The Woodlanders

The inspiriting appointment which had led Grace Melbury to indulge in a

six-candle illumination for the arrangement of her attire, carried her

over the ground the next morning with a springy tread. Her sense of

being properly appreciated on her own native soil seemed to brighten

the atmosphere and herbage around her, as the glowworm's lamp

irradiates the grass. Thus she moved along, a vessel of emotion going

to empty itself on she knew not what.

Twenty minutes' walking through copses, over a stile, and along an

upland lawn brought her to the verge of a deep glen, at the bottom of

which Hintock House appeared immediately beneath her eye. To describe

it as standing in a hollow would not express the situation of the

manor-house; it stood in a hole, notwithstanding that the hole was full

of beauty. From the spot which Grace had reached a stone could easily

have been thrown over or into, the birds'-nested chimneys of the

mansion. Its walls were surmounted by a battlemented parapet; but the

gray lead roofs were quite visible behind it, with their gutters, laps,

rolls, and skylights, together with incised letterings and

shoe-patterns cut by idlers thereon.

The front of the house exhibited an ordinary manorial presentation of

Elizabethan windows, mullioned and hooded, worked in rich snuff-colored

freestone from local quarries. The ashlar of the walls, where not

overgrown with ivy and other creepers, was coated with lichen of every

shade, intensifying its luxuriance with its nearness to the ground,

till, below the plinth, it merged in moss.

Above the house to the back was a dense plantation, the roots of whose

trees were above the level of the chimneys. The corresponding high

ground on which Grace stood was richly grassed, with only an old tree

here and there. A few sheep lay about, which, as they ruminated,

looked quietly into the bedroom windows. The situation of the house,

prejudicial to humanity, was a stimulus to vegetation, on which account

an endless shearing of the heavy-armed ivy was necessary, and a

continual lopping of trees and shrubs. It was an edifice built in

times when human constitutions were damp-proof, when shelter from the

boisterous was all that men thought of in choosing a dwelling-place,

the insidious being beneath their notice; and its hollow site was an

ocular reminder, by its unfitness for modern lives, of the fragility to

which these have declined. The highest architectural cunning could

have done nothing to make Hintock House dry and salubrious; and

ruthless ignorance could have done little to make it unpicturesque. It

was vegetable nature's own home; a spot to inspire the painter and poet

of still life--if they did not suffer too much from the relaxing

atmosphere--and to draw groans from the gregariously disposed. Grace

descended the green escarpment by a zigzag path into the drive, which

swept round beneath the slope. The exterior of the house had been

familiar to her from her childhood, but she had never been inside, and

the approach to knowing an old thing in a new way was a lively

experience. It was with a little flutter that she was shown in; but

she recollected that Mrs. Charmond would probably be alone. Up to a

few days before this time that lady had been accompanied in her

comings, stayings, and goings by a relative believed to be her aunt;

latterly, however, these two ladies had separated, owing, it was

supposed, to a quarrel, and Mrs. Charmond had been left desolate. Being

presumably a woman who did not care for solitude, this deprivation

might possibly account for her sudden interest in Grace.