Part 12 (1/2)
Winterborne had abstractedly taken the poker, and with a wrinkled forehead was ploughing abroad the wood-embers on the broad hearth, till it was like a vast scorching Sahara, with red-hot bowlders lying about everywhere. ”Do you think it went off well, Creedle?” he asked.
”The victuals did; that I know. And the drink did; that I steadfastly believe, from the holler sound of the barrels. Good, honest drink 'twere, the headiest mead I ever brewed; and the best wine that berries could rise to; and the briskest Horner-and-Cleeves cider ever wrung down, leaving out the spice and sperrits I put into it, while that egg-flip would ha' pa.s.sed through muslin, so little curdled 'twere.
'Twas good enough to make any king's heart merry--ay, to make his whole carca.s.s smile. Still, I don't deny I'm afeared some things didn't go well with He and his.” Creedle nodded in a direction which signified where the Melburys lived.
”I'm afraid, too, that it was a failure there!”
”If so, 'twere doomed to be so. Not but what that snail might as well have come upon anybody else's plate as hers.”
”What snail?”
”Well, maister, there was a little one upon the edge of her plate when I brought it out; and so it must have been in her few leaves of wintergreen.”
”How the deuce did a snail get there?”
”That I don't know no more than the dead; but there my gentleman was.”
”But, Robert, of all places, that was where he shouldn't have been!”
”Well, 'twas his native home, come to that; and where else could we expect him to be? I don't care who the man is, snails and caterpillars always will lurk in close to the stump of cabbages in that tantalizing way.”
”He wasn't alive, I suppose?” said Giles, with a shudder on Grace's account.
”Oh no. He was well boiled. I warrant him well boiled. G.o.d forbid that a LIVE snail should be seed on any plate of victuals that's served by Robert Creedle....But Lord, there; I don't mind 'em myself--them small ones, for they were born on cabbage, and they've lived on cabbage, so they must be made of cabbage. But she, the close-mouthed little lady, she didn't say a word about it; though 'twould have made good small conversation as to the nater of such creatures; especially as wit ran short among us sometimes.”
”Oh yes--'tis all over!” murmured Giles to himself, shaking his head over the glooming plain of embers, and lining his forehead more than ever. ”Do you know, Robert,” he said, ”that she's been accustomed to servants and everything superfine these many years? How, then, could she stand our ways?”
”Well, all I can say is, then, that she ought to hob-and-n.o.b elsewhere.
They shouldn't have schooled her so monstrous high, or else bachelor men shouldn't give randys, or if they do give 'em, only to their own race.”
”Perhaps that's true,” said Winterborne, rising and yawning a sigh.
CHAPTER XI.
”'Tis a pity--a thousand pities!” her father kept saying next morning at breakfast, Grace being still in her bedroom.
But how could he, with any self-respect, obstruct Winterborne's suit at this stage, and nullify a scheme he had labored to promote--was, indeed, mechanically promoting at this moment? A crisis was approaching, mainly as a result of his contrivances, and it would have to be met.
But here was the fact, which could not be disguised: since seeing what an immense change her last twelve months of absence had produced in his daughter, after the heavy sum per annum that he had been spending for several years upon her education, he was reluctant to let her marry Giles Winterborne, indefinitely occupied as woodsman, cider-merchant, apple-farmer, and what not, even were she willing to marry him herself.
”She will be his wife if you don't upset her notion that she's bound to accept him as an understood thing,” said Mrs. Melbury. ”Bless ye, she'll soon shake down here in Hintock, and be content with Giles's way of living, which he'll improve with what money she'll have from you.
'Tis the strangeness after her genteel life that makes her feel uncomfortable at first. Why, when I saw Hintock the first time I thought I never could like it. But things gradually get familiar, and stone floors seem not so very cold and hard, and the hooting of the owls not so very dreadful, and loneliness not so very lonely, after a while.”
”Yes, I believe ye. That's just it. I KNOW Grace will gradually sink down to our level again, and catch our manners and way of speaking, and feel a drowsy content in being Giles's wife. But I can't bear the thought of dragging down to that old level as promising a piece of maidenhood as ever lived--fit to ornament a palace wi'--that I've taken so much trouble to lift up. Fancy her white hands getting redder every day, and her tongue losing its pretty up-country curl in talking, and her bounding walk becoming the regular Hintock shail and wamble!”
”She may shail, but she'll never wamble,” replied his wife, decisively.
When Grace came down-stairs he complained of her lying in bed so late; not so much moved by a particular objection to that form of indulgence as discomposed by these other reflections.