Chapter 13 - Page 2

the
life on your property is taken away?"

"Never you mind me--that's of no consequence," said Giles. "Think
of yourself alone."

He looked out of the window in the direction of the woodman's
gaze. The tree was a tall elm, familiar to him from childhood,
which stood at a distance of two-thirds its own height from the
front of South's dwelling. Whenever the wind blew, as it did now,
the tree rocked, naturally enough; and the sight of its motion and
sound of its sighs had gradually bred the terrifying illusion in
the woodman's mind that it would descend and kill him. Thus he
would sit all day, in spite of persuasion, watching its every
sway, and listening to the melancholy Gregorian melodies which the
air wrung out of it. This fear it apparently was, rather than any
organic disease which was eating away the health of John South.

As the tree waved, South waved his head, making it his flugel-man
with abject obedience. "Ah, when it was quite a small tree," he
said, "and I was a little boy, I thought one day of chopping it
off with my hook to make a clothes-line prop with. But I put off
doing it, and then I again thought that I would; but I forgot it,
and didn't. And at last it got too big, and now 'tis my enemy,
and will be the death o' me. Little did I think, when I let that
sapling stay, that a time would come when it would torment me, and
dash me into my grave."

"No, no," said Winterborne and Marty, soothingly. But they
thought it possible that it might hasten him into his grave,
though in another way than by falling.

"I tell you what," added Winterborne, "I'll climb up this
afternoon and shroud off the lower boughs, and then it won't be so
heavy, and the wind won't affect it so."

"She won't allow it--a strange woman come from nobody knows where--
she won't have it done."

"You mean Mrs. Charmond? Oh, she doesn't know there's such a tree
on her estate. Besides, shrouding is not felling, and I'll risk
that much."

He went out, and when afternoon came he returned, took a billhook
from the woodman's shed, and with a ladder climbed into the lower
part of the tree, where he began lopping off--"shrouding," as they
called it at Hintock--the lowest boughs. Each of these quivered
under his attack, bent, cracked, and fell into the hedge. Having
cut away the lowest tier, he stepped off the ladder, climbed a few
steps higher, and attacked those at the next level. Thus he
ascended with the progress of his work far above the top of the
ladder, cutting away his perches as he went, and leaving nothing
but a bare stem below him.

The work was troublesome, for the tree was large. The afternoon
wore on, turning dark and misty about four o'clock. From time