Chapter 26

CHAPTER XXVI.

Winterborne's house had been pulled down. On this account his
face had been seen but fitfully in Hintock; and he would probably
have disappeared from the place altogether but for his slight
business connection with Melbury, on whose premises Giles kept his
cider-making apparatus, now that he had no place of his own to
stow it in. Coming here one evening on his way to a hut beyond
the wood where he now slept, he noticed that the familiar brown-
thatched pinion of his paternal roof had vanished from its site,
and that the walls were levelled. In present circumstances he had
a feeling for the spot that might have been called morbid, and
when he had supped in the hut aforesaid he made use of the spare
hour before bedtime to return to Little Hintock in the twilight
and ramble over the patch of ground on which he had first seen the
day.

He repeated this evening visit on several like occasions. Even in
the gloom he could trace where the different rooms had stood;
could mark the shape of the kitchen chimney-corner, in which he
had roasted apples and potatoes in his boyhood, cast his bullets,
and burned his initials on articles that did and did not belong to
him. The apple-trees still remained to show where the garden had
been, the oldest of them even now retaining the crippled slant to
north-east given them by the great November gale of 1824, which
carried a brig bodily over the Chesil Bank. They were at present
bent to still greater obliquity by the heaviness of their produce.
Apples bobbed against his head, and in the grass beneath he
crunched scores of them as he walked. There was nobody to gather
them now.

It was on the evening under notice that, half sitting, half
leaning against one of these inclined trunks, Winterborne had
become lost in his thoughts, as usual, till one little star after
another had taken up a position in the piece of sky which now
confronted him where his walls and chimneys had formerly raised
their outlines. The house had jutted awkwardly into the road, and
the opening caused by its absence was very distinct.

In the silence the trot of horses and the spin of carriage-wheels
became audible; and the vehicle soon shaped itself against the
blank sky, bearing down upon him with the bend in the lane which
here occurred, and of which the house had been the cause. He
could discern the figure of a woman high up on the driving-seat of
a phaeton, a groom being just visible behind. Presently there was
a slight scrape, then a scream. Winterborne went across to the
spot, and found the phaeton half overturned, its driver sitting on
the heap of rubbish which had once been his dwelling, and the man
seizing the horses' heads. The equipage was Mrs.