The Woodlanders | Page 6

showed little hardness or roughness about it. The palm was red and
blistering, as if this present occupation were not frequent enough with
her to subdue it to what it worked in. As with so many right hands born
to manual labor, there was nothing in its fundamental shape to bear out
the physiological conventionalism that gradations of birth, gentle or
mean, show themselves primarily in the form of this member. Nothing
but a cast of the die of destiny had decided that the girl should handle
the tool; and the fingers which clasped the heavy ash haft might have
skilfully guided the pencil or swept the string, had they only been set to
do it in good time.
Her face had the usual fulness 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. In years she was no more than nineteen or twenty, but the
necessity of taking thought at a too early period of life had forced the

provisional curves of her childhood's face to a premature finality. Thus
she had but little pretension to beauty, save in one prominent
particular--her hair. Its abundance made it almost unmanageable; its
color was, roughly speaking, and as seen here by firelight, brown, but
careful notice, or an observation by day, would have revealed that its
true shade was a rare and beautiful approximation to chestnut.
On this one bright gift of Time to the particular victim of his now
before us the new-comer's eyes were fixed; meanwhile the fingers of
his right hand mechanically played over something sticking up from his
waistcoat-pocket--the bows of a pair of scissors, whose polish made
them feebly responsive to the light within. In her present beholder's
mind the scene formed by the girlish spar-maker composed itself into a
post-Raffaelite picture of extremest quality, wherein the girl's hair
alone, as the focus of observation, was depicted with intensity and
distinctness, and her face, shoulders, hands, and figure in general, being
a blurred mass of unimportant detail lost in haze and obscurity.
He hesitated no longer, but tapped at the door and entered. The young
woman turned at the crunch of his boots on the sanded floor, and
exclaiming, "Oh, Mr. Percombe, how you frightened me!" quite lost
her color for a moment.
He replied, "You should shut your door--then you'd hear folk open it."
"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--"
"Yes--to have your answer about this." He touched her head with his
cane, and she winced. "Do you agree?" he continued. "It is necessary
that I should know at once, as the lady is soon going away, and it takes
time to make up."
"Don't press me--it worries me. I was in hopes you had thought no
more of it. I can NOT part with it--so there!"
"Now, look here, Marty," said the barber, sitting down on the

coffin-stool table. "How much do you get for making these spars?"
"Hush--father's up-stairs awake, and he don't know that I am doing his
work."
"Well, now tell me," said the man, more softly. "How much do you
get?"
"Eighteenpence a thousand," she said, reluctantly.
"Who are you making them for?"
"Mr. Melbury, the timber-dealer, just below here."
"And how many can you make in a day?"
"In a day and half the night, three bundles--that's a thousand and a
half."
"Two and threepence." The barber paused. "Well, look here," he
continued, with the remains of a calculation in his tone, which
calculation had been the reduction to figures of the probable monetary
magnetism necessary to overpower the resistant force of her present
purse and the woman's love of comeliness, "here's a sovereign--a gold
sovereign, almost new." He held it out between his finger and thumb.
"That's as much as you'd earn in a week and a half at that rough man's
work, and it's yours for just letting me snip off what you've got too
much of."
The girl's bosom moved a very little. "Why can't the lady send to some
other girl who don't value her hair--not to me?" she exclaimed.
"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,"