Winch

“ He was looking for something, though the betrayed reach of vision was but of an instant. Mark caught it, however, and with his own sensibility all in vibration, found himself feeling at once that it meant something and that what it meant was connected with his entertainer’s slightly marked appeal to him, the appeal of a moment before, not to remain standing. Winch knew by this time quite easily enough that he was hanging fire; which meant that they were suddenly facing each other across the wide space with a new consciousness. ”

“ Mark wondered and wondered—he made strange things out. "Your nerves have needed company." He could lay his hand on him now, even as shortly before he had felt Winch's own pressure of possession and detention. "As good for you yourself, that—or still better," he went on—"than I and my grievance were to have found you. Talk to me, talk to me, Newton Winch!" he added with an immense inspiration of charity.
"That's a different matter—that others but too much can do! But I'll say this. If you want to go to Phil Bloodgood—!" ”

“ Behind that Dutch-clock-like mask of a face was a complex-working brain which delighted in secrets and mysteries, and occasionally went so far as to imagine them where none existed. Although his employer had never told him so—for that was one of the few matters which the lawyer kept to himself—Mr. Winch had not the least doubt in his mind that the John Alexander to whom the letter of which he was the bearer was addressed and the heir of Withington Chase, who had set out on his travels upwards of four years ago and had never returned, were one and the same person. ”

“ Fotheringay sat with his arm on the table and his head on his arm, looking worried. "I don't see how I'm to manage about Winch," he said.
"A gift of working miracles—apparently a very powerful gift," said Mr. Maydig, "will find a way about Winch—never fear. My dear sir, you are a most important man—a man of the most astonishing possibilities. As evidence, for example! And in other ways, the things you may do..."
"Yes, I've thought of a thing or two," said Mr. Fotheringay. "But— some of the things came a bit twisty. ”

“ For the moment Mr Fotheringay could not think what he had done it for. His silence seemed to irritate Mr Winch. 'You've been assaulting the police, young man, this time. That's what you done.'
'Look here, Mr Winch,' said Mr Fotheringay, annoyed and confused. 'I'm sorry, very. The fact is——'
'Well?'
He could think of no way but the truth. 'I was working a miracle.' He tried to speak in an offhand way, but try as he would he couldn't.
'Working a——! 'Ere, don't you talk rot. Working a miracle, indeed! Miracle! Well, that's downright funny! Why, you's the chap that don't believe in miracles. . ”

“ Winch gave another groan.
"The wound must be an internal one," said Sinjin, "for he is not bleeding much now."
Frank assisted to lift him, and together they bore him back towards the road. It was a difficult task. Frank had neither the stature nor the strength of a man; but he made up in energy and good will what he lacked in force. Very carefully, very tenderly, through bogs and through thickets, they carried the helpless, heavy weight of the blood-stained volunteer.
"Frank! is it you?" murmured Winch, faintly.
"Yes, Jack!" panted the boy, out of breath with exertion. ”

“ Yet prodigious was the interest, for prodigious truly—it seemed to loom before Mark—must have been the system. "To 'take' it?" he echoed; and then, though faltering a little, "To take what?"
He had scarce spoken when a long sharp sound shrilled in from the outer door, seeming of so high and peremptory a pitch that with the start it gave him his grasp of his host's shoulders relaxed an instant, though to the effect of no movement in them but what came from just a sensibly intenser vibration of the whole man. "For that!" said Newton Winch. ”

“ Winch seated himself between Mr. Sopley and Bindle, who had been much interested to hear that the new arrival was a missionary.
"Do yer live in the jungle, sir?" enquired Bindle of Mr. Winch.
"Well, I live in the interior, miles away from any other white men," replied Mr. Winch. "Why do you ask?" ”

“ Winch seemed to transform the whole assembly. He and Bindle quickly became the leaders of the revels. Faces that had hitherto been shrouded in gloom broke into slow and hesitant smiles. Several of the men laughed, arguing that if so devout a man as Mr. Winch could find it in him to laugh, as he very frequently did, then surely they, being merely laymen, might allow themselves the same privilege.
It was Mr. Winch who proposed "Blind Man's Buff," and it was Bindle who when blindfolded caught Mr. Sopley, who was not playing, and after feeling all over his bewhiskered face guessed him as Millie ”

“ He hadn't so much minded the epithets Mrs Folliott had applied, for they were to the appropriator of her securities. As the appropriator of his own he didn't so much want to brand him as—just more "amusingly" even, if one would!—to make out, perhaps, with intelligent help, how such a man, in such a relation, could come to tread such a path: which was exactly the interesting light that Winch's curiosity and sympathy were there to assist him to. ”

“ Monteith made brave enough answer, promising to do what he could. He liked the pretty girl, with her straight attack and her free awkwardness—also with her difference from the others through something of a sense and a distinction given her by so clearly having Newton on her mind. Yet it was odd to him, and it showed the lapse of the years, that Winch—as he had known him of old—could be to that degree on anyone's mind. ”

“ Winch shook his head. "You keep me up—and you see how no one else comes near me."
Mark's eyes made out that he was better—though it wasn't yet that nothing was the matter with him. If there was ever a man with whom there was still something the matter—! Yet one couldn't insist on that, and meanwhile he clearly did want company. "Then there we are. I myself had no one to go to."
"You save my life," Newton renewedly grinned. ”

“ With this, at the same time, the oddity of that particular consequence was vivid to him; the glare of his curiosity fairly lasting while he remembered how he had once noted the very opposite turn of the experiment for Phil Bloodgood. He would have said in advance that poor Winch couldn’t have afforded to risk showing his “real” mouth; just as he would have said that in spite of the fine ornament that so considerably muffled it Phil could only have gained by showing his. ”

“ Not really. . . . I wonder what Hades is like!"
He sat on the bed taking off his boots. Struck by a happy thought he transferred the constable to San Francisco, and without any more interference with normal causation went soberly to bed. In the night he dreamt of the anger of Winch.
The next day Mr. Fotheringay heard two interesting items of news. Someone had planted a most beautiful climbing rose against the elder Mr. Gomshott's private house in the Lullaborough Road, and the river as far as Rawling's Mill was to be dragged for Constable Winch. ”

“ Winch, who seemed to enjoy himself with a thoroughness that astonished his fellow-guests.
The riot culminated in Bindle kissing Millie, who was next to him. Mr. Winch, who was third in the living tail, left no doubt in Millie's mind that she was intended to pass on the compliment. Bindle watched with keen enjoyment the embarrassment of his victims, in particular that of Mrs. Bindle, who was next to Mr. Sopley, as she looked up enquiringly at the pastor, who bent his head towards her with a weary smile.
"Look at my missis a-burrowin' in all them whiskers," whispered Bindle to Mr. Winch. ”

“ He pulled his soft and discolored old hat down over his brows with a significantly hostile nod, and, turning, stumped toward the hall-door without offering to shake hands.
The other trustees had risen likewise, in tacit recognition that the meeting was over. Winch clasped the minister's hand in his own broad, hard palm, and squeezed it in an exuberant grip. “Don't mind his little ways, Brother Ware,” he urged in a loud, unctuous whisper, with a grinning backward nod: “he's a trifle skittish sometimes when you don't give him free rein ”

“ His letters written from Winchester are full and charming literary productions: he describes the ‘maiden-ladylike gentility’ of her streets; the door-steps always ‘fresh from the flannel’—the knockers with a staid, serious, and almost awful quietness about them; the High Street as quiet as a lamb, the door-knockers ‘dieted to three raps per diem’;—in such happy, delicate phrases he hits off the Winchester of the day. Of the place itself he gives us interesting touches: the air on one of its downs is ‘worth sixpence a pint’ ”

“ It was in the churchyard of Winchelsea that John Wesley, who was almost always travelling about the country, preached his last open-air sermon, in 1790, under the shelter39 of the great tree on the western side, “to many folk,” we are told, “some few of which were converted so that tears ran a-down their cheeks.”
And thus the greatness of Winchelsea, stranded as it is from the lapping of the channel surges, though the boom of them when angry can be heard, is of the past. ”

“ In following out some of the numerous avenues of Winchester interest, which seem to open out continually in fresh and unsuspected directions as soon as one commences to wander through her confines, many have received but a cursory examination, and many more have been entirely ignored. ”

“ Can one not well see her? She steps over the stile and her shin defines itself through her balbriggan stocking. She is a knock-kneed girl, and she looks at Mr. Winkle with that sensual regard that sometimes comes when the wind is north-west. Yes, it is a north-west wind that is blowing over this landscape that Hals or Winchoven might have painted—no, Winchoven would have fumbled it with rose-madder, but Hals would have done it well. Hals would have approved—would he not?—the pollard aspens, these pollard aspens deciduous and wistful, which the rime makes glistening. ”

“ The first literary associations of Winchester are, as is but natural, historical ones, and the first mention of her in literature is found in Bede, who records for us, among other scanty details, her name, ‘Venta, quae a gente Saxonum Ventanceastir appellatur’ ”

“ He hesitated, studied her small, resolute face, her fever-bright eyes, with a puzzled expression. "I suppose it's best to give a woman her way in her whims, so long as they're harmless," said he aloud, but to himself rather than to her. She finished wrapping up the boy, went out to the carriage, and got in. He lifted Winchie in, tucked them both carefully, bade them a last good-by, his expression grave and constrained. ”

“ We may well be proud of the part that Winchester, as the capital of Wessex, played in the course of civilization during those dark days; and when, as indeed happened 150 years after, Winchester did see the Danish kingdom realized and herself the capital of it, it was a Christian and civilizing kingdom, and not one of violence and unbridled slaughter, over which she was called to preside. ”

“ There is surely nothing in the world quite like Winchelsea. Lovelier by far than Rye, not only in itself, but because of what it offers you, those views of hill and marsh and sea with Rye itself, like I know not what little masterpiece of Flemish art, in the middle distance eastward, Winchelsea is a place never to be left or at worst never to be forgotten. ”

“ But, after all, it was Winchie who saved her. But for him she, with no taste for "chasing about," would have withdrawn within herself, would have become silent, cold, ever more and more like her mother, with barren cynicism in place of Mrs. Benedict's equally barren religiosity. Winchie's spirits of overflowing health, his newcomer's delight in life were infectious and stimulating. In keeping him in perfect health—outdoors, winter and summer, and always active, she made her own health so perfect that the cheerful and hopeful side of things was rarely so much as obscured. ”

“ Antiquity and long-continued vitality such as have fallen to Winchester—for to go back to its early humble beginnings takes us back very far indeed—lead us naturally to look for causes, and prompt the questions, Why, in the first instance, did a human community settle here at all? What through so many alternations of human vicissitude and political circumstance has operated to maintain these intact? Tempus edax rerum—Time, the devourer of constituted things, is written not so much on its stones, as in its stones, yet Winchester remains Winchester still. ”

“ Winchester looks upon Philippa as a dependent; a being too insignificant to be regarded, much less admired or feared. Nothing, not even the change in her son’s moral life, would ever have convinced her that this girl possessed influence ”

“ The sister societies of Natives and Aliens still survive in Winchester, to carry on the work of relieving widows and orphans, first begun when plague laid its hand so heavily on the city in the ‘Annus Mirabilis’ and left so many widows and orphans to relieve. ”

“ That may seem a little thing to the reader, but consider the delicate refinement of Miss Winchelsea's mind. Be as refined as you can and then think of writing yourself down:—"Snooks." She conceived herself being addressed as Mrs. Snooks by all the people she liked least, conceived the patronymic touched with a vague quality of insult. She figured a card of grey and silver bearing 'Winchelsea' triumphantly effaced by an arrow, Cupid's arrow, in favour of "Snooks." Degrading confession of feminine weakness! ”