Yet a short two months earlier Marty’s father, aged fifty-five years, though something of a fidgety, anxious being, would have been looked on as a man whose existence was so far removed from hazardous as any in the parish, and as bidding fair to be prolonged for another quarter of a century.
Winterborne walked up and down his garden next day thinking of the contingency. The sense that the paths he was pacing, the cabbage-plots, the apple-trees, his dwelling, cider-cellar, wring-house, stables, and weathercock, were all slipping away over his head and beneath his feet, as if they were painted on a magic-lantern slide, was curious. In spite of John South’s late indisposition he had not anticipated danger. To inquire concerning his health had been to show less sympathy than to remain silent, considering the material interest he possessed in the woodman’s life, and he had, accordingly, made a point of avoiding Marty’s house.
While he was here in the garden somebody came to fetch him. It was Marty herself, and she showed her distress by her unconsciousness of a cropped poll.
“Father is still so much troubled in his mind about that tree,” she said. “You know the tree I mean, Mr. Winterborne? the tall one in front of the house, that he thinks will blow down and kill us. Can you come and see if you can persuade him out of his notion? I can do nothing.”
He accompanied her to the cottage, and she conducted him up-stairs. John South was pillowed up in a chair between the bed and the window exactly opposite the latter, towards which his face was turned.
“Ah, neighbor Winterborne,” he said. “I wouldn’t have minded if my life had only been my own to lose; I don’t vallie it in much of itself, and can let it go if ’tis required of me. But to think what ’tis worth to you, a young man rising in life, that do trouble me! It seems a trick of dishonesty towards ye to go off at fifty-five! I could bear up, I know I could, if it were not for the tree — yes, the tree, ’tis that’s killing me. There he stands, threatening my life every minute that the wind do blow. He’ll come down upon us and squat us dead; and what will ye do when the life on your property is taken away?”
“Never you mind me — that’s of no consequence,” said Giles. “Think of yourself alone.”
He looked out of the window in the direction of the woodman’s gaze. The tree was a tall elm, familiar to him from childhood, which stood at a distance of two-thirds its own height from the front of South’s dwelling. Whenever the wind blew, as it did now, the tree rocked, naturally enough; and the sight of its motion and sound of its sighs had gradually bred the terrifying illusion in the woodman’s mind that it would descend and kill him. Thus he would sit all day, in spite of persuasion, watching its every sway, and listening to the melancholy Gregorian melodies which the air wrung out of it. This fear it apparently was, rather than any organic disease which was eating away the health of John South.
As the tree waved, South waved his head, making it his flugel-man with abject obedience. “Ah, when it was quite a small tree,” he said, “and I was a little boy, I thought one day of chopping it off with my hook to make a clothes-line prop with. But I put off doing it, and then I again thought that I would; but I forgot it, and didn’t. And at last it got too big, and now ’tis my enemy, and will be the death o’ me. Little did I think, when I let that sapling stay, that a time would come when it would torment me, and dash me into my grave.”
“No, no,” said Winterborne and Marty, soothingly. But they thought it possible that it might hasten him into his grave, though in another way than by falling.
“I tell you what,” added Winterborne, “I’ll climb up this afternoon and shroud off the lower boughs, and then it won’t be so heavy, and the wind won’t affect it so.”
“She won’t allow it — a strange woman come from nobody knows where — she won’t have it done.”
“You mean Mrs. Charmond? Oh, she doesn’t know there’s such a tree on her estate. Besides, shrouding is not felling, and I’ll risk that much.”
He went out, and when afternoon came he returned, took a billhook from the woodman’s shed, and with a ladder climbed into the lower part of the tree, where he began lopping off —“shrouding,” as they called it at Hintock — the lowest boughs. Each of these quivered under his attack, bent, cracked, and fell into the hedge. Having cut away the lowest tier, he stepped off the ladder, climbed a few steps higher, and attacked those at the next level. Thus he ascended with the progress of his work far above the top of the ladder, cutting away his perches as he went, and leaving nothing but a bare stem below him.
The work was troublesome, for the tree was large. The afternoon wore on, turning dark and misty about four o’clock. From time to time Giles cast his eyes across towards the bedroom window of South, where, by the flickering fire in the chamber, he could see the old man watching him, sitting motionless with a hand upon each arm of the chair. Beside him sat Marty, also straining her eyes towards the skyey field of his operations.
A curious question suddenly occurred to Winterborne, and he stopped his chopping. He was operating on another person’s property to prolong the years of a lease by whose termination that person would considerably benefit. In that aspect of the case he doubted if he ought to go on. On the other hand he was working to save a man’s life, and this seemed to empower him to adopt arbitrary measures.
The wind had died down to a calm, and while he was weighing the circumstances he saw coming along the road through the increasing mist a figure which, indistinct as it was, he knew well. It was Grace Melbury, on her way out from the house, probably for a short evening walk before dark. He arranged himself for a greeting from her, since she could hardly avoid passing immediately beneath the tree.
But Grace, though she looked up and saw him, was just at that time too full of the words of her father to give him any encouragement. The years-long regard that she had had for him was not kindled by her return into a flame of sufficient brilliancy to make her rebellious. Thinking that she might not see him, he cried, “Miss Melbury, here I am.”
She looked up again. She was near enough to see the expression of his face, and the nails in his soles, silver-bright with constant walking. But she did not reply; and dropping her glance again, went on.
Winterborne’s face grew strange; he mused, and proceeded automatically with his work. Grace meanwhile had not gone far. She had reached a gate, whereon she had leaned sadly, and whispered to herself, “What shall I do?”
A sudden fog came on, and she curtailed her walk, passing under the tree again on her return. Again he addressed her. “Grace,” he said, when she was close to the trunk, “speak to me.” She shook her head without stopping, and went on to a little distance, where she stood observing him from behind the hedge.
Her coldness had been kindly meant. If it was to be done, she had said to herself, it should be begun at once. While she stood out of observation Giles seemed to recognize her meaning; with a sudden start he worked on, climbing higher, and cutting himself off more and more from all intercourse with the sublunary world. At last he had worked himself so high up the elm, and the mist had so thickened, that he could only just be discerned as a dark-gray spot on the light-gray sky: he would have been altogether out of notice but for the stroke of his billhook and the flight of a bough downward, and its crash upon the hedge at intervals.
It was not to be done thus, after all: plainness and candor were best. She went back a third time; he did not see her now, and she lingeringly gazed up at his unconscious figure, loath to put an end to any kind of hope that might live on in him still. “Giles — Mr. Winterborne,” she said.
He was so high amid the fog that he did not hear. “Mr. Winterborne!” she cried again, and this time he stopped, looked down, and replied.
“My silence just now was not accident,” she said, in an unequal voice. “My father says it is best not to think too much of that — engagement, or understanding between us, that you know of. I, too, think that upon the whole he is right. But we are friends, you know, Giles, and almost relations.”
“Very well,” he answered, as if without surprise, in a voice which barely reached down the tree. “I have nothing to say in objection — I cannot say anything till I’ve thought a while.”
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