At first not a soul appeared who could enlighten him as he desired, or
seemed likely to appear that night. But presently a slight noise of
laboring wheels and the steady dig of a horse's shoe-tips became
audible; and there loomed in the notch of the hill and plantation that
the road formed here at the summit a carrier's van drawn by a single
horse. When it got nearer, he said, with some relief to himself, "'Tis
Mrs. Dollery's--this will help me."
The vehicle was half full of passengers, mostly women. He held up his
stick at its approach, and the woman who was driving drew rein.
"I've been trying to find a short way to Little Hintock this last
half-hour, Mrs. Dollery," he said. "But though I've been to Great
Hintock and Hintock House half a dozen times I am at fault about the
small village. You can help me, I dare say?"
She assured him that she could--that as she went to Great Hintock her
van passed near it--that it was only up the lane that branched out of
the lane into which she was about to turn--just ahead. "Though,"
continued Mrs. Dollery, "'tis such a little small place that, as a town
gentleman, you'd need have a candle and lantern to find it if ye don't
know where 'tis. Bedad! I wouldn't live there if they'd pay me to.
Now at Great Hintock you do see the world a bit."
He mounted and sat beside her, with his feet outside, where they were
ever and anon brushed over by the horse's tail.
This van, driven and owned by Mrs. Dollery, was rather a movable
attachment of the roadway than an extraneous object, to those who knew
it well. The old horse, whose hair was of the roughness and color of
heather, whose leg-joints, shoulders, and hoofs were distorted by
harness and drudgery from colthood--though if all had their rights, he
ought, symmetrical in outline, to have been picking the herbage of some
Eastern plain instead of tugging here--had trodden this road almost
daily for twenty years. Even his subjection was not made congruous
throughout, for the harness being too short, his tail was not drawn
through the crupper, so that the breeching slipped awkwardly to one
side. He knew every subtle incline of the seven or eight miles of
ground between Hintock and Sherton Abbas--the market-town to which he
journeyed--as accurately as any surveyor could have learned it by a
Dumpy level.
The vehicle had a square black tilt which nodded with the motion of the
wheels, and at a point in it over the driver's head was a hook to which
the reins were hitched at times, when they formed a catenary curve from
the horse's shoulders. Somewhere about the axles was a loose chain,
whose only known purpose was to clink as it went. Mrs. Dollery, having
to hop up and down many times in the service of her passengers, wore,
especially in windy weather, short leggings under her gown for
modesty's sake, and instead of a bonnet a felt hat tied down with a
handkerchief, to guard against an earache to which she was frequently
subject. In the rear of the van was a glass window, which she cleaned
with her pocket-handkerchief every market-day before starting. Looking
at the van from the back, the spectator could thus see through its
interior a square piece of the same sky and landscape that he saw
without, but intruded on by the profiles of the seated passengers, who,
as they rumbled onward, their lips moving and heads nodding in animated
private converse, remained in happy unconsciousness that their
mannerisms and facial peculiarities were sharply defined to the public
eye.