Winterborne's house had been pulled down. On this account his face had
been seen but fitfully in Hintock; and he would probably have
disappeared from the place altogether but for his slight business
connection with Melbury, on whose premises Giles kept his cider-making
apparatus, now that he had no place of his own to stow it in. Coming
here one evening on his way to a hut beyond the wood where he now
slept, he noticed that the familiar brown-thatched pinion of his
paternal roof had vanished from its site, and that the walls were
levelled. In present circumstances he had a feeling for the spot that
might have been called morbid, and when he had supped in the hut
aforesaid he made use of the spare hour before bedtime to return to
Little Hintock in the twilight and ramble over the patch of ground on
which he had first seen the day.
He repeated this evening visit on several like occasions. Even in the
gloom he could trace where the different rooms had stood; could mark
the shape of the kitchen chimney-corner, in which he had roasted apples
and potatoes in his boyhood, cast his bullets, and burned his initials
on articles that did and did not belong to him. The apple-trees still
remained to show where the garden had been, the oldest of them even now
retaining the crippled slant to north-east given them by the great
November gale of 1824, which carried a brig bodily over the Chesil
Bank. They were at present bent to still greater obliquity by the
heaviness of their produce. Apples bobbed against his head, and in the
grass beneath he crunched scores of them as he walked. There was
nobody to gather them now.
It was on the evening under notice that, half sitting, half leaning
against one of these inclined trunks, Winterborne had become lost in
his thoughts, as usual, till one little star after another had taken up
a position in the piece of sky which now confronted him where his walls
and chimneys had formerly raised their outlines. The house had jutted
awkwardly into the road, and the opening caused by its absence was very
distinct.
In the silence the trot of horses and the spin of carriage-wheels
became audible; and the vehicle soon shaped itself against the blank
sky, bearing down upon him with the bend in the lane which here
occurred, and of which the house had been the cause. He could discern
the figure of a woman high up on the driving-seat of a phaeton, a groom
being just visible behind. Presently there was a slight scrape, then a
scream. Winterborne went across to the spot, and found the phaeton
half overturned, its driver sitting on the heap of rubbish which had
once been his dwelling, and the man seizing the horses' heads. The
equipage was Mrs. Charmond's, and the unseated charioteer that lady
herself.