The Woodlanders - Page 3/314

This hour of coming home from market was the happy one, if not the

happiest, of the week for them. Snugly ensconced under the tilt, they

could forget the sorrows of the world without, and survey life and

recapitulate the incidents of the day with placid smiles.

The passengers in the back part formed a group to themselves, and while

the new-comer spoke to the proprietress, they indulged in a

confidential chat about him as about other people, which the noise of

the van rendered inaudible to himself and Mrs. Dollery, sitting forward.

"'Tis Barber Percombe--he that's got the waxen woman in his window at

the top of Abbey Street," said one. "What business can bring him from

his shop out here at this time and not a journeyman hair-cutter, but a

master-barber that's left off his pole because 'tis not genteel!"

They listened to his conversation, but Mr. Percombe, though he had

nodded and spoken genially, seemed indisposed to gratify the curiosity

which he had aroused; and the unrestrained flow of ideas which had

animated the inside of the van before his arrival was checked

thenceforward.

Thus they rode on till they turned into a half-invisible little lane,

whence, as it reached the verge of an eminence, could be discerned in

the dusk, about half a mile to the right, gardens and orchards sunk in

a concave, and, as it were, snipped out of the woodland. From this

self-contained place rose in stealthy silence tall stems of smoke,

which the eye of imagination could trace downward to their root on

quiet hearth-stones festooned overhead with hams and flitches. It was

one of those sequestered spots outside the gates of the world where may

usually be found more meditation than action, and more passivity than

meditation; where reasoning proceeds on narrow premises, and results in

inferences wildly imaginative; yet where, from time to time, no less

than in other places, dramas of a grandeur and unity truly Sophoclean

are enacted in the real, by virtue of the concentrated passions and

closely knit interdependence of the lives therein.

This place was the Little Hintock of the master-barber's search. The

coming night gradually obscured the smoke of the chimneys, but the

position of the sequestered little world could still be distinguished

by a few faint lights, winking more or less ineffectually through the

leafless boughs, and the undiscerned songsters they bore, in the form

of balls of feathers, at roost among them.

Out of the lane followed by the van branched a yet smaller lane, at the

corner of which the barber alighted, Mrs. Dollery's van going on to the

larger village, whose superiority to the despised smaller one as an

exemplar of the world's movements was not particularly apparent in its

means of approach.