Chapter 4

CHAPTER IV.

There was now a distinct manifestation of morning in the air, and
presently the bleared white visage of a sunless winter day emerged
like a dead-born child. The villagers everywhere had already
bestirred themselves, rising at this time of the year at the far
less dreary hour of absolute darkness. It had been above an hour
earlier, before a single bird had untucked his head, that twenty
lights were struck in as many bedrooms, twenty pairs of shutters
opened, and twenty pairs of eyes stretched to the sky to forecast
the weather for the day.

Owls that had been catching mice in the out-houses, rabbits that
had been eating the wintergreens in the gardens, and stoats that
had been sucking the blood of the rabbits, discerning that their
human neighbors were on the move, discreetly withdrew from
publicity, and were seen and heard no more that day.

The daylight revealed the whole of Mr. Melbury's homestead, of
which the wagon-sheds had been an outlying erection. It formed
three sides of an open quadrangle, and consisted of all sorts of
buildings, the largest and central one being the dwelling itself.
The fourth side of the quadrangle was the public road.

It was a dwelling-house of respectable, roomy, almost dignified
aspect; which, taken with the fact that there were the remains of
other such buildings thereabout, indicated that Little Hintock had
at some time or other been of greater importance than now, as its
old name of Hintock St. Osmond also testified. The house was of
no marked antiquity, yet of well-advanced age; older than a stale
novelty, but no canonized antique; faded, not hoary; looking at
you from the still distinct middle-distance of the early Georgian
time, and awakening on that account the instincts of reminiscence
more decidedly than the remoter and far grander memorials which
have to speak from the misty reaches of mediaevalism. The faces,
dress, passions, gratitudes, and revenues of the great-great-
grandfathers and grandmothers who had been the first to gaze from
those rectangular windows, and had stood under that key-stoned
doorway, could be divined and measured by homely standards of to-
day. It was a house in whose reverberations queer old personal
tales were yet audible if properly listened for; and not, as with
those of the castle and cloister, silent beyond the possibility of
echo.

The garden-front remained much as it had always been, and there
was a porch and entrance that way. But the principal house-door
opened on the square yard or quadrangle towards the road, formerly
a regular carriage entrance, though the middle of the area was now
made use of for stacking timber, fagots, bundles, and other
products of the wood. It was