Supper-time came, and with it the hot-baked meats from the oven, laid
on a snowy cloth fresh from the press, and reticulated with folds, as
in Flemish “Last Suppers.” Creedle and the boy fetched and carried with
amazing alacrity, the latter, to mollify his superior and make things
pleasant, expressing his admiration of Creedle’s cleverness when they
were 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, and many
ways of strange dashing life. Not but that Giles has worked hard in
helping me to bring things to such perfection to-day. ‘Giles,’ says I,
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 had twinned
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 and
hang-fairs and other pomps, seem to me as yesterday. Ah, many’s the
patriarch I’ve seed come and go in this parish! There, he’s calling for
more plates. Lord, why can’t ’em turn their plates bottom upward for
pudding, as they used to do in former days?”
Meanwhile, in the adjoining room Giles was presiding in a
half-unconscious state. He could not get over the initial failures in
his scheme for advancing his suit, and hence he did not know that he
was eating mouthfuls of bread and nothing else, and continually
snuffing the two candles next him till he had reduced them to mere
glimmers drowned in their own grease. Creedle now appeared with a
specially prepared dish, which he served by elevating the little
three-legged pot that contained it, and tilting the contents into a
dish, exclaiming, simultaneously, “Draw back, gentlemen and ladies,
please!”
A splash followed. Grace gave a quick, involuntary nod and blink, and
put 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 expostulated
Creedle, in an aside audible to all the company.
“Well, yes—but—” replied Giles. He went over to Grace, and hoped none
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 bear
these little mishaps.” But there could be discerned in his face
something which said “I ought to have foreseen this.”
Giles himself, since the untoward beginning of the feast, had not quite
liked to see Grace present. He wished he had not asked such people as
Bawtree and the hollow-turner. He had done it, in dearth of other
friends, that the room might not appear empty. In his mind’s eye,
before the event, they had been the mere background or padding of the
scene, but somehow in reality they were the most prominent personages
there.
After supper they played cards, Bawtree and the hollow-turner
monopolizing the new packs for an interminable game, in which a lump of
chalk was incessantly used—a game those two always played wherever they
were, taking a solitary candle and going to a private table in a corner
with the mien of persons bent on weighty matters. The rest of the
company on this account were obliged to put up with old packs for their
round game, that had been lying by in a drawer ever since the time that
Giles’s grandmother was alive. Each card had a great stain in the
middle of its back, produced by the touch of generations of damp and
excited thumbs now fleshless in the grave; and the kings and queens
wore a decayed expression of feature, as if they were rather an
impecunious dethroned race of monarchs hiding in obscure slums than
real regal characters. Every now and then the comparatively few remarks
of the players at the round game were harshly intruded on by the
measured jingle of Farmer Bawtree and the hollow-turner from the back
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 an
exclamation, an argument, a dealing of the cards; then the commencement
of the rhymes anew.
The timber-merchant showed his feelings by talking with a satisfied
sense of weight in his words, and by praising the party in a
patronizing tone, when Winterborne expressed his fear that he and his
were not enjoying themselves.
“Oh yes, yes; pretty much. What handsome glasses those are! I didn’t
know you had such glasses in the house. Now, Lucy” (to his wife), “you
ought to get some like them for ourselves.” And when they had abandoned
cards, and Winterborne was talking to Melbury by the fire, it was the
timber-merchant who stood with his back to the mantle in a proprietary
attitude, from which post of vantage he critically regarded Giles’s
person, rather as a superficies than as a solid with ideas and feelings
inside 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 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 sylph-like
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 what not, 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 d—— 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 bowlders 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 Creedle....But Lord, there; I don’t mind ’em myself—them small
ones, for they were born on cabbage, and they’ve lived on cabbage, so
they must be made of cabbage. But she, the close-mouthed little lady,
she didn’t say a word about it; though ’twould have made good small
conversation as to the nater of such creatures; especially as wit ran
short among us sometimes.”
“Oh yes—’tis all over!” murmured Giles to himself, shaking his head
over the glooming plain of embers, and lining his forehead more than
ever. “Do you know, Robert,” he said, “that she’s been accustomed to
servants and everything superfine these many years? How, then, could
she 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 bachelor
men shouldn’t give randys, or if they do give ’em, only to their own
race.”
“Perhaps that’s true,” said Winterborne, rising and yawning a sigh.