Thomas Hardy: The Woodlanders

31. CHAPTER XXXI. (continued)

"Now," said Winterborne, "don't be in a hurry to go home. I've put some cider down to warm in my shelter here, and we'll sit and drink it and talk this over."

Melbury turned unresistingly as Giles took his arm, and they went back to where the fire was, and sat down under the screen, the other woodmen having gone. He drew out the cider-mug from the ashes and they drank together.

"Giles, you ought to have had her, as I said just now," repeated Melbury. "I'll tell you why for the first time."

He thereupon told Winterborne, as with great relief, the story of how he won away Giles's father's chosen one--by nothing worse than a lover's cajoleries, it is true, but by means which, except in love, would certainly have been pronounced cruel and unfair. He explained how he had always intended to make reparation to Winterborne the father by giving Grace to Winterborne the son, till the devil tempted him in the person of Fitzpiers, and he broke his virtuous vow.

"How highly I thought of that man, to be sure! Who'd have supposed he'd have been so weak and wrong-headed as this! You ought to have had her, Giles, and there's an end on't."

Winterborne knew how to preserve his calm under this unconsciously cruel tearing of a healing wound to which Melbury's concentration on the more vital subject had blinded him. The young man endeavored to make the best of the case for Grace's sake.

"She would hardly have been happy with me," he said, in the dry, unimpassioned voice under which he hid his feelings. "I was not well enough educated: too rough, in short. I couldn't have surrounded her with the refinements she looked for, anyhow, at all."

"Nonsense--you are quite wrong there," said the unwise old man, doggedly. "She told me only this day that she hates refinements and such like. All that my trouble and money bought for her in that way is thrown away upon her quite. She'd fain be like Marty South--think o' that! That's the top of her ambition! Perhaps she's right. Giles, she loved you--under the rind; and, what's more, she loves ye still--worse luck for the poor maid!"