The Woodlanders

The news was true. The life--the one fragile life--that had been used

as a measuring-tape of time by law, was in danger of being frayed away.

It was the last of a group of lives which had served this purpose, at

the end of whose breathings the small homestead occupied by South

himself, the larger one of Giles Winterborne, and half a dozen others

that had been in the possession of various Hintock village families for

the previous hundred years, and were now Winterborne's, would fall in

and become part of the encompassing estate.

Yet a short two months earlier Marty's father, aged fifty-five years,

though something of a fidgety, anxious being, would have been looked on

as a man whose existence was so far removed from hazardous as any in

the parish, and as bidding fair to be prolonged for another quarter of

a century.

Winterborne walked up and down his garden next day thinking of the

contingency. The sense that the paths he was pacing, the

cabbage-plots, the apple-trees, his dwelling, cider-cellar,

wring-house, stables, and weathercock, were all slipping away over his

head and beneath his feet, as if they were painted on a magic-lantern

slide, was curious. In spite of John South's late indisposition he had

not anticipated danger. To inquire concerning his health had been to

show less sympathy than to remain silent, considering the material

interest he possessed in the woodman's life, and he had, accordingly,

made a point of avoiding Marty's house.

While he was here in the garden somebody came to fetch him. It was

Marty herself, and she showed her distress by her unconsciousness of a

cropped poll.

"Father is still so much troubled in his mind about that tree," she

said. "You know the tree I mean, Mr. Winterborne? the tall one in

front of the house, that he thinks will blow down and kill us. Can you

come and see if you can persuade him out of his notion? I can do

nothing."

He accompanied her to the cottage, and she conducted him upstairs.

John South was pillowed up in a chair between the bed and the window

exactly opposite the latter, towards which his face was turned.

"Ah, neighbor Winterborne," he said. "I wouldn't have minded if my

life had only been my own to lose; I don't vallie it in much of itself,

and can let it go if 'tis required of me. But to think what 'tis worth

to you, a young man rising in life, that do trouble me! It seems a

trick of dishonesty towards ye to go off at fifty-five! I could bear

up, I know I could, if it were not for the tree--yes, the tree, 'tis

that's killing me. There he stands, threatening my life every minute

that the wind do blow. He'll come down upon us and squat us dead; and

what will ye do when the life on your property is taken away?"