They went noiselessly over mats of starry moss, rustled through
interspersed tracts of leaves, skirted trunks with spreading roots,
whose mossed rinds made them like hands wearing green gloves; elbowed
old elms and ashes with great forks, in which stood pools of water that
overflowed on rainy days, and ran down their stems in green cascades.
On older trees still than these, huge lobes of fungi grew like lungs.
Here, as everywhere, the Unfulfilled Intention, which makes life what
it is, was as obvious as it could be among the depraved crowds of a
city slum. The leaf was deformed, the curve was crippled, the taper
was interrupted; the lichen eat the vigor of the stalk, and the ivy
slowly strangled to death the promising sapling.
They dived amid beeches under which nothing grew, the younger boughs
still retaining their hectic leaves, that rustled in the breeze with a
sound almost metallic, like the sheet-iron foliage of the fabled
Jarnvid wood. Some flecks of white in Grace's drapery had enabled
Giles to keep her and her father in view till this time; but now he
lost sight of them, and was obliged to follow by ear--no difficult
matter, for on the line of their course every wood-pigeon rose from its
perch with a continued clash, dashing its wings against the branches
with wellnigh force enough to break every quill. By taking the track
of this noise he soon came to a stile.
Was it worth while to go farther? He examined the doughy soil at the
foot of the stile, and saw among the large sole-and-heel tracks an
impression of a slighter kind from a boot that was obviously not local,
for Winterborne knew all the cobblers' patterns in that district,
because they were very few to know. The mud-picture was enough to make
him swing himself over and proceed.
The character of the woodland now changed. The bases of the smaller
trees were nibbled bare by rabbits, and at divers points heaps of
fresh-made chips, and the newly-cut stool of a tree, stared white
through the undergrowth. There had been a large fall of timber this
year, which explained the meaning of some sounds that soon reached him.
A voice was shouting intermittently in a sort of human bark, which
reminded Giles that there was a sale of trees and fagots that very day.
Melbury would naturally be present. Thereupon Winterborne remembered
that he himself wanted a few fagots, and entered upon the scene.
A large group of buyers stood round the auctioneer, or followed him
when, between his pauses, he wandered on from one lot of plantation
produce to another, like some philosopher of the Peripatetic school
delivering his lectures in the shady groves of the Lyceum. His
companions were timber-dealers, yeomen, farmers, villagers, and others;
mostly woodland men, who on that account could afford to be curious in
their walking-sticks, which consequently exhibited various
monstrosities of vegetation, the chief being cork-screw shapes in black
and white thorn, brought to that pattern by the slow torture of an
encircling woodbine during their growth, as the Chinese have been said
to mould human beings into grotesque toys by continued compression in
infancy. Two women, wearing men's jackets on their gowns, conducted in
the rear of the halting procession a pony-cart containing a tapped
barrel of beer, from which they drew and replenished horns that were
handed round, with bread-and-cheese from a basket.