John Grimbal heard only the beginning of this speech, for he turned his
back on Will and rode away while the younger man still shouted after
him. Blanchard was in a rage, and would have liked to make a third trial
of strength with his enemy on the spot, but the rider vanished and Will
quickly cooled as he went down the hill to Chagford. The remembrance of
this interview, for all his scorn, chilled him when he reflected on John
Grimbal's threats. He feared nothing indeed, but here was another cloud,
and a black one, blown violently back from below the horizon of his life
to the very zenith. Malignity of this type was strange to him and
differed widely from the petty bickerings, jealousies, and strifes of
ordinary country existence. It discouraged him to feel in his hour of
universal contentment that a strong, bitter foe would now be at hand,
forever watching to bring ruin on him at the first opportunity. As he
walked home he asked himself how he should feel and act in Grimbal's
shoes, and tried to look at the position from his enemy's standpoint. Of
course he told himself that he would have accepted defeat with right
philosophy. It was a just fix for a man to find himself in,--a proper
punishment for a mean act. Arguing thus, from the right side of the
hedge, he forgot what wiser men have forgotten, that there is no
disputing about man's affection for woman, there is no transposition of
the standpoint, there is no looking through another's eyes upon a girl.
Many have loved, and many have rendered vivid pictures of the emotion,
touched with insight of genius and universally proclaimed true to nature
from general experience; but no two men love alike, and neither you nor
another man can better say how a third feels under the yoke, estimate
his thrall, or foretell his actions, despite your own experience, than
can one sufferer from gout, though it has torn him half a hundred times,
gauge the qualities of another's torment under the same disease. Will
could not guess what John Grimbal had felt for Phoebe; he knew nothing
of the other's disposition, because, young in knowledge of the world and
a boy still, despite his age, it was beyond him to appreciate even
remotely the mind of a man fifteen years older than himself--a man of
very different temper and one whose life had been such as we have just
described.
Home went Blanchard, and kept his meeting secret. His mother, returning
long before him, was already in some argument with Chris concerning the
disposal of certain articles of furniture, the pristine splendour of
which had been worn off at Newtake five-and-thirty years before. At
Farmer Ford's death these things passed to his son, and he, not
requiring them, had made them over to Damaris.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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