An old woodman, grey and bent and walking painfully, in
great leather gloves and gaiters, carrying a chopper, passed slowly
along the ride and touched his hat. Jack insisted on giving him
some of the luncheon, and made up a package for him which the old
man put away in a pocket, making some remarks about the weather,
and adding with a senile pride that he was over seventy, and had
worked in the woodland for sixty years and more. He was an almost
mediaeval figure, Howard thought--a woodman five centuries ago would
have looked and spoken much the same; he knew nothing of the world,
or the thoughts and hopes of it; he was almost as much of the soil
as the very woods themselves, in his dim mechanical life; was man
made for that after all? How did that square with Miss Merry's
eager optimism? What was the meaning of so unconscious a figure, so
obviously without an ethical programme, and yet so curiously
devised by God, patiently nurtured and preserved?
In the infinite peace, while the flies hummed on the shining
bracken, and the breeze nestled in the firs like a falling sea,
Howard had a spasm of incredulous misery. Could any heart be so
heavy, so unquiet as his own?--life suddenly struck so aimless,
with but one overmastering desire, which he could not fulfil. He
was shocked at his feebleness. A year ago he could have devised no
sweeter or more delicious day than this, with such a party, in the
high sunlit wood.
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