The auctioneer adjusted himself to circumstances by using his
walking-stick as a hammer, and knocked down the lot on any convenient
object that took his fancy, such as the crown of a little boy's head,
or the shoulders of a by-stander who had no business there except to
taste the brew; a proceeding which would have been deemed humorous but
for the air of stern rigidity which that auctioneer's face preserved,
tending to show that the eccentricity was a result of that absence of
mind which is engendered by the press of affairs, and no freak of fancy
at all.
Mr. Melbury stood slightly apart from the rest of the Peripatetics, and
Grace beside him, clinging closely to his arm, her modern attire
looking almost odd where everything else was old-fashioned, and
throwing over the familiar garniture of the trees a homeliness that
seemed to demand improvement by the addition of a few contemporary
novelties also. Grace seemed to regard the selling with the interest
which attaches to memories revived after an interval of obliviousness.
Winterborne went and stood close to them; the timber-merchant spoke,
and continued his buying; Grace merely smiled. To justify his presence
there Winterborne began bidding for timber and fagots that he did not
want, pursuing the occupation in an abstracted mood, in which the
auctioneer's voice seemed to become one of the natural sounds of the
woodland. A few flakes of snow descended, at the sight of which a
robin, alarmed at these signs of imminent winter, and seeing that no
offence was meant by the human invasion, came and perched on the tip of
the fagots that were being sold, and looked into the auctioneer's face,
while waiting for some chance crumb from the bread-basket. Standing a
little behind Grace, Winterborne observed how one flake would sail
downward and settle on a curl of her hair, and how another would choose
her shoulder, and another the edge of her bonnet, which took up so much
of his attention that his biddings proceeded incoherently; and when the
auctioneer said, every now and then, with a nod towards him, "Yours,
Mr. Winterborne," he had no idea whether he had bought fagots, poles,
or logwood.
He regretted, with some causticity of humor, that her father should
show such inequalities of temperament as to keep Grace tightly on his
arm to-day, when he had quite lately seemed anxious to recognize their
betrothal as a fact. And thus musing, and joining in no conversation
with other buyers except when directly addressed, he followed the
assemblage hither and thither till the end of the auction, when Giles
for the first time realized what his purchases had been. Hundreds of
fagots, and divers lots of timber, had been set down to him, when all
he had required had been a few bundles of spray for his odd man Robert
Creedle's use in baking and lighting fires.