The Woodlanders: Chapter 6
Chapter 6
CHAPTER VI.
Meanwhile, Winterborne and Grace Melbury had also undergone their
little experiences of the same homeward journey.
As he drove off with her out of the town the glances of people
fell upon them, the younger thinking that Mr. Winterborne was in a
pleasant place, and wondering in what relation he stood towards
her. Winterborne himself was unconscious of this. Occupied
solely with the idea of having her in charge, he did not notice
much with outward eye, neither observing how she was dressed, nor
the effect of the picture they together composed in the landscape.
Their conversation was in briefest phrase for some time, Grace
being somewhat disconcerted, through not having understood till
they were about to start that Giles was to be her sole conductor
in place of her father. When they were in the open country he
spoke.
"Don't Brownley's farm-buildings look strange to you, now they
have been moved bodily from the hollow where the old ones stood to
the top of the hill?"
She admitted that they did, though she should not have seen any
difference in them if he had not pointed it out.
"They had a good crop of bitter-sweets; they couldn't grind them
all" (nodding towards an orchard where some heaps of apples had
been left lying ever since the ingathering).
She said "Yes," but looking at another orchard.
"Why, you are looking at John-apple-trees! You know bitter-sweets--
you used to well enough!"
"I am afraid I have forgotten, and it is getting too dark to
distinguish."
Winterborne did not continue. It seemed as if the knowledge and
interest which had formerly moved Grace's mind had quite died away
from her. He wondered whether the special attributes of his image
in the past had evaporated like these other things.
However that might be, the fact at present was merely this, that
where he was seeing John-apples and farm-buildings she was
beholding a far remoter scene--a scene no less innocent and
simple, indeed, but much contrasting--a broad lawn in the
fashionable suburb of a fast city, the evergreen leaves shining in
the evening sun, amid which bounding girls, gracefully clad in
artistic arrangements of blue, brown, red, black, and white, were
playing at games, with laughter and chat, in all the pride of
life, the notes of piano and harp trembling in the air from the
open windows adjoining. Moreover, they were girls--and this was a
fact which Grace Melbury's delicate femininity could not lose
sight of--whose parents Giles would have addressed with a
deferential Sir or Madam. Beside this visioned scene the homely
farmsteads did not quite hold their own from her present twenty-
year point of survey. For all his woodland sequestration, Giles
knew the primitive simplicity of the subject he had started, and
now sounded a deeper note.
"'Twas very odd what we said to each other years ago; I often
think of it. I mean our saying that if we still liked each other
when you were twenty and I twenty-five, we'd--"
"It was child's tattle."
"H'm!" said Giles, suddenly.
"I mean we were young," said she, more considerately. That gruff
manner of his in making inquiries reminded her that he was
unaltered in much.
"Yes....I beg your pardon, Miss Melbury; your father SENT me to
meet you to-day."
"I know it, and I am glad of it."
He seemed satisfied with her tone and went on: "At that time you
were sitting beside me at the back of your father's covered car,
when we were coming home from gypsying, all the party being
squeezed in together as tight as sheep in an auction-pen. It got
darker and darker, and I said--I forget the exact words--but I put
my arm round your waist and there you let it stay till your
father, sitting in front suddenly stopped telling his story to
Farmer Bollen, to light his pipe. The flash shone into the car,
and showed us all up distinctly; my arm flew from your waist like
lightning; yet not so quickly but that some of 'em had seen, and
laughed at us. Yet your father, to our amazement, instead of
being angry, was mild as milk, and seemed quite pleased. Have you
forgot all that, or haven't you?"
She owned that she remembered it very well, now that he mentioned
the circumstances. "But, goodness! I must have been in short
frocks," she said.
"Come now, Miss Melbury, that won't do! Short frocks, indeed! You
know better, as well as I."
Grace thereupon declared that she would not argue with an old
friend she valued so highly as she valued him, saying the words
with the easy elusiveness that will be polite at all costs. It
might possibly be true, she added, that she was getting on in
girlhood when that event took place; but if it were so, then she
was virtually no less than an old woman now, so far did the time
seem removed from her present. "Do you ever look at things
philosophically instead of personally?" she asked.
"I can't say that I do," answered Giles, his eyes lingering far
ahead upon a dark spot, which proved to be a brougham.
"I think you may, sometimes, with advantage," said she. "Look at
yourself as a pitcher drifting on the stream with other pitchers,
and consider what contrivances are most desirable for avoiding
cracks in general, and not only for saving your poor one. Shall I
tell you all about Bath or Cheltenham, or places on the Continent
that I visited last summer?"
"With all my heart."
She then described places and persons in such terms as might have
been used for that purpose by any woman to any man within the four
seas, so entirely absent from that description was everything
specially appertaining to her own existence. When she had done
she said, gayly, "Now do you tell me in return what has happened
in Hintock since I have been away."
"Anything to keep the conversation away from her and me," said
Giles within him.
It was true cultivation had so far advanced in the soil of Miss
Melbury's mind as to lead her to talk by rote of anything save of
that she knew well, and had the greatest interest in developing--
that is to say, herself.
He had not proceeded far with his somewhat bald narration when
they drew near the carriage that had been preceding them for some
time. Miss Melbury inquired if he knew whose carriage it was.
Winterborne, although he had seen it, had not taken it into
account. On examination, he said it was Mrs. Charmond's.
Grace watched the vehicle and its easy roll, and seemed to feel
more nearly akin to it than to the one she was in.
"Pooh! We can polish off the mileage as well as they, come to
that," said Winterborne, reading her mind; and rising to emulation
at what it bespoke, he whipped on the horse. This it was which
had brought the nose of Mr. Melbury's old gray close to the back
of Mrs. Charmond's much-eclipsing vehicle.
"There's Marty South Sitting up with the coachman," said he,
discerning her by her dress.
"Ah, poor Marty! I must ask her to come to see me this very
evening. How does she happen to be riding there?"
"I don't know. It is very singular."
Thus these people with converging destinies went along the road
together, till Winterborne, leaving the track of the carriage,
turned into Little Hintock, where almost the first house was the
timber-merchant's. Pencils of dancing light streamed out of the
windows sufficiently to show the white laurestinus flowers, and
glance over the polished leaves of laurel. The interior of the
rooms could be seen distinctly, warmed up by the fire-flames,
which in the parlor were reflected from the glass of the pictures
and bookcase, and in the kitchen from the utensils and ware.
"Let us look at the dear place for a moment before we call them,"
she said.
In the kitchen dinner was preparing; for though Melbury dined at
one o'clock at other times, to-day the meal had been kept back for
Grace. A rickety old spit was in motion, its end being fixed in
the fire-dog, and the whole kept going by means of a cord conveyed
over pulleys along the ceiling to a large stone suspended in a
corner of the room. Old Grammer Oliver came and wound it up with
a rattle like that of a mill.
In the parlor a large shade of Mrs. Melbury's head fell on the
wall and ceiling; but before the girl had regarded this room many
moments their presence was discovered, and her father and step-
mother came out to welcome her.
The character of the Melbury family was of that kind which evinces
some shyness in showing strong emotion among each other: a trait
frequent in rural households, and one which stands in curiously
inverse relation to most of the peculiarities distinguishing
villagers from the people of towns. Thus hiding their warmer
feelings under commonplace talk all round, Grace's reception
produced no extraordinary demonstrations. But that more was felt
than was enacted appeared from the fact that her father, in taking
her in-doors, quite forgot the presence of Giles without, as did
also Grace herself. He said nothing, but took the gig round to
the yard and called out from the spar-house the man who
particularly attended to these matters when there was no
conversation to draw him off among the copse-workers inside.
Winterborne then returned to the door with the intention of
entering the house.
The family had gone into the parlor, and were still absorbed in
themselves. The fire was, as before, the only light, and it
irradiated Grace's face and hands so as to make them look
wondrously smooth and fair beside those of the two elders; shining
also through the loose hair about her temples as sunlight through
a brake. Her father was surveying her in a dazed conjecture, so
much had she developed and progressed in manner and stature since
he last had set eyes on her.
Observing these things, Winterborne remained dubious by the door,
mechanically tracing with his fingers certain time-worn letters
carved in the jambs--initials of by-gone generations of
householders who had lived and died there.
No, he declared to himself, he would not enter and join the
family; they had forgotten him, and it was enough for to-day that
he had brought her home. Still, he was a little surprised that
her father's eagerness to send him for Grace should have resulted
in such an anticlimax as this.
He walked softly away into the lane towards his own house, looking
back when he reached the turning, from which he could get a last
glimpse of the timber-merchant's roof. He hazarded guesses as to
what Grace was saying just at that moment, and murmured, with some
self-derision, "nothing about me!" He looked also in the other
direction, and saw against the sky the thatched hip and solitary
chimney of Marty's cottage, and thought of her too, struggling
bravely along under that humble shelter, among her spar-gads and
pots and skimmers.
At the timber-merchant's, in the mean time, the conversation
flowed; and, as Giles Winterborne had rightly enough deemed, on
subjects in which he had no share. Among the excluding matters
there was, for one, the effect upon Mr. Melbury of the womanly
mien and manners of his daughter, which took him so much unawares
that, though it did not make him absolutely forget the existence
of her conductor homeward, thrust Giles's image back into quite
the obscurest cellarage of his brain. Another was his interview
with Mrs. Charmond's agent that morning, at which the lady herself
had been present for a few minutes. Melbury had purchased some
standing timber from her a long time before, and now that the date
had come for felling it he was left to pursue almost his own
course. This was what the household were actually talking of
during Giles's cogitation without; and Melbury's satisfaction with
the clear atmosphere that had arisen between himself and the deity
of the groves which enclosed his residence was the cause of a
counterbalancing mistiness on the side towards Winterborne.
"So thoroughly does she trust me," said Melbury, "that I might
fell, top, or lop, on my own judgment, any stick o' timber
whatever in her wood, and fix the price o't, and settle the
matter. But, name it all! I wouldn't do such a thing. However,
it may be useful to have this good understanding with her....I
wish she took more interest in the place, and stayed here all the
year round."
"I am afraid 'tis not her regard for you, but her dislike of
Hintock, that makes her so easy about the trees," said Mrs.
Melbury.
When dinner was over, Grace took a candle and began to ramble
pleasurably through the rooms of her old home, from which she had
latterly become wellnigh an alien. Each nook and each object
revived a memory, and simultaneously modified it. The chambers
seemed lower than they had appeared on any previous occasion of
her return, the surfaces of both walls and ceilings standing in
such relations to the eye that it could not avoid taking
microscopic note of their irregularities and old fashion. Her own
bedroom wore at once a look more familiar than when she had left
it, and yet a face estranged. The world of little things therein
gazed at her in helpless stationariness, as though they had tried
and been unable to make any progress without her presence. Over
the place where her candle had been accustomed to stand, when she
had used to read in bed till the midnight hour, there was still
the brown spot of smoke. She did not know that her father had
taken especial care to keep it from being cleaned off.
Having concluded her perambulation of this now uselessly
commodious edifice, Grace began to feel that she had come a long
journey since the morning; and when her father had been up
himself, as well as his wife, to see that her room was comfortable
and the fire burning, she prepared to retire for the night. No
sooner, however, was she in bed than her momentary sleepiness took
itself off, and she wished she had stayed up longer. She amused
herself by listening to the old familiar noises that she could
hear to be still going on down-stairs, and by looking towards the
window as she lay. The blind had been drawn up, as she used to
have it when a girl, and she could just discern the dim tree-tops
against the sky on the neighboring hill. Beneath this meeting-
line of light and shade nothing was visible save one solitary
point of light, which blinked as the tree-twigs waved to and fro
before its beams. From its position it seemed to radiate from the
window of a house on the hill-side. The house had been empty when
she was last at home, and she wondered who inhabited the place
now.
Her conjectures, however, were not intently carried on, and she
was watching the light quite idly, when it gradually changed
color, and at length shone blue as sapphire. Thus it remained
several minutes, and then it passed through violet to red.
Her curiosity was so widely awakened by the phenomenon that she
sat up in bed, and stared steadily at the shine. An appearance of
this sort, sufficient to excite attention anywhere, was no less
than a marvel in Hintock, as Grace had known the hamlet. Almost
every diurnal and nocturnal effect in that woodland place had
hitherto been the direct result of the regular terrestrial roll
which produced the season's changes; but here was something
dissociated from these normal sequences, and foreign to local
habit and knowledge.
It was about this moment that Grace heard the household below
preparing to retire, the most emphatic noise in the proceeding
being that of her father bolting the doors. Then the stairs
creaked, and her father and mother passed her chamber. The last
to come was Grammer Oliver.
Grace slid out of bed, ran across the room, and lifting the latch,
said, "I am not asleep, Grammer. Come in and talk to me."
Before the old woman had entered, Grace was again under the
bedclothes. Grammer set down her candlestick, and seated herself
on the edge of Miss Melbury's coverlet.
"I want you to tell me what light that is I see on the hill-side,"
said Grace.
Mrs. Oliver looked across. "Oh, that," she said, "is from the
doctor's. He's often doing things of that sort. Perhaps you
don't know that we've a doctor living here now--Mr. Fitzpiers by
name?"
Grace admitted that she had not heard of him.
"Well, then, miss, he's come here to get up a practice. I know
him very well, through going there to help 'em scrub sometimes,
which your father said I might do, if I wanted to, in my spare
time. Being a bachelor-man, he've only a lad in the house. Oh
yes, I know him very well. Sometimes he'll talk to me as if I
were his own mother."
"Indeed."
"Yes. 'Grammer,' he said one day, when I asked him why he came
here where there's hardly anybody living, 'I'll tell you why I
came here. I took a map, and I marked on it where Dr. Jones's
practice ends to the north of this district, and where Mr.
Taylor's ends on the south, and little Jimmy Green's on the east,
and somebody else's to the west. Then I took a pair of compasses,
and found the exact middle of the country that was left between
these bounds, and that middle was Little Hintock; so here I
am....' But, Lord, there: poor young man!"
"Why?"
"He said, 'Grammer Oliver, I've been here three months, and
although there are a good many people in the Hintocks and the
villages round, and a scattered practice is often a very good one,
I don't seem to get many patients. And there's no society at all;
and I'm pretty near melancholy mad,' he said, with a great yawn.
'I should be quite if it were not for my books, and my lab--
laboratory, and what not. Grammer, I was made for higher things.'
And then he'd yawn and yawn again."
"Was he really made for higher things, do you think? I mean, is he
clever?"
"Well, no. How can he be clever? He may be able to jine up a
broken man or woman after a fashion, and put his finger upon an
ache if you tell him nearly where 'tis; but these young men--they
should live to my time of life, and then they'd see how clever
they were at five-and-twenty! And yet he's a projick, a real
projick, and says the oddest of rozums. 'Ah, Grammer,' he said,
at another time, 'let me tell you that Everything is Nothing.
There's only Me and not Me in the whole world.' And he told me
that no man's hands could help what they did, any more than the
hands of a clock....Yes, he's a man of strange meditations, and
his eyes seem to see as far as the north star."
"He will soon go away, no doubt."
"I don't think so." Grace did not say "Why?" and Grammer
hesitated. At last she went on: "Don't tell your father or
mother, miss, if I let you know a secret."
Grace gave the required promise.
"Well, he talks of buying me; so he won't go away just yet."
"Buying you!--how?"
"Not my soul--my body, when I'm dead. One day when I was there
cleaning, he said, 'Grammer, you've a large brain--a very large
organ of brain,' he said. 'A woman's is usually four ounces less
than a man's; but yours is man's size.' Well, then--hee, hee!--
after he'd flattered me a bit like that, he said he'd give me ten
pounds to have me as a natomy after my death. Well, knowing I'd
no chick nor chiel left, and nobody with any interest in me, I
thought, faith, if I can be of any use to my fellow-creatures
after I'm gone they are welcome to my services; so I said I'd
think it over, and would most likely agree and take the ten
pounds. Now this is a secret, miss, between us two. The money
would be very useful to me; and I see no harm in it."
"Of course there's no harm. But oh, Grammer, how can you think to
do it? I wish you hadn't told me."
"I wish I hadn't--if you don't like to know it, miss. But you
needn't mind. Lord--hee, hee!--I shall keep him waiting many a
year yet, bless ye!"
"I hope you will, I am sure."
The girl thereupon fell into such deep reflection that
conversation languished, and Grammer Oliver, taking her candle,
wished Miss Melbury good-night. The latter's eyes rested on the
distant glimmer, around which she allowed her reasoning fancy to
play in vague eddies that shaped the doings of the philosopher
behind that light on the lines of intelligence just received. It
was strange to her to come back from the world to Little Hintock
and find in one of its nooks, like a tropical plant in a hedge-
row, a nucleus of advanced ideas and practices which had nothing
in common with the life around. Chemical experiments, anatomical
projects, and metaphysical conceptions had found a strange home
here.
Thus she remained thinking, the imagined pursuits of the man
behind the light intermingling with conjectural sketches of his
personality, till her eyes fell together with their own heaviness,
and she slept.
Back to chapter list of: The Woodlanders