Kaleidoscopic dreams of a weird alchemist-surgeon, Grammer Oliver's
skeleton, and the face of Giles Winterborne, brought Grace Melbury to
the morning of the next day. It was fine. A north wind was
blowing--that not unacceptable compromise between the atmospheric
cutlery of the eastern blast and the spongy gales of the west quarter.
She looked from her window in the direction of the light of the
previous evening, and could just discern through the trees the shape of
the surgeon's house. Somehow, in the broad, practical daylight, that
unknown and lonely gentleman seemed to be shorn of much of the interest
which had invested his personality and pursuits in the hours of
darkness, and as Grace's dressing proceeded he faded from her mind.
Meanwhile, Winterborne, though half assured of her father's favor, was
rendered a little restless by Miss Melbury's behavior. Despite his dry
self-control, he could not help looking continually from his own door
towards the timber-merchant's, in the probability of somebody's
emergence therefrom. His attention was at length justified by the
appearance of two figures, that of Mr. Melbury himself, and Grace
beside him. They stepped out in a direction towards the densest
quarter of the wood, and Winterborne walked contemplatively behind
them, till all three were soon under the trees.
Although the time of bare boughs had now set in, there were sheltered
hollows amid the Hintock plantations and copses in which a more tardy
leave-taking than on windy summits was the rule with the foliage. This
caused here and there an apparent mixture of the seasons; so that in
some of the dells that they passed by holly-berries in full red were
found growing beside oak and hazel whose leaves were as yet not far
removed from green, and brambles whose verdure was rich and deep as in
the month of August. To Grace these well-known peculiarities were as
an old painting restored.
Now could be beheld that change from the handsome to the curious which
the features of a wood undergo at the ingress of the winter months.
Angles were taking the place of curves, and reticulations of
surfaces--a change constituting a sudden lapse from the ornate to the
primitive on Nature's canvas, and comparable to a retrogressive step
from the art of an advanced school of painting to that of the Pacific
Islander.
Winterborne followed, and kept his eye upon the two figures as they
threaded their way through these sylvan phenomena. Mr. Melbury's long
legs, and gaiters drawn in to the bone at the ankles, his slight stoop,
his habit of getting lost in thought and arousing himself with an
exclamation of "Hah!" accompanied with an upward jerk of the head,
composed a personage recognizable by his neighbors as far as he could
be seen. It seemed as if the squirrels and birds knew him. One of the
former would occasionally run from the path to hide behind the arm of
some tree, which the little animal carefully edged round pari passu
with Melbury and his daughters movement onward, assuming a mock manner,
as though he were saying, "Ho, ho; you are only a timber-merchant, and
carry no gun!"