Book: The Woodlanders

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"I s'pose 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 pomps, seem to me as yesterday. Ah, many's
the patriarch I've seed come and go in this parish! There, he's
calling for more plates. Lord, why can't 'em turn their plates
bottom upward for pudding, as they used to do in former days?"

Meanwhile, in the adjoining room Giles was presiding in a half-
unconscious state. He could not get over the initial failures in
his scheme for advancing his suit, and hence he did not know that
he was eating mouthfuls of bread and nothing else, and continually
snuffing the two candles next 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, involuntary 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 baint here, maister," mildly
expostulated Creedle, in an aside audible to all the company.

"Well, yes--but--" replied Giles. He went over to Grace, and
hoped none of it had gone into her eye.

"Oh no," she said. "Only a sprinkle on my face. It was nothing."

"Kiss it and make it well," gallantly observed Mr. Bawtree.

Miss Melbury blushed.

The timber-merchant said, quickly, "Oh, it is nothing! She must
bear these little mishaps." But there could be discerned in his
face something which said "I ought to have foreseen this."

Giles himself, since the untoward beginning of the feast, had not
quite liked to see Grace present. He wished he had not asked such
people as Bawtree 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, Bawtree and the hollow-turner
monopolizing the new packs for an interminable game, in which a
lump of chalk was incessantly used--a game those two always played
wherever they were, taking a solitary candle and going to a
private table in a corner with the mien of persons bent on weighty
matters. The rest of the company on this account were obliged to
put up with old packs for their round game, that had been lying by
in a drawer ever since the time that Gliles'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 wore 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 Bawtree and the hollow-turner
from the back of the room:


"And I' will hold' a wa'-ger with you'
That all' these marks' are thirt'-y two!"


accompanied by rapping strokes with the chalk on the table; then
an exclamation, an argument, a dealing of the cards; then the
commencement of the rhymes anew.

The timber-merchant showed his feelings by talking with a
satisfied sense of weight in his words, and by praising the party
in a patronizing tone, when Winterborne expressed his fear that he
and his were not enjoying themselves.

"Oh yes, yes; pretty much. What handsome glasses those are! I
didn't know you had such glasses in the house. Now, Lucy" (to his
wife), "you ought to get some like them for ourselves." And when
they had abandoned cards, and Winterborne was talking to Melbury
by the fire, it was the timber-merchant who stood with his back to
the mantle in a proprietary attitude, from which post of vantage
he critically regarded Giles's person, rather as a superficies
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 bandsmen from Great Hintock
having arrived some time before. Grace had been away from home so
long that she had forgotten the old figures, and hence did not
join in the movement. Then Giles felt that 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 sylph-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 unskilfully, for want of practice, as she
declared.

Mr. Melbury was standing by, and exclaimed, contemptuously, "Tell
her fortune, indeed! Her fortune has been told by men of science--
what do you call 'em? 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 in Hintock."

At last the time came for breaking up, Melbury 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's mahogany table with chalk scratches. The three
walked home, the distance being short and the night clear.

"Well, Giles is a very good fellow," said Mr. Melbury, as they
struck down the lane under boughs which formed a black filigree in
which the stars seemed set.

"Certainly he is, said Grace, quickly, and in such a tone as to
show that he stood no lower, if no higher, in her regard than he
had stood before.

When 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!"

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