 THE WOODLANDERS CHAPTER VII Clydescopic 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 a 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 emergence therefrom. His attention was at length justified by the appearance of two figures, that of Mr. Melbury himself and Grace beside him. They stepped out in the 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 Bear Bowes had now set in, there were sheltered hollows amid the hint of plantations and copses in which a more tardy leaf-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, Holly Berries 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 surface, 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 the advanced school of painting to that of the Pacific Islander. Born followed, and kept his eye upon the two figures as they treaded away through these silvan phenomena, Mr. Melbury's long legs and gaiters drawn into the bone at the ankles, his slight stoop, his habit of getting lost and taught, and arousing himself with an exclamation of ha! accompanied by an upward jerk of the head, composed of personage recognisable by his neighbours, so far as could be seen. It seemed as if the squirrels and birds knew him. One of the former would occasionally run from the path and hide behind the arm of some tree, which a little animal carefully edge-drowned, parry-pasoo, with Melbury and his daughter's movement onward, assuming a mock manner, as though he were saying, Ho-ho! you will only do the timber-merchant and carry no-gun. They went noisily over the mats of starry moss, bustled through interspersed tracts of leaves, skirted trunks with spreading roots, whose must-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 stem in green cascades. On all the trees still then these huge loaves 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 interrupted, the lichen et the vigor off from 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 a sound almost metallic, like the sheet-iron foliage of the fabled, jarn-vid wood. Some flecks of white in Grace's 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 by ear. No difficult matter, for on the line of their course every wood-pigeon rolls from its perch with a continued clash, dashing its wings against the branches with well-knife forced 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-heeled tracks an impression of a slider kind from a boot that was obviously not local, for Winterborne 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 meanings 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 Winterborne 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 from one lot of plantation produce to another, like some philosopher of the peripatetic school delivering his lectures in the shady groves of the Lyceum. His companions were timber-dealers, yeoman, 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 very pattern by the slow torture of an encircling wood-bind during their growth, as the Chinese would have been said to mould human beings into grotesque toys by continued compression in infancy. Two women, wearing men's jackets on their gowns, conducted in the rear of the halting possession, a pony-cart containing a tapped barrel of beer, from which they drew and replenished horns that were handed around 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 boy-stander 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 that the auctioneer's face preserved, tending 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 peripathetics, and graced beside him, clinging closely to his arm, a 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 interest which attaches to memories revived after an interval of obliviousness. Winterborne went and stood close to them. The timber merchants spoke and continued his buying. Grace merely smiled. To justify his presence there, Winterborne 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 with 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 breadbasket. Standing a little behind Grace, Winterborne 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 a nod towards him, Yours, Mr. Winterborne, he had no idea whether he had bought faggots, poles, or logwood. He regretted, with some causticity of humour, that her father would show such inequalities of temperament as to keep Grace tightly on his arm today, 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 hither till 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 Juice, 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. Winterborne 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 the 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 the glade without looking back. While they moved slowly through it, a lady appeared on horseback in the middle distance, the line of a progress converging upon that of Melbury's. They met. Melbury took off his hat and she reigned in her horse. Her 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 an 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 much seemed to be said. When Melbury and Grace resumed their walk, it was with something of a lighter tread than before. Winterborne then pursued his own course homeward. He was unwilling to let coldness grow between himself and the Melbury's for any trivial reason, and in the evening went to their house. On 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 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 he was doing. I had come to say that any of the lots you may require are yours. Oh, never mind, never mind, said the timber merchant with a slight wave of his hand. I have so much else to think of that I nearly had forgotten. Just now, too, there are matters of a different kind from Tray to attend to, so don't let a 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 tomorrow, she said quietly. She's looking out at things now. I dare say she's wanting me this minute to assist her. Thereupon Mrs. Melbury left the room. Nothing 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 paternal pride, not sorry to have dragged out of him while he could not in any circumstances have kept in. Coming home from the woods this afternoon, we met Mrs. Sharman 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. That freemasonry of education made them close at once. Naturally enough, she was amazed at such an article. Ha! Ha! Ha! Could come from my house. At last it led on to Mrs. Grace being asked to the house. So she's busy hunting up her frills and four belowes 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. 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 home 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 chivalre 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 into an all-grade on the model, an intimate acquaintance with a new, interesting, and powerful friend. THE INSPIRITING 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 herbage around her, as the glowworm'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 corpses, over a stile 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 bird's nested chimneys of the mansion. Its walls were surmounted by a battle-minted parapet, but the gray-led roofs were quite visible behind it, with their gutters, laps, rolls, and skylights, together with incised letterings and shoe patterns cut by idlers thereon. The front of the house exhibited an ordinary menorial presentation of Elizabethan windows, mullioned and hooded, worked in rich snuff-colored freestone from local quarries. The ashlar of the walls, where not overgrown with ivy and other creepers, was coated with lichen of every shade, intensifying its luxuriance 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 Grace stood was richly grassed, with only an old tree here and there. A few she-play about, which as they ruminated, looked quietly into the bedroom windows. The situation of the house, prejudicial to humanity, was a stimulus to vegetation, on which a count and 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 the unfitness for 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, if 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 her 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 recollected that Mrs. Charmon would probably be alone. Up to a few days before this time, that lady had been accompanied in her comings, stayings, and goings by a relative believed to be her aunt. Laterally, however, these two ladies had separated, owing it is supposed to a quarrel, and Mrs. Charmon 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. Charmon was at the head 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 neighbors. 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 up by a gamekeeper in the track of a notorious poacher. But the keeper, forgetting what he had done, went that way himself, received the charge in 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 added playfully, Mantraps are of rather ominous significance where a person of our sex lives, are they not? Grace was bound to smile, but that side of womanliness 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. Charmon, with an indolent turn of her head, and they moved on inward. When she had shown her visitor different articles and cabinets that she deemed likely to interest her, some tapestries, wood carvings, ivories, miniatures, and so on, always with a mean of listlessness which might either have been constitutional 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 to 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 lymphatic temperament than Mrs. Charmon's was, who lingeringly smile their meanings to men rather than speak them, who inveigle rather than prompt, and take advantage of currents rather than steer. I am the most inactive woman when I am here, she says. I think sometimes I was born to live and do 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 was something so sympathetic, so appreciative, in the sound of Grace's voice, that it impelled people to play havoc with their customary reservations in talking to her. It is tender and kind of you to feel that, said Mrs. Charmon. 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 of 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 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 at 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 always could 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 they would be very glad. You are so accomplished I 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 lately come, and I have heard that he reads a great deal. I see his light sometimes through the trees late at night. Oh yes, a doctor, I believe I was told of him. It is a strange place for him to settle in. It is a convenience center for a 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? Fitzpiae, he represents a very old family, I believe, the Fitzpieses of Buckbury Fitzpiae, 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. Charmone 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, belt-burger-leaked nature had grown tired of caring about, a peculiarity that made her a contrast to her neighbors. It is of rather more importance 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 set quite at her ease by her entertainer. Mrs. Charmone was far too well-practiced 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 that young girl's eyes. So, being violently possessed with her idea of 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 glassed back by the faithful reflector, but Grace's countenance had the effect of making Mrs. Charmone appear more than her full age. There are complexions which set off each other to great advantage, and there are those which antagonize the one killing or damaging its neighbor unmercifully. This was unhappily the case here. Mrs. Charmone fell into a meditation and replied abstractedly to a cursory remark of her companions. However, she departed from her 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. Charmone still stood at the door meditatively regarding her. Often during the previous night, after his call on the Melbury's, Winterborne's thoughts ran upon Grace's announced visit to Hintock House. Why could he not have proposed to walk with her part of the way? Something 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 of 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 any 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 came audible a slight knocking at his front door. He descended the path and looked out and beheld Marty South dressed for outdoor work. Why didn't you come, Mr. Winterborne? she said. I've been waiting there hours and hours, and at last I thought I must try to find you. Bless my soul, I'd quite forgot, said Giles. What he had forgotten was that there was a thousand young fir trees to be planted in a neighboring spot which had been cleared by the woodcutters and that he had arranged to plant them with his own hands. He had a marvelous 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 beach 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 delight in the work even when, as at present, he contracted to do it 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 mold. He accompanied her towards the spot, being stimulated yet further to proceed with the work by the knowledge that the ground was close to the wayside along which Grace must pass on her return from Hintock House. You have a cold in the head, Marty, he said as they walked. That comes of cutting off your hair. I suppose it do. Yes, I have three headaches going on in my head at the same time. Three headaches. Yes, a rheumatic headache in my pole, a sick headache over my eyes, and a misery headache in the middle of my brain. However, I 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 conjurer's touch in spreading the roots of each little tree, resulting in a sort of caress under which the delicate fibers all laid themselves out in their proper directions for growth. He put most of these roots toward the southwest, 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 are lying down they don't sigh at all, said Marty. Do they? said Giles. I've never noticed it. She erected one of the young pines into its hole and held up her finger. The soft musical breathing instantly set in, which was not to cease night or day till 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 looked critically 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 a 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 an 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 wear my feet? Why, yes, of course, he said, wakening anew to her existence, though I was just thinking what a mild day it is for the 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. A run down the lane will be quite enough. No, it won't. You ought not to have come out today at all. But I should like to finish the— Marty, I tell you to go home, he said peremptorily. I can manage to keep the rest of them upright with a stick 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 good that I was rough, you know, but warm yourself in your own way. I don't care. When she had run off, he fancied he discerned a woman's dress through the hollybushes, which divided the coppice from the road. It was Grace at last on her way back from the interview with Mrs. Charmon. 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 his 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. Fitzpied. When he was gone, Winterborne pushed through the hollies and emerged close beside the interesting object of their contemplation. End of Chapter 8 Chapter 9 of The Woodlanders This is a LibriVox recording. All LibriVox recordings are in the public domain. For more information or to volunteer, please visit LibriVox.org. The Woodlanders by Thomas Hardy Chapter 9 I heard the bushes move long before I saw you, she began. I said first, it is some terrible beast. Next, it is a poacher. Next, it is a friend. 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 they're shown upon Miss Melbury's face a species of exultation which saw no environing 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 readened a little and said, How can you be so profane, Giles Winterborne? 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. Charmond's late husband bought the property. She is so nice, and grace fell into such an abstracted gaze at the imaginary image of Miss Charmond and her niceness that it almost conjured up a vision of that lady in mid-air before them. She has 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 is 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 won't keep you standing here. Hoy, Robert! He cried to a swaying collection of clothes in the distance, which was the figure of Cretal his man. Go on filling in there till I come back. I am a coming, sir. I am a coming. Well, the reason is this, she continued, as they went on together. Mrs. Charmond has a delightful side to her character, a desire to record her impressions of travel, like Alexander Dumas, and Murray and Stern and others. But she cannot find energy enough to do it herself. And Grace proceeded to explain Mrs. Charmond's proposal at large. My notion is that Murray's style will suit her best, because he writes in that soft, emotional, luxurious way she has. Grace said, musingly. Indeed, said Winterborne, with mock awe. Suppose you talk over my head a little longer, Ms. Grace Melbury. Oh, I didn't mean it, she said repentantly, 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, guiles? It is well enough in one sense, but it will take yawn away. Said he, mollified. Only for a short time we should return in May. Well, Ms. 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 matters 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 today 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 contented with him, a yeoman, now immersed in tree planting, even though he planted them well. And yet she's a true hearted girl, he said, thinking of her words about Hintock. I must bring matters to a point, and there's 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 a girl as before. Suppose Marty, he said after a while, looking at her extended arm, upon which old scratches from briars showed 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 she? 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 up a man to plant the rest tomorrow. I have 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 aglow, like some vast foundry, where a new world 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 roost. It will be fine tomorrow, said Marty, observing them, with a vermillion light of the sun in the pupils of her eyes. For they are a creepy down nearly at the end of the bow. If it 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. Winterborne? And so they must be later harder than we. I daresay they are, said Winterborne. Before taking a single step in the preparations, Winterborne, with no great hopes, went across that evening to the timber merchants to a certain if Grace and her parents would honor him with their presence. Having first 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 hint of houses but fitfully as yet on account of the trees. Melbury was crossing his yard on his way to call on some one at the larger village, but he readily turned and walked up and down the path with a 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 tomorrow? 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 today, 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. But how do I know what Grace's notions may be? You see, she has been away among cultivated folks a good while. And now there's acquaintance with Mrs. Charmonds. Well, I'll ask her. I can say no more. When winterborne 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 churchyard 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 ill upon the grass, and approached a particular headstone where he read, in memory of John Winterborne, with a subjoined date and age. It was the grave of Giles's father. The timber merchant laid his hands upon the stone and was humanized. Jack, my wronged friend, he said, I'll be faithful to my plan of making amends to ye. 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 down and spend an hour with him the day after tomorrow, and I'm thinking that, as his Giles who asks us, will go. They assented without demure, and, accordingly, the timber merchant sent Giles the next morning an answer in the affirmative. Winterborne, 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, stir and bustle pervaded the interior of Winterborne's domicile from cellar to apple loft. He had plans 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 Creedle, who did everything that required doing, from making Giles' bed to catching moles in his field. He was a survival from the days when Giles' father held the homestead, and Giles was a playing boy. These two, with a certain dilatoriousness which appertained to both, were now in the heat of preparation in the bakehouse, expecting nobody before six o'clock. Winterborne was standing before the brick oven, in his shirt sleeves, tossing in thorn sprays, and stirring about the blazing mass with a long-handled, three-pronged, Biel's-above kind of fork, the heat shining out upon his streaming face and making his eyes like furnaces, the thorns crackling and sputtering. While Creedle, having arranged 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, a roll of the ladder standing upside down on the hob to melt out the grease. Looking up from the rolling pin, Creedle saw passing the window first, the timber merchant, in his second best suit, Mrs. Malbury 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 fierce illumination which the oven threw out upon the operators and their utensils. Lord, lord, if they bank come already, said Creedle. No, hey? said Giles, looking round aghast, while the boy in the background waved a reeking candlestick in his delight. As there was no help for it, Winterborne 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 is not much difference. I hope you'll come in. But this means a regular rendezvous, said Mr. Malbury, accusingly glancing round and pointing towards the bakehouse with his stick. Well, yes, said Giles. And not 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 us, which 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 in a couple of hours? I hope you'll stay, if you'll 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 temperaments, for he feared that if the Malburys 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 tis,' said Mr. Malbury testily. Don't keep us here in the sitting-room. Lead on to the bakehouse, man. Now we are here. We'll help you get ready for the rest. Here, Mrs., take off your things and help him out in his baking, or he won't get done to-night. I'll finish eating the oven and set you free to go and skiver up them ducks.' His eyes had passed with pitiless direction of criticism into yet remote recesses of Winterborne'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. "'Tisn't quite so much in your line, as it is in your mother-laws and mine.' "'Of course I couldn't let you, Grace,' said Giles, with some distress. "'I'll do it, of course,' said Mrs. Malbury, 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, potterdidely about, while her father and his wife helped on the preparations. A kindly pity of his household management, which Winterborne saw in her eyes whenever he caught them, he pressed 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 brockle-head, semester. I much have feared. Who to have thought they to come so soon?' The bitter placidity of Winterborne's look. Adam breaded 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 a scrubbing brush is not clean. "'Very well, very well. I'll attend to it. You go and get him 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 have married, you'd see, Master,' he said. "'This cattle couldn't have happened to us. Everything being at last underway, 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 parlor, where the mulberries again dropped into position as guests, though the room was not nearly so warm and cheerful as the blazing bakehouse. Others now arrived. Among them, Farmer Baltry and the Hollow Turner, and T, went off very well. Grace's disposition to make the best of everything and to wink at deficiencies in Winterborne's menage was so uniform and persistent that he suspected her of seeing even more deficiencies than he was aware of. That suppressed sympathy which Ed showed in her face, ever since her arrival, told him as much too plainly. This muddling 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 Hintick 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 Creedle, in his zeal 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 as laid on. Giles apologized and called Creedle, but he felt that the fates were against him. End of Chapter 9 Recording by Katie Riley June 2009 Chapter 10 of The Woodlanders This is a LibriVox recording. All LibriVox recordings are in the public domain. For more information or to volunteer, please visit LibriVox.org The Woodlanders by Thomas Hardy Chapter 10 Supper time came, and with it, the hot baked from the oven laid on a snowy cloth fresh from the press and articulated with folds, as in Flemish last suppers. 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 these knowing things, Mr. Creedle, was when you was in the militia? Well, yes. I have seen the world at that time somewhat, certainly, and many ways a strange dashing life. Not but that Giles has worked hard in helping me to bring things to such perfection today. Giles, says I, though he is master, not that I should call him master by rights, for his father grow'd up side by side with me, as if one mother had twinned us and been our nourishing. I suppose your memory can reach a long way back into history, Mr. Creedle. Oh yes, ancient days when there was battles and famines and hang-fairs and other pumps, seemed to me as yesterday. Ah, many's the patriarch I've seen come and go in this parish. There, he's calling for more plates. Lord, why can't and 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 suits, 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 and ladies, please. A splash followed. Grace gave a quick and voluntary nod and blink, and put her handkerchief to her face. Good heavens, what did you do that for, Creedle? said Giles sternly and jumping up. Tis how I do it when they bane here, master. Mildly expostulated Creedle and 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. Paltry. Miss Malbury 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 Paltry and the Hollow-Turner. He had done it, in 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, Paltry and the Hollow-Turner monopolizing on 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 mind 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 Guile'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 thumbs now fleshless in the grave, and the kings and queens were a decayed expression of feature, as if they were rather an impecunious dethroned race of monarchs hiding in obscure slums than real regal 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 Paltry and the Hollow-Turner from the back of the room, and I will hold a 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 tempered 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 Minterborn 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 want to get some like them for ourselves. And when they had abandoned cards, and Minterborn was talking to Malbury by the fire, it was the tempered merchant who stood with his back to the mantle in a proprietary attitude from which post-advantage he critically regarded Giles' person, rather as a super-fishies, 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 bandsman from Great Hentuck 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 all was 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 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 unskillfully, for want of practice, as she declared. Mr. Malbury was standing by and exclaimed contemptuously, tell her fortune indeed, her fortune has been told by men of science. What do you call them, phrenologists? You 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 at Hentuck. At last the time came for breaking up, Malbury and his family being the earliest to leave. The two card-players, still pursuing their game doggedly in the corner, where they had completely covered Giles' 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. Malbury, as they struck down the lane under bows which formed a black filigree in which the stars seemed set. Certainly he is, said Grace quickly, in such a tone as to show that he stood no lower, if no higher, in her regard than he had stood before. When they were opposite in 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 is not a bed yet, said Mrs. Malbury. 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, to the astonishing how little we see of him. Malbury's mind seemed to turn with much relief to the contemplation of Mr. Fitzpiers after the scenes of the evening. It is natural enough, he replied. 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' 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, after 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, to the thousand pitties, but he ought to have her, he ought. At this moment the two exclusive chalkmark 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 step to the same in far-reaching strides. She may go O, she may go O, she may go to the D, for me. The timber-mergent turned indignantly to Mrs. Malbury. 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 aesthetic feeling, rather the reverse, indeed. At last he entered the bake-house, and found there Robert Creedle, sitting over the embers, also lost in contemplation. Winterburn sat down beside him. Well, Robert, you must be tired. You'd better go on to bed. Aye, aye, Giles, what do I call ye? Master, I would say. But tis well to think the day is done, when tis done. Winterburn had abstractly taken the poker, and, with a wrinkled forehead, was plowing abroad the wood embers on 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 vitals did, that I know, and the drink did, that I said fastly believe, from the holler sound of the barrels, good, honest drink, to the heaviest meat I ever brewed, and the best wine that berries could rise to, and the brickest hornar and cleave cider ever wrung down, leaving out the spice and spirits I put into it, while that egg-flip would have passed through muslin, so little curdles were, which was good enough to make any king's heart merry. Aye, to make his whole carcass smile. Still, I don't deny him a fear, some things didn't go well with he and his. Creedle nodded, in a direction which signified where the melburys lived. I'm afraid, too, that it was a failure there. If so, it were doomed to be so. Not but what that snail might as well have come upon anybody else's plate as hers. What snail? Well, Master, there was a little one upon the edge of her plate when I brought it out, so it must have been in her few leaves of wintergreen. How the deuce did a snail get there? That I don't know more than the dead, but there my gentleman was. But Robert, of all places, that was where he shouldn't have been. Well, twas 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 always will lurk in close to the stump of cabbages in that tantalizing way. He wasn't alive, I suppose, said Giles, with a shudder on Grace's account. Oh, no, he was well-boiled. I warrant him well-boiled. God forbid that a live snail should be seeded on any plate of vitals that serve by Robert Cretol. But, Lord, there I don't mind them myself. Them small ones, for they were born on cabbage, and they've lived on cabbage, so they must be made a cabbage. But she, the closed-mouthed little lady, she didn't say a word about it, though it would have made good small conversation as to the nature such creatures, especially as wit ran short among us sometimes. Oh, yes, tis all over, murmur Giles to himself, shaking his head over the glooming plain of embers, and lining his forehead more than ever. Do you know, Robert, he said, that she's been accustomed to servants and everything superfine these many years? How, then, could she stand our ways? Well, all I can say is, then, that she ought to have a knob elsewhere. They shouldn't have schooled her so monstrous high, or else Bachelor Men shouldn't give randies. Or, if they do give em, only to their own race. Perhaps that's true, said Winterborne, rising and yawning aside. End of Chapter 10. Recording by Katie Riley. July 2009. Chapter 11 of The Woodlanders. This is a LibriVox recording. All LibriVox recordings are in the public domain. For more information or to volunteer, please visit LibriVox.org. The Woodlanders by Thomas Hardy. Chapter 11. Tis a pity, a thousand pities, her father kept saying next morning at breakfast, grace being still in her bedroom. But how could he, with any self-respect, obstruct Winterborne's suit at this stage and nullify a scheme he had labored to promote, 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 in her last 12 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 woodsman, cider merchant, apple farmer, and whatnot, 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. Malbury. Bless ye, she'll soon shake down here in Hintock and be content with Giles' 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 had thought, I never could like it, but things gradually got familiar, and stone floors seemed not so very cold and hard, and the hooting of the owls not so very dreadful, and loneliness 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 way of speaking, and feel a drowsy content in being Giles' wife, but I can't bear the thought of dragging down to that old level as promising a piece of maidenhood has ever lifted, fit to orm in a place 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 curl in talking, and her bounding walk becoming the regular Hintock shale and wamble. She may shale, but she'll 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 mouth dropped a little down. You used to complain with justice when I was a girl, she said, but I am a woman now, and can judge for myself, but it is not that, it is something else. Instead of sitting down, she went outside the door. He was sorry, the petulance that relatives show toward each other is in truth directed against that intangible casualty which has shaped the situation no less for the offenders than the offended, but is too elusive to be discerned and cornered by poor humanity in irritated mood. Melbury followed her. She had rambled onto the paddock where the white frost lie, and where starlings in flocks of 20s and 30s were walking about, matched 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. Come into breakfast, my girl, he said, and as to Giles, use your own mind. Whatever pleases you will please me. I am promised to him, father, and I cannot help thinking that an honor I ought to marry him, whenever I do marry. He had a strong suspicion that somewhere in the bottom of her heart there perched an old, simple indigenous feeling favorable to Giles, though it had become overlaid with implanted tastes, but he would not distinctly express his views in the promise. Very well, he said, but I hope I shan't lose you yet. Come into breakfast. What did you think of the inside of Hintuck House the other day? I liked it much, different from friend Winterborn's. She said nothing, but he who knew her was aware that she meant by her silence to approach him with drawing cruel comparisons. Miss Charmond has 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 this subject upon their lips they entered to breakfast. Tuesday came, but no message from Mrs. Charmond, nor was there on Wednesday. In brief, a fortnight slipped by without a sign, and it looks suspiciously as if Mrs. Charmond were not going forward in this direction of taking up grace at present. Her father reasoned there on. Immediately after his daughter's two indubitable successes with Mrs. Charmond, the interview in the wood and a visit to the house, she had attended Winterborn's party. No doubt the out-and-out joviality of that gathering had made it a topic in the neighborhood, and that every one present as guests had been widely spoken of, grace with her exceptional qualities of a ball. What then, so natural as 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 was settled in his mind that her sudden mingling with the villagers of the unlucky Winterborn's was the cause of her most grievous loss, as he deemed it in the direction of Hintock House. "'Tis a thousand pities,' 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. Could have read him through his old pains, but he knew nothing. His features just now were, for a wonder, led 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, misses Melbury Plaston inquiring. "'We have come out to look at your horse,' she said. It could be seen that he was quite pleased at their attention and explained that he had risen 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 has been used to carry a lady. Still, Mr. Merbury did not brighten. Mr. Melbury said, and is she quiet? Winterborne assured her that there was no doubt of it. I took care of that. She's five and twenty and very clever for her age. "'Well, could often come in,' said Melbury. This was the concrete result of Winterborne's thoughts during the past week or two. The want of success with his evening party he had accepted in the philosophic mood as he was capable of. But there had been enthusiasm enough left in him one day at Shirt and Abass Market to purchase this old mare, which had belonged to a neighboring person 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 gals with the means of Brian stating himself in Melbury's good opinion as a man of considerateness by throwing at future possibilities to grace. The latter looked at him with intensified interest this morning in the mood which is altogether peculiar to a woman's nature and which, when reduced into plain words, seems as impossible as the penetrability of matter that of entertaining a tender pity for the object of her own unnecessary coldness. The impertutable poise, which marked Winterborne in general, was enliven 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 and that the hour was inconveniently late and that the note piped by the kettle denoted it to be nearly empty so that a 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 through 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 was narrating something that amused him. While he was still thinking of the scene he had described, Grace Rosen said, I have to go and help my mother now, Mr. Winterborn. Hmm, he ejaculated, turning his eyes suddenly upon her. She repeated her words with a slight blush of awkwardness, whereupon Giles, being suddenly conscious, too conscious, jumped up saying, to be sure, to be sure, wishing them 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. For, as her father saw with some regret, already the homeliness of his talk life was fast becoming effaced from her observations of singularity. Just as the first strangeness of a face from which we have for years been separated insensibly passes off with renewed intercourse and tones itself down into simply identity with the liniments of the past. Thus, Mr. Melbury, when out of the house, still unreconciled to the sacrifice of the gem, he had been at such pains in mounting. He fancied good hope in the secret neither chamber of his mind that something would happen. Therefore, the balance of her feeling had quite turned into Winterborn's favor to relieve his conscious 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 the 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 his side and that is made to travel in specific directions, the little touches of circumstances in the life of this young girl shaped the curves of her career. This is a LibriVox recording. All LibriVox recordings are in the public domain. For more information or to volunteer, please visit LibriVox.org. Recording by Tyg Hines. The Woodlanders by Thomas Hardy Chapter 12 It was a day of rather bright weather for this season. Miss Melbury went out for a morning walk, and her ever-regardful 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 around 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. 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. It was evident from their movements that the chase had been stultified by general puzzle-headedness as to the whereabouts of the intended victim. In a minute a farmer rode up to the two pedestrians panting with actionic 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? I'll get that old buffer to do it for you, sir, 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 not by the epithet applied to himself. And he wouldn't, if he'd been a gentleman. It was not the language to use towards a woman of any niceness. You so well read and cultivated, how could he expect you to know what Tom by field folk are in that way of doing? If so be you would just come from trimming Swedes or Mangolds, 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, and to show an example to the neighbourhood of what a woman can be? Grace, shall I tell you the secret of it? It was cos I was in your company. If a black-coated squire had passed and 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 it is that. 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 tall re-imitation article when she's hobbin' and knobbin' 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 you 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. Would you like to have more honour, if it pleases me? asked her father in continuation of the subject. Despite her feelings, 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 wherever 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 mention it, Father, not as a matter of sentiment, but as a question of keeping faith. The timber-merchants' eyes fell for a moment. I don't know. I don't know, he said. Is it trying straight? Well, well, there's no hurry. We'll wait and see how he gets on. That evening he called her to his room, a snug little apartment behind a 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 its keys were hanging from it. Sit down, Grace, and keep me company, he said. You may amuse yourselves 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 were so much money each. Now, here's a lot of torn plate bonds for one thing. What do you think that each of these pieces of paper is worth two hundred pounds? No, indeed, if you didn't say so. It is so, then. Now, here are papers of another sort. These are for different sums in the three percents. Now, these are pork-breedy harbour bonds. We have a great stake in that, Harvey, you know, because I send off timber there. Open the rest, see 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, 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 Chetanadis. Yes, but she hesitated, looked at the fire, and went on in a low voice. If what has been arranged about me should come to anything, my sphere will 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 all, more in your element, anywhere that you did that afternoon is a charmant. When she showed you her house and all her knickknacks, and made you stay to tea so nicely in her drawing 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, you're feeling at the time was the right one, because your mind and body were just in full and fresh cultivation, so that going there with her was like meeting like. 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 you'll be worth some day, far than we all 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 said and errone, men such as that fellow this morning may tink 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. To sow in a heart cravings for social position was obviously his strong desire, though in direct 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 check-book 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 expense of her clothes, board and education. I too cost a good deal like the horses and wagons and corn, she said, looking up sorrowily. 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 yield a better return. Don't think of me like that. She begged a mere chattel. A 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 humorily, and he looked her proudly up and down. In a few minutes, Grandma Oliver came in to tell him the 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 forum parts tomorrow for the rest of the winter months, and be choked if I don't wish I could do the same for my windpipers ford like a flu. When the old woman had left the room, Melbury turned to his daughter and said, So Grace, you've lost your new friend, and your chance of keeping her company and writing her travels has quite gone by from you. Grace said nothing. Now, he said emphatically, Tis Winterborne's affair has done this. Oh, yes, tis. So, let me say one word. Promise me that you'll not meet him again without my knowledge. I never do meet him, Father, either without your knowledge or with it. So much to bear. I don't like the look of this at all, and I say it not out of harshness in him, poor fellow, but out of tenderness to you, for how could a woman, brought up deliquely 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 the intractability of circumstances. At the same hour, and almost at the same minute, there was a conversation about Winterborne and progress in the village street, opposite Mr. Melbury's gates, where Timothy Tang's The Elder and Robert Creadle had accidentally met. The sawer 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 in respect of it as news, and towards concern in respect of it as circumstance. Well, that poor little lonesome thing marries south, is like the loser father. He was almost well, but he's much worse again, a man all skin and grief he ever wear, and if he leaves it lint not for a better land, won't it make some difference to your master Winterborne, neighbor Creadle? Can I be a prophet in Israel? said Creadle. Won't it? And I was only shaping of such a thing yesterday in my poor long-seeing way, and all the work of the house upon my one's shoulders. You know what it means? It is upon John South's life that all Mr. Winterborne's houses hang. If so, be South Dui, and so make his decease. Thereupon the law is that the houses fall without the least chance of absolution into whorehands at the house. I told him so, but the words of the faithful be only as wind. End of Chapter 12 Chapter 13 of The Woodlanders This is a Librivox recording. All Librivox recordings are in the public domain. For more information or to volunteer, please visit Librivox.org. Recording by Tyang Hines The Woodlanders by Thomas Hardy Chapter 13 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 breathings the small homeset occupied by South himself, the larger one of Giles Winterborne, and half a dozen others that had been in the possession of various Hintock village families for the previous hundred years, and were now Winterborne's, would fall in and become part of the encompassing estate. Yet, a short two months earlier, Marty's father, aged 55 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 fare to be prolonged for another quarter of a century. Winterborne walked up and down his garden next day, thinking of the contingency. The sense that the paths he was paving, the cabbage plots, the apple trees, his dwelling, siler cellar, ring house, stables, and weathercock, 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 late in his position, 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 paw. Father still so much trouble in his mind about that tree, she said. You know the tree I mean, Mr. Winterborne, the tall one in front of the house that he thinks will blow down and kill us? Can you come and see if you can persuade him out of his notion, or you 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, name her Winterborne, 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, that do trouble me. It seems a trick of dishonesty towards you to go off at fifty-five. I could bear up, I know I could, if I were not for the tree. Yes, the tree did, that's killing me. There he stands, treading my life every minute that the wind do blow. He'll come down upon us and squat us dead, and what will he do when the life in your property is taken away? Never you mind me, that's of no consequence, said Giles. Think of 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 the south's dwelling. Whatever the wind blew, as it did now, the tree rocked naturally enough, and the sight of its motion and the sound of its sighs 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 wrung out of it. This fear it apparently was, rather than any organic disease, which was eating away the health of John's south. As the tree waved, south waved his head, making it his flubberman 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 in my hook to make a clothesline proper, but I put off doing it, and then I again thought I would, but I forgot it and didn't, and at last it got too big and out is my enemy and will be the death of me. Little 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 Winterbone 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 Winterbone, I'll climb up this afternoon and shroud off the lower powers, then it won't be so heavy and the wind won't affect it so. She won't allow it, strange woman come from nobody knows where, she won't have it done. You mean Mrs. Shaman? Oh, she doesn't know there's such a tree on her estate, besides shrouding is not felling and on risk that much. He went out and when the afternoon came he returned, took a bill hook from the woodman shed and with the ladder climbed into the lower 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 purchase 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 Marky, also straining her eyes towards the skyed field of his operations. A curious question suddenly occurred to Winterbourne and he stopped his chopping. He was operating on another person's property to prolong the years of release 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 of 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, the nails in his soul silver bright with constant walking, but she did not reply and dropping her glance again went on. Winterbourne's face grew strange, he mused and proceeded automatically with his work. Meanwhile Grace had not gone far. She had reached a gate whereon 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 a 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 mint. 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 Grace spot on the light Grace guy. He would have been all together out of notice but for the stroke of his billhook 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 candour were best. She went back a termed time, he did not see her now, and she lingeringly gazed up at his unconscious figure loathe to put an end to any kind of hope that might live on in him still. Giles, Mr Winterborn, she said. He was so high amid the fog that he did not hear. Mr Winterborn, she cried again, and this time he stopped, looked down and replied. My silence just now is not an accident, she said, in an unequal voice. But my father says it is best not to think too 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 a surprise, in a voice which barely reached down the tree. I have nothing to say in objection. I cannot say anything till I talk to her. 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 on my eyes. He made no reply, but sat back upon a bell, 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. Had 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 her sexes is never so much inclined to throw in her lot with a man for good and all, as five minutes after she has told them such a thing cannot be, the probabilities are that something might have been done by the appearance of Winterworn on the ground beside Grace. But he continued motionless and silent in that gloomy niffle-heim 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 reach the tree. A quarter of an hour had passed, and all was blackness overhead. Giles had not yet come down. Then the tree seemed to shiver, then to heave a sigh. A movement was audible, and Winterworn dropped almost noiselessly to the ground. He had thought the 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 whose leaseholds 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 wasn't truth more like a burial at her than a rupture with her, but he did not realise 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 harness 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 was the form two octaves, running from the highest note on the right or off side 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 neighbourhood, for living at Little Hintock, where the lanes yet remained as narrow as before the days of turn-bike roads, these sound signals were still as useful to him and his neighbours 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 till long after its time. The load being a ponderous one, the lane crooked and the air so thick, Winterborne set out, as he often did, to accompany the team as far as the corner, where it would turn into a wider road. So 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 an endeavour to guard. Suddenly they're beamed into their eyes, quite close to them, the two lamps of a carriage shorn of rays by the fog. Its approach had been quite unheard by reason of their own noise. The carriage was a covered one, while behind the cubby the siren another vehicle laden with luggage. Winterborne went to the head of the team and heard the coachman telling the character that he must turn back. The character declared that this was impossible. You can turn back if you want to eat your string horses, said the coachman. It's much easier for you to turn than us, said Winterborne. We fight on the timber on these wheels that we've announced. Five another carriage with luggage at my back. Winterborne admitted the strength of the argument. But even with that, he said, you can turn our back then away, and you ought to, for you could hear our bells and wind off. And you could see our lights. We couldn't because of the fog. Well, our timeless precious, said the coachman heartily. You're only going to some jumpy little village or other in the neighborhood, and we're going straight to Italy. Driving all the way, I suppose, said Winterborne 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 the horse's heads. The message was brought, and Winterborne sent the bearer back to say that he begged the ladies pardon, but that he could not do as 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 Melry 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 this purpose. Then the team came on ponderously, and the clanging of its sixteen bells as it passed the disconflicted 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 they 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 Winterborne felt a pang of regret. No man, a younger man, in a smaller way of business in Lentock. Winterborne is his name. Thus they parted company. Why, Mr Winterborne, said the wagoner when they were out of hearing, that was she, Mrs Charmond. Who'd have thought it? What a world-kind of woman that does nothing be cock-watching out here at this time of day for. Oh, going to Italy, yes, to be sure, I heard she was going abroad, she can't endure the winter here. Winterborne was vexed at the incident. The more so that he knew Mr Melbury, in his adoration of the Hintock house, would be the first to blame him if it became known. But saying no more, he accompanied the Lord to the end of the lane, and then turned back with the attention to call at Souths to learn the result of the experiment of the preceding evening. It chanced 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 tournure was a magnificent mass of braided locks. How well she looks this morning, said Grace, forgetting Mrs Charmond's light and her generous admiration. Her hair so becomes her worn that way. I have never seen any more beautiful. Nor have I miss, said Marty, dryly, unconsciously stroking her crown. Grace watched the carriages with lingering regret till they were out of sight. Then she learned of Marty that South was no better. Before she had come away, Winterbaughn approached the house, but seeing that one of the two girls standing at the doorstep was Grace, he suddenly turned back again and saw the shelter of his own home, till she should have gone away.