The Woodlanders - Page 2/314

At first not a soul appeared who could enlighten him as he desired, or

seemed likely to appear that night. But presently a slight noise of

laboring wheels and the steady dig of a horse's shoe-tips became

audible; and there loomed in the notch of the hill and plantation that

the road formed here at the summit a carrier's van drawn by a single

horse. When it got nearer, he said, with some relief to himself, "'Tis

Mrs. Dollery's--this will help me."

The vehicle was half full of passengers, mostly women. He held up his

stick at its approach, and the woman who was driving drew rein.

"I've been trying to find a short way to Little Hintock this last

half-hour, Mrs. Dollery," he said. "But though I've been to Great

Hintock and Hintock House half a dozen times I am at fault about the

small village. You can help me, I dare say?"

She assured him that she could--that as she went to Great Hintock her

van passed near it--that it was only up the lane that branched out of

the lane into which she was about to turn--just ahead. "Though,"

continued Mrs. Dollery, "'tis such a little small place that, as a town

gentleman, you'd need have a candle and lantern to find it if ye don't

know where 'tis. Bedad! I wouldn't live there if they'd pay me to.

Now at Great Hintock you do see the world a bit."

He mounted and sat beside her, with his feet outside, where they were

ever and anon brushed over by the horse's tail.

This van, driven and owned by Mrs. Dollery, was rather a movable

attachment of the roadway than an extraneous object, to those who knew

it well. The old horse, whose hair was of the roughness and color of

heather, whose leg-joints, shoulders, and hoofs were distorted by

harness and drudgery from colthood--though if all had their rights, he

ought, symmetrical in outline, to have been picking the herbage of some

Eastern plain instead of tugging here--had trodden this road almost

daily for twenty years. Even his subjection was not made congruous

throughout, for the harness being too short, his tail was not drawn

through the crupper, so that the breeching slipped awkwardly to one

side. He knew every subtle incline of the seven or eight miles of

ground between Hintock and Sherton Abbas--the market-town to which he

journeyed--as accurately as any surveyor could have learned it by a

Dumpy level.

The vehicle had a square black tilt which nodded with the motion of the

wheels, and at a point in it over the driver's head was a hook to which

the reins were hitched at times, when they formed a catenary curve from

the horse's shoulders. Somewhere about the axles was a loose chain,

whose only known purpose was to clink as it went. Mrs. Dollery, having

to hop up and down many times in the service of her passengers, wore,

especially in windy weather, short leggings under her gown for

modesty's sake, and instead of a bonnet a felt hat tied down with a

handkerchief, to guard against an earache to which she was frequently

subject. In the rear of the van was a glass window, which she cleaned

with her pocket-handkerchief every market-day before starting. Looking

at the van from the back, the spectator could thus see through its

interior a square piece of the same sky and landscape that he saw

without, but intruded on by the profiles of the seated passengers, who,

as they rumbled onward, their lips moving and heads nodding in animated

private converse, remained in happy unconsciousness that their

mannerisms and facial peculiarities were sharply defined to the public

eye.