CHAPTER VII.

Kaleidoscopic dreams of a weird alchemist-surgeon, Grammer Oliver’s

skeleton, and the face of Giles Winterborne, brought Grace Melbury to

the morning of the next day. It was fine. A north wind was blowing—that

not unacceptable compromise between the atmospheric cutlery of the

eastern blast and the spongy gales of the west quarter. She looked from

her window in the direction of the light of the previous evening, and

could just discern through the trees the shape of the surgeon’s house.

Somehow, in the broad, practical daylight, that unknown and lonely

gentleman seemed to be shorn of much of the interest which had invested

his personality and pursuits in the hours of darkness, and as Grace’s

dressing proceeded he faded from her mind.

Meanwhile, Winterborne, though half assured of her father’s favor, was

rendered a little restless by Miss Melbury’s behavior. Despite his dry

self-control, he could not help looking continually from his own door

towards the timber-merchant’s, 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 a direction towards the densest quarter

of the wood, and Winterborne walked contemplatively behind them, till

all three were soon under the trees.

Although the time of bare boughs had now set in, there were sheltered

hollows amid the Hintock plantations and copses in which a more tardy

leave-taking than on windy summits was the rule with the foliage. This

caused here and there an apparent mixture of the seasons; so that in

some of the dells 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 verdure was rich and deep as in

the month of August. To Grace these well-known peculiarities were as an

old painting restored.

Now could be beheld that change from the handsome to the curious which

the features of a wood undergo at the ingress of the winter months.

Angles were taking the place of curves, and reticulations of surfaces—a

change constituting a sudden lapse from the ornate to the primitive on

Nature’s canvas, and comparable to a retrogressive step from the art of

an advanced school of painting to that of the Pacific Islander.

Winterborne followed, and kept his eye upon the two figures as they

threaded their way through these sylvan phenomena. Mr. Melbury’s long

legs, and gaiters drawn in to the bone at the ankles, his slight stoop,

his habit of getting lost in thought and arousing himself with an

exclamation of “Hah!” accompanied with an upward jerk of the head,

composed a personage recognizable by his neighbors as far as he could

be seen. It seemed as if the squirrels and birds knew him. One of the

former would occasionally run from the path to hide behind the arm of

some tree, which the little animal carefully edged round _pari passu_

with Melbury and his daughters movement onward, assuming a mock manner,

as though he were saying, “Ho, ho; you are only a timber-merchant, and

carry no gun!”

They went noiselessly over mats of starry moss, rustled through

interspersed tracts of leaves, skirted trunks with spreading roots,

whose mossed rinds made them like hands wearing green gloves; elbowed

old elms and ashes with great forks, in which stood pools of water that

overflowed on rainy days, and ran down their stems in green cascades.

On older trees still than these, huge lobes of fungi grew like lungs.

Here, as everywhere, the Unfulfilled Intention, which makes life what

it is, was as obvious as it could be among the depraved crowds of a

city slum. The leaf was deformed, the curve was crippled, the taper was

interrupted; the lichen eat the vigor of the stalk, and the ivy slowly

strangled to death the promising sapling.

They dived amid beeches 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

Jarnvid 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 rose from its perch

with a continued clash, dashing its wings against the branches with

wellnigh force enough to break every quill. By taking the track of this

noise he soon came to a stile.

Was it worth while to go farther? He examined the doughy soil at the

foot of the stile, and saw among the large sole-and-heel tracks an

impression of a slighter kind from a boot that was obviously not local,

for Winterborne knew all the cobblers’ patterns in that district,

because they 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 divers points heaps of

fresh-made chips, and the newly-cut stool of a tree, stared white

through the undergrowth. There had been a large fall of timber this

year, which explained the meaning of some sounds that soon reached him.

A voice was shouting intermittently in a sort of human bark, which

reminded Giles that there was a sale of trees and fagots that very day.

Melbury would naturally be present. Thereupon Winterborne remembered

that he himself wanted a few fagots, and entered upon the scene.

A large group of buyers stood round the auctioneer, or followed him

when, between his pauses, he wandered on from one lot of plantation

produce to another, like some philosopher of the Peripatetic school

delivering his lectures in the shady groves of the Lyceum. His

companions were timber-dealers, yeomen, farmers, villagers, and others;

mostly woodland men, who on that account could afford to be curious in

their walking-sticks, which consequently exhibited various

monstrosities of vegetation, the chief being cork-screw shapes in black

and white thorn, brought to that pattern by the slow torture of an

encircling woodbine during their growth, as the Chinese 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 procession a pony-cart containing a tapped

barrel of beer, from which they drew and replenished horns that were

handed round, with bread-and-cheese from a basket.

The auctioneer adjusted himself to circumstances by using his

walking-stick as a hammer, and knocked down the lot on any convenient

object that took his fancy, such as the crown of a little boy’s head,

or the shoulders of a by-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 which that 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 Peripatetics, and

Grace beside him, clinging closely to his arm, her modern attire

looking almost odd where everything else was old-fashioned, and

throwing over the familiar garniture of the trees a homeliness that

seemed to demand improvement by the addition of a few contemporary

novelties also. Grace seemed to regard the selling with the interest

which attaches to memories revived after an interval of obliviousness.

Winterborne went and stood close to them; the timber-merchant spoke,

and continued his buying; Grace merely smiled. To justify his presence

there Winterborne began bidding for timber and fagots that he did not

want, pursuing the occupation in an abstracted mood, in which the

auctioneer’s voice seemed to become one of the natural sounds of the

woodland. A few flakes of snow descended, at the sight of which a

robin, alarmed at these signs of imminent winter, and seeing that no

offence was meant by the human invasion, came and perched on the tip of

the fagots that were being sold, and looked into the auctioneer’s face,

while waiting for some chance crumb from the bread-basket. Standing a

little behind Grace, Winterborne observed how one flake would sail

downward and settle on a curl of her hair, and how another would choose

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 fagots, poles,

or logwood.

He regretted, with some causticity of humor, that her father should

show such inequalities of temperament as to keep Grace tightly on his

arm to-day, when he had quite lately seemed anxious to recognize their

betrothal as a fact. And thus musing, and joining in no conversation

with other buyers except when directly addressed, he followed the

assemblage hither and thither till the end of the auction, when Giles

for the first time realized what his purchases had been. Hundreds of

fagots, and divers lots of timber, had been set down to him, when all

he had required had been a few bundles of spray for his odd man Robert

Creedle’s use in baking and lighting fires.

Business being over, he turned to speak to the timber merchant. But

Melbury’s manner was short and distant; and Grace, too, looked vexed

and reproachful. Winterborne then discovered that he had been

unwittingly bidding against her father, and picking up his favorite

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 a glade without looking back. While

they moved slowly through it a lady appeared on horseback in the middle

distance, the line of her progress converging upon that of Melbury’s.

They met, Melbury took off his hat, and she reined in her horse. A

conversation was evidently in progress between Grace and her father and

this equestrian, in whom he was almost sure that he recognized Mrs.

Charmond, less by her outline than by the livery of the groom who had

halted some yards off.

The interlocutors did not part till after a prolonged pause, during

which 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 up between himself and the Melburys for any trivial

reason, and in the evening he 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 hand on

her bosom, her face thoughtfully fixed on each wick as it kindled, as

if she saw in every flame’s growth the rise of a life to maturity. He

wondered what such unusual brilliancy could mean to-night. On getting

in-doors he found her father and step-mother in a state of suppressed

excitement, which at first he could not comprehend.

“I am sorry about my biddings to-day,” said Giles. “I don’t know what I

was doing. I have come to say that any of the lots you may require are

yours.”

“Oh, never mind—never mind,” replied the timber-merchant, with a slight

wave of his hand, “I have so much else to think of that I nearly had

forgot it. Just now, too, there are matters of a different kind from

trade to attend to, so don’t let it concern ye.”

As the timber-merchant spoke, as it were, down to him from a higher

moral plane than his own, Giles turned to Mrs. Melbury.

“Grace is going to the House to-morrow,” she said, quietly. “She is

looking out her things now. I dare say she is 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 what

he could not in any circumstances have kept in. “Coming home from the

woods this afternoon we met Mrs. Charmond out for a ride. She spoke to

me on a little matter of business, and then got acquainted with Grace.

’Twas wonderful how she took to Grace in a few minutes; that

freemasonry of education made ’em close at once. Naturally enough she

was amazed that such an article—ha, ha!—could come out of my house. At

last it led on to Mis’ess Grace being asked to the House. So she’s busy

hunting up her frills and furbelows to go in.” As Giles remained in

thought without responding, Melbury continued: “But I’ll call her

down-stairs.”

“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 am concerned.”

“Thanks—my best thanks....But I think, since it is all right between us

about the biddings, that I’ll not interrupt her now. I’ll step

homeward, and call another time.”

On leaving the house he looked up at the bedroom again. Grace,

surrounded by a sufficient number of candles to answer all purposes of

self-criticism, was standing before a cheval-glass that her father had

lately bought expressly for her use; she was bonneted, cloaked, and

gloved, and glanced over her shoulder into the mirror, estimating her

aspect. Her face was lit with the natural elation of a young girl

hoping to inaugurate on the morrow an intimate acquaintance with a new,

interesting, and powerful friend.