The Woodlanders. Thomas Hardy
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wonderful that she should ask ye," observed the magisterial coachman, presently. "I have never known her do it before, for as a rule she takes no interest in the village folk at all."
Marty said no more, but occasionally turned her head to see if she could get a glimpse of the Olympian creature who as the coachman had truly observed, hardly ever descended from her clouds into the Tempe of the parishioners. But she could discern nothing of the lady. She also looked for Miss Melbury and Winterborne. The nose of their horse sometimes came quite near the back of Mrs. Charmond's carriage. But they never attempted to pass it till the latter conveyance turned towards the park gate, when they sped by. Here the carriage drew up that the gate might be opened, and in the momentary silence Marty heard a gentle oral sound, soft as a breeze.
"What's that?" she whispered.
"Mis'ess yawning."
"Why should she yawn?"
"Oh, because she's been used to such wonderfully good life, and finds it dull here. She'll soon be off again on account of it."
"So rich and so powerful, and yet to yawn!" the girl murmured. "Then things don't fay with she any more than with we!"
Marty now alighted; the lamp again shone upon her, and as the carriage rolled on, a soft voice said to her from the interior, "Good-night."
"Good-night, ma'am," said Marty. But she had not been able to see the woman who began so greatly to interest her – the second person of her own sex who had operated strongly on her mind that day.
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