTER XII It was a day of rather bright weather for the season. Miss Merbury went out for a morning walk, and her ever-regartful father, having an hour's leisure, offered to walk with her. The breeze was fresh and quite steady, filtering itself through the denuded mass of twigs without swaying them, but making the point of each ivy-leaf on the trunks scratch its underlying neighbour restlessly. Grace's lips sucked in this native air of hers like milk. They soon reached a place where the wood ran down into a corner, and went outside it towards comparatively open ground. Having looked round about, they were intending to re-enter the cops when a fox quietly emerged, with a dragging brush, trotted past them tamely as a domestic cat, and disappeared amid some dead fern. They walked on, her father merely observing, after watching the animal, and they are hunting somewhere near. Father up they saw in the mid-distance the hounds running hither and hither, as if there were little or no scent that day. Soon diverse members of the hunt appeared on the scene, and it was evident from their movements that a chase had been stultified by general puzzled headiness as did the whereabouts of the intended victim. In a minute a farmer rode up to the two pedestrians, panting with actianic excitement, and Grace, being a few steps in advance, he addressed her, asking if she had seen the fox. Yes, she said, we saw him some time ago, just out there. Did you cry hello? We said nothing. Then why the devil didn't you, or get the old buffer to do it for you? said the man, as he cantered away. She looked rather disconcerted at this reply, and observing her father's face saw that it was quite red. He ought not to have spoken to you like that, said the old man, in the tone of one whose heart was bruised, though it was not by the epithet implied to himself. And he wouldn't, if he had been a gentleman, to his not a language to use to a woman of any niceness. You so well-read and cultivated, how could he expect you to know what tomboy feel-foker and the habit of doing? If so be, you had just come from trimming Swedes or mangals, and joking with the rough-work folk, and all that, I could have stood it, but hasn't it cost me near a hundred a year to lift you out of all that, so as to show an example to the neighbourhood of what a woman can be? Grace, shall I tell you the secret of it? It was because I was in your company. If a black-coated squire or a person had been walking with you instead of me, he wouldn't have spoken so. No, no, Father, there's nothing in you rough or ill-mannered. I tell you that is it. I've noticed, and I've noticed it many times, that a woman takes her colour from the man she's walking with. The woman who looks an unquestionable lady when she's with a polished-up fellow, looks a mere tawd re-imitation article when she's hobbing and nubbing with a homely blade. You shan't be treated like that for long, or at least your children shan't. You shall have somebody to walk with who looks more of a dandy than I. Please, God, you shall. But, my dear Father, she said much distressed. I don't mind at all. I don't wish for more honour than I already have. A perplexing and ticklish possession is a daughter, according to Menander, or some old Greek poet, and to nobody was one ever more so than to Melbury, by reason of her very dearness to him. As for Grace, she began to feel troubled. She did not perhaps wish there and then to unambitiously devote her life to Giles Winterborne, but she was conscious of more and more uneasiness at the possibility of being the social hope of the family. You would like to have more honour, if it pleases me? Asked her father in continuation of the subject. Despite her feeling, she assented to this, his reasoning had not been without its weight upon her. Grace, he said, just before they had reached the house, If it cost me my life, you shall marry well. Today has shown me that whatever a young woman's niceness she stands for nothing alone. You shall marry well." He breathed heavily, and his breathing was caught up by the breeze, which seemed to sigh a soft remonstrance. She looked calmly at him. And how about Mr. Winterborne? She asked. I mentioned it, father, not as a matter of sentiment, but as a question of keeping faith. The timber-merchant's eyes fell for a moment. I don't know. I don't know, he said, to the trying-straight. Well, well, there's no hurry. We wait and see how he gets on. That evening he called her to his room, a snug little apartment behind the large parlour. It had at one time been part of the bake-house with the ordinary oval brick oven in the wall, but Mr. Melbury, in turning it into an office, had built into the cavity an iron safe, which he used for holding his private papers. The door of the safe was now open, and his keys were hanging from it. Mr. Down Grace and Keep Me Company, he said, you may amuse yourself by looking over these. He threw out a heap of papers before her. What are they, she asked? Securities of various sorts. He unfolded them one by one. Papers worth so much money each. Now, here's a lot of torn-pipe bonds for one thing. Would you think that each of these pieces of paper is worth 200 pounds? No, indeed, if you didn't say so. To so, then. Now, here are papers of another sort, there for different sums in the 3%. Now, these are pork-breedy harbour bonds. We have a great stake in that harbour, you know, because I send off timber there. Open the rest at your pleasure. They'll interest you. Yes, I will some day, she said, rising. Nonsense. Open them now. You ought to learn a little of such matters. A young lady of education should not be ignorant of money affairs altogether. Suppose you should be left a widow some day, with your husband's title deeds and investments thrown upon your hands. Don't say that, father, in title deeds. It sounds so vain. It does not. Come to that, I have title deeds myself. There, that piece of parchment represents houses in shirt and abyss. Yes, but she hesitated, looked at the fire, and went on in a low voice. If what had been arranged about me should come to anything, my sphere would be quite a middling one. Your sphere ought not to be middling. He exclaimed, not in passion, but in earnest conviction. You said you never felt more at home, more in your element anywhere than you did that afternoon with Mrs. Charmond, when she showed you her house and all her knickknacks, and made you stay to tea so nicely in a drawn room. Surely you did. Yes, I did say so, admitted Grace. Was it true? Yes, I felt so at the time. The feeling is less strong now, perhaps. Ah, now, though you don't see it, your feeling at the time was the right one, because your mind and body were just in full and fresh cultivation. So the going there with horror was like meeting like, and since then you've been biding with us and have fallen back a little, and so you don't feel your place so strongly. Now, do as I tell you and look over these papers and see what should be worth some day, for they'll all be yours, you know, who have I got to leave them to but you. Perhaps when your education is backed up by what these papers represent, and that backed up by another such asset and their owner, men such as that fellow was this morning may think you a little more than a buffer's girl. So she did as commanded, and opened each of the folded representatives of hard cash that her father put before her. To sow on a hard cravings for social position was obviously his strong desire, though indirect antagonism to a better feeling which had hitherto prevailed with him, and had indeed only succumbed that morning during the ramble. She wished that she was not his worldly hope. The responsibility of such a position was too great. She had made it for herself mainly by her appearance and attractive behaviour to him since her return. If I had only come home in a shabby dress and tried to speak roughly this might not have happened, she thought. She deplored less the fact than the sad possibilities that might lie hidden therein. Her father then insisted upon her looking over his checkbook and reading the counter-foils. This also she obediently did, and at last came to two or three which had been drawn to defray some of the late expenses of her clothes, board, and education. I too cost a good deal, like the horses and wagons and corn. She said, looking up surly, I didn't want you to look at those. I merely meant to give you an idea of my investment transactions. But if you do cost as much as they, never mind. You'll yield a better return. Don't think of me like that. She begged. A mere chattel. Now what? Oh! A dictionary word. Well, as that's in your line, I don't forbid it, even if it tells against me. He said, good-humoredly, and he looked her proudly up and down. A few minutes later Grandma Oliver came to tell them that supper was ready, and in giving the information she added incidentally. So we shall soon lose the mistress of Hintock House for some time, I hear, Master Melbury. Yes, she's going off to Thorne Parts tomorrow, for the rest of the winter months, and be chocked if I don't wish I could do the same for my wind-pipe has floored like a flu. When the old woman had left the room, Melbury turned to his daughter and said, So, Grace, you have lost your new friend, and your chance of keeping her company, and writing her travels is quite gone for me. And Grace said nothing. Now, he went on emphatically, to his winter-born's affair has done this. Oh! So let me say one word, and promise me that you will not meet him again without my knowledge. I never do meet him, Father, either without your knowledge or with it. And so much the better. I don't like the look of this at all, and I say it not out of harshness to him, poor fellow, but out of tenderness to you, for how could a woman, brought up delicately as you have been, bear the roughness of a life with him? She sighed. It was a sigh of sympathy with Giles, complicated by a sense of intractability of circumstances. At that same hour, and almost at the same minute, there was a conversation about winter-born and progress in the village street opposite Mr. Melbury's gates, where Timothy tangs the elder and Robert Creadle had accidentally met. The sore was asking Creadle if he had heard what was all over the parish. The skin of his face being drawn two ways on the matter, towards brightness and respect of it as news, and towards concern and respect of it as circumstance. Why, that poor little lonesome thing, Marty South, is likely to lose her father. He was almost well, but as much worse again. A man all skin and griefy ever were, and if he leave little hintock for a better land, won't it make some difference to your master winter-born neighbour, Creadle? Can I be a prophet in Israel? said Creadle. I won't it. I was only shapen of such a thing yesterday in my poor long-seeing way, and all the work of the house upon my wound's shoulders. You know what it means? It is upon John South's life that all Mr. Winterborn's houses hang. If so be, South, die, and so make his decease. Thereupon the law is that the houses fall without the least chance of absolution, into her hands of the house. I told him so, but the words of the faithful be only as wind. CHAPTER XIII. The news was true. The life, the one fragile life that had been used as a measuring tape of time by law, was in danger of being frayed away. It was the last of a group of lives which had served this purpose, at the end of whose breathing the small homestead occupied by South himself, the larger one of Giles Winterborn, and half a dozen others that had been in the possession of various Hintock village families for the previous hundred years, and were now Winterborn's, would fall in and become part of the encompassing estate. Yet a short two months earlier, Marty's father, aged fifty-five years, though something of a fidgety, anxious being, would have been looked on as a man whose existence was so far removed from hazardous as any in the parish, and as bidding fair to be prolonged for another quarter of a century. Winterborn walked up and down his garden next day, thinking of the contingency. The sense that the paths he was pacing, the cabbage plots, the apple trees, his dwelling, cider-cellar, ring-house, stables, and weather-cock, were all slipping away over his head and beneath his feet, as if they were painted on a magic lantern slide, was curious. In spite of John South's laid-in disposition, he had not anticipated danger. To inquire concerning his health had been to show less sympathy than to remain silent, considering the material interest he possessed in the woodman's life, and he had accordingly made a point of avoiding Marty's house. While he was here in the garden, somebody came to fetch him. It was Marty herself, and she showed her distress by her unconsciousness of a cropped pawl. Father is still much troubled in his mind about that tree. She said, you know the tree I mean, Mr. Winterborn, the tall one in front of the house that he thinks will blow down and kill us. Can you come and see if he can persuade him out of his notion, or he can do nothing? He accompanied her to the cottage, and she conducted him upstairs. John South was pillowed up in a chair between the bed and the window, exactly opposite the ladder, towards which his face was turned. Ah, neighbor Winterborn, he said, I wouldn't have minded if my life had only been my own to lose. I don't value it in much of itself, and I can let it go if it is required of me, but to think what is worth to you, a young man rising in life, and that do trouble me. It seems a trick of dishonesty toward me to go off at fifty-five. I could bear up. I know I could, if it were not for the tree. Yes, the tree it is that's killing me. There he stands, treading in my life every minute that the wind do blow. Here come down upon us and squat us dead, and what will you do when the life in your property is taken away? Never you mind me. That's of no consequence," said Giles, thinking yourself alone. He looked out of the window in the direction of the woodman's gaze. The tree was a tall elm, familiar to him from childhood, which stood at a distance of two-thirds its own height from the front of South's dwelling. Whenever the wind blew, as it did now, the tree rocked naturally enough, and the sight of its motion and the sound of its size had gradually bred the terrifying illusion in the woodman's mind that it would descend and kill him. Thus he would sit all day, in spite of persuasion, watching its every sway, and listening to the melancholy Gregorian melodies which the air rung out of it. This fear it apparently was, rather than any organic disease which was eating away the health of John South. As the tree waved, South waved his head, making it his flugelman with abject obedience. Ah! When it was quite a small tree," he said, and I was a little boy, I thought one day of chopping it off with my billhook to make a clothesline prop with. But I put off doing it, and then I again thought that I would, but I forgot it, and I didn't, and at last it got too big and out is my enemy, and would be the death of me, till did I think when I let that sapling stay that a time would come when it would torment me and dash me into my grave. No, no," said Winterborne and Marty soothingly, but they thought it possible that it might hasten them to his grave, though in another way than by falling. I'll tell you what," added Winterborne, I'll climb up this afternoon and shroud off the lower bells, and then it won't be so heavy, and the wind won't affect it so. Ah! She won't know it. A strange woman come from nobody knows where. She won't have it done. You mean Mrs. Charmond, though she doesn't know there's such a tree on her estate, besides shrouding is not felling, and will risk that much. He went out, and when afternoon came he returned, took a billhook from the woodman's shed, and with a ladder climbed into the lowest part of the tree, where he began lopping off, shrouding, as they called it at Hintock, the lowest boughs. Each of these quivered under his attack, bent, cracked, and fell into the hedge. Having cut away the lowest here, he stepped off the ladder, climbed a few steps higher, and attacked those at the next level. Thus he ascended with the progress of his work far above the top of the ladder, cutting away his perches as he went, and leaving nothing but a bare stem below him. The work was troublesome, for the tree was large. The afternoon wore on, turning dark and misty about four o'clock. From time to time Giles cast his eyes across towards the bedroom window of south, where, by the flickering fire in the chamber, he could see the old man watching him, sitting motionless with a hand upon each arm of the chair. Beside him sat Marty, also straining her eyes towards the skyed field of his operations. A curious question suddenly occurred to Winterborne, and he stopped his chopping. He was operating on another person's property to prolong the years of a lease by whose termination that person would considerably benefit. In that aspect of the case he doubted if he ought to go on. On the other hand he was working to save a man's life, and this seemed to empower him to adopt arbitrary measures. The wind had died down to a calm, and while he was weighing the circumstances he saw coming along the road through the increasing mist, a figure which, indistinct as it was, he knew well. It was Grace Melbury, on her way out from the house, probably for a short evening walk before dark. He arranged himself for a greeting from her, since she could hardly avoid passing immediately beneath the tree. But Grace, though she looked up and saw him, was just at that time too full of the words of her father to give him any encouragement. The years-long regard that she had had for him was not kindled by her return into a flame of sufficient brilliancy to make her rebellious. Thinking that she might not see him, he cried. Miss Melbury, here I am. She looked up again. She was near enough to see the expression of his face and the nails in his soul's silver bright with constant walking, but she did not reply, and dropping her glance again went on. Winterborne's face grew strange. He mused and proceeded automatically with his work. Grace, meanwhile, had not gone far. She had reached a gate whereupon she had leaned sadly and whispered to herself, What shall I do? A sudden fog came on, and she curtailed her walk, passing under the tree again on her return. Again he addressed her. Grace, he said, when she was close to the trunk, speak to me. She shook her head, without stopping, and went on to a little distance, where she stood observing him from behind the hedge. Her coldness had been kindly meant. If it was to be done, she had said to herself, It should be begun at once. While she stood out of observation Giles seemed to recognize her meaning. With a sudden start he worked on, climbing higher and cutting himself off more and more from all intercourse with the sublunary world. At last he had worked himself so high up the elm, and the mist had so thickened that he could only just be discerned as a dark grey spot on the light grey sky. He would have been altogether out of notice but for the strokes of his bill-hook, and the flight of a bow downward and its crash upon the hedge at intervals. It was not to be done thus, after all. Plainness and candor were best. She went back a third time. He did not see her now, and she lingeringly gazed up at his unconscious figure, loathed to put an end to any kind of hope that might live on in him still. Giles, Mr. Winterborne, she said. He was so high amid the fog that he did not hear. Mr. Winterborne, she cried again, and this time he stopped, looked down and replied. My silence just now was not an accident, she said, in an unequal voice. My father says it is best not to think much of that engagement or understanding between us that you know of. I too think that upon the whole he is right, but we are friends, you know, Giles, and almost relations. Very well, he answered, as if without surprise, in a voice which barely reached down the tree. I have nothing to say in objection. I cannot say anything until I've taught awhile. She added with emotion in her tone. For myself I would have married you some day, I think. But I give way, for I see it would be unwise. He made no reply but sat back upon a bow, placed his elbow in a fork, and rested his head upon his hand. Thus he remained till the fog and the night had completely enclosed him from her view. Grace heaved a divided sigh, with a tense pause between, and moved onward, her heart feeling uncomfortably big and heavy, and her eyes wet. But Giles, instead of remaining still, immediately come down from the tree to her. Would she have continued in that filial, acquiescent frame of mind which she had announced to him as final? If it be true, as women themselves have declared, that one of their sexes is never so much inclined to throw in her lot with a man, for good and all, as five minutes after she had told him that such a thing cannot be, the probabilities are that something might have been done by the appearance of Winterborne on the ground beside Grace. But he continued motionless and silent in that gloomy Niffelheim or Fogland which involved him, and she proceeded on her way. The spot seemed now to be quite deserted. The light from south's window made rays on the fog, but did not quite reach the tree. A quarter of an hour passed, and all was blackness overhead. Giles had not yet come down. Then the tree seemed to shiver, and then heave a sigh, and a movement was audible, and Winterborne dropped almost noiseless into the ground. He had thought a matter out, and having returned the ladder and bill-hook to their places, pursued his way homeward. He would not allow this incident to affect his outer conduct any more than the danger to his lease-holds had done, and went to bed as usual. Two simultaneous troubles do not always make a double trouble, and thus it came to pass that Giles's practical anxiety about his houses, which would have been enough to keep him awake half the night at any other time, was displaced and not reinforced by his sentimental trouble about Grace Melbury. This severance was, in truth, more like a burial-hover than a rupture with her, but he did not realize so much at present. Even when he arose the next morning he felt quite moody and stern, as yet the second note in the gamut of such emotions, a tender regret for his loss, had not made itself heard. A load of oak timber was to be sent away that morning to a builder whose works were in a town many miles off. The proud trunks were taken up from the silent spot, which had known them through the buddings and sheddings of their growth for the foregoing hundred years, chained down like slaves to a heavy timber carriage with enormous red wheels, and four of the most powerful of Melbury's horses were harnessed in front to draw them. The horses wore their bells that day. There were sixteen to the team, carried on a frame above each animal's shoulders, and tuned to scale, so as to form two octaves, running from the highest note on the right or offside of the leader, to the lowest on the left or near side of the shaft horse. Melbury was among the last to retain horse-bells in that neighborhood, for living at Little Hintock, where the lanes yet remained as narrow as before the days of Turnpike roads. These sound signals were still as useful to him and his neighbors as they had ever been in former times. Much backing was saved in the course of a year by the warning notes they cast ahead. Moreover, the tones of all the teams in the district being known to the characters of each, they could tell a long way off on a dark night, whether they were about to encounter friends or strangers. The fog of the previous evening still lingered so heavily over the woods, that the morning could not penetrate the trees to long after its time. The load, being a ponderous one, the lane crooked, and the air so thick, winter-borne set out, as he often did, to accompany the team as far as the corner, where it would turn into a wider road. As they rumbled on, shaking the foundations of the roadside cottages by the weight of their progress, the sixteen bells chiming harmoniously over all, till they had risen out of the valley and were descending towards the more open route, the sparks rising from their creaking skid and nearly setting fire to the dead leaves alongside. Then occurred one of the very incidents against which the bells were in endeavour to guard. Suddenly, they were beamed into their eyes quite close to them, two lamps of a carriage, shorn of rays by the fog. Its approach had been quite unheard, by reasons of their own noise. The carriage was a covered one, while behind it could be discerned another vehicle laden with luggage. Winter-borne went to the head of the team, and heard the coachman telling the character that he must turn back, and the character declared that this was impossible. "'You can turn if you want to hit your string horses,' said the coachman. "'It is much easier for you to turn than for us,' said Winter-borne, and we have five tonnes of timber on these wheels if we have an ounce. But I have another carriage with luggage on my back.' Winter-borne admitted the strength of the argument. "'But even with that,' he said, "'you can back better than we, and you ought to, for you could hear our bells half a mile off, and you could see our lights.' We couldn't, because of the fog. "'Well, our time is precious,' said the coachman heartily. "'You are only going to some trumpery little village or other in the neighbourhood, while we are going straight to Italy.' "'Driven all the way, I suppose,' said Winter-borne sarcastically. The argument continued in these terms, till a voice from the interior of the carriage inquired what was the matter. It was the ladies.' She was briefly informed of the timber-people's obstinacy, and then Giles could hear her telling the footman to direct the timber-people to turn their horses' heads. The message was brought, and Winter-borne sent the bearer back to say that he begged the ladies pardon, but that he could not do what she requested, that though he would not assert it to be impossible, it was impossible by comparison with the slight difficulty to her party to back their light carriages. As fate would have it, the incident with Grace Melbury on the previous day made Giles less gentle than he might otherwise have shown himself, his confidence in the sex being rudely shaken. In fine nothing could move him, and the carriages were compelled to back, till they reached one of the sidings or turnouts constructed in the bank for the purpose. Then the team came on ponderously, and the clanging of its sixteen bells as it passed at his comforted carriages tilted up against the bank, lent a particularly triumphant tone to the team's progress, a tone which, in point of fact, did not at all attach to its conductor's feelings. Giles walked behind the timber, and just as he had got past the yet stationary carriages, he heard a soft voice say, Who is that rude man? Not Melbury. The sex of the speaker was so prominent in the voice that Winter-borne felt a pang of regret. No, ma'am, a younger man in a smaller way of business in little Hintock. Winter-borne is his name. Thus they parted company. Well, he missed a Winter-borne, said the wagoner, when they were out of hearing, that was she, Mrs. Charmond. Who'd have thought it? What in the world can a woman that does nothing be cock-watching out here at this time of day for? Oh, going to Italy, yes, to be sure, or he heard she was going abroad, as you can't endure the Winter here. Winter-borne was vexed at the incident. The more so, that he knew Mr. Melbury, in his adoration of Hintock House, would be the first to blame him if it became known. But saying no more, he accompanied the lode to the end of the lane, and then turned back with an intention to call at Souths to learn the result of the experiment of the preceding evening. A chance that a few minutes before this time, Grace Melbury, who now rose soon enough to breakfast with her father, in spite of the unwantedness of the hour, had been commissioned by him to make the same inquiry at Souths. Marty had been standing at the door when Miss Melbury arrived. Almost before the latter had spoken, Mrs. Charmond's carriages, released from the obstruction of the lane, came bowling along, and the two girls turned to regard the spectacle. Mrs. Charmond did not see them, but there was sufficient light for them to discern her outline between the carriage windows. A noticeable feature in her torn ear was a magnificent mass of braided locks. "'How well she looks this morning,' said Grace, forgetting Mrs. Charmond's slight and her generous admiration. Her hair so becomes her worn that way, I have never seen any more beautiful.' "'And all of I miss,' said Marty, dryly, unconsciously stroking her crown.' Grace watched the carriages with lingering regret, till they were out of sight. She then learned of Marty that South was no better. Before she had come away Winterborne approached the house, but seeing that one of the two girls standing on the doorstep was Grace, he suddenly turned back again, and sought the shelter of his own home till she should have gone away. CHAPTER XIV The encounter with the carriages having sprung upon Winterborne's mind the image of Mrs. Charmond, his thoughts by a natural channel went from her to the fact that several cottages and other houses in the two hintocks, now his own, would fall into her possession in the event of South's death. He marveled what people could have been thinking about in the past to invent such precarious tenures as these. Still more, what could have induced his ancestors at Hintock and other village people to exchange their old copy-holds for life leases? But having naturally succeeded to these properties to his father, he had done his best to keep them in order, though he was much struck with his father's negligence in not ensuring South's life. After breakfast, still musing on the circumstances, he went upstairs, turned over his bed, and drew out a flat canvas bag which lay between the mattress and the sacking. In this he kept his leases, which had remained there unopened ever since his father's death. It was the usual hiding-place among rural life-holders for such documents. Winterborne sat down on the bed and looked them over, and there were ordinary leases for three lives, which a member of the South family some fifty years before this time had accepted of the Lord of the Manor in lieu of certain copy-holds and other rights, in consideration of having the dilapidated houses rebuilt by the said Lord. They had come into his father's possession chiefly through his mother, who was a South. Pinned to the parchment of one of the indentures was a letter which Winterborne had never before seen. It bore a remote date, the handwriting being that of some solicitor or agent, and the signature the land-holders. It was to the effect that at any time before the last of the stated life should drop, Mr. Giles Winterborne, Sr., or his representative, should have the privilege of adding his own and his son's life to the life remaining on payment of a merely nominal sum, the concession being in consequence of the elder Winterborne's consent to demolish one of the houses and relinquish its site, which stood at an awkward corner of the lane and impeded the way. The house had been pulled down years before. Why Giles's father had not taken advantage of his privilege to insert his own and his son's lives, it was impossible to say. The likelihood was that death alone had hindered him in the execution of this project, as it surely was the elder Winterborne having been a man who took much pleasure in dealing with house property in his small way. Since one of the Souths still survived, there was not much doubt that Giles could do what his father had left undone as far as his own life was concerned. His possibility cheered him much, for by those houses hung many things. Melbury's doubt of the young man's fitness to be the husband of Grace had been based not a little on the precariousness of his holdings in little and great Hintock. He resolved to attend to the business at once, the fine for renewal being a sum that he could easily muster. His scheme, however, could not be carried out in a day, and meanwhile he would run up to Souths, as he had intended to do, and learned the result of the experiment with the tree. Marty met him at the door. Well, Marty, he said, and was surprised to read in her face that the case was not so hopeful as he had imagined. I am sorry for your labour, she said. It's all lost, he says the tree seems taller than ever. Winterborne looked round at it. Taller the tree certainly did seem, the gauntness of its now naked stem being more marked than before. It quite terrified him when he first saw what you had done to it this morning, she added. He declares it'll come down upon us and cleave us like the sword of the Lord and of Gideon. Well, can I do anything else? He asked. The doctor says the tree ought to be cut down. Oh, you've had the doctor. I didn't send for him. Mrs. Sharman, before she left, heard the father was ill and told him to attend at her expense. That was very good of her. And he says it ought to be cut down, and we mustn't cut it down without her knowledge, I suppose. He went upstairs. There the old man sat staring at the now gaunt tree as if his gaze were frozen onto its trunk. Unluckily the tree waved afresh by this time, the wind having sprung up and blown the fog away, and his eyes turned with its wavings. They heard footsteps, a man's but of a lighter step than usual. There is Dr. Fitzpiers again, she said, and descended. Presently his tread was heard on the naked stairs. Mr. Fitzpiers entered the sick chamber just as a doctor is more or less wont to do on such occasions, and preeminently when the room is that of a humble cottager, looking round towards the patient with that preoccupied gaze, which so plainly reveals that he has well-knife forgotten all about the case and the whole circumstances, since he dismissed him from his mind at his last exit from the same apartment. He nodded to Winterborne, with whom he was already a little acquainted, recalled the case to his thoughts, and went leisurely on to where South sat. Fitzpiers was, on the whole, a finely formed handsome man. His eyes were dark and impressive, and beamed with the light either of energy or susceptivity. It was difficult to say which. It might have been a little of both. That quick, glittering, practical eye, sharp for the surface of things and for nothing beneath it, he had not. But whether his apparent depth of vision was real, or only an artistic accident of his corporeal moulding, nothing but his deeds could reveal. His face was rather soft than stern, charming than grand, pale than flushed. His nose, with a sketch of his feature be derogued for a person of his pretensions, was artistically beautiful enough to have been worth doing in marble by any sculptor not over-busy, and was hence devoid of those nutty irregularities which often mean power, while the double Saima, a classical curve of his mouth, was not without elusiveness in its clothes. Nevertheless, either from his readily appreciative mienne, or his reflective manner, or the instinct towards profound things which was said to possess him, his presence bespoke the philosopher rather than the dandy or macaroni, an effect which was helped by the absence of trinkets or other trivialities from his attire, though this was more finished and up-to-date than is usually the case among rural practitioners. Strict people of the highly respectable class, knowing a little about them by report, might have said that he seemed likely to err rather in the possession of too many ideas than too few. To be a dreamy ist of some sort, or too deeply steeped in some false kind of ism, however this may be, it will be seen that he was undoubtedly a somewhat rare kind of gentleman and doctor, to have descended as from the clouds upon little Hintock. This is an extraordinary case, he said at last to Winterborne, after examining south by conversation, look and touch, and learning that the craze about the Elm was stronger than ever. I'll come downstairs, and I'll tell you what I think. They accordingly descended, and the doctor continued, the tree must be cut down, or I won't answer for his life. It is Mrs. Sharman's tree, and I suppose we must get permission, said Giles, and if so, as she's gone away I must speak to her agent. Oh, never mind whose tree it is, what's a tree beside a life? You cut it down, I have not the honour of knowing Mrs. Sharman as yet, but I am disposed to risk that much with her. To timber, rejoined Giles, more scrupulous than he would have been, had not his own interest stood so closely involved. Then never fell a stick about here without it being marked first, either by her or the agent. Then we'll inaugurate a new era forthwith. How long has he complained of the tree? Asked the doctor of Marty. A weeks and weeks, sir, the shape of it seems to haunt him like an evil spirit. He says that it is exactly his own age, that it has got human sense, and sprouted up when he was born on purpose to rule him, and keep him as its slave. Others have been like it a foreign hintock. They could hear South's voice upstairs. Oh, he's rocking this way, he must come. And then my poor life, that's what houses upon houses would be squashed out of me. Oh, oh, oh. That's how he goes on, she added, and he'll ever look anywhere else but out of the window, and scarcely have the curtains drawn. Down with it, then, and hang, Mr. Shaman, said Mr. Fitzpiers. The best plan would be to wait till the evening, when it's dark, or early in the morning before he's awake, so that he doesn't see it fall, for that would terrify him worse than ever. Keep the blind down till I come, and then I'll assure him, and show him that his trouble is over. The doctor then departed, and they waited till the evening. When it was dusk, and the curtains drawn, Winterborne directed a couple of woodmen to bring a cross-cut saw, and the tall threatening tree was soon nearly off at its base. He would not fell it completely then on account of the possible crash, but next morning, before South was awake, they went and lowered it cautiously, in a direction away from the cottage. It was a business difficult to do quite silently, but it was done at last, and the elm of the same birth-year as the woodmen's lay stretched upon the ground. The weakest idler that passed could now set foot on marks formerly made in the upper forks by the shoes of adventurous climbers only, once inaccessible nests could be examined microscopically, and on swaying extremities where birds alone had perched the bystanders sat down. As soon as it was broad daylight the doctor came, and Winterborne entered the house with him. Marty said that her father was wrapped up and ready, as usual, to be put into his chair. They ascended the stairs, and soon seated him. He began at once to complain of the tree, and the danger to his life and Winterborne's house-property in consequence. The doctor signalled to Giles, who went and drew back the printed cotton curtains. "'Tis gone, see,' said Mr. Fitzpiers. As soon as the old man saw the vacant patch of sky in place of the branched column so familiar to his gaze he sprang up speechless. His eyes rose from the hollows till the whites showed all round. He fell back, and a bluish whiteness overspread him. Greatly alarmed they put him on the bed. As soon as he came a little out of his fit he gasped. "'Oh! It is gone! Where? Where?' His whole system seemed paralysed by amazement. They were thunderstruck at the result of the experiment, and did all they could. Nothing seemed to avail. Giles and Fitzpiers went and came, but uselessly. He lingered through the day, and died that evening as the sun went down. "'Damn if my remedy hasn't killed him,' murmured the doctor. End of chapter 14