The Woodlanders

Miss Melbury blushed.

The timber-merchant said, quickly, "Oh, it is nothing! She must bear

these little mishaps." But there could be discerned in his face

something which said "I ought to have foreseen this."

Giles himself, since the untoward beginning of the feast, had not quite

liked to see Grace present. He wished he had not asked such people as

Bawtree and the hollow-turner. He had done it, in dearth of other

friends, that the room might not appear empty. In his mind's eye,

before the event, they had been the mere background or padding of the

scene, but somehow in reality they were the most prominent personages

there.

After supper they played cards, Bawtree and the hollow-turner

monopolizing the new packs for an interminable game, in which a lump of

chalk was incessantly used--a game those two always played wherever

they were, taking a solitary candle and going to a private table in a

corner with the mien of persons bent on weighty matters. The rest of

the company on this account were obliged to put up with old packs for

their round game, that had been lying by in a drawer ever since the

time that Giles's grandmother was alive. Each card had a great stain

in the middle of its back, produced by the touch of generations of damp

and excited thumbs now fleshless in the grave; and the kings and queens

wore a decayed expression of feature, as if they were rather an

impecunious dethroned race of monarchs hiding in obscure slums than

real regal characters. Every now and then the comparatively few

remarks of the players at the round game were harshly intruded on by

the measured jingle of Farmer Bawtree and the hollow-turner from the

back of the room: "And I' will hold' a wa'-ger with you'

That all' these marks' are thirt'-y two!"

accompanied by rapping strokes with the chalk on the table; then an

exclamation, an argument, a dealing of the cards; then the commencement

of the rhymes anew.

The timber-merchant showed his feelings by talking with a satisfied

sense of weight in his words, and by praising the party in a

patronizing tone, when Winterborne expressed his fear that he and his

were not enjoying themselves.

"Oh yes, yes; pretty much. What handsome glasses those are! I didn't

know you had such glasses in the house. Now, Lucy" (to his wife), "you

ought to get some like them for ourselves." And when they had abandoned

cards, and Winterborne was talking to Melbury by the fire, it was the

timber-merchant who stood with his back to the mantle in a proprietary

attitude, from which post of vantage he critically regarded Giles's

person, rather as a superficies than as a solid with ideas and feelings

inside it, saying, "What a splendid coat that one is you have on,

Giles! I can't get such coats. You dress better than I."