The Woodlanders Thomas Hardy (the reader ebook TXT) 📖

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 sylphlike 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 whatnot, 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 devil 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 boulders 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