When he reached the plantation he found that Marty had come back, and dismissing Creedle, he went on planting silently with the girl as before.
“Suppose, Marty,” he said, after a while, looking at her extended arm, upon which old scratches from briers showed themselves purple in the cold wind—“suppose you know a person, and want to bring that person to a good understanding with you, do you think a Christmas party of some sort is a warming-up thing, and likely to be useful in hastening on the matter?”
“Is there to be dancing?”
“There might be, certainly.”
“Will He dance with She?”
“Well, yes.”
“Then it might bring things to a head, one way or the other; I won’t be the one to say which.”
“It shall be done,” said Winterborne, not to her, though he spoke the words quite loudly. And as the day was nearly ended, he added, “Here, Marty, I’ll send up a man to plant the rest tomorrow. I’ve other things to think of just now.”
She did not inquire what other things, for she had seen him walking with Grace Melbury. She looked towards the western sky, which was now aglow like some vast foundery wherein new worlds were being cast. Across it the bare bough of a tree stretched horizontally, revealing every twig against the red, and showing in dark profile every beck and movement of three pheasants that were settling themselves down on it in a row to roost.
“It will be fine tomorrow,” said Marty, observing them with the vermilion light of the sun in the pupils of her eyes, “for they are a-croupied down nearly at the end of the bough. If it were going to be stormy they’d squeeze close to the trunk. The weather is almost all they have to think of, isn’t it, Mr. Winterborne? and so they must be lighter-hearted than we.”
“I dare say they are,” said Winterborne.
Before taking a single step in the preparations, Winterborne, with no great hopes, went across that evening to the timber-merchant’s to ascertain if Grace and her parents would honor him with their presence. Having first to set his nightly gins in the garden, to catch the rabbits that ate his winter-greens, his call was delayed till just after the rising of the moon, whose rays reached the Hintock houses but fitfully as yet, on account of the trees. Melbury was crossing his yard on his way to call on someone at the larger village, but he readily turned and walked up and down the path with the young man.
Giles, in his self-deprecatory sense of living on a much smaller scale than the Melburys did, would not for the world imply that his invitation was to a gathering of any importance. So he put it in the mild form of “Can you come in for an hour, when you have done business, the day after tomorrow; and Mrs. and Miss Melbury, if they have nothing more pressing to do?”
Melbury would give no answer at once. “No, I can’t tell you today,” he said. “I must talk it over with the women. As far as I am concerned, my dear Giles, you know I’ll come with pleasure. But how do I know what Grace’s notions may be? You see, she has been away among cultivated folks a good while; and now this acquaintance with Mrs. Charmond—Well, I’ll ask her. I can say no more.”
When Winterborne was gone the timber-merchant went on his way. He knew very well that Grace, whatever her own feelings, would either go or not go, according as he suggested; and his instinct was, for the moment, to suggest the negative. His errand took him past the church, and the way to his destination was either across the churchyard or alongside it, the distances being the same. For some reason or other he chose the former way.
The moon was faintly lighting up the gravestones, and the path, and the front of the building. Suddenly Mr. Melbury paused, turned ill upon the grass, and approached a particular headstone, where he read, “In memory of John Winterborne,” with the subjoined date and age. It was the grave of Giles’s father.
The timber-merchant laid his hand upon the stone, and was humanized. “Jack, my wronged friend!” he said. “I’ll be faithful to my plan of making amends to ’ee.”
When he reached home that evening, he said to Grace and Mrs. Melbury, who were working at a little table by the fire,
“Giles wants us to go down and spend an hour with him the day after tomorrow; and I’m thinking, that as ’tis Giles who asks us, we’ll go.”
They assented without demur, and accordingly the timber-merchant sent Giles the next morning an answer in the affirmative.
Winterborne, in his modesty, or indifference, had mentioned no particular hour in his invitation; and accordingly Mr. Melbury and his family, expecting no other guests, chose their own time, which chanced to be rather early in the afternoon, by reason of the somewhat quicker despatch than usual of the timber-merchant’s business that day. To show their sense of the unimportance of the occasion, they walked quite slowly to the house, as if they were merely out for a ramble, and going to nothing special at all; or at most intending to pay a casual call and take a cup of tea.
At this hour stir and bustle pervaded the interior of Winterborne’s domicile from cellar to apple-loft. He had planned an elaborate high tea for six o’clock or thereabouts, and a good roaring supper to come on about eleven. Being a bachelor of rather retiring habits, the whole of the preparations devolved upon himself and his trusty man and familiar, Robert Creedle, who did everything that required doing, from making Giles’s bed to catching moles in his
