The Woodlanders

by Thomas Hardy

  CHAPTER X.

  Supper-time came, and with it the hot-baked from the oven, laid on asnowy cloth fresh from the press, and reticulated with folds, as inFlemish "Last Suppers." Creedle and the boy fetched and carried withamazing alacrity, the latter, to mollify his superior and make thingspleasant, expressing his admiration of Creedle's cleverness when theywere alone.

  "I s'pose the time when you learned all these knowing things, Mr.Creedle, was when you was in the militia?"

  "Well, yes. I seed the world at that time somewhat, certainly, andmany ways of strange dashing life. Not but that Giles has worked hardin helping me to bring things to such perfection to-day. 'Giles,' saysI, though he's maister. Not that I should call'n maister by rights,for his father growed up side by side with me, as if one mother hadtwinned us and been our nourishing."

  "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 andhang-fairs and other pomps, seem to me as yesterday. Ah, many's thepatriarch I've seed come and go in this parish! There, he's calling formore plates. Lord, why can't 'em turn their plates bottom upward forpudding, as they used to do in former days?"

  Meanwhile, in the adjoining room Giles was presiding in ahalf-unconscious state. He could not get over the initial failures inhis scheme for advancing his suit, and hence he did not know that hewas eating mouthfuls of bread and nothing else, and continuallysnuffing the two candles next him till he had reduced them to mereglimmers drowned in their own grease. Creedle now appeared with aspecially prepared dish, which he served by elevating the littlethree-legged pot that contained it, and tilting the contents into adish, exclaiming, simultaneously, "Draw back, gentlemen and ladies,please!"

  A splash followed. Grace gave a quick, involuntary nod and blink, andput 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 expostulatedCreedle, in an aside audible to all the company.

  "Well, yes--but--" replied Giles. He went over to Grace, and hopednone 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 bearthese little mishaps." But there could be discerned in his facesomething which said "I ought to have foreseen this."

  Giles himself, since the untoward beginning of the feast, had not quiteliked to see Grace present. He wished he had not asked such people asBawtree and the hollow-turner. He had done it, in dearth of otherfriends, that the room might not appear empty. In his mind's eye,before the event, they had been the mere background or padding of thescene, but somehow in reality they were the most prominent personagesthere.

  After supper they played cards, Bawtree and the hollow-turnermonopolizing the new packs for an interminable game, in which a lump ofchalk was incessantly used--a game those two always played whereverthey were, taking a solitary candle and going to a private table in acorner with the mien of persons bent on weighty matters. The rest ofthe company on this account were obliged to put up with old packs fortheir round game, that had been lying by in a drawer ever since thetime that Giles's grandmother was alive. Each card had a great stainin the middle of its back, produced by the touch of generations of dampand excited thumbs now fleshless in the grave; and the kings and queenswore a decayed expression of feature, as if they were rather animpecunious dethroned race of monarchs hiding in obscure slums thanreal regal characters. Every now and then the comparatively fewremarks of the players at the round game were harshly intruded on bythe measured jingle of Farmer Bawtree and the hollow-turner from theback 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 anexclamation, an argument, a dealing of the cards; then the commencementof the rhymes anew.

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

  "Oh yes, yes; pretty much. What handsome glasses those are! I didn'tknow you had such glasses in the house. Now, Lucy" (to his wife), "youought to get some like them for ourselves." And when they had abandonedcards, and Winterborne was talking to Melbury by the fire, it was thetimber-merchant who stood with his back to the mantle in a proprietaryattitude, from which post of vantage he critically regarded Giles'sperson, rather as a superficies than as a solid with ideas and feelingsinside 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 havingarrived some time before. Grace had been away from home so long thatshe had forgotten the old figures, and hence did not join in themovement. Then Giles felt that all was over. As for her, she wasthinking, as she watched the gyrations, of a very different measurethat she had been accustomed to tread with a bevy of sylph-likecreatures in muslin, in the music-room of a large house, most of whomwere now moving in scenes widely removed from this, both as regardedplace and character.

  A woman she did not know came and offered to tell her fortune with theabandoned cards. Grace assented to the proposal, and the woman toldher tale unskilfully, for want of practice, as she declared.

  Mr. Melbury was standing by, and exclaimed, contemptuously, "Tell herfortune, indeed! Her fortune has been told by men of science--what doyou call 'em? Phrenologists. You can't teach her anything new. She'sbeen too far among the wise ones to be astonished at anything she canhear among us folks in Hintock."

  At last the time came for breaking up, Melbury and his family being theearliest to leave, the two card-players still pursuing their gamedoggedly in the corner, where they had completely covered Giles'smahogany table with chalk scratches. The three walked home, thedistance being short and the night clear.

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

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

  When they were opposite an opening through which, by day, the doctor'shouse 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 byday, he could at least afford to go to bed early at night. 'Tisastonishing how little we see of him."

  Melbury's mind seemed to turn with much relief to the contemplation ofMr. Fitzpiers after the scenes of the evening. "It is natural enough,"he replied. "What can a man of that sort find to interest him inHintock? I don't expect he'll stay here long."

  His mind reverted to Giles's party, and when they were nearly home hespoke again, his daughter being a few steps in advance: "It is hardlythe line of life for a girl like Grace, after what she's beenaccustomed to. I didn't foresee that in sending her to boarding-schooland letting her travel, and what not, to make her a good bargain forGiles, I should be really spoiling her for him. Ah, 'tis a thousandpities! But he ought to have her--he ought!"

  At this moment the two exclusive, chalk-mark men, having at last reallyfinished their play, could be heard coming along in the rear,vociferously singing a song to march-time, and keeping vigorous step tothe 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
thesort of society we've been asked to meet," he said. "For us old folkit didn't matter; but for Grace--Giles should have known better!"

  Meanwhile, in the empty house from which the guests had just clearedout, the subject of their discourse was walking from room to roomsurveying the general displacement of furniture with no ecstaticfeeling; rather the reverse, indeed. At last he entered the bakehouse,and found there Robert Creedle sitting over the embers, also lost incontemplation. 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 wellto think the day IS done, when 'tis done."

  Winterborne had abstractedly taken the poker, and with a wrinkledforehead was ploughing abroad the wood-embers on the broad hearth, tillit was like a vast scorching Sahara, with red-hot bowlders lying abouteverywhere. "Do you think it went off well, Creedle?" he asked.

  "The victuals did; that I know. And the drink did; that I steadfastlybelieve, from the holler sound of the barrels. Good, honest drink'twere, the headiest mead I ever brewed; and the best wine that berriescould rise to; and the briskest Horner-and-Cleeves cider ever wrungdown, leaving out the spice and sperrits I put into it, while thategg-flip would ha' passed through muslin, so little curdled 'twere.'Twas good enough to make any king's heart merry--ay, to make his wholecarcass smile. Still, I don't deny I'm afeared some things didn't gowell with He and his." Creedle nodded in a direction which signifiedwhere 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 wellhave come upon anybody else's plate as hers."

  "What snail?"

  "Well, maister, there was a little one upon the edge of her plate whenI brought it out; and so it must have been in her few leaves ofwintergreen."

  "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 weexpect him to be? I don't care who the man is, snails and caterpillarsalways will lurk in close to the stump of cabbages in that tantalizingway."

  "He wasn't alive, I suppose?" said Giles, with a shudder on Grace'saccount.

  "Oh no. He was well boiled. I warrant him well boiled. God forbidthat a LIVE snail should be seed on any plate of victuals that's servedby Robert Creedle....But Lord, there; I don't mind 'em myself--themsmall ones, for they were born on cabbage, and they've lived oncabbage, so they must be made of cabbage. But she, the close-mouthedlittle lady, she didn't say a word about it; though 'twould have madegood small conversation as to the nater of such creatures; especiallyas wit ran short among us sometimes."

  "Oh yes--'tis all over!" murmured Giles to himself, shaking his headover the glooming plain of embers, and lining his forehead more thanever. "Do you know, Robert," he said, "that she's been accustomed toservants and everything superfine these many years? How, then, couldshe 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 bachelormen shouldn't give randys, or if they do give 'em, only to their ownrace."

  "Perhaps that's true," said Winterborne, rising and yawning a sigh.