I strolled over, and watched the play. Something had happened to disturb Mr. Parrett, for though his face was turned from me, I could see that his bald head had taken on a purple hue. And gradually, as the game progressed, the mystery became clear.
‘Emma, my d-d-dear! Emma!’
It was Mr. Parrett’s voice again, and this time with a sharper ring of warning and remonstrance. Two or three times in the next half-hour he spoke thus, and each time now I was able to detect the cause. Mrs. Parrett was cheating. Continually her neck craned for a sidelong view of her opponents’ cards. She revoked unblushingly. Once I could have sworn I saw a card-corner sticking out of a fold in her silken lap. The aces she seemed to be trying to mark with her thumb-nail. And all the time, though Mr. Parrett got momentarily redder and more wrathful, Farmer Coles and his wife sat serenely smiling, evidently well used to dear Emma and her little harmless, eccentric ways.
III
Here is a winter’s day already, and still November. As I looked forth at sunrise this morning, the whole village was white with frost. I could hear the ice in the wheel-ruts crackling under the tread of passers-by. A single thrush piped forlornly somewhere in the dense thicket of the churchyard. And as I leaned out into the nipping blast, a word came up to me, bandied between a trudging labourer and his friend, a word that brought with it an entire new sheaf of thoughts and memories. ‘More ’n ’aaf like Christmas, bean’t ut, Bill?’ It was said but in jest, and that unthinkingly. Yet, by the calendar, as a glance now told me, Christmas was scarce a month away.
While the sun was yet no more than a white spot in the faint gold mists of morning, I took the lane that led to the Downs. It was strange to see how the frost had missed all the bright-hued berries in the hedgerows, and how the ivy-leaves were only rimmed with white. It was the same with the prickly holly foliage. The spines were thickly encrusted, while the dark green membranes of the leaves had given no fingerhold to the frost. But the colour of the grass, and dead dry herbage, by the wayside was completely blotted out. Every blade and twig stood up stark and white against its fellow; and here it was easy to see which way the frozen air had been drifting all night long, because on the windward side the pale accretion was thicker: in the more exposed places it more than doubled the natural girth of the stems.
Where the dew-pond lay, at the top of the hill, far above the swimming lowland mists, there must have been bright sunshine from the very first; for here the veneer of frost had melted into dewdrops, that flashed back a thousand prismatic rays amidst the emerald of the grass at every step. But behind each upstanding tussock, the frost still held as white and thick as ever. The water, too, in the pond was still frozen over. As I came up to the rail, a flock of starlings rose whirring over my head. They had been waiting there on the sunny side of the bank for the ice to melt round the pond edges, and thither they would return to slake their morning thirst, as soon as I passed on.
Keen and unkindly blew the blast, so that one must keep ever moving to withstand the chill of it. Looking round me on the waste of hills, I could see that the northern slopes still retained their wintry hue, though all those facing to the sun were intensely green. Below in the valley only the oak-woods kept their bronze stain of autumn. Every other tree, the hedges that divided ploughlands and meadows, the winding line of thicket marking the course of the river, all looked bare and dark in the glistening pallor of the sun. The river itself, between the broad water-meadows, seemed like a river of ink.
As I took in all the cheerless, void purity of what lay below me, thinking to myself that this indeed was winter, there came a sudden cawing and dawing high up in the frosty steel-blue dome of the sky; and here again was confirmation of that unenlivening fact. A great company of rooks and jackdaws was streaming by, but with none of its summer zest and purpose. The throng made a general progress towards the south, yet it was obviously doing little more than killing time, spinning out the business of a doubtful journey into the semblance of a morning’s task. Instead of going straight forward in one steady strong tide, the birds were incessantly veering back in wide circles, crossing and re-crossing each other’s paths aimlessly, and weaving a mazy dark pattern on the sky.