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Updated: May 3, 2025
If peace and hope were lost in the effort, I must learn the truth and satisfy myself, once and for all, as to whose hatred and fear the Pollards were indebted for insinuations at once so tremendous and so veiled. That I was the only person who had probably seen and read these fatal words, lent purpose to my resolution.
As he told her of his trip up the valley and the effect it made upon him, and how he had never dreamed of anything so beautiful, and how good the Pollards were; and what he had painted and what he expected to paint; talking all the time with his thumb circling about as if it was a bit of charcoal and the air it swept through but a sheet of Whatman's best, her critical eye roamed over his figure and costume.
'Why, that clump of pollards still emerging from the water on the left, cried Claude, 'was the Barreux Island, where we used to chat together, lying on the grass! You remember, don't you? Ah! the scoundrels! Sandoz, who could never see a tree felled without shaking his fist at the wood-cutter, turned pale with anger, and felt exasperated that the authorities had thus dared to mutilate nature.
The trees which lined the road were much lower, being indeed mere pollards, and allowed them to see the sky overhead. Presently they heard a dog bark; then another and another. Could the brutes be barking at them? It was a sign that there were dwellings near, and the inhabitants might be looking out to ascertain what made their dogs bark.
The brimming dykes, fringed with bare pollards, and the long sheets of water spread out across the lush meadows, threw back the fiery radiance of the sky from their gleaming surface.
We came, at last, a little before sunrise to the summit of a hill, and saw the high-road passing at right angles through an open country of meadows and hedgerow pollards; and not only the York mail, speeding smoothly at the gallop of the four horses, but a post-chaise besides, with the post-boy titupping briskly, and the traveller himself putting his head out of the window, but whether to breathe the dawn, or the better to observe the passage of the mail, I do not know.
This incident, so suggestive, and, alas! so degrading to my self- esteem, produced a deep and painful effect on my mind. For hours I could not rid my ears of that final sentence: "One of us two must marry that girl." Nor could the events that speedily followed quite remove from my mind and heart the sting which this knowledge of the Pollards' base calculation and diplomacy had implanted.
Under it the narrow blade of grass comes up freshly green between the old white fibres the rook pulled; the sycamore bud swells and opens, and takes the eye instantly in the still dark wood; the starlings go to the hollow pollards; the lambs leap in the mead. You never know what a day may bring forth what new thing will come next.
And he sings out, 'Land ahead! or 'Breakers ahead! and gives directions accordin'. Only I can't always make out what he says. But when he shuts up his spyglass, and comes down the riggin', and talks to us like one man to another, then I don't know what I should do without the parson. Good evenin' to you, sir, and welcome to Marshmallows." The pollards did not look half so dreary.
From this, towards the left, extended alleys, some recently planted, intended to afford, in summer, cool and shady places for the favourite game of bowls; while scattered clumps, chiefly of old pollards, to the right broke the space agreeably enough into detached portions, each of which afforded its separate pastime or diversion.
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