The Woodlanders quotes

At one place, where a hill is crossed, the largest of the woods shows itself bisected by the highway, as the head of thick hair is bisected by the white line of its parting. The spot is lonely.

The physiognomy of a deserted highway expresses solitude to a degree that is not reached by mere dales or downs, and bespeaks a tomb-like stillness more emphatic than that of glades and pools.

The contrast of what is with what might be probably accounts for this.

From this self-contained place rose in stealthy silence tall stems of smoke, which the eye of imagination could trace downward to their root on quiet hearthstones festooned overhead with hams and flitches.

It was one of those sequestered spots outside the gates of the world where may usually be found more meditation than action, and more passivity than meditation

; where reasoning proceeds on narrow premises, and results in inferences wildly imaginative;

Her face had the usual fullness of expression which is developed by a life of solitude.

Where the eyes of a multitude beat like waves upon a countenance they seem to wear away its individuality; but in the still water of privacy every tentacle of feeling and sentiment shoots out in visible luxuriance

, to be interpreted as readily as a child’s look by an intruder.

“I can’t,” she said; “the chimney smokes so.

Mr. Percombe, you look as unnatural out of your shop as a canary in a thorn-hedge.

Surely you have not come out here on my account—for—”

“Why, simpleton, because yours is the exact shade of her own, and ’tis a shade you can’t match by dyeing. But you are not going to refuse me now I’ve come all the way from Sherton o’ purpose?”

“I say I won’t sell it⁠—to you or anybody.”

“Now listen,” and he drew up a little closer beside her. “The lady is very rich, and won’t be particular to a few shillings; so I will advance to this on my own responsibility—I’ll make the one sovereign two, rather than go back empty-handed.”

“Nonsense, you know better. How can it be?” She refrained from further speech, and descended to the ground-floor again.

“Thank Heaven, then,” she said to herself, “what belongs to me I keep.”

Her heart swelled, and she could not speak. At length she managed to groan, looking on the ground,

“I’ve made myself ugly⁠—and hateful⁠—that’s what I’ve done!”

“No, no,” he answered. “You’ve only cut your hair—I see now.”

He made the proposal with cheerful energy; he was hardly the same man as the man of the small dark hours.

Ever it happens that even among the moodiest the tendency to be cheered is stronger than the tendency to be cast down; and a soul’s specific gravity stands permanently less than that of the sea of troubles into which it is thrown.

Winterborne, though not demonstrative, replied to this suggestion with something like alacrity. There was not much doubt that Marty’s grounds for cutting off her hair were substantial enough, if Ambrose’s eyes had been a reason for keeping it on.

“Oh, because she’s been used to such wonderfully good life, and finds it dull here. She’ll soon be off again on account of it.”

“So rich and so powerful, and yet to yawn!” the girl murmured. “Then things don’t fay with she any more than with we!”

Marty now alighted; the lamp again shone upon her, and as the carriage rolled on, a soft voice said to her from the interior, “Good night.”

the soft musical breathing instantly set in, which was not to cease night or day till the grown tree should be felled—probably long after the two planters should be felled themselves.

“It seems to me,” the girl continued, “as if they sigh because they are very sorry to begin life in earnest⁠—just as we be.”

“Just as we be?” He looked critically at her. “You ought not to feel like that, Marty.”

“

Your face is like the face of Moses when he came down from the Mount.

”

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 tell you it is that!

I’ve noticed, and I’ve noticed it many times, that a woman takes her color from the man she’s walking with.

The woman who looks an unquestionable lady when she’s with a polished-up fellow, looks a mere tawdry imitation article when she’s hobbing and nobbing with a homely blade. You shan’t be treated like that for long, or at least your children shan’t.

“

A perplexing and ticklish possession is a daughter

,” according to Menander or some old Greek poet, and to nobody was one ever more so than to Melbury, by reason of her very dearness to him. As for Grace, she began to feel troubled;

By this time all the villagers knew of the circumstances, and being well-nigh like one family, a keen interest was the result all round.

Everybody thought of Giles; nobody thought of Marty.

Had any of them looked in upon her during those moonlight nights which preceded the burial of her father, they would have seen the girl absolutely alone in the house with the dead man.

… of the fact that her father could have settled upon her a fortune sufficient to enable both to live in comfort, he deemed it now an absurdity to dream any longer of such a vanity as making her his wife, and sank into silence forthwith.

Yet whatever the value of taciturnity to a man among strangers, it is apt to express more than talkativeness when he dwells among friends.

The countryman who is obliged to judge the time of day from changes in external nature sees a thousand successive tints and traits in the landscape which are never discerned by him who hears the regular chime of a clock, because they are never in …

“Never,” said Fitzpiers, fervently—“never could I deceive you.”

Foreknowledge to the distance of a year or so in either of them might have spoiled the effect of that pretty speech. Never deceive her! But they knew nothing, and the phrase had its day.

Grace began now to be anxious to terminate the interview, but the compelling power of Fitzpiers’s atmosphere still held her there.

Such anticipated glimpses of her now and then realized themselves in the event.

Rencounters of not more than a minute’s duration, frequently repeated, will build up mutual interest, even an intimacy, in a lonely place.

Theirs grew as imperceptibly as the tree-twigs budded. There never was a particular moment at which it could be said they became friends; yet a delicate understanding now existed between two who in the winter had been strangers.

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.

“A man brought me. Women are always carried about like corks upon the waves of masculine desires. … I hope I have not alarmed you; but

Hintock has the curious effect of bottling up the emotions till one can no longer hold them; I am often obliged to fly away and discharge my sentiments somewhere, or I should die outright.

”

“A man brought me.

Women are always carried about like corks upon the waves of masculine desires.

… I hope I have not alarmed you; but Hintock has the curious effect of bottling up the emotions till one can no longer hold them; I am often obliged to fly away and discharge my sentiments somewhere, or I should die outright.”

In the unattached bachelor days of his first sojourning here how highly proper an emotional reason for lingering on would have appeared to troublesome dubiousness.

Matrimonial ambition is such an honorable thing.

“My father has told me that you have sent off one of the men with a late letter to Budmouth,” cried Grace, coming out vivaciously to meet him under the declining light of the sky, wherein hung, solitary, the folding star.

What could he and his simple Grace do to countervail the passions of such as those two sophisticated beings—versed in the world’s ways, armed with every apparatus for victory?

In such an encounter the homely timber-dealer felt as inferior as a bow-and-arrow savage before the precise weapons of modern warfare.

Grace came out of the house as the morning drew on. The village was silent, most of the folk having gone to the fair. Fitzpiers had retired to bed, and was sleeping off his fatigue. She went to the stable and looked at poor Darling:

The suspicion that his darling child was being slighted wrought almost a miraculous change in Melbury’s nature.

No man so furtive for the time as the ingenuous countryman who finds that his ingenuousness has been abused.

Melbury’s heretofore confidential candor towards his gentlemanly son-in-law was displaced by a feline stealth that did injury to his every action, thought, and mood.

bending his steps that way, he saw Winterborne just in front of him. It just now happened that Giles, after being for a long time apathetic and unemployed, had become one of the busiest men in the neighborhood.

It is often thus; fallen friends, lost sight of, we expect to find starving; we discover them going on fairly well.

Without any solicitation, or desire for profit on his part, he had been asked to execute during that winter a very large order for hurdles and other copse-ware, for which purpose he had been obliged to buy several acres of brushwood standing.

“Pray don’t distress yourself,” she said, with exquisitely fine scorn.

“You may keep him⁠—for me.”

Had she been wounded instead of mortified she could not have used the words; but Fitzpiers’s hold upon her heart was slight.

Perhaps Winterborne was not quite so ardent as heretofore.

There is no such thing as a stationary love: men are either loving more or loving less.

But Giles himself recognized no decline in his sense of her dearness. If the flame did indeed burn lower now than when he had fetched her from Sherton at her last return from school, the marvel was small.

Tapping at the window, he signified that she should open the casement, and when she had done this he handed in the key to her.

“You are locked in,” he said; “and your own mistress.”

Even in her trouble she could not refrain from a faint smile at his scrupulousness, as she took the door-key.

Above stretched an old beech, with vast armpits, and great pocket-holes in its sides where branches had been amputated in past times; a black slug was trying to climb it.

Dead boughs were scattered about like ichthyosauri in a museum, and beyond them were perishing woodbine stems resembling old ropes.

From the other window all she could see were more trees, jacketed with lichen and stockinged with moss. At their roots were stemless yellow fungi like lemons and apricots, and tall fungi with more stem than stool.

Next were more trees close together, wrestling for existence, their branches disfigured with wounds resulting from their mutual rubbings and blows. It was the struggle between these neighbors that she had heard in the night.

Beneath them were the rotting stumps of those of the group that had been vanquished long ago, rising from their mossy setting like decayed teeth from green gums.

Farther on were other tufts of moss in islands divided by the shed leaves—variety upon variety, dark green and pale green; moss-like little fir-trees, like plush, like malachite stars, like nothing on earth except moss.

But is there a yet greater humiliation in store for me? You say you have been living here—that he is everything to you. Am I to draw from that the obvious, the extremest inference?”

Triumph at any price is sweet to men and women⁠—especially the latter.

It was her first and last opportunity of repaying him for the cruel contumely which she had borne at his hands so docilely.

Melbury did not know enough to give the gist of the incident, which was that Marty South’s letter had been concerning a certain personal adornment common to herself and Mrs. Charmond.

Her bullet reached its billet at last.

The scene between Fitzpiers and Felice had been sharp, as only a scene can be which arises out of the mortification of one woman by another in the presence of a lover. True, Marty had not effected it by word of mouth;

Grace was abased when, by degrees, she found that she had never understood Giles as Marty had done.

Marty South alone, of all the women in Hintock and the world, had approximated to Winterborne’s level of intelligent intercourse with nature.

In that respect she had formed the complement to him in the other sex, had lived as his counterpart, had subjoined her thought to his as a corollary.

Marty shook her head.

“In all our outdoor days and years together, ma’am,” she replied, “the one thing he never spoke of to me was love; nor I to him.”

“Yet you and he could speak in a tongue that nobody else knew—not even my father, though he came nearest knowing—the tongue of the trees and fruits and flowers themselves.”

Sometimes Grace thought that it was a pity neither one of them had been his wife for a little while, and given the world a copy of him who was so valuable in their eyes.

Nothing ever had brought home to her with such force as this death how little acquirements and culture weigh beside sterling personal character.

While her simple sorrow for his loss took a softer edge with the lapse of the autumn and winter seasons, her self-reproach at having had a possible hand in causing it knew little abatement.

Grace’s heart struggled between the wish not to be harsh and the fear that she might mislead him.

“I cannot look contemptuous unless I feel contempt,” she said, evasively. “And all I feel is lovelessness.”

“I have been very bad, I know,” he returned. “But unless you can really love me again, Grace, I would rather go away from you forever. I don’t want you to receive me again for duty’s sake, or anything of that sort.

She was obliged to admit that he had not.

“Then I think that you might get your heart out of that grave,” said he, with playful sadness. “It has been there a long time.”

She faintly shook her head, but said, “I’ll try to think of you more—if I can.”