"Well, Giles is a very good fellow," said Mr. Melbury, as they
struck down the lane under boughs which formed a black filigree in
which the stars seemed set.
"Certainly he is, said Grace, quickly, and in such a tone as to
show that he stood no lower, if no higher, in her regard than he
had stood before.
When they were opposite an opening through which, by day, the
doctor's house could be seen, they observed a light in one of his
rooms, although it was now about two o'clock.
"The doctor is not abed yet," said Mrs. Melbury.
"Hard study, no doubt," said her husband.
"One would think that, as he seems to have nothing to do about
here by day, he could at least afford to go to bed early at night.
'Tis astonishing how little we see of him."
Melbury'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's party, and when they were nearly home
he spoke again, his daughter being a few steps in advance: "It is
hardly the line of life for a girl like Grace, 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 be really spoiling her for him.
Ah, 'tis a thousand pities! But he ought to have her - he ought!"
At this moment the two exclusive, chalk-mark men, having at last
really finished their play, could be heard coming along in the
rear, vociferously singing a song to march-time, and keeping
vigorous step to the same in far-reaching strides -
"She may go, oh!
She may go, oh!
She may go to the d - - for me!"
The timber-merchant turned indignantly to Mrs. Melbury. "That's
the sort of society we've been asked to meet," he said. "For us
old folk it didn't matter; but for Grace - Giles should have known
better!"
Meanwhile, in the empty house from which the guests had just
cleared out, the subject of their discourse was walking from room
to room surveying the general displacement of furniture with no
ecstatic feeling; rather the reverse, indeed. At last he entered
the bakehouse, and found there Robert Creedle sitting over the
embers, also lost in contemplation. Winterborne sat down beside
him.
"Well, Robert, you must be tired. You'd better get on to bed."
"Ay, ay, Giles - what do I call ye? Maister, I would say. But 'tis
well to think the day IS done, when 'tis done."
Winterborne had abstractedly taken the poker, and with a wrinkled
forehead was ploughing abroad the wood-embers on the broad hearth,
till it was like a vast scorching Sahara, with red-hot bowlders
lying about everywhere. "Do you think it went off well, Creedle?"
he asked.
"The victuals did; that I know. And the drink did; that I
steadfastly believe, from the holler sound of the barrels. Good,
honest drink 'twere, the headiest mead I ever brewed; and the best
wine that berries could rise to; and the briskest Horner-and-
Cleeves cider ever wrung down, leaving out the spice and sperrits
I put into it, while that egg-flip would ha' passed through
muslin, so little curdled 'twere. 'Twas good enough to make any
king's heart merry - ay, to make his whole carcass smile. Still, I
don't deny I'm afeared 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, 'twere doomed to be so. Not but what that snail might as
well have come upon anybody else's plate as hers."
"What snail?"
"Well, maister, there was a little one upon the edge of her plate
when I brought it out; and so it must have been in her few leaves
of wintergreen."
"How the deuce did a snail get there?"
"That I don't know no more than the dead; but there my gentleman
was."
"But, Robert, of all places, that was where he shouldn't have
been!"
"Well, '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 seed on any plate of victuals
that's served by Robert Creedle....But Lord, there; I don't mind
'em myself - them small ones, for they were born on cabbage, and
they've lived on cabbage, so they must be made of cabbage. But
she, the close-mouthed little lady, she didn't say a word about
it; though 'twould have made good small conversation as to the
nater of such creatures; especially as wit ran short among us
sometimes."
"Oh yes - 'tis all over!" murmured 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 hob-and-nob
elsewhere. They shouldn't have schooled her so monstrous high, or
else bachelor men shouldn't give randys, or if they do give 'em,
only to their own race."
"Perhaps that's true," said Winterborne, rising and yawning a
sigh.
CHAPTER XI.
"'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 her last twelve months of absence had
produced in his daughter, after the heavy sum per annum that he
had been spending for several years upon her education, he was
reluctant to let her marry Giles Winterborne, indefinitely
occupied as woodsman, cider-merchant, apple-farmer, and what not,
even were she willing to marry him herself.
"She will be his wife if you don't upset her notion that she's
bound to accept him as an understood thing," said Mrs. Melbury.
"Bless ye, she'll soon shake down here in Hintock, and be content
with Giles's way of living, which he'll improve with what money
she'll have from you. 'Tis the strangeness after her genteel life
that makes her feel uncomfortable at first. Why, when I saw
Hintock the first time I thought I never could like it. But
things gradually get familiar, and stone floors seem not so very
cold and hard, and the 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's wife. But I
can't bear the thought of dragging down to that old level as
promising a piece of maidenhood as ever lived - fit to ornament a
palace wi' - 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 shail and wamble!"
"She may shail, but she'll never wamble," replied his wife,
decisively.
When Grace came down-stairs he complained of her lying in bed so
late; not so much moved by a particular objection to that form of
indulgence as discomposed by these other reflections.
The corners of her pretty mouth dropped 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 towards each
other is in truth directed against that intangible Causality 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 on to the paddock, where the white frost lay, and where
starlings in flocks of twenties and thirties were walking about,
watched by a comfortable family of sparrows perched in a line
along the string-course of the chimney, preening themselves in the
rays of the sun.
"Come in to 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 in
honor I ought to marry him, whenever I do marry."
He had a strong suspicion that somewhere in the bottom of her
heart there pulsed an old simple indigenous feeling favorable to
Giles, though it had become overlaid with implanted tastes. But
he would not distinctly express his views on the promise. "Very
well," he said. "But I hope I sha'n't lose you yet. Come in to
breakfast. What did you think of the inside of Hintock House the
other day?"
"I liked it much."
"Different from friend Winterborne's?"
She said nothing; but he who knew her was aware that she meant by
her silence to reproach him with drawing cruel comparisons.
"Mrs. Charmond 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
any on Wednesday. In brief, a fortnight slipped by without a
sign, and it looked suspiciously as if Mrs. Charmond were not
going further in the direction of "taking up" Grace at present.
Her father reasoned thereon. Immediately after his daughter's two
indubitable successes with Mrs. Charmond - the interview in the
wood and a visit to the House - she had attended Winterborne'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, above all. 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 it was settled in his mind that her sudden mingling with the
villagers at the unlucky Winterborne'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' 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 he have read
them through those old panes. But he saw nothing: his features
just now were, for a wonder, lit up with a red smile at some other
idea. So they rose from breakfast and went to the door, Grace
with an anxious, wistful manner, her father in a reverie, Mrs.
Melbury placid and inquiring. "We have come out to look at your
horse," she said.
It could be seen that he was pleased at their attention, and
explained that he had ridden a mile or two to try the animal's
paces. "I bought her," he added, with warmth so severely
repressed as to seem indifference, "because she has been used to
carry a lady."
Still Mr. Melbury did not brighten. Mrs. 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, get off and come in," said Melbury, brusquely; and Giles
dismounted accordingly.
This event 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 as philosophic a mood as he was capable
of; but there had been enthusiasm enough left in him one day at
Sherton Abbas market to purchase this old mare, which had belonged
to a neighboring parson with several daughters, and was offered
him to carry either a gentleman or a lady, and to do odd jobs of
carting and agriculture at a pinch. This obliging quadruped
seemed to furnish Giles with a means of reinstating himself in
Melbury's good opinion as a man of considerateness by throwing out
future possibilities to Grace.
The latter looked at him with intensified interest this morning,
in the mood which is altogether peculiar to woman's nature, and
which, when reduced into plain words, seems as impossible as the
penetrability of matter - that of entertaining a tender pity for
the object of her own unnecessary coldness. The imperturbable
poise which marked Winterborne in general was enlivened now by a
freshness and animation that set a brightness in his eye and on
his cheek. Mrs. Melbury asked him to have some breakfast, and he
pleasurably replied that he would join them, with his usual lack
of tactical observation, not perceiving that they had all finished
the meal, that the hour was inconveniently late, and that the note
piped by the kettle denoted it to be nearly empty; so that fresh
water had to be brought in, trouble taken to make it boil, and a
general renovation of the table carried out. Neither did he know,
so full was he of his tender ulterior object in buying that horse,
how many cups of tea he was gulping down one after another, nor
how the morning was slipping, nor how he was keeping the family
from dispersing about their duties.
Then he told throughout the humorous story of the horse's
purchase,looking particularly grim at some fixed object in the
room, a way he always looked when he narrated anything that amused
him. While he was still thinking of the scene he had described,
Grace rose and said, "I have to go and help my mother now, Mr.
Winterborne."
"H'm!" he ejaculated, turning his eyes suddenly upon her.
She repeated her words with a slight blush of awkwardness;
whereupon Giles, becoming suddenly conscious, too conscious,
jumped up, saying, "To be sure, to be sure!" wished 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 Hintock life was
fast becoming effaced from her observation as a 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 simple identity with the lineaments of the
past.
Thus Mr. Melbury went out of the house still unreconciled to the
sacrifice of the gem he had been at such pains in mounting. He
fain could hope, in the secret nether chamber of his mind, that
something would happen, before the balance of her feeling had
quite turned in Winterborne's favor, to relieve his conscience and
preserve her on her elevated plane.
He could not forget that Mrs. Charmond had apparently abandoned
all interest in his daughter as suddenly as she had conceived it,
and was as firmly convinced as ever that 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
this side and on that is made to travel in specific directions,
the little touches of circumstance in the life of this young girl
shaped the curves of her career.
CHAPTER XII.
It was a day of rather bright weather for the season. Miss
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 neighbor
restlessly. Grace's lips sucked in this native air of hers like
milk. They soon reached a place where the wood ran down into a
corner, and went outside it towards comparatively open ground.
Having looked round about, they were intending to re-enter the
copse 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."
Farther up they saw in the mid-distance the hounds running hither
and thither, as if there were little or no scent that day. Soon
divers members of the hunt appeared on the scene, and 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 acteonic excitement, and Grace being a few steps in
advance, he addressed her, asking if she had seen the fox.
"Yes," said she. "We saw him some time ago - just out there."
"Did you cry Halloo?"
"We said nothing."
"Then why the d - - didn't you, or get the old buffer to do it for
you?" said the man, as he cantered away.
She looked rather disconcerted at this reply, and observing her
father's face, saw that it was quite red.
"He ought not to have spoken to ye like that!" said the old man,
in the tone of one whose heart was bruised, though it was not by
the epithet applied to himself. "And he wouldn't if he had been a
gentleman. 'Twas not the language to use to a woman of any
niceness. You, so well read and cultivated - how could he expect
ye to know what tom-boy field-folk are in the habit of doing? If
so be you had 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, so as to show an example to the neighborhood of what a woman
can be? Grace, shall I tell you the secret of it? 'Twas because I
was in your company. If a black-coated squire or pa'son 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 color 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 tawdry imitation article when
she's hobbing and nobbing with a homely blade. You sha'n't be
treated like that for long, or at least your children sha'n'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 honor than I already have!"
"A perplexing and ticklish possession is a daughter," according to
Menander or some old Greek poet, and to nobody was one ever more
so than to Melbury, by reason of her very dearness to him. As for
Grace, she began to feel troubled; she did not perhaps wish there
and then to unambitiously devote her life to Giles Winterborne,
but she was conscious of more and more uneasiness at the
possibility of being the social hope of the family.
"You would like to have more honor, if it pleases me?" asked her
father, in continuation of the subject.
Despite her feeling she assented to this. His reasoning had not
been without its weight upon her.
"Grace," he said, just before they had reached the house, "if it
costs me my life you shall marry well! To-day has shown me that
whatever a young woman's niceness, she stands for nothing alone.
You shall marry well."
He breathed heavily, and his breathing was caught up by the
breeze, which seemed to sigh a soft remonstrance.
She looked calmly at him. "And how about Mr. Winterborne?" she
asked. "I mention it, father, not as a matter of sentiment, but
as a question of keeping faith."
The timber-merchant's eyes fell for a moment. "I don't know - I
don't know," he said. "'Tis a trying strait. Well, well; there's
no hurry. We'll wait and see how he gets on."
That evening he called her into his room, a snug little apartment
behind the large parlor. It had at one time been part of the
bakehouse, with the ordinary oval brick oven in the wall; but Mr.
Melbury, in turning it into an office, had built into the cavity
an iron safe, which he used for holding his private papers. The
door of the safe was now open, and his keys were hanging from it.
"Sit down, Grace, and keep me company," he said. "You may amuse
yourself by looking over these." He threw out a heap of papers
before her.
"What are they?" she asked.
"Securities of various sorts." He unfolded them one by one.
"Papers worth so much money each. Now here's a lot of turnpike
bonds for one thing. Would you think that each of these pieces of
paper is worth two hundred pounds?"
"No, indeed, if you didn't say so."
"'Tis so, then. Now here are papers of another sort. They are
for different sums in the three-per-cents. Now these are Port
Breedy Harbor bonds. We have a great stake in that harbor, you
know, because I send off timber there. Open the rest at your
pleasure. They'll interest ye."
"Yes, I will, some day," said she, 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 Sherton Abbas."
"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 home, more in your element, anywhere than you did that
afternoon with Mrs. Charmond, when she showed you her house and
all her knick-knacks, 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, your 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 ye, and look over these papers and see what you'll be
worth some day. For they'll all be yours, you know; who have I
got to leave 'em to but you? Perhaps when your education is
backed up by what these papers represent, and that backed up by
another such a set and their owner, men such as that fellow was
this morning may think you a little more than a buffer's girl."
So she did as commanded, and opened each of the folded
representatives of hard cash that her father put before her. To
sow in her 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 behavior to him since her
return. "If I had only come home in a shabby dress, and tried to
speak roughly, this might not have happened," she thought. She
deplored less the fact than the sad possibilities that might lie
hidden therein.
Her father then insisted upon her looking over his checkbook and
reading the counterfoils. This, also, she obediently did, and at
last came to two or three which had been drawn to defray some of
the late expenses of her clothes, board, and education.
"I, too, cost a good deal, like the horses and wagons and corn,"
she said, looking up sorrily.
"I didn't want you to look at those; I merely meant to give you an
idea of my investment transactions. But if you do cost as much as
they, never mind. You'll yield a better return."
"Don't think of me like that!" she begged. "A mere chattel."
"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-
humoredly. And he looked her proudly up and down.
A few minutes later Grammer Oliver came to tell them that supper
was ready, and in giving the information she added, incidentally,
"So we shall soon lose the mistress of Hintock House for some
time, I hear, Maister Melbury. Yes, she's going off to foreign
parts to-morrow, for the rest of the winter months; and be-chok'd
if I don't wish I could do the same, for my wynd-pipe is furred
like a flue."
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 is
quite gone from ye!"
Grace said nothing.
"Now," he went on, emphatically, "'tis Winterborne's affair has
done this. Oh yes, 'tis. So let me say one word. Promise me
that you will not meet him again without my knowledge."
"I never do meet him, father, either without your knowledge or
with it."
"So much the better. I don't like the look of this at all. And I
say it not out of harshness to him, poor fellow, but out of
tenderness to you. For how could a woman, brought up delicately
as you have been, bear the roughness of a life with him?"
She sighed; it was a sigh of sympathy with Giles, complicated by a
sense of the intractability of circumstances.
At that same hour, and almost at that same minute, there was a
conversation about Winterborne in progress in the village street,
opposite Mr. Melbury's gates, where Timothy Tangs the elder and
Robert Creedle had accidentally met.
The sawyer was asking Creedle 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.
"Why, that poor little lonesome thing, Marty South, is likely to
lose her father. He was almost well, but is much worse again. A
man all skin and grief he ever were, and if he leave Little
Hintock for a better land, won't it make some difference to your
Maister Winterborne, neighbor Creedle?"
"Can I be a prophet in Israel?" said Creedle. "Won't it! 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 shoulders! You know
what it means? It is upon John South's life that all Mr.
Winterborne's houses hang. If so be South die, and so make his
decease, thereupon the law is that the houses fall without the
least chance of absolution into HER hands at the House. I told
him so; but the words of the faithful be only as wind!"
CHAPTER XIII.
The news was true. The life - the one fragile life - that had been
used as a measuring-tape of time by law, was in danger of being
frayed away. It was the last of a group of lives which had served
this purpose, at the end of whose breathings the small homestead
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 fifty-five
years, though something of a fidgety, anxious being, would have
been looked on as a man whose existence was so far removed from
hazardous as any in the parish, and as bidding fair to be
prolonged for another quarter of a century.
Winterborne walked up and down his garden next day thinking of the
contingency. The sense that the paths he was pacing, the cabbage-
plots, the apple-trees, his dwelling, cider-cellar, wring-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 indisposition
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 poll.
"Father is still so much troubled 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? I can do nothing."
He accompanied her to the cottage, and she conducted him up-
stairs. John South was pillowed up in a chair between the bed and
the window exactly opposite the latter, towards which his face was
turned.
"Ah, neighbor Winterborne," he said. "I wouldn't have minded if
my life had only been my own to lose; I don't vallie it in much of
itself, and can let it go if 'tis required of me. But to think
what 'tis worth to you, a young man rising in life, that do
trouble me! It seems a trick of dishonesty towards ye to go off at
fifty-five! I could bear up, I know I could, if it were not for
the tree - yes, the tree, 'tis that's killing me. There he stands,
threatening my life every minute that the wind do blow. He'll
come down upon us and squat us dead; and what will ye do when the
life on 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 South's dwelling. Whenever the wind blew, as it did now,
the tree rocked, naturally enough; and the sight of its motion and
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 South.
As the tree waved, South waved his head, making it his flugel-man
with abject obedience. "Ah, when it was quite a small tree," he
said, "and I was a little boy, I thought one day of chopping it
off with my hook to make a clothes-line prop with. But I put off
doing it, and then I again thought that I would; but I forgot it,
and didn't. And at last it got too big, and now 'tis my enemy,
and will be the death o' 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 Winterborne and Marty, soothingly. But they
thought it possible that it might hasten him into his grave,
though in another way than by falling.
"I tell you what," added Winterborne, "I'll climb up this
afternoon and shroud off the lower boughs, and then it won't be so
heavy, and the wind won't affect it so."
"She won't allow it - a strange woman come from nobody knows where -
she won't have it done."
"You mean Mrs. Charmond? Oh, she doesn't know there's such a tree
on her estate. Besides, shrouding is not felling, and I'll risk
that much."
He went out, and when afternoon came he returned, took a billhook
from the woodman's shed, and with a ladder climbed into the 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 tier, he stepped off the ladder, climbed a few
steps higher, and attacked those at the next level. Thus he
ascended with the progress of his work far above the top of the
ladder, cutting away his perches as he went, and leaving nothing
but a bare stem below him.
The work was troublesome, for the tree was large. The afternoon
wore on, turning dark and misty about four o'clock. From time to
time Giles cast his eyes across towards the bedroom window of
South, where, by the flickering fire in the chamber, he could see
the old man watching him, sitting motionless with a hand upon each
arm of the chair. Beside him sat Marty, also straining her eyes
towards the skyey field of his operations.
A curious question suddenly occurred to Winterborne, and he
stopped his chopping. He was operating on another person's
property to prolong the years of a lease by whose termination that
person would considerably benefit. In that aspect of the case he
doubted if he ought to go on. On the other hand he was working to
save a man's life, and this seemed to empower him to adopt
arbitrary measures.
The wind had died down to a calm, and while he was weighing the
circumstances he saw coming along the road through the increasing
mist a figure which, indistinct as it was, he knew well. It was
Grace Melbury, on her way out from the house, probably for a short
evening walk before dark. He arranged himself for a greeting from
her, since she could hardly avoid passing immediately beneath the
tree.
But Grace, though she looked up and saw him, was just at that time
too full of the words of her father to give him any encouragement.
The years-long regard that she had had for him was not kindled by
her return into a flame of sufficient brilliancy to make her
rebellious. Thinking that she might not see him, he cried, "Miss
Melbury, here I am."
She looked up again. She was near enough to see the expression of
his face, and the nails in his soles, silver-bright with constant
walking. But she did not reply; and dropping her glance again,
went on.
Winterborne's face grew strange; he mused, and proceeded
automatically with his work. Grace meanwhile had not gone far.
She had reached a gate, 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 her return. Again he addressed her. "Grace,"
he said, when she was close to the trunk, "speak to me." She shook
her head without stopping, and went on to a little distance, where
she stood observing him from behind the hedge.
Her coldness had been kindly meant. If it was to be done, she had
said to herself, it should be begun at once. While she stood out
of observation Giles seemed to recognize her meaning; with a
sudden start he worked on, climbing higher, and cutting himself
off more and more from all intercourse with the sublunary world.
At last he had worked himself so high up the elm, and the mist had
so thickened, that he could only just be discerned as a dark-gray
spot on the light-gray sky: he would have been altogether out of
notice but for the stroke of his billhook and the flight of a
bough downward, and its crash upon the hedge at intervals.
It was not to be done thus, after all: plainness and candor were
best. She went back a third time; he did not see her now, and she
lingeringly gazed up at his unconscious figure, loath to put an
end to any kind of hope that might live on in him still. "Giles -
Mr. Winterborne," she said.
He was so high amid the fog that he did not hear. "Mr.
Winterborne!" she cried again, and this time he stopped, looked
down, and replied.
"My silence just now was not accident," she said, in an unequal
voice. "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 surprise, in a voice which
barely reached down the tree. "I have nothing to say in
objection - I cannot say anything till I've thought a while."
She added, with emotion in her tone, "For myself, I would have
married you - some day - I think. But I give way, for I see it
would be unwise."
He made no reply, but sat back upon a bough, 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
their sex is never so much inclined to throw in her lot with a man
for good and all as five minutes after she has told him such a
thing cannot be, the probabilities are that something might have
been done by the appearance of Winterborne on the ground beside
Grace. But he continued motionless and silent in that gloomy
Niflheim or fog-land 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 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 Winterborne dropped almost noiselessly to the
ground. He had thought the matter out, and having returned the
ladder and billhook to their places, pursued his way homeward. He
would not allow this incident to affect his outer conduct any more
than the danger to his 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