The chief hotel at Sherton-Abbas was an old stone-fronted inn with a yawning arch, under which vehicles were driven by stooping coachmen to back premises of wonderful commodiousness. The windows to the street were mullioned into narrow lights, and only commanded a view of the opposite houses; hence, perhaps, it arose that the best and most luxurious private sitting-room that the inn could afford over-looked the nether parts of the establishment, where beyond the yard were to be seen gardens and orchards, now bossed, nay incrusted, with scarlet and gold fruit, stretching to infinite distance under a luminous lavender mist. The time was early autumn,
'When the fair apples, red as evening sky, Do bend the tree unto the fruitful ground, When juicy pears, and berries of black dye, Do dance in air, and call the eyes around.'
The landscape confronting the window might, indeed, have been part of the identical stretch of country which the youthful Chatterton had in his mind.
In this room sat she who had been the maiden Grace Melbury till the finger of fate touched her and turned her to a wife. It was two months after the wedding, and she was alone. Fitzpiers had walked out to see the abbey by the light of sunset, but she had been too fatigued to accompany him. They had reached the last stage of a long eight-weeks' tour, and were going on to Hintock that night.
In the yard, between Grace and the orchards, there progressed a scene natural to the locality at this time of the year. An apple- mill and press had been erected on the spot, to which some men were bringing fruit from divers points in mawn- baskets, while others were grinding them, and others wringing down the pomace, whose sweet juice gushed forth into tubs and pails. The superintendent of these proceedings, to whom the others spoke as master, was a young yeoman of prepossessing manner and aspect, whose form she recognized in a moment. He had hung his coat to a nail of the out-house wall, and wore his shirt-sleeves rolled up beyond his elbows, to keep them unstained while he rammed the pomace into the bags of horse-hair. Fragments of apple-rind had alighted upon the brim of his hat--probably from the bursting of a bag--while brown pips of the same fruit were sticking among the down upon his fine, round arms.
She realized in a moment how he had come there. Down in the heart of the apple country nearly every farmer kept up a cider-making apparatus and wring-house for his own use, building up the pomace in great straw 'cheeses,' as they were called; but here, on the margin of Pomona's plain, was a debatable land neither orchard nor sylvan exclusively, where the apple produce was hardly sufficient to warrant each proprietor in keeping a mill of his own. This was the field of the travelling cider-maker. His press and mill were fixed to wheels instead of being set up in a cider-house; and with a couple of horses, buckets, tubs, strainers, and an assistant or two, he wandered from place to place, deriving very satisfactory returns for his trouble in such a prolific season as the present.
The back parts of the town were just now abounding with apple- gatherings. They stood in the yards in carts, baskets, and loose heaps; and the blue. stagnant air of autumn which hung over everything was heavy with a sweet cidery smell. Cakes of pomace lay against the walls in the yellow sun, where they were drying to be used as fuel. Yet it was not the great make of the year as yet; before the standard crop came in there accumulated, in abundant times like this, a large superfluity of early apples, and windfalls from the trees of later harvest, which would not keep long. Thus, in the baskets, and quivering in the hopper of the mill, she saw specimens of mixed dates, including the mellow countenances of streaked-jacks, codlins, costards, stubbards, ratheripes, and other well-known friends of her ravenous youth.
Grace watched the head-man with interest. The slightest sigh escaped her. Perhaps she thought of the day--not so far distant-- when that friend of her childhood had met her by her father's arrangement in this same town, warm with hope, though diffident, and trusting in a promise rather implied than given. Or she might have thought of days earlier yet--days of childhood--when her mouth was somewhat more ready to receive a kiss from his than was his to bestow one. However, all that was over. She had felt superior to him then, and she felt superior to him now.
She wondered why he never looked towards her open window. She did not know that in the slight commotion caused by their arrival at the inn that afternoon Winterborne had caught sight of her through the archway, had turned red, and was continuing his work with more concentrated attention on the very account of his discovery. Robert Creedle, too, who travelled with Giles, had been incidentally informed by the hostler that Dr. Fitzpiers and his young wife were in the hotel, after which news Creedle kept shaking his head and saying to himself, 'Ah!' very audibly, between his thrusts at the screw of the cider-press.
'Why the deuce do you sigh like that, Robert?' asked Winterborne, at last.
'Ah, maister--'tis my thoughts--'tis my thoughts!...Yes, ye've lost a hundred load o' timber well seasoned; ye've lost five hundred pound in good money; ye've lost the stone-windered house that's big enough to hold a dozen families; ye've lost your share of half a dozen good wagons and their horses--all lost!--through your letting slip she that was once yer own!'
'Good God, Creedle, you'll drive me mad!' said Giles, sternly. 'Don't speak of that any more!'
Thus the subject had ended in the yard. Meanwhile, the passive cause of all this loss still regarded the scene. She was beautifully dressed; she was seated in the most comfortable room that the inn afforded; her long journey had been full of variety, and almost luxuriously performed--for Fitzpiers did not study economy where pleasure was in question. Hence it perhaps arose that Giles and all his belongings seemed sorry and common to her for the moment--moving in a plane so far removed from her own of late that she could scarcely believe she had ever found congruity therein. 'No--I could never have married him!' she said, gently shaking her head. 'Dear father was right. It would have been too coarse a life for me.' And she looked at the rings of sapphire and opal upon her white and slender fingers that had been gifts from Fitzpiers.
Seeing that Giles still kept his back turned, and with a little of the above- described pride of life--easily to be understood, and possibly excused, in a young, inexperienced woman who thought she had married well--she said at last, with a smile on her lips, 'Mr. Winterborne!'
He appeared to take no heed, and she said a second time, 'Mr. Winterborne!' Even now he seemed not to hear, though a person close enough to him to see the expression of his face might have doubted it; and she said a third time, with a timid loudness, 'Mr. Winterborne! What, have you forgotten my voice?' She remained with her lips parted in a welcoming smile.
He turned without surprise, and came deliberately towards the window. 'Why do you call me?' he said, with a sternness that took her completely unawares, his face being now pale. 'Is it not enough that you see me here moiling and muddling for my daily bread while you are sitting there in your success, that you can't refrain from opening old wounds by calling out my name?'
She flushed, and was struck dumb for some moments; but she forgave his unreasoning anger, knowing so well in what it had its root. 'I am sorry I offended you by speaking,' she replied, meekly. 'Believe me, I did not intend to do that. I could hardly sit here so near you without a word of recognition.'
Winterborne's heart had swollen big, and his eyes grown moist by this time, so much had the gentle answer of that familiar voice moved him. He assured her hurriedly, and without looking at her, that he was not angry. He then managed to ask her, in a clumsy, constrained way, if she had had a pleasant journey, and seen many interesting sights. She spoke of a few places that she had visited, and so the time passed till he withdrew to take his place at one of the levers which pulled round the screw.
Forgotten her voice! Indeed, he had not forgotten her voice, as his bitterness showed. But though in the heat of the moment he had reproached her keenly, his second mood was a far more tender one--that which could regard her renunciation of such as he as her glory and her privilege, his own fidelity notwithstanding. He could have declared with a contemporary poet--
'If I forget, The salt creek may forget the ocean; If I forget The heart whence flows my heart's bright motion, May I sink meanlier than the worst Abandoned, outcast, crushed, accurst, If I forget.
'Though you forget, No word of mine shall mar your pleasure; Though you forget, You filled my barren life with treasure, You may withdraw the gift you gave; You still are queen, I still am slave, Though you forget.'
She had tears in her eyes at the thought that she could not remind him of what he ought to have remembered; that not herself but the pressure of events had dissipated the dreams of their early youth. Grace was thus unexpectedly worsted in her encounter with her old friend. She had opened the window with a faint sense of triumph, but he had turned it into sadness; she did not quite comprehend the reason why. In truth it was because she was not cruel enough in her cruelty. If you have to use the knife, use it, say the great surgeons; and for her own peace Grace should have contemned Winterborne thoroughly or not at all. As it was, on closing the window an indescribable, some might have said dangerous, pity quavered in her bosom for him.
Presently her husband entered the room, and told her what a wonderful sunset there was to be seen.
'I have not noticed it. But I have seen somebody out there that we know,' she replied, looking into the court.
Fitzpiers followed the direction of her eyes, and said he did not recognize anybody.
'Why, Mr. Winterborne--there he is, cider-making. He combines that with his other business, you know.'
'Oh--that fellow,' said Fitzpiers, his curiosity becoming extinct.
She, reproachfully: 'What, call Mr. Winterborne a fellow, Edgar? It is true I was just saying to myself that I never could have married him; but I have much regard for him, and always shall.'
'Well, do by all means, my dear one. I dare say I am inhuman, and supercilious, and contemptibly proud of my poor old ramshackle family; but I do honestly confess to you that I feel as if I belonged to a different species from the people who are working in that yard.'
'And from me too, then. For my blood is no better than theirs.'
He looked at her with a droll sort of awakening. It was, indeed, a startling anomaly that this woman of the tribe without should be standing there beside him as his wife, if his sentiments were as he had said. In their travels together she had ranged so unerringly at his level in ideas, tastes, and habits that he had almost forgotten how his heart had played havoc with his principles in taking her to