A month after the marriage Joanna's mother died, and the couple were

obliged to turn their attention to very practical matters. Now that she

was left without a parent, Joanna could not bear the notion of her

husband going to sea again, but the question was, What could he do at

home? They finally decided to take on a grocer's shop in High Street,

the goodwill and stock of which were waiting to be disposed of at that

time. Shadrach knew nothing of shopkeeping, and Joanna very little, but

they hoped to learn.

To the management of this grocery business they now devoted all their

energies, and continued to conduct it for many succeeding years, without

great success. Two sons were born to them, whom their mother loved to

idolatry, although she had never passionately loved her husband; and she

lavished upon them all her forethought and care. But the shop did not

thrive, and the large dreams she had entertained of her sons' education

and career became attenuated in the face of realities. Their schooling

was of the plainest, but, being by the sea, they grew alert in all such

nautical arts and enterprises as were attractive to their age.

The great interest of the Jolliffes' married life, outside their own

immediate household, had lain in the marriage of Emily. By one of those

odd chances which lead those that lurk in unexpected corners to be

discovered, while the obvious are passed by, the gentle girl had been

seen and loved by a thriving merchant of the town, a widower, some years

older than herself, though still in the prime of life. At first Emily

had declared that she never, never could marry any one; but Mr. Lester

had quietly persevered, and had at last won her reluctant assent. Two

children also were the fruits of this union, and, as they grew and

prospered, Emily declared that she had never supposed that she could

live to be so happy.

The worthy merchant's home, one of those large, substantial brick

mansions frequently jammed up in old-fashioned towns, faced directly on

the High Street, nearly opposite to the grocery shop of the Jolliffes,

and it now became the pain of Joanna to behold the woman whose place she

had usurped out of pure covetousness, looking down from her position of

comparative wealth upon the humble shop-window with its dusty sugar-

loaves, heaps of raisins, and canisters of tea, over which it was her

own lot to preside. The business having so dwindled, Joanna was obliged

to serve in the shop herself; and it galled and mortified her that Emily

Lester, sitting in her large drawing-room over the way, could witness

her own dancings up and down behind the counter at the beck and call of

wretched twopenny customers, whose patronage she was driven to welcome

gladly: persons to whom she was compelled to be civil in the street,

while Emily was bounding along with her children and her governess, and

conversing with the genteelest people of the town and neighbourhood.

This was what she had gained by not letting Shadrach Jolliffe, whom she

had so faintly loved, carry his affection elsewhere.

Shadrach was a good and honest man, and he had been faithful to her in

heart and in deed. Time had clipped the wings of his love for Emily in

his devotion to the mother of his boys: he had quite lived down that

impulsive earlier fancy, and Emily had become in his regard nothing more

than a friend. It was the same with Emily's feelings for him. Possibly,

had she found the least cause for jealousy, Joanna would almost have

been better satisfied. It was in the absolute acquiescence of Emily and

Shadrach in the results she herself had contrived that her discontent

found nourishment.

Shadrach was not endowed with the narrow shrewdness necessary for

developing a retail business in the face of many competitors. Did a

customer inquire if the grocer could really recommend the wondrous

substitute for eggs which a persevering bagman had forced into his

stock, he would answer that 'when you did not put eggs into a pudding it

was difficult to taste them there'; and when he was asked if his 'real

Mocha coffee' was real Mocha, he would say grimly, 'as understood in

small shops.'

One summer day, when the big brick house opposite was reflecting the

oppressive sun's heat into the shop, and nobody was present but husband

and wife, Joanna looked across at Emily's door, where a wealthy

visitor's carriage had drawn up. Traces of patronage had been visible in

Emily's manner of late.

'Shadrach, the truth is, you are not a business-man,' his wife sadly

murmured. 'You were not brought up to shopkeeping, and it is impossible

for a man to make a fortune at an occupation he has jumped into, as you

did into this.'

Jolliffe agreed with her, in this as in everything else.

'Not that I care a rope's end about making a fortune,' he said

cheerfully. 'I am happy enough, and we can rub on somehow.'

She looked again at the great house through the screen of bottled

pickles.

'Rub on-yes,' she said bitterly. 'But see how well off Emmy Lester is,

who used to be so poor! Her boys will go to College, no doubt; and think

of yours-obliged to go to the Parish School!'

Shadrach's thoughts had flown to Emily.

'Nobody,' he said good-humouredly, 'ever did Emily a better turn than

you did, Joanna, when you warned her off me and put an end to that

little simpering nonsense between us, so as to leave it in her power to

say "Aye" to Lester when he came along.' This almost maddened her.

'Don't speak of bygones!' she implored, in stern sadness. 'But think,

for the boys' and my sake, if not for your own, what are we to do to get

richer?'

'Well,' he said, becoming serious, 'to tell the truth, I have always

felt myself unfit for this business, though I've never liked to say so.

I seem to want more room for sprawling; a more open space to strike out

in than here among friends and neighbours. I could get rich as well as

any man, if I tried my own way.'

'I wish you would! What is your way?'

'To go to sea again.'

She had been the very one to keep him at home, hating the semi-widowed

existence of sailors' wives. But her ambition checked her instincts now,

and she said: 'Do you think success really lies that way?'

'I am sure it lies in no other.'

'Do you want to go, Shadrach?'

'Not for the pleasure of it, I can tell 'ee. There's no such pleasure at

sea, Joanna, as I can find in my back parlour here. To speak honest, I

have no love for the brine. I never had much. But if it comes to a

question of a fortune for you and the lads, it is another thing. That's

the only way to it for one born and bred a seafarer as I.'

'Would it take long to earn?'

'Well, that depends; perhaps not.'

The next morning Shadrach pulled from a chest of drawers the nautical

jacket he had worn during the first months of his return, brushed out

the moths, donned it, and walked down to the quay. The port still did a

fair business in the Newfoundland trade, though not so much as formerly.

It was not long after this that he invested all he possessed in

purchasing a part-ownership in a brig, of which he was appointed

captain. A few months were passed in coast-trading, during which

interval Shadrach wore off the land-rust that had accumulated upon him

in his grocery phase; and in the spring the brig sailed for

Newfoundland.

Joanna lived on at home with her sons, who were now growing up into

strong lads, and occupying themselves in various ways about the harbour

and quay.

'Never mind, let them work a little,' their fond mother said to herself.

'Our necessities compel it now, but when Shadrach comes home they will

be only seventeen and eighteen, and they shall be removed from the port,

and their education thoroughly taken in hand by a tutor; and with the

money they'll have they will perhaps be as near to gentlemen as Emmy

Lester's precious two, with their algebra and their Latin!'

The date for Shadrach's return drew near and arrived, and he did not

appear. Joanna was assured that there was no cause for anxiety, sailing-

ships being so uncertain in their coming; which assurance proved to be

well grounded, for late one wet evening, about a month after the

calculated time, the ship was announced as at hand, and presently the

slip-slop step of Shadrach as the sailor sounded in the passage, and he

entered. The boys had gone out and had missed him, and Joanna was

sitting alone.

As soon as the first emotion of reunion between the couple had passed,

Jolliffe explained the delay as owing to a small speculative contract,

which had produced good results.

'I was determined not to disappoint 'ee,' he said; 'and I think you'll

own that I haven't!'

With this he pulled out an enormous canvas bag, full and rotund as the

money-bag of the giant whom Jack slew, untied it, and shook the contents

out into her lap as she sat in her low chair by the fire. A mass of

sovereigns and guineas (there were guineas on the earth in those days)

fell into her lap with a sudden thud, weighing down her gown to the

floor.

'There!' said Shadrach complacently. 'I told 'ee, dear, I'd do it; and

have I done it or no?'

Somehow her face, after the first excitement of possession, did not

retain its glory.

'It is a lot of gold, indeed,' she said. 'And-is this all?'

'All? Why, dear Joanna, do you know you can count to three hundred in

that heap? It is a fortune!'

'Yes-yes. A fortune-judged by sea; but judged by land-'

However, she banished considerations of the money for the nonce. Soon

the boys came in, and next Sunday Shadrach returned thanks to God-this

time by the more ordinary channel of the italics in the General

Thanksgiving. But a few days after, when the question of investing the

money arose, he remarked that she did not seem so satisfied as he had

hoped.

'Well you see, Shadrach,' she answered, 'we count by hundreds; they

count by thousands' (nodding towards the other side of the Street).

'They have set up a carriage and pair since you left.'

'O, have they?'

'My dear Shadrach, you don't know how the world moves. However, we'll do

the best we can with it. But they are rich, and we are poor still!'

The greater part of a year was desultorily spent. She moved sadly about

the house and shop, and the boys were still occupying themselves in and

around the harbour.

'Joanna,' he said, one day, 'I see by your movements that it is not

enough.'

'It is not enough,' said she. 'My boys will have to live by steering the

ships that the Lesters own; and I was once above her!'

Jolliffe was not an argumentative man, and he only murmured that he

thought he would make another voyage.

He meditated for several days, and coming home from the quay one

afternoon said suddenly:

'I could do it for 'ee, dear, in one more trip, for certain, if-if-'

'Do what, Shadrach?'

'Enable 'ee to count by thousands instead of hundreds.'

'If what?'

'If I might take the boys.'

She turned pale.

'Don't say that, Shadrach,' she answered hastily.

'Why?'

'I don't like to hear it! There's danger at sea. I want them to be

something genteel, and no danger to them. I couldn't let them risk their

lives at sea. O, I couldn't ever, ever!'

'Very well, dear, it shan't be done.'

Next day, after a silence, she asked a question:

'If they were to go with you it would make a great deal of difference, I

suppose, to the profit?'

''Twould treble what I should get from the venture single-handed. Under

my eye they would be as good as two more of myself.'

Later on she said: 'Tell me more about this.'

'Well, the boys are almost as clever as master-mariners in handling a

craft, upon my life! There isn't a more cranky place in the Northern

Seas than about the sandbanks of this harbour, and they've practised

here from their infancy. And they are so steady. I couldn't get their

steadiness and their trustworthiness in half a dozen men twice their

age.'

'And is it very dangerous at sea; now, too, there are rumours of war?'

she asked uneasily.

'O, well, there be risks. Still . . . '

The idea grew and magnified, and the mother's heart was crushed and

stifled by it. Emmy was growing too patronizing; it could not be borne.

Shadrach's wife could not help nagging him about their comparative

poverty. The young men, amiable as their father, when spoken to on the

subject of a voyage of enterprise, were quite willing to embark; and

though they, like their father, had no great love for the sea, they

became quite enthusiastic when the proposal was detailed.

Everything now hung upon their mother's assent. She withheld it long,

but at last gave the word: the young men might accompany their father.

Shadrach was unusually cheerful about it: Heaven had preserved him

hitherto, and he had uttered his thanks. God would not forsake those who

were faithful to him.

All that the Jolliffes possessed in the world was put into the

enterprise. The grocery stock was pared down to the least that possibly

could afford a bare sustenance to Joanna during the absence, which was

to last through the usual 'New-f'nland spell.' How she would endure the

weary time she hardly knew, for the boys had been with her formerly; but

she nerved herself for the trial.

The ship was laden with boots and shoes, ready-made clothing, fishing-

tackle, butter, cheese, cordage, sailcloth, and many other commodities;

and was to bring back oil, furs, skins, fish, cranberries, and what else

came to hand. But much trading to other ports was to be undertaken

between the voyages out and homeward, and thereby much money made.

CHAPTER III

The brig sailed on a Monday morning in spring; but Joanna did not

witness its departure. She could not bear the sight that she had been

the means of bringing about. Knowing this, her husband told her

overnight that they were to sail some time before noon next day hence

when, awakening at five the next morning, she heard them bustling about

downstairs, she did not hasten to descend, but lay trying to nerve

herself for the parting, imagining they would leave about nine, as her

husband had done on his previous voyage. When she did descend she beheld

words chalked upon the sloping face of the bureau; but no husband or

sons. In the hastily-scrawled lines Shadrach said they had gone off thus

not to pain her by a leave-taking; and the sons had chalked under his

words: 'Good-bye, mother!'

She rushed to the quay, and looked down the harbour towards the blue rim

of the sea, but she could only see the masts and bulging sails of the

Joanna; no human figures. ''Tis I have sent them!' she said wildly, and

burst into tears. In the house the chalked 'Good-bye' nearly broke her

heart. But when she had re-entered the front room, and looked across at

Emily's, a gleam of triumph lit her thin face at her anticipated release

from the thraldom of subservience.

To do Emily Lester justice, her assumption of superiority was mainly a

figment of Joanna's brain. That the circumstances of the merchant's wife

were more luxurious than Joanna's, the former could not conceal; though

whenever the two met, which was not very often now, Emily endeavoured to

subdue the difference by every means in her power.

The first summer lapsed away; and Joanna meagrely maintained herself by

the shop, which now consisted of little more than a window and a

counter. Emily was, in truth, her only large customer; and Mrs. Lester's

kindly readiness to buy anything and everything without questioning the

quality had a sting of bitterness in it, for it was the uncritical

attitude of a patron, and almost of a donor. The long dreary winter

moved on; the face of the bureau had been turned to the wall to protect

the chalked words of farewell, for Joanna could never bring herself to

rub them out; and she often glanced at them with wet eyes. Emily's

handsome boys came home for the Christmas holidays; the University was

talked of for them; and still Joanna subsisted as it were with held

breath, like a person submerged. Only one summer more, and the 'spell'

would end. Towards the close of the time Emily called on her quondam

friend. She had heard that Joanna began to feel anxious; she had

received no letter from husband or sons for some months. Emily's silks

rustled arrogantly when, in response to Joanna's almost dumb invitation,

she squeezed through the opening of the counter and into the parlour

behind the shop.

'You are all success, and I am all the other way!' said Joanna.

'But why do you think so?' said Emily. 'They are to bring back a

fortune, I hear.'

'Ah! will they come? The doubt is more than a woman can bear. All three

in one ship-think of that! And I have not heard of them for months!'

'But the time is not up. You should not meet misfortune half-way.'

'Nothing will repay me for the grief of their absence!'

'Then why did you let them go? You were doing fairly well.'

'I made them go!' she said, turning vehemently upon Emily. 'And I'll

tell you why! I could not bear that we should be only muddling on, and

you so rich and thriving! Now I have told you, and you may hate me if

you will!'

'I shall never hate you, Joanna.'

And she proved the truth of her words afterwards. The end of autumn

came, and the brig should have been in port; but nothing like the Joanna

appeared in the channel between the sands. It was now really time to be

uneasy. Joanna Jolliffe sat by the fire, and every gust of wind caused

her a cold thrill. She had always feared and detested the sea; to her it

was a treacherous, restless, slimy creature, glorying in the griefs of

women. 'Still,' she said, 'they must come!'

She recalled to her mind that Shadrach had said before starting that if

they returned safe and sound, with success crowning their enterprise, he

would go as he had gone after his shipwreck, and kneel with his sons in

the church, and offer sincere thanks for their deliverance. She went to

church regularly morning and afternoon, and sat in the most forward pew,

nearest the chancel-step. Her eyes were mostly fixed on that step, where

Shadrach had knelt in the bloom of his young manhood: she knew to an

inch the spot which his knees had pressed twenty winters before; his

outline as he had knelt, his hat on the step beside him. God was good.

Surely her husband must kneel there again: a son on each side as he had

said; George just here, Jim just there. By long watching the spot as she

worshipped it became as if she saw the three returned ones there

kneeling; the two slim outlines of her boys, the more bulky form between

them; their hands clasped, their heads shaped against the eastern wall.

The fancy grew almost to an hallucination: she could never turn her worn

eyes to the step without seeing them there.

Nevertheless they did not come. Heaven was merciful, but it was not yet

pleased to relieve her soul. This was her purgation for the sin of

making them the slaves of her ambition. But it became more than

purgation soon, and her mood approached despair. Months had passed since

the brig had been due, but it had not returned.

Joanna was always hearing or seeing evidences of their arrival. When on

the hill behind the port, whence a view of the open Channel could be

obtained, she felt sure that a little speck on the horizon, breaking the

eternally level waste of waters southward, was the truck of the Joana's

mainmast. Or when indoors, a shout or excitement of any kind at the

corner of the Town Cellar, where the High Street joined the Quay, caused

her to spring to her feet and cry: ''Tis they!'

But it was not. The visionary forms knelt every Sunday afternoon on the

chancel-step, but not the real. Her shop had, as it were, eaten itself

hollow. In the apathy which had resulted from her loneliness and grief

she had ceased to take in the smallest supplies, and thus had sent away

her last customer.

In this strait Emily Lester tried by every means in her power to aid the

afflicted woman; but she met with constant repulses.

'I don't like you! I can't bear to see you!' Joanna would whisper

hoarsely when Emily came to her and made advances.

'But I want to help and soothe you, Joanna,' Emily would say.

'You are a lady, with a rich husband and fine sons! What can you want

with a bereaved crone like me!'

'Joanna, I want this: I want you to come and live in my house, and not

stay alone in this dismal place any longer.'

'And suppose they come and don't find me at home? You wish to separate

me and mine! No, I'll stay here. I don't like you, and I can't thank

you, whatever kindness you do me!'

However, as time went on Joanna could not afford to pay the rent of the

shop and house without an income. She was assured that all hope of the

return of Shadrach and his sons was vain, and she reluctantly consented

to accept the asylum of the Lesters' house. Here she was allotted a room

of her own on the second floor, and went and came as she chose, without

contact with the family. Her hair greyed and whitened, deep lines

channeled her forehead, and her form grew gaunt and stooping. But she

still expected the lost ones, and when she met Emily on the staircase

she would say morosely: 'I know why you've got me here! They'll come,

and be disappointed at not finding me at home, and perhaps go away

again; and then you'll be revenged for my taking Shadrach away from

'ee!'

Emily Lester bore these reproaches from the grief-stricken soul. She was

sure-all the people of Havenpool were sure-that Shadrach and his sons

could not return. For years the vessel had been given up as lost.

Nevertheless, when awakened at night by any noise, Joanna would rise

from bed and glance at the shop opposite by the light from the

flickering lamp, to make sure it was not they.

It was a damp and dark December night, six years after the departure of

the brig Joanna. The wind was from the sea, and brought up a fishy mist

which mopped the face like moist flannel. Joanna had prayed her usual

prayer for the absent ones with more fervour and confidence than she had

felt for months, and had fallen asleep about eleven. It must have been

between one and two when she suddenly started up. She had certainly

heard steps in the street, and the voices of Shadrach and her sons

calling at the door of the grocery shop. She sprang out of bed, and,

hardly knowing what clothing she dragged on herself; hastened down

Emily's large and carpeted staircase, put the candle on the hall-table,

unfastened the bolts and chain, and stepped into the street. The mist,

blowing up the street from the Quay, hindered her seeing the shop,

although it was so near; but she had crossed to it in a moment. How was

it? Nobody stood there. The wretched woman walked wildly up and down

with her bare feet-there was not a soul. She returned and knocked with

all her might at the door which had once been her own-they might have

been admitted for the night, unwilling to disturb her till the morning.

It was not till several minutes had elapsed that the young man who now

kept the shop looked out of an upper window, and saw the skeleton of

something human standing below half-dressed.

'Has anybody come?' asked the form.

'O, Mrs. Jolliffe, I didn't know it was you,' said the young man kindly,

for he was aware how her baseless expectations moved her. 'No; nobody

has come.'

June 1891.

THE MELANCHOLY HUSSAR OF THE GERMAN LEGION

CHAPTER I

Here stretch the downs, high and breezy and green, absolutely unchanged

since those eventful days. A plough has never disturbed the turf, and

the sod that was uppermost then is uppermost now. Here stood the camp;

here are distinct traces of the banks thrown up for the horses of the

cavalry, and spots where the midden-heaps lay are still to be observed.

At night, when I walk across the lonely place, it is impossible to avoid

hearing, amid the scourings of the wind over the grass-bents and

thistles, the old trumpet and bugle calls, the rattle of the halters; to

help seeing rows of spectral tents and the impedimenta of the soldiery.

From within the canvases come guttural syllables of foreign tongues, and

broken songs of the fatherland; for they were mainly regiments of the

King's German Legion that slept round the tent-poles hereabout at that

time.

It was nearly ninety years ago. The British uniform of the period, with

its immense epaulettes, queer cocked-hat, breeches, gaiters, ponderous

cartridge-box, buckled shoes, and what not, would look strange and

barbarous now. Ideas have changed; invention has followed invention.

Soldiers were monumental objects then. A divinity still hedged kings

here and there; and war was considered a glorious thing.

Secluded old manor-houses and hamlets lie in the ravines and hollows

among these hills, where a stranger had hardly ever been seen till the

King chose to take the baths yearly at the sea-side watering-place a few

miles to the south; as a consequence of which battalions descended in a

cloud upon the open country around. Is it necessary to add that the

echoes of many characteristic tales, dating from that picturesque time,

still linger about here in more or less fragmentary form, to be caught

by the attentive ear? Some of them I have repeated; most of them I have

forgotten; one I have never repeated, and assuredly can never forget.

Phyllis told me the story with her own lips. She was then an old lady of

seventy-five, and her auditor a lad of fifteen. She enjoined silence as

to her share in the incident, till she should be 'dead, buried, and

forgotten.' Her life was prolonged twelve years after the day of her

narration, and she has now been dead nearly twenty. The oblivion which

in her modesty and humility she courted for herself has only partially

fallen on her, with the unfortunate result of inflicting an injustice

upon her memory; since such fragments of her story as got abroad at the

time, and have been kept alive ever since, are precisely those which are

most unfavourable to her character.

It all began with the arrival of the York Hussars, one of the foreign

regiments above alluded to. Before that day scarcely a soul had been

seen near her father's house for weeks. When a noise like the brushing

skirt of a visitor was heard on the doorstep, it proved to be a scudding

leaf; when a carriage seemed to be nearing the door, it was her father

grinding his sickle on the stone in the garden for his favourite

relaxation of trimming the box-tree borders to the plots. A sound like

luggage thrown down from the coach was a gun far away at sea; and what

looked like a tall man by the gate at dusk was a yew bush cut into a

quaint and attenuated shape. There is no such solitude in country places

now as there was in those old days.

Yet all the while King George and his court were at his favourite sea-

side resort, not more than five miles off.

The daughter's seclusion was great, but beyond the seclusion of the girl

lay the seclusion of the father. If her social condition was twilight,

his was darkness. Yet he enjoyed his darkness, while her twilight

oppressed her. Dr. Grove had been a professional man whose taste for

lonely meditation over metaphysical questions had diminished his

practice till it no longer paid him to keep it going; after which he had

relinquished it and hired at a nominal rent the small, dilapidated, half

farm half manor-house of this obscure inland nook, to make a sufficiency

of an income which in a town would have been inadequate for their

maintenance. He stayed in his garden the greater part of the day,

growing more and more irritable with the lapse of time, and the

increasing perception that he had wasted his life in the pursuit of

illusions. He saw his friends less and less frequently. Phyllis became

so shy that if she met a stranger anywhere in her short rambles she felt

ashamed at his gaze, walked awkwardly, and blushed to her shoulders.

Yet Phyllis was discovered even here by an admirer, and her hand most

unexpectedly asked in marriage.

The King, as aforesaid, was at the neighbouring town, where he had taken

up his abode at Gloucester Lodge and his presence in the town naturally

brought many county people thither. Among these idlers-many of whom

professed to have connections and interests with the Court-was one

Humphrey Gould, a bachelor; a personage neither young nor old; neither

good-looking nor positively plain. Too steady-going to be 'a buck' (as

fast and unmarried men were then called), he was an approximately

fashionable man of a mild type. This bachelor of thirty found his way to

the village on the down: beheld Phyllis; made her father's acquaintance

in order to make hers; and by some means or other she sufficiently

inflamed his heart to lead him in that direction almost daily; till he

became engaged to marry her.

As he was of an old local family, some of whose members were held in

respect in the county, Phyllis, in bringing him to her feet, had

accomplished what was considered a brilliant move for one in her

constrained position. How she had done it was not quite known to Phyllis

herself. In those days unequal marriages were regarded rather as a

violation of the laws of nature than as a mere infringement of

convention, the more modern view, and hence when Phyllis, of the

watering-place bourgeoisie, was chosen by such a gentlemanly fellow, it

was as if she were going to be taken to heaven, though perhaps the

uninformed would have seen no great difference in the respective

positions of the pair, the said Gould being as poor as a crow.

This pecuniary condition was his excuse-probably a true one-for

postponing their union, and as the winter drew nearer, and the King

departed for the season, Mr. Humphrey Gould set out for Bath, promising

to return to Phyllis in a few weeks. The winter arrived, the date of his

promise passed, yet Gould postponed his coming, on the ground that he

could not very easily leave his father in the city of their sojourn, the

elder having no other relative near him. Phyllis, though lonely in the

extreme, was content. The man who had asked her in marriage was a

desirable husband for her in many ways; her father highly approved of

his suit; but this neglect of her was awkward, if not painful, for

Phyllis. Love him in the true sense of the word she assured me she never

did, but she had a genuine regard for him; admired a certain methodical

and dogged way in which he sometimes took his pleasure; valued his

knowledge of what the Court was doing, had done, or was about to do; and

she was not without a feeling of pride that he had chosen her when he

might have exercised a more ambitious choice.

But he did not come; and the spring developed. His letters were regular

though formal; and it is not to be wondered that the uncertainty of her

position, IRONlinked with the fact that there was not much passion in

her thoughts of Humphrey, bred an indescribable dreariness in the heart

of Phyllis Grove. The spring was soon summer, and the summer brought the

King; but still no Humphrey Gould. All this while the engagement by

letter was maintained intact.

At this point of time a golden radiance flashed in upon the lives of

people here, and charged all youthful thought with emotional interest.

This radiance was the aforesaid York Hussars.

CHAPTER II

The present generation has probably but a very dim notion of the

celebrated York Hussars of ninety years ago. They were one of the

regiments of the King's German Legion, and (though they somewhat

degenerated later on) their brilliant uniform, their splendid horses,

and above all, their foreign air and mustachios (rare appendages then),

drew crowds of admirers of both sexes wherever they went. These with

other regiments had come to encamp on the downs and pastures, because of

the presence of the King in the neighbouring town.

The spot was high and airy, and the view extensive, commanding the Isle

of Portland in front, and reaching to St. Aldhelm's Head eastward, and

almost to the Start on the west.

Phyllis, though not precisely a girl of the village, was as interested

as any of them in this military investment. Her father's home stood

somewhat apart, and on the highest point of ground to which the lane

ascended, so that it was almost level with the top of the church tower

in the lower part of the parish. Immediately from the outside of the

garden-wall the grass spread away to a great distance, and it was

crossed by a path which came close to the wall. Ever since her childhood

it had been Phyllis's pleasure to clamber up this fence and sit on the

top-a feat not so difficult as it may seem, the walls in this district

being built of rubble, without mortar, so that there were plenty of

crevices for small toes.

She was sitting up here one day, listlessly surveying the pasture

without, when her attention was arrested by a solitary figure walking

along the path. It was one of the renowned German Hussars, and he moved

onward with his eyes on the ground, and with the manner of one who

wished to escape company. His head would probably have been bent like

his eyes but for his stiff neck-gear. On nearer view she perceived that

his face was marked with deep sadness. Without observing her, he

advanced by the footpath till it brought him almost immediately under

the wall.

Phyllis was much surprised to see a fine, tall soldier in such a mood as

this. Her theory of the military, and of the York Hussars in particular

(derived entirely from hearsay, for she had never talked to a soldier in

her life), was that their hearts were as gay as their accoutrements.

At this moment the Hussar lifted his eyes and noticed her on her perch,

the white muslin neckerchief which covered her shoulders and neck where

left bare by her low gown, and her white raiment in general, showing

conspicuously in the bright sunlight of this summer day. He blushed a

little at the suddenness of the encounter, and without halting a moment

from his pace passed on.

All that day the foreigner's face haunted Phyllis; its aspect was so

striking, so handsome, and his eyes were so blue, and sad, and

abstracted. It was perhaps only natural that on some following day at

the same hour she should look over that wall again, and wait till he had

passed a second time. On this occasion he was reading a letter, and at

the sight of her his manner was that of one who had half expected or

hoped to discover her. He almost stopped, smiled, and made a courteous

salute. The end of the meeting was that they exchanged a few words. She

asked him what he was reading, and he readily informed her that he was

re-perusing letters from his mother in Germany; he did not get them

often, he said, and was forced to read the old ones a great many times.

This was all that passed at the present interview, but others of the

same kind followed.

Phyllis used to say that his English, though not good, was quite

intelligible to her, so that their acquaintance was never hindered by

difficulties of speech. Whenever the subject became too delicate,

subtle, or tender, for such words of English as were at his command, the

eyes no doubt helped out the tongue, and-though this was later on-the

lips helped out the eyes. In short this acquaintance, unguardedly made,

and rash enough on her part, developed and ripened. Like Desdemona, she

pitied him, and learnt his history.

His name was Matth�us Tina, and Saarbr�ck his native town, where his

mother was still living. His age was twenty-two, and he had already

risen to the grade of corporal, though he had not long been in the army.

Phyllis used to assert that no such refined or well-educated young man

could have been found in the ranks of the purely English regiments, some

of these foreign soldiers having rather the graceful manner and presence

of our native officers than of our rank and file.

She by degrees learnt from her foreign friend a circumstance about

himself and his comrades which Phyllis would least have expected of the

York Hussars. So far from being as gay as its uniform, the regiment was

pervaded by a dreadful melancholy, a chronic home-sickness, which

depressed many of the men to such an extent that they could hardly

attend to their drill. The worst sufferers were the younger soldiers who

had not been over here long. They hated England and English life; they

took no interest whatever in King George and his island kingdom, and

they only wished to be out of it and never to see it any more. Their

bodies were here, but their hearts and minds were always far away in

their dear fatherland, of which-brave men and stoical as they were in

many ways-they would speak with tears in their eyes. One of the worst of

the sufferers from this home-woe, as he called it in his own tongue, was

Matth�us Tina, whose dreamy musing nature felt the gloom of exile still

more intensely from the fact that he had left a lonely mother at home

with nobody to cheer her.

Though Phyllis, touched by all this, and interested in his history, did

not disdain her soldier's acquaintance, she declined (according to her

own account, at least) to permit the young man to overstep the line of

mere friendship for a long while-as long, indeed, as she considered

herself likely to become the possession of another; though it is

probable that she had lost her heart to Matth�us before she was herself

aware. The stone wall of necessity made anything like intimacy

difficult; and he had never ventured to come, or to ask to come, inside

the garden, so that all their conversation had been overtly conducted

across this boundary.

CHAPTER III

But news reached the village from a friend of Phyllis's father

concerning Mr. Humphrey Gould, her remarkably cool and patient

betrothed. This gentleman had been heard to say in Bath that he

considered his overtures to Miss Phyllis Grove to have reached only the

stage of a half-understanding; and in view of his enforced absence on

his father's account, who was too great an invalid now to attend to his

affairs, he thought it best that there should be no definite promise as

yet on either side. He was not sure, indeed, that he might not cast his

eyes elsewhere.

This account-though only a piece of hearsay, and as such entitled to no

absolute credit-tallied so well with the infrequency of his letters and

their lack of warmth, that Phyllis did not doubt its truth for one

moment; and from that hour she felt herself free to bestow her heart as

she should choose. Not so her father; he declared the whole story to be

a fabrication. He had known Mr. Gould's family from his boyhood; and if

there was one proverb which expressed the matrimonial aspect of that

family well, it was 'Love me little, love me long.' Humphrey was an

honourable man, who would not think of treating his engagement so

lightly. 'Do you wait in patience,' he said; 'all will be right enough

in time.'

From these words Phyllis at first imagined that her father was in

correspondence with Mr. Gould; and her heart sank within her; for in

spite of her original intentions she had been relieved to hear that her

engagement had come to nothing. But she presently learnt that her father

had heard no more of Humphrey Gould than she herself had done; while he

would not write and address her affianced directly on the subject, lest

it should be deemed an imputation on that bachelor's honour.

'You want an excuse for encouraging one or other of those foreign

fellows to flatter you with his unmeaning attentions,' her father

exclaimed, his mood having of late been a very unkind one towards her.

'I see more than I say. Don't you ever set foot outside that garden-

fence without my permission. If you want to see the camp I'll take you

myself some Sunday afternoon.'

Phyllis had not the smallest intention of disobeying him in her actions,

but she assumed herself to be independent with respect to her feelings.

She no longer checked her fancy for the Hussar, though she was far from

regarding him as her lover in the serious sense in which an Englishman

might have been regarded as such. The young foreign soldier was almost

an ideal being to her, with none of the appurtenances of an ordinary

house-dweller; one who had descended she knew not whence, and would

disappear she knew not whither; the subject of a fascinating dream-no

more.

They met continually now-mostly at dusk-during the brief interval

between the going down of the sun and the minute at which the last

trumpet-call summoned him to his tent. Perhaps her manner had become

less restrained latterly; at any rate that of the Hussar was so; he had

grown more tender every day, and at parting after these hurried

interviews she reached down her hand from the top of the wall that he

might press it. One evening he held it so long that she exclaimed, 'The

wall is white, and somebody in the field may see your shape against it!'

He lingered so long that night that it was with the greatest difficulty

that he could run across the intervening stretch of ground and enter the

camp in time. On the next occasion of his awaiting her she did not

appear in her usual place at the usual hour. His disappointment was

unspeakably keen; he remained staring blankly at the spot, like a man in

a trance. The trumpets and tattoo sounded, and still he did not go.

She had been delayed purely by an accident. When she arrived she was

anxious because of the lateness of the hour, having heard as well as he

the sounds denoting the closing of the camp. She implored him to leave

immediately.

'No,' he said gloomily. 'I shall not go in yet-the moment you come-I

have thought of your coming all day.'

'But you may be disgraced at being after time?'

'I don't mind that. I should have disappeared from the world some time

ago if it had not been for two persons-my beloved, here, and my mother

in Saarbr�ck. I hate the army. I care more for a minute of your company

than for all the promotion in the world.'

Thus he stayed and talked to her, and told her interesting details of

his native place, and incidents of his childhood, till she was in a

simmer of distress at his recklessness in remaining. It was only because

she insisted on bidding him good-night and leaving the wall that he

returned to his quarters.

The next time that she saw him he was without the stripes that had

adorned his sleeve. He had been broken to the level of private for his

lateness that night; and as Phyllis considered herself to be the cause

of his disgrace her sorrow was great. But the position was now reversed;

it was his turn to cheer her.

'Don't grieve, meine Liebliche!' he said. 'I have got a remedy for

whatever comes. First, even supposing I regain my stripes, would your

father allow you to marry a non-commissioned officer in the York

Hussars?'

She flushed. This practical step had not been in her mind in relation to

such an unrealistic person as he was; and a moment's reflection was

enough for it. 'My father would not-certainly would not,' she answered

unflinchingly. 'It cannot be thought of! My dear friend, please do

forget me: I fear I am ruining you and your prospects!'

'Not at all!' said he. 'You are giving this country of yours just

sufficient interest to me to make me care to keep alive in it. If my

dear land were here also, and my old parent, with you, I could be happy

as I am, and would do my best as a soldier. But it is not so. And now

listen. This is my plan. That you go with me to my own country, and be

my wife there, and live there with my mother and me. I am not a

Hanoverian, as you know, though I entered the army as such; my country

is by the Saar, and is at peace with France, and if I were once in it I

should be free.'

'But how get there?' she asked. Phyllis had been rather amazed than

shocked at his proposition. Her position in her father's house was

growing irksome and painful in the extreme; his parental affection

seemed to be quite dried up. She was not a native of the village, like

all the joyous girls around her; and in some way Matth�us Tina had

infected her with his own passionate longing for his country, and

mother, and home.

'But how?' she repeated, finding that he did not answer. 'Will you buy

your discharge?'

'Ah, no,' he said. 'That's impossible in these times. No; I came here

against my will; why should I not escape? Now is the time, as we shall

soon be striking camp, and I might see you no more. This is my scheme. I

will ask you to meet me on the highway two miles off; on some calm night

next week that may be appointed. There will be nothing unbecoming in it,

or to cause you shame; you will not fly alone with me, for I will bring

with me my devoted young friend Christoph, an Alsatian, who has lately

joined the regiment, and who has agreed to assist in this enterprise. We

shall have come from yonder harbour, where we shall have examined the

boats, and found one suited to our purpose. Christoph has already a

chart of the Channel, and we will then go to the harbour, and at

midnight cut the boat from her moorings, and row away round the point

out of sight; and by the next morning we are on the coast of France,

near Cherbourg. The rest is easy, for I have saved money for the land

journey, and can get a change of clothes. I will write to my mother, who

will meet us on the way.'

He added details in reply to her inquiries, which left no doubt in

Phyllis's mind of the feasibility of the undertaking. But its magnitude

almost appalled her; and it is questionable if she would ever have gone

further in the wild adventure if, on entering the house that night, her

father had not accosted her in the most significant terms.

'How about the York Hussars?' he said.

'They are still at the camp; but they are soon going away, I believe.'

'It is useless for you to attempt to cloak your actions in that way. You

have been meeting one of those fellows; you have been seen walking with

him-foreign barbarians, not much better than the French themselves! I

have made up my mind-don't speak a word till I have done, please!-I have

made up my mind that you shall stay here no longer while they are on the

spot. You shall go to your aunt's.'

It was useless for her to protest that she had never taken a walk with

any soldier or man under the sun except himself. Her protestations were

feeble, too, for though he was not literally correct in his assertion,

he was virtually only half in error.

The house of her father's sister was a prison to Phyllis. She had quite

recently undergone experience of its gloom; and when her father went on

to direct her to pack what would be necessary for her to take, her heart

died within her. In after years she never attempted to excuse her

conduct during this week of agitation; but the result of her self-

communing was that she decided to join in the scheme of her lover and

his friend, and fly to the country which he had coloured with such

lovely hues in her imagination. She always said that the one feature in

his proposal which overcame her hesitation was the obvious purity and

straightforwardness of his intentions. He showed himself to be so

virtuous and kind; he treated her with a respect to which she had never

before been accustomed; and she was braced to the obvious risks of the

voyage by her confidence in him.

CHAPTER IV

It was on a soft, dark evening of the following week that they engaged

in the adventure. Tina was to meet her at a point in the highway at

which the lane to the village branched off. Christoph was to go ahead of

them to the harbour where the boat lay, row it round the Nothe-or Look-

out as it was called in those days-and pick them up on the other side of

the promontory, which they were to reach by crossing the harbour-bridge

on foot, and climbing over the Look-out hill.

As soon as her father had ascended to his room she left the house, and,

bundle in hand, proceeded at a trot along the lane. At such an hour not

a soul was afoot anywhere in the village, and she reached the junction

of the lane with the highway unobserved. Here she took up her position

in the obscurity formed by the angle of a fence, whence she could

discern every one who approached along the turnpike-road, without being

herself seen.

She had not remained thus waiting for her lover longer than a minute-

though from the tension of her nerves the lapse of even that short time

was trying-when, instead of the expected footsteps, the stage-coach

could be heard descending the hill. She knew that Tina would not show

himself till the road was clear, and waited impatiently for the coach to

pass. Nearing the corner where she was it slackened speed, and, instead

of going by as usual, drew up within a few yards of her. A passenger

alighted, and she heard his voice. It was Humphrey Gould's.

He had brought a friend with him, and luggage. The luggage was deposited

on the grass, and the coach went on its route to the royal watering-

place.

'I wonder where that young man is with the horse and trap?' said her

former admirer to his companion. 'I hope we shan't have to wait here

long. I told him half-past nine o'clock precisely.'

'Have you got her present safe?'

'Phyllis's? O, yes. It is in this trunk. I hope it will please her.'

'Of course it will. What woman would not be pleased with such a handsome

peace-offering?'

'Well-she deserves it. I've treated her rather badly. But she has been

in my mind these last two days much more than I should care to confess

to everybody. Ah, well; I'll say no more about that. It cannot be that

she is so bad as they make out. I am quite sure that a girl of her good

wit would know better than to get entangled with any of those Hanoverian

soldiers. I won't believe it of her, and there's an end on't.'

More words in the same strain were casually dropped as the two men

waited; words which revealed to her, as by a sudden illumination, the

enormity of her conduct. The conversation was at length cut off by the

arrival of the man with the vehicle. The luggage was placed in it, and

they mounted, and were driven on in the direction from which she had

just come.

Phyllis was so conscience-stricken that she was at first inclined to

follow them; but a moment's reflection led her to feel that it would

only be bare justice to Matth�us to wait till he arrived, and explain

candidly that she had changed her mind-difficult as the struggle would

be when she stood face to face with him. She bitterly reproached herself

for having believed reports which represented Humphrey Gould as false to

his engagement, when, from what she now heard from his own lips, she

gathered that he had been living full of trust in her. But she knew well

enough who had won her love. Without him her life seemed a dreary

prospect, yet the more she looked at his proposal the more she feared to

accept it-so wild as it was, so vague, so venturesome. She had promised

Humphrey Gould, and it was only his assumed faithlessness which had led

her to treat that promise as nought. His solicitude in bringing her

these gifts touched her; her promise must be kept, and esteem must take

the place of love. She would preserve her self- respect. She would stay

at home, and marry him, and suffer.

Phyllis had thus braced herself to an exceptional fortitude when, a few

minutes later, the outline of Matth�us Tina appeared behind a field-

gate, over which he lightly leapt as she stepped forward. There was no

evading it, he pressed her to his breast.

'It is the first and last time!' she wildly thought as she stood

encircled by his arms.

How Phyllis got through the terrible ordeal of that night she could

never clearly recollect. She always attributed her success in carrying

out her resolve to her lover's honour, for as soon as she declared to

him in feeble words that she had changed her mind, and felt that she

could not, dared not, fly with him, he forbore to urge her, grieved as

he was at her decision. Unscrupulous pressure on his part, seeing how

romantically she had become attached to him, would no doubt have turned

the balance in his favour. But he did nothing to tempt her unduly or

unfairly.

On her side, fearing for his safety, she begged him to remain. This, he

declared, could not be. 'I cannot break faith with my friend,' said he.

Had he stood alone he would have abandoned his plan. But Christoph, with

the boat and compass and chart, was waiting on the shore; the tide would

soon turn; his mother had been warned of his coming; go he must.

Many precious minutes were lost while he tarried, unable to tear himself

away. Phyllis held to her resolve, though it cost her many a bitter

pang. At last they parted, and he went down the hill. Before his

footsteps had quite died away she felt a desire to behold at least his

outline once more, and running noiselessly after him regained view of

his diminishing figure. For one moment she was sufficiently excited to

be on the point of rushing forward and IRONlinking her fate with his.

But she could not. The courage which at the critical instant failed

Cleopatra of Egypt could scarcely be expected of Phyllis Grove.

A dark shape, similar to his own, joined him in the highway. It was

Christoph, his friend. She could see no more; they had hastened on in

the direction of the town and harbour, four miles ahead. With a feeling

akin to despair she turned and slowly pursued her way homeward.

Tattoo sounded in the camp; but there was no camp for her now. It was as

dead as the camp of the Assyrians after the passage of the Destroying

Angel.

She noiselessly entered the house, seeing nobody, and went to bed.

Grief, which kept her awake at first, ultimately wrapped her in a heavy

sleep. The next morning her father met her at the foot of the stairs.

'Mr. Gould is come!' he said triumphantly.

Humphrey was staying at the inn, and had already called to inquire for

her. He had brought her a present of a very handsome looking-glass in a

frame of repouss� silverwork, which her father held in his hand. He had

promised to call again in the course of an hour, to ask Phyllis to walk

with him.

Pretty mirrors were rarer in country-houses at that day than they are

now, and the one before her won Phyllis's admiration. She looked into

it, saw how heavy her eyes were, and endeavoured to brighten them. She

was in that wretched state of mind which leads a woman to move

mechanically onward in what she conceives to be her allotted path. Mr.

Humphrey had, in his undemonstrative way, been adhering all along to the

old understanding; it was for her to do the same, and to say not a word

of her own lapse. She put on her bonnet and tippet, and when he arrived

at the hour named she was at the door awaiting him.

CHAPTER V

Phyllis thanked him for his beautiful gift; but the talking was soon

entirely on Humphrey's side as they walked along. He told her of the

latest movements of the world of fashion-a subject which she willingly

discussed to the exclusion of anything more personal-and his measured

language helped to still her disquieted heart and brain. Had not her own

sadness been what it was she must have observed his embarrassment. At

last he abruptly changed the subject.

'I am glad you are pleased with my little present,' he said. 'The truth

is that I brought it to propitiate 'ee, and to get you to help me out of

a mighty difficulty.'

It was inconceivable to Phyllis that this independent bachelor-whom she

admired in some respects-could have a difficulty.

'Phyllis-I'll tell you my secret at once; for I have a monstrous secret

to confide before I can ask your counsel. The case is, then, that I am

married: yes, I have privately married a dear young belle; and if you

knew her, and I hope you will, you would say everything in her praise.

But she is not quite the one that my father would have chose for me-you

know the paternal idea as well as I-and I have kept it secret. There

will be a terrible noise, no doubt; but I think that with your help I

may get over it. If you would only do me this good turn-when I have told

my father, I mean-say that you never could have married me, you know, or

something of that sort-'pon my life it will help to smooth the way

vastly. I am so anxious to win him round to my point of view, and not to

cause any estrangement.'

What Phyllis replied she scarcely knew, or how she counselled him as to

his unexpected situation. Yet the relief that his announcement brought

her was perceptible. To have confided her trouble in return was what her

aching heart longed to do; and had Humphrey been a woman she would

instantly have poured out her tale. But to him she feared to confess;

and there was a real reason for silence, till a sufficient time had

elapsed to allow her lover and his comrade to get out of harm's way.

As soon as she reached home again she sought a solitary place, and spent

the time in half regretting that she had not gone away, and in dreaming

over the meetings with Matth�us Tina from their beginning to their end.

In his own country, amongst his own countrywomen, he would possibly soon

forget her, even to her very name.

Her listlessness was such that she did not go out of the house for

several days. There came a morning which broke in fog and mist, behind

which the dawn could be discerned in greenish grey; and the outlines of

the tents, and the rows of horses at the ropes. The smoke from the

canteen fires drooped heavily.

The spot at the bottom of the garden where she had been accustomed to

climb the wall to meet Matth�us, was the only inch of English ground in

which she took any interest; and in spite of the disagreeable haze

prevailing she walked out there till she reached the well-known corner.

Every blade of grass was weighted with little liquid globes, and slugs

and snails had crept out upon the plots. She could hear the usual faint

noises from the camp, and in the other direction the trot of farmers on

the road to the town, for it was market-day. She observed that her

frequent visits to this corner had quite trodden down the grass in the

angle of the wall, and left marks of garden soil on the stepping-stones

by which she had mounted to look over the top. Seldom having gone there

till dusk, she had not considered that her traces might be visible by

day. Perhaps it was these which had revealed her trysts to her father.

While she paused in melancholy regard, she fancied that the customary

sounds from the tents were changing their character. Indifferent as

Phyllis was to camp doings now, she mounted by the steps to the old

place. What she beheld at first awed and perplexed her; then she stood

rigid, her fingers hooked to the wall, her eyes staring out of her head,

and her face as if hardened to stone.

On the open green stretching before her all the regiments in the camp

were drawn up in line, in the mid-front of which two empty coffins lay

on the ground. The unwonted sounds which she had noticed came from an

advancing procession. It consisted of the band of the York Hussars

playing a dead march; next two soldiers of that regiment in a mourning

coach, guarded on each side, and accompanied by two priests. Behind came

a crowd of rustics who had been attracted by the event. The melancholy

procession marched along the front of the line, returned to the centre,

and halted beside the coffins, where the two condemned men were

blindfolded, and each placed kneeling on his coffin; a few minutes pause

was now given, while they prayed.

A firing-party of twenty-four men stood ready with levelled carbines.

The commanding officer, who had his sword drawn, waved it through some

cuts of the sword-exercise till he reached the downward stroke, whereat

the firing-party discharged their volley. The two victims fell, one upon

his face across his coffin, the other backwards.

As the volley resounded there arose a shriek from the wall of Dr.

Grove's garden, and some one fell down inside; but nobody among the

spectators without noticed it at the time. The two executed Hussars were

Matth�us Tina and his friend Christoph. The soldiers on guard placed the

bodies in the coffins almost instantly; but the colonel of the regiment,

an Englishman, rode up and exclaimed in a stern voice: 'Turn them out-as

an example to the men!'

The coffins were lifted endwise, and the dead Germans flung out upon

their faces on the grass. Then all the regiments wheeled in sections,

and marched past the spot in slow time. When the survey was over the

corpses were again coffined, and borne away.

Meanwhile Dr. Grove, attracted by the noise of the volley, had rushed

out into his garden, where he saw his wretched daughter lying motionless

against the wall. She was taken indoors, but it was long before she

recovered consciousness; and for weeks they despaired of her reason.

It transpired that the luckless deserters from the York Hussars had cut

the boat from her moorings in the adjacent harbour, according to their

plan, and, with two other comrades who were smarting under ill-treatment

from their colonel, had sailed in safety across the Channel. But

mistaking their bearings they steered into Jersey, thinking that island

the French coast. Here they were perceived to be deserters, and

delivered up to the authorities. Matth�us and Christoph interceded for

the other two at the court-martial, saying that it was entirely by the

former's representations that these were induced to go. Their sentence

was accordingly commuted to flogging, the death punishment being

reserved for their leaders.

The visitor to the well-known old Georgian watering-place, who may care

to ramble to the neighbouring village under the hills, and examine the

register of burials, will there find two entries in these words:-

'Matth:-Tina (Corpl.) in His Majesty's Regmt. of York Hussars, and Shot

for Desertion, was Buried June 30th, 1801, aged 22 years. Born in the

town of Sarrbruk, Germany.

'Christoph Bless, belonging to His Majesty's Regmt. of York Hussars, who

was Shot for Desertion, was Buried June 30th, 1801, aged 22 years. Born

at Lothaargen, Alsatia.'

Their graves were dug at the back of the little church, near the wall.

There is no memorial to mark the spot, but Phyllis pointed it out to me.

While she lived she used to keep their mounds neat; but now they are

overgrown with nettles, and sunk nearly flat. The older villagers,

however, who know of the episode from their parents, still recollect the

place where the soldiers lie. Phyllis lies near.

October 1889.

THE FIDDLER OF THE REELS

'Talking of Exhibitions, World's Fairs, and what not,' said the old

gentleman, 'I would not go round the corner to see a dozen of them

nowadays. The only exhibition that ever made, or ever will make, any

impression upon my imagination was the first of the series, the parent

of them all, and now a thing of old times-the Great Exhibition of 1851,

in Hyde Park, London. None of the younger generation can realize the

sense of novelty it produced in us who were then in our prime. A noun

substantive went so far as to become an adjective in honour of the

occasion. It was "exhibition" hat, "exhibition" razor-strop,

"exhibition" watch; nay, even "exhibition" weather, "exhibition"

spirits, sweethearts, babies, wives-for the time.

'For South Wessex, the year formed in many ways an extraordinary

chronological frontier or transit-line, at which there occurred what one

might call a precipice in Time. As in a geological "fault," we had

presented to us a sudden bringing of ancient and modern into absolute

contact, such as probably in no other single year since the Conquest was

ever witnessed in this part of the country.'

These observations led us onward to talk of the different personages,

gentle and simple, who lived and moved within our narrow and peaceful

horizon at that time; and of three people in particular, whose queer

little history was oddly touched at points by the Exhibition, more

concerned with it than that of anybody else who dwelt in those outlying

shades of the world, Stickleford, Mellstock, and Egdon. First in

prominence among these three came Wat Ollamoor-if that were his real

name-whom the seniors in our party had known well.

He was a woman's man, they said,-supremely so-externally little else. To

men he was not attractive; perhaps a little repulsive at times.

Musician, dandy, and company-man in practice; veterinary surgeon in

theory, he lodged awhile in Mellstock village, coming from nobody knew

where; though some said his first appearance in this neighbourhood had

been as fiddle-player in a show at Greenhill Fair.

Many a worthy villager envied him his power over unsophisticated

maidenhood-a power which seemed sometimes to have a touch of the weird

and wizardly in it. Personally he was not ill-favoured, though rather

un-English, his complexion being a rich olive, his rank hair dark and

rather clammy-made still clammier by secret ointments, which, when he

came fresh to a party, caused him to smell like 'boys'-love'

(southernwood) steeped in lamp-oil. On occasion he wore curls-a double

row-running almost horizontally around his head. But as these were

sometimes noticeably absent, it was concluded that they were not

altogether of Nature's making. By girls whose love for him had turned to

hatred he had been nicknamed 'Mop,' from this abundance of hair, which

was long enough to rest upon his shoulders; as time passed the name more

and more prevailed.

His fiddling possibly had the most to do with the fascination he

exercised, for, to speak fairly, it could claim for itself a most

peculiar and personal quality, like that in a moving preacher. There

were tones in it which bred the immediate conviction that indolence and

averseness to systematic application were all that lay between 'Mop' and

the career of a second Paganini.

While playing he invariably closed his eyes; using no notes, and, as it

were, allowing the violin to wander on at will into the most plaintive

passages ever heard by rustic man. There was a certain lingual character

in the supplicatory expressions he produced, which would well nigh have

drawn an ache from the heart of a gate-post. He could make any child in

the parish, who was at all sensitive to music, burst into tears in a few

minutes by simply fiddling one of the old dance-tunes he almost entirely

affected-country jigs, reels, and 'Favourite Quick Steps' of the last

century-some mutilated remains of which even now reappear as nameless

phantoms in new quadrilles and gallops, where they are recognized only

by the curious, or by such old-fashioned and far- between people as have

been thrown with men like Wat Ollamoor in their early life.

His date was a little later than that of the old Mellstock quire-band

which comprised the Dewys, Mail, and the rest-in fact, he did not rise

above the horizon thereabout till those well-known musicians were

disbanded as ecclesiastical functionaries. In their honest love of

thoroughness they despised the new man's style. Theophilus Dewy (Reuben

the tranter's younger brother) used to say there was no 'plumness' in

it-no bowing, no solidity-it was all fantastical. And probably this was

true. Anyhow, Mop had, very obviously, never bowed a note of church-

music from his birth; he never once sat in the gallery of Mellstock

church where the others had tuned their venerable psalmody so many

hundreds of times; had never, in all likelihood, entered a church at

all. All were devil's tunes in his repertory. 'He could no more play the

Wold Hundredth to his true time than he could play the brazen serpent,'

the tranter would say. (The brazen serpent was supposed in Mellstock to

be a musical instrument particularly hard to blow.)

Occasionally Mop could produce the aforesaid moving effect upon the

souls of grown-up persons, especially young women of fragile and

responsive organization. Such an one was Car'line Aspent. Though she was

already engaged to be married before she met him, Car'line, of them all,

was the most influenced by Mop Ollamoor's heart-stealing melodies, to

her discomfort, nay, positive pain and ultimate injury. She was a

pretty, invocating, weak-mouthed girl, whose chief defect as a companion

with her sex was a tendency to peevishness now and then. At this time

she was not a resident in Mellstock parish where Mop lodged, but lived

some miles off at Stickleford, farther down the river.

How and where she first made acquaintance with him and his fiddling is

not truly known, but the story was that it either began or was developed

on one spring evening, when, in passing through Lower Mellstock, she

chanced to pause on the bridge near his house to rest herself, and

languidly leaned over the parapet. Mop was standing on his door-step, as

was his custom, spinning the insidious thread of semi- and demi-semi-

quavers from the E string of his fiddle for the benefit of passers-by,

and laughing as the tears rolled down the cheeks of the little children

hanging around him. Car'line pretended to be engrossed with the rippling

of the stream under the arches, but in reality she was listening, as he

knew. Presently the aching of the heart seized her simultaneously with a

wild desire to glide airily in the mazes of an infinite dance. To shake

off the fascination she resolved to go on, although it would be

necessary to pass him as he played. On stealthily glancing ahead at the

performer, she found to her relief that his eyes were closed in

abandonment to instrumentation, and she strode on boldly. But when

closer her step grew timid, her tread convulsed itself more and more

accordantly with the time of the melody, till she very nearly danced

along. Gaining another glance at him when immediately opposite, she saw

that one of his eyes was open, quizzing her as he smiled at her

emotional state. Her gait could not divest itself of its compelled

capers till she had gone a long way past the house; and Car'line was

unable to shake off the strange infatuation for hours.

After that day, whenever there was to be in the neighbourhood a dance to

which she could get an invitation, and where Mop Ollamoor was to be the

musician, Car'line contrived to be present, though it sometimes involved

a walk of several miles; for he did not play so often in Stickleford as

elsewhere.

The next evidences of his influence over her were singular enough, and

it would require a neurologist to fully explain them. She would be

sitting quietly, any evening after dark, in the house of her father, the

parish clerk, which stood in the middle of Stickleford village street,

this being the highroad between Lower Mellstock and Moreford, five miles

eastward. Here, without a moment's warning, and in the midst of a

general conversation between her father, sister, and the young man

before alluded to, who devotedly wooed her in ignorance of her

infatuation, she would start from her seat in the chimney-corner as if

she had received a galvanic shock, and spring convulsively towards the

ceiling; then she would burst into tears, and it was not till some half-

hour had passed that she grew calm as usual. Her father, knowing her

hysterical tendencies, was always excessively anxious about this trait

in his youngest girl, and feared the attack to be a species of epileptic

fit. Not so her sister Julia. Julia had found out what was the cause. At

the moment before the jumping, only an exceptionally sensitive ear

situated in the chimney-nook could have caught from down the flue the

beat of a man's footstep along the highway without. But it was in that

footfall, for which she had been waiting, that the origin of Car'line's

involuntary springing lay. The pedestrian was Mop Ollamoor, as the girl

well knew; but his business that way was not to visit her; he sought

another woman whom he spoke of as his Intended, and who lived at

Moreford, two miles farther on. On one, and only one, occasion did it

happen that Car'line could not control her utterance; it was when her

sister alone chanced to be present. 'Oh-oh-oh-!' she cried. 'He's going

to her, and not coming to me!'

To do the fiddler justice he had not at first thought greatly of, or

spoken much to, this girl of impressionable mould. But he had soon found

out her secret, and could not resist a little by-play with her too

easily hurt heart, as an interlude between his more serious performances

at Moreford. The two became well acquainted, though only by stealth,

hardly a soul in Stickleford except her sister, and her lover Ned

Hipcroft, being aware of the attachment. Her father disapproved of her

coldness to Ned; her sister, too, hoped she might get over this nervous

passion for a man of whom so little was known. The ultimate result was

that Car'line's manly and simple wooer Edward found his suit becoming

practically hopeless. He was a respectable mechanic, in a far sounder

position than Mop the nominal horse-doctor; but when, before leaving

her, Ned put his flat and final question, would she marry him, then and

there, now or never, it was with little expectation of obtaining more

than the negative she gave him. Though her father supported him and her

sister supported him, he could not play the fiddle so as to draw your

soul out of your body like a spider's thread, as Mop did, till you felt

as limp as withy-wind and yearned for something to cling to. Indeed,

Hipcroft had not the slightest ear for music; could not sing two notes

in tune, much less play them.

The No he had expected and got from her, in spite of a preliminary

encouragement, gave Ned a new start in life. It had been uttered in such

a tone of sad entreaty that he resolved to persecute her no more; she

should not even be distressed by a sight of his form in the distant

perspective of the street and lane. He left the place, and his natural

course was to London.

The railway to South Wessex was in process of construction, but it was

not as yet opened for traffic; and Hipcroft reached the capital by a six

days' trudge on foot, as many a better man had done before him. He was

one of the last of the artisan class who used that now extinct method of

travel to the great centres of labour, so customary then from time

immemorial.

In London he lived and worked regularly at his trade. More fortunate

than many, his disinterested willingness recommended him from the first.

During the ensuing four years he was never out of employment. He neither

advanced nor receded in the modern sense; he improved as a workman, but

he did not shift one jot in social position. About his love for Car'line

he maintained a rigid silence. No doubt he often thought of her; but

being always occupied, and having no relations at Stickleford, he held

no communication with that part of the country, and showed no desire to

return. In his quiet lodging in Lambeth he moved about after working-

hours with the facility of a woman, doing his own cooking, attending to

his stocking-heels, and shaping himself by degrees to a life-long

bachelorhood. For this conduct one is bound to advance the canonical

reason that time could not efface from his heart the image of little

Car'line Aspent-and it may be in part true; but there was also the

inference that his was a nature not greatly dependent upon the

ministrations of the other sex for its comforts.

The fourth year of his residence as a mechanic in London was the year of

the Hyde-Park Exhibition already mentioned, and at the construction of

this huge glass-house, then unexampled in the world's history, he worked

daily. It was an era of great hope and activity among the nations and

industries. Though Hipcroft was, in his small way, a central man in the

movement, he plodded on with his usual outward placidity. Yet for him,

too, the year was destined to have its surprises, for when the bustle of

getting the building ready for the opening day was past, the ceremonies

had been witnessed, and people were flocking thither from all parts of

the globe, he received a letter from Car'line. Till that day the silence

of four years between himself and Stickleford had never been broken.

She informed her old lover, in an uncertain penmanship which suggested a

trembling hand, of the trouble she had been put to in ascertaining his

address, and then broached the subject which had prompted her to write.

Four years ago, she said with the greatest delicacy of which she was

capable, she had been so foolish as to refuse him. Her wilful wrong-

headedness had since been a grief to her many times, and of late

particularly. As for Mr. Ollamoor, he had been absent almost as long as

Ned-she did not know where. She would gladly marry Ned now if he were to

ask her again, and be a tender little wife to him till her life's end.

A tide of warm feeling must have surged through Ned Hipcroft's frame on

receipt of this news, if we may judge by the issue. Unquestionably he

loved her still, even if not to the exclusion of every other happiness.

This from his Car'line, she who had been dead to him these many years,

alive to him again as of old, was in itself a pleasant, gratifying

thing. Ned had grown so resigned to, or satisfied with, his lonely lot,

that he probably would not have shown much jubilation at anything.

Still, a certain ardour of preoccupation, after his first surprise,

revealed how deeply her confession of faith in him had stirred him.

Measured and methodical in his ways, he did not answer the letter that

day, nor the next, nor the next. He was having 'a good think.' When he

did answer it, there was a great deal of sound reasoning mixed in with

the unmistakable tenderness of his reply; but the tenderness itself was

sufficient to reveal that he was pleased with her straightforward

frankness; that the anchorage she had once obtained in his heart was

renewable, if it had not been continuously firm.

He told her-and as he wrote his lips twitched humorously over the few

gentle words of raillery he indited among the rest of his sentences-that

it was all very well for her to come round at this time of day. Why

wouldn't she have him when he wanted her? She had no doubt learned that

he was not married, but suppose his affections had since been fixed on

another? She ought to beg his pardon. Still, he was not the man to

forget her. But considering how he had been used, and what he had

suffered, she could not quite expect him to go down to Stickleford and

fetch her. But if she would come to him, and say she was sorry, as was

only fair; why, yes, he would marry her, knowing what a good little

woman she was at the core. He added that the request for her to come to

him was a less one to make than it would have been when he first left

Stickleford, or even a few months ago; for the new railway into South

Wessex was now open, and there had just begun to be run wonderfully

contrived special trains, called excursion-trains, on account of the

Great Exhibition; so that she could come up easily alone.

She said in her reply how good it was of him to treat her so generously,

after her hot and cold treatment of him; that though she felt frightened

at the magnitude of the journey, and was never as yet in a railway-

train, having only seen one pass at a distance, she embraced his offer

with all her heart; and would, indeed, own to him how sorry she was, and

beg his pardon, and try to be a good wife always, and make up for lost

time.

The remaining details of when and where were soon settled, Car'line

informing him, for her ready identification in the crowd, that she would

be wearing 'my new sprigged-laylock cotton gown,' and Ned gaily

responding that, having married her the morning after her arrival, he

would make a day of it by taking her to the Exhibition. One early summer

afternoon, accordingly, he came from his place of work, and hastened

towards Waterloo Station to meet her. It was as wet and chilly as an

English June day can occasionally be, but as he waited on the platform

in the drizzle he glowed inwardly, and seemed to have something to live

for again.

The 'excursion-train'-an absolutely new departure in the history of

travel-was still a novelty on the Wessex line, and probably everywhere.

Crowds of people had flocked to all the stations on the way up to

witness the unwonted sight of so long a train's passage, even where they

did not take advantage of the opportunity it offered. The seats for the

humbler class of travellers in these early experiments in steam-

locomotion, were open trucks, without any protection whatever from the

wind and rain; and damp weather having set in with the afternoon, the

unfortunate occupants of these vehicles were, on the train drawing up at

the London terminus, found to be in a pitiable condition from their long

journey; blue-faced, stiff-necked, sneezing, rain-beaten, chilled to the

marrow, many of the men being hatless; in fact, they resembled people

who had been out all night in an open boat on a rough sea, rather than

inland excursionists for pleasure. The women had in some degree

protected themselves by turning up the skirts of their gowns over their

heads, but as by this arrangement they were additionally exposed about

the hips, they were all more or less in a sorry plight.

In the bustle and crush of alighting forms of both sexes which followed

the entry of the huge concatenation into the station, Ned Hipcroft soon

discerned the slim little figure his eye was in search of, in the

sprigged lilac, as described. She came up to him with a frightened

smile-still pretty, though so damp, weather-beaten, and shivering from

long exposure to the wind.

'O Ned!' she sputtered, 'I-I-' He clasped her in his arms and kissed

her, whereupon she burst into a flood of tears.

'You are wet, my poor dear! I hope you'll not get cold,' he said. And

surveying her and her multifarious surrounding packages, he noticed that

by the hand she led a toddling child-a little girl of three or so-whose

hood was as clammy and tender face as blue as those of the other

travellers.

'Who is this-somebody you know?' asked Ned curiously.

'Yes, Ned. She's mine.'

'Yours?'

'Yes-my own!'

'Your own child?'

'Yes!'

'Well-as God's in-'

'Ned, I didn't name it in my letter, because, you see, it would have

been so hard to explain! I thought that when we met I could tell you how

she happened to be born, so much better than in writing! I hope you'll

excuse it this once, dear Ned, and not scold me, now I've come so many,

many miles!'

'This means Mr. Mop Ollamoor, I reckon!' said Hipcroft, gazing palely at

them from the distance of the yard or two to which he had withdrawn with

a start.

Car'line gasped. 'But he's been gone away for years!' she supplicated.

'And I never had a young man before! And I was so onlucky to be catched

the first time, though some of the girls down there go on like

anything!'

Ned remained in silence, pondering.

'You'll forgive me, dear Ned?' she added, beginning to sob outright. 'I

haven't taken 'ee in after all, because-because you can pack us back

again, if you want to; though 'tis hundreds o' miles, and so wet, and

night a-coming on, and I with no money!'

'What the devil can I do!' Hipcroft groaned.

A more pitiable picture than the pair of helpless creatures presented

was never seen on a rainy day, as they stood on the great, gaunt,

puddled platform, a whiff of drizzle blowing under the roof upon them

now and then; the pretty attire in which they had started from

Stickleford in the early morning bemuddled and sodden, weariness on

their faces, and fear of him in their eyes; for the child began to look

as if she thought she too had done some wrong, remaining in an appalled

silence till the tears rolled down her chubby cheeks.

'What's the matter, my little maid?' said Ned mechanically.

'I do want to go home!' she let out, in tones that told of a bursting

heart. 'And my totties be cold, an' I shan't have no bread an' butter no

more!'

'I don't know what to say to it all!' declared Ned, his own eye moist as

he turned and walked a few steps with his head down; then regarded them

again point blank. From the child escaped troubled breaths and silently

welling tears.

'Want some bread and butter, do 'ee?' he said, with factitious hardness.

'Ye-e-s!'

'Well, I daresay I can get 'ee a bit! Naturally, you must want some. And

you, too, for that matter, Car'line.'

'I do feel a little hungered. But I can keep it off,' she murmured.

'Folk shouldn't do that,' he said gruffly. . . . 'There come along!' he

caught up the child, as he added, 'You must bide here to-night, anyhow,

I s'pose! What can you do otherwise? I'll get 'ee some tea and victuals;

and as for this job, I'm sure I don't know what to say! This is the way

out.'

They pursued their way, without speaking, to Ned's lodgings, which were

not far off. There he dried them and made them comfortable, and prepared

tea; they thankfully sat down. The ready-made household of which he

suddenly found himself the head imparted a cosy aspect to his room, and

a paternal one to himself. Presently he turned to the child and kissed

her now blooming cheeks; and, looking wistfully at Car'line, kissed her

also.

'I don't see how I can send 'ee back all them miles,' he growled, 'now

you've come all the way o' purpose to join me. But you must trust me,

Car'line, and show you've real faith in me. Well, do you feel better

now, my little woman?'

The child nodded, her mouth being otherwise occupied.

'I did trust you, Ned, in coming; and I shall always!'

Thus, without any definite agreement to forgive her, he tacitly

acquiesced in the fate that Heaven had sent him; and on the day of their

marriage (which was not quite so soon as he had expected it could be, on

account of the time necessary for banns) he took her to the Exhibition

when they came back from church, as he had promised. While standing near

a large mirror in one of the courts devoted to furniture, Car'line

started, for in the glass appeared the reflection of a form exactly

resembling Mop Ollamoor's-so exactly, that it seemed impossible to

believe anybody but that artist in person to be the original. On passing

round the objects which hemmed in Ned, her, and the child from a direct

view, no Mop was to be seen. Whether he were really in London or not at

that time was never known; and Car'line always stoutly denied that her

readiness to go and meet Ned in town arose from any rumour that Mop had

also gone thither; which denial there was no reasonable ground for

doubting.

And then the year glided away, and the Exhibition folded itself up and

became a thing of the past. The park trees that had been enclosed for

six months were again exposed to the winds and storms, and the sod grew

green anew. Ned found that Car'line resolved herself into a very good

wife and companion, though she had made herself what is called cheap to

him; but in that she was like another domestic article, a cheap tea-pot,

which often brews better tea than a dear one. One autumn Hipcroft found

himself with but little work to do, and a prospect of less for the

winter. Both being country born and bred, they fancied they would like

to live again in their natural atmosphere. It was accordingly decided

between them that they should leave the pent-up London lodging, and that

Ned should seek out employment near his native place, his wife and her

daughter staying with Car'line's father during the search for occupation

and an abode of their own.

Tinglings of pleasure pervaded Car'line's spasmodic little frame as she

journeyed down with Ned to the place she had left two or three years

before, in silence and under a cloud. To return to where she had once

been despised, a smiling London wife with a distinct London accent, was

a triumph which the world did not witness every day.

The train did not stop at the petty roadside station that lay nearest to

Stickleford, and the trio went on to Casterbridge. Ned thought it a good

opportunity to make a few preliminary inquiries for employment at

workshops in the borough where he had been known; and feeling cold from

her journey, and it being dry underfoot and only dusk as yet, with a

moon on the point of rising, Car'line and her little girl walked on

toward Stickleford, leaving Ned to follow at a quicker pace, and pick

her up at a certain half-way house, widely known as an inn.

The woman and child pursued the well-remembered way comfortably enough,

though they were both becoming wearied. In the course of three miles

they had passed Heedless-William's Pond, the familiar landmark by

Bloom's End, and were drawing near the Quiet Woman Inn, a lone roadside

hostel on the lower verge of the Egdon Heath, since and for many years

abolished. In stepping up towards it Car'line heard more voices within

than had formerly been customary at such an hour, and she learned that

an auction of fat stock had been held near the spot that afternoon. The

child would be the better for a rest as well as herself, she thought,

and she entered.

The guests and customers overflowed into the passage, and Car'line had

no sooner crossed the threshold than a man whom she remembered by sight

came forward with glass and mug in his hands towards a friend leaning

against the wall; but, seeing her, very gallantly offered her a drink of

the liquor, which was gin-and-beer hot, pouring her out a tumblerful and

saying, in a moment or two: 'Surely, 'tis little Car'line Aspent that

was-down at Stickleford?'

She assented, and, though she did not exactly want this beverage, she

drank it since it was offered, and her entertainer begged her to come in

farther and sit down. Once within the room she found that all the

persons present were seated close against the walls, and there being a

chair vacant she did the same. An explanation of their position occurred

the next moment. In the opposite corner stood Mop, rosining his bow and

looking just the same as ever. The company had cleared the middle of the

room for dancing, and they were about to dance again. As she wore a veil

to keep off the wind she did not think he had recognized her, or could

possibly guess the identity of the child; and to her satisfied surprise

she found that she could confront him quite calmly-mistress of herself

in the dignity her London life had given her. Before she had quite

emptied her glass the dance was called, the dancers formed in two lines,

the music sounded, and the figure began.

Then matters changed for Car'line. A tremor quickened itself to life in

her, and her hand so shook that she could hardly set down her glass. It

was not the dance nor the dancers, but the notes of that old violin

which thrilled the London wife, these having still all the witchery that

she had so well known of yore, and under which she had used to lose her

power of independent will. How it all came back! There was the fiddling

figure against the wall; the large, oily, mop-like head of him, and

beneath the mop the face with closed eyes.

After the first moments of paralyzed reverie the familiar tune in the

familiar rendering made her laugh and shed tears simultaneously. Then a

man at the bottom of the dance, whose partner had dropped away,

stretched out his hand and beckoned to her to take the place. She did

not want to dance; she entreated by signs to be left where she was, but

she was entreating of the tune and its player rather than of the dancing

man. The saltatory tendency which the fiddler and his cunning instrument

had ever been able to start in her was seizing Car'line just as it had

done in earlier years, possibly assisted by the gin-and-beer hot. Tired

as she was she grasped her little girl by the hand, and plunging in at

the bottom of the figure, whirled about with the rest. She found that

her companions were mostly people of the neighbouring hamlets and farms-

Bloom's End, Mellstock, Lewgate, and elsewhere; and by degrees she was

recognized as she convulsively danced on, wishing that Mop would cease

and let her heart rest from the aching he caused, and her feet also.

After long and many minutes the dance ended, when she was urged to

fortify herself with more gin-and-beer; which she did, feeling very weak

and overpowered with hysteric emotion. She refrained from unveiling, to

keep Mop in ignorance of her presence, if possible. Several of the

guests having left, Car'line hastily wiped her lips and also turned to

go; but, according to the account of some who remained, at that very

moment a five-handed reel was proposed, in which two or three begged her

to join.

She declined on the plea of being tired and having to walk to

Stickleford, when Mop began aggressively tweedling 'My Fancy-Lad,' in D

major, as the air to which the reel was to be footed. He must have

recognized her, though she did not know it, for it was the strain of all

seductive strains which she was least able to resist-the one he had

played when she was leaning over the bridge at the date of their first

acquaintance. Car'line stepped despairingly into the middle of the room

with the other four.

Reels were resorted to hereabouts at this time by the more robust

spirits, for the reduction of superfluous energy which the ordinary

figure-dances were not powerful enough to exhaust. As everybody knows,

or does not know, the five reelers stood in the form of a cross, the

reel being performed by each line of three alternately, the persons who

successively came to the middle place dancing in both directions.

Car'line soon found herself in this place, the axis of the whole

performance, and could not get out of it, the tune turning into the

first part without giving her opportunity. And now she began to suspect

that Mop did know her, and was doing this on purpose, though whenever

she stole a glance at him his closed eyes betokened obliviousness to

everything outside his own brain. She continued to wend her way through

the figure of 8 that was formed by her course, the fiddler introducing

into his notes the wild and agonizing sweetness of a living voice in one

too highly wrought; its pathos running high and running low in endless

variation, projecting through her nerves excruciating spasms, a sort of

blissful torture. The room swam, the tune was endless; and in about a

quarter of an hour the only other woman in the figure dropped out

exhausted, and sank panting on a bench.

The reel instantly resolved itself into a four-handed one. Car'line

would have given anything to leave off; but she had, or fancied she had,

no power, while Mop played such tunes; and thus another ten minutes

slipped by, a haze of dust now clouding the candles, the floor being of

stone, sanded. Then another dancer fell out-one of the men-and went into

the passage, in a frantic search for liquor. To turn the figure into a

three-handed reel was the work of a second, Mop modulating at the same

time into 'The Fairy Dance,' as better suited to the contracted

movement, and no less one of those foods of love which, as manufactured

by his bow, had always intoxicated her.

In a reel for three there was no rest whatever, and four or five minutes

were enough to make her remaining two partners, now thoroughly blown,

stamp their last bar and, like their predecessors, limp off into the

next room to get something to drink. Car'line, half-stifled inside her

veil, was left dancing alone, the apartment now being empty of everybody

save herself, Mop, and their little girl.

She flung up the veil, and cast her eyes upon him, as if imploring him

to withdraw himself and his acoustic magnetism from the atmosphere. Mop

opened one of his own orbs, as though for the first time, fixed it

peeringly upon her, and smiling dreamily, threw into his strains the

reserve of expression which he could not afford to waste on a big and

noisy dance. Crowds of little chromatic subtleties, capable of drawing

tears from a statue, proceeded straightway from the ancient fiddle, as

if it were dying of the emotion which had been pent up within it ever

since its banishment from some Italian city where it first took shape

and sound. There was that in the look of Mop's one dark eye which said:

'You cannot leave off, dear, whether you would or no!' and it bred in

her a paroxysm of desperation that defied him to tire her down.

She thus continued to dance alone, defiantly as she thought, but in

truth slavishly and abjectly, subject to every wave of the melody, and

probed by the gimlet-like gaze of her fascinator's open eye; keeping up

at the same time a feeble smile in his face, as a feint to signify it

was still her own pleasure which led her on. A terrified embarrassment

as to what she could say to him if she were to leave off, had its

unrecognized share in keeping her going. The child, who was beginning to

be distressed by the strange situation, came up and said: 'Stop, mother,

stop, and let's go home!' as she seized Car'line's hand.

Suddenly Car'line sank staggering to the floor; and rolling over on her

face, prone she remained. Mop's fiddle thereupon emitted an elfin shriek

of finality; stepping quickly down from the nine-gallon beer-cask which

had formed his rostrum, he went to the little girl, who disconsolately

bent over her mother.

The guests who had gone into the back-room for liquor and change of air,

hearing something unusual, trooped back hitherward, where they

endeavoured to revive poor, weak Car'line by blowing her with the

bellows and opening the window. Ned, her husband, who had been detained

in Casterbridge, as aforesaid, came along the road at this juncture, and

hearing excited voices through the open casement, and to his great

surprise, the mention of his wife's name, he entered amid the rest upon

the scene. Car'line was now in convulsions, weeping violently, and for a

long time nothing could be done with her. While he was sending for a

cart to take her onward to Stickleford Hipcroft anxiously inquired how

it had all happened; and then the assembly explained that a fiddler

formerly known in the locality had lately revisited his old haunts, and

had taken upon himself without invitation to play that evening at the

inn.

Ned demanded the fiddler's name, and they said Ollamoor.

'Ah!' exclaimed Ned, looking round him. 'Where is he, and where-where's

my little girl?'

Ollamoor had disappeared, and so had the child. Hipcroft was in ordinary

a quiet and tractable fellow, but a determination which was to be feared

settled in his face now. 'Blast him!' he cried. 'I'll beat his skull in

for'n, if I swing for it to-morrow!'

He had rushed to the poker which lay on the hearth, and hastened down

the passage, the people following. Outside the house, on the other side

of the highway, a mass of dark heath-land rose sullenly upward to its

not easily accessible interior, a ravined plateau, whereon jutted into

the sky, at the distance of a couple of miles, the fir-woods of Mistover

backed by the Yalbury coppices-a place of Dantesque gloom at this hour,

which would have afforded secure hiding for a battery of artillery, much

less a man and a child.

Some other men plunged thitherward with him, and more went along the

road. They were gone about twenty minutes altogether, returning without

result to the inn. Ned sat down in the settle, and clasped his forehead

with his hands.

'Well-what a fool the man is, and hev been all these years, if he thinks

the child his, as a' do seem to!' they whispered. 'And everybody else

knowing otherwise!'

'No, I don't think 'tis mine!' cried Ned hoarsely, as he looked up from

his hands. 'But she is mine, all the same! Ha'n't I nussed her? Ha'n't I

fed her and teached her? Ha'n't I played wi' her? O, little Carry-gone

with that rogue-gone!'

'You ha'n't lost your mis'ess, anyhow,' they said to console him. 'She's

throwed up the sperrits, and she is feeling better, and she's more to

'ee than a child that isn't yours.'

'She isn't! She's not so particular much to me, especially now she's

lost the little maid! But Carry's everything!'

'Well, ver' like you'll find her to-morrow.'

'Ah-but shall I? Yet he can't hurt her-surely he can't! Well-how's

Car'line now? I am ready. Is the cart here?'

She was lifted into the vehicle, and they sadly lumbered on toward

Stickleford. Next day she was calmer; but the fits were still upon her;

and her will seemed shattered. For the child she appeared to show

singularly little anxiety, though Ned was nearly distracted. It was

nevertheless quite expected that the impish Mop would restore the lost

one after a freak of a day or two; but time went on, and neither he nor

she could be heard of, and Hipcroft murmured that perhaps he was

exercising upon her some unholy musical charm, as he had done upon

Car'line herself. Weeks passed, and still they could obtain no clue

either to the fiddler's whereabouts or the girl's; and how he could have

induced her to go with him remained a mystery.

Then Ned, who had obtained only temporary employment in the

neighbourhood, took a sudden hatred toward his native district, and a

rumour reaching his ears through the police that a somewhat similar man

and child had been seen at a fair near London, he playing a violin, she

dancing on stilts, a new interest in the capital took possession of

Hipcroft with an intensity which would scarcely allow him time to pack

before returning thither.

He did not, however, find the lost one, though he made it the entire

business of his over-hours to stand about in by-streets in the hope of

discovering her, and would start up in the night, saying, 'That rascal's

torturing her to maintain him!' To which his wife would answer

peevishly, 'Don't 'ee raft yourself so, Ned! You prevent my getting a

bit o' rest! He won't hurt her!' and fall asleep again.

That Carry and her father had emigrated to America was the general

opinion; Mop, no doubt, finding the girl a highly desirable companion

when he had trained her to keep him by her earnings as a dancer. There,

for that matter, they may be performing in some capacity now, though he

must be an old scamp verging on threescore-and-ten, and she a woman of

four-and-forty.

May 1893.

A TRADITION OF EIGHTEEN HUNDRED AND FOUR

The widely discussed possibility of an invasion of England through a

Channel tunnel has more than once recalled old Solomon Selby's story to

my mind.

The occasion on which I numbered myself among his audience was one

evening when he was sitting in the yawning chimney-corner of the inn-

kitchen, with some others who had gathered there, and I entered for

shelter from the rain. Withdrawing the stem of his pipe from the dental

notch in which it habitually rested, he leaned back in the recess behind

him and smiled into the fire. The smile was neither mirthful nor sad,

not precisely humorous nor altogether thoughtful. We who knew him

recognized it in a moment: it was his narrative smile. Breaking off our

few desultory remarks we drew up closer, and he thus began:-

'My father, as you mid know, was a shepherd all his life, and lived out

by the Cove four miles yonder, where I was born and lived likewise, till

I moved here shortly afore I was married. The cottage that first knew me

stood on the top of the down, near the sea; there was no house within a

mile and a half of it; it was built o' purpose for the farm-shepherd,

and had no other use. They tell me that it is now pulled down, but that

you can see where it stood by the mounds of earth and a few broken

bricks that are still lying about. It was a bleak and dreary place in

winter-time, but in summer it was well enough, though the garden never

came to much, because we could not get up a good shelter for the

vegetables and currant bushes; and where there is much wind they don't

thrive.

'Of all the years of my growing up the ones that bide clearest in my

mind were eighteen hundred and three, four, and five. This was for two

reasons: I had just then grown to an age when a child's eyes and ears

take in and note down everything about him, and there was more at that

date to bear in mind than there ever has been since with me. It was, as

I need hardly tell ye, the time after the first peace, when Bonaparte

was scheming his descent upon England. He had crossed the great Alp

mountains, fought in Egypt, drubbed the Turks, the Austrians, and the

Proossians, and now thought he'd have a slap at us. On the other side of

the Channel, scarce out of sight and hail of a man standing on our

English shore, the French army of a hundred and sixty thousand men and

fifteen thousand horses had been brought together from all parts, and

were drilling every day. Bonaparte had been three years a-making his

preparations; and to ferry these soldiers and cannon and horses across

he had contrived a couple of thousand flat-bottomed boats. These boats

were small things, but wonderfully built. A good few of 'em were so made

as to have a little stable on board each for the two horses that were to

haul the cannon carried at the stern. To get in order all these, and

other things required, he had assembled there five or six thousand

fellows that worked at trades-carpenters, blacksmiths, wheelwrights,

saddlers, and what not. O 'twas a curious time!

'Every morning Neighbour Boney would muster his multitude of soldiers on

the beach, draw 'em up in line, practise 'em in the manoeuvre of

embarking, horses and all, till they could do it without a single hitch.

My father drove a flock of ewes up into Sussex that year, and as he went

along the drover's track over the high downs thereabout he could see

this drilling actually going on-the accoutrements of the rank and file

glittering in the sun like silver. It was thought and always said by my

uncle Job, sergeant of foot (who used to know all about these matters),

that Bonaparte meant to cross with oars on a calm night. The grand query

with us was, Where would my gentleman land? Many of the common people

thought it would be at Dover; others, who knew how unlikely it was that

any skilful general would make a business of landing just where he was

expected, said he'd go either east into the River Thames, or west'ard to

some convenient place, most likely one of the little bays inside the

Isle of Portland, between the Beal and St. Alban's Head-and for choice

the three-quarter-round Cove, screened from every mortal eye, that

seemed made o' purpose, out by where we lived, and which I've climmed up

with two tubs of brandy across my shoulders on scores o' dark nights in

my younger days. Some had heard that a part o' the French fleet would

sail right round Scotland, and come up the Channel to a suitable haven.

However, there was much doubt upon the matter; and no wonder, for after-

years proved that Bonaparte himself could hardly make up his mind upon

that great and very particular point, where to land. His uncertainty

came about in this wise, that he could get no news as to where and how

our troops lay in waiting, and that his knowledge of possible places

where flat-bottomed boats might be quietly run ashore, and the men they

brought marshalled in order, was dim to the last degree. Being flat-

bottomed, they didn't require a harbour for unshipping their cargo of

men, but a good shelving beach away from sight, and with a fair open

road toward London. How the question posed that great Corsican tyrant

(as we used to call him), what pains he took to settle it, and, above

all, what a risk he ran on one particular night in trying to do so, were

known only to one man here and there; and certainly to no maker of

newspapers or printer of books, or my account o't would not have had so

many heads shaken over it as it has by gentry who only believe what they

see in printed lines.

'The flocks my father had charge of fed all about the downs near our

house, overlooking the sea and shore each way for miles. In winter and

early spring father was up a deal at nights, watching and tending the

lambing. Often he'd go to bed early, and turn out at twelve or one; and

on the other hand, he'd sometimes stay up till twelve or one, and then

turn in to bed. As soon as I was old enough I used to help him, mostly

in the way of keeping an eye upon the ewes while he was gone home to

rest. This is what I was doing in a particular month in either the year

four or five-I can't certainly fix which, but it was long before I was

took away from the sheepkeeping to be bound prentice to a trade. Every

night at that time I was at the fold, about half a mile, or it may be a

little more, from our cottage, and no living thing at all with me but

the ewes and young lambs. Afeard? No; I was never afeard of being alone

at these times; for I had been reared in such an out-step place that the

lack o' human beings at night made me less fearful than the sight of

'em. Directly I saw a man's shape after dark in a lonely place I was

frightened out of my senses.

'One day in that month we were surprised by a visit from my uncle Job,

the sergeant in the Sixty-first foot, then in camp on the downs above

King George's watering-place, several miles to the west yonder. Uncle

Job dropped in about dusk, and went up with my father to the fold for an

hour or two. Then he came home, had a drop to drink from the tub of

sperrits that the smugglers kept us in for housing their liquor when

they'd made a run, and for burning 'em off when there was danger. After

that he stretched himself out on the settle to sleep. I went to bed: at

one o'clock father came home, and waking me to go and take his place,

according to custom, went to bed himself. On my way out of the house I

passed Uncle Job on the settle. He opened his eyes, and upon my telling

him where I was going he said it was a shame that such a youngster as I

should go up there all alone; and when he had fastened up his stock and

waist-belt he set off along with me, taking a drop from the sperrit-tub

in a little flat bottle that stood in the corner-cupboard.

'By and by we drew up to the fold, saw that all was right, and then, to

keep ourselves warm, curled up in a heap of straw that lay inside the

thatched hurdles we had set up to break the stroke of the wind when

there was any. To-night, however, there was none. It was one of those

very still nights when, if you stand on the high hills anywhere within

two or three miles of the sea, you can hear the rise and fall of the

tide along the shore, coming and going every few moments like a sort of

great snore of the sleeping world. Over the lower ground there was a bit

of a mist, but on the hill where we lay the air was clear, and the moon,

then in her last quarter, flung a fairly good light on the grass and

scattered straw.

'While we lay there Uncle Job amused me by telling me strange stories of

the wars he had served in and the wounds he had got. He had already

fought the French in the Low Countries, and hoped to fight 'em again.

His stories lasted so long that at last I was hardly sure that I was not

a soldier myself, and had seen such service as he told of. The wonders

of his tales quite bewildered my mind, till I fell asleep and dreamed of

battle, smoke, and flying soldiers, all of a kind with the doings he had

been bringing up to me.

'How long my nap lasted I am not prepared to say. But some faint sounds

over and above the rustle of the ewes in the straw, the bleat of the

lambs, and the tinkle of the sheep-bell brought me to my waking senses.

Uncle Job was still beside me; but he too had fallen asleep. I looked

out from the straw, and saw what it was that had aroused me. Two men, in

boat-cloaks, cocked hats, and swords, stood by the hurdles about twenty

yards off.

'I turned my ear thitherward to catch what they were saying, but though

I heard every word o't, not one did I understand. They spoke in a tongue

that was not ours-in French, as I afterward found. But if I could not

gain the meaning of a word, I was shrewd boy enough to find out a deal

of the talkers' business. By the light o' the moon I could see that one

of 'em carried a roll of paper in his hand, while every moment he spoke

quick to his comrade, and pointed right and left with the other hand to

spots along the shore. There was no doubt that he was explaining to the

second gentleman the shapes and features of the coast. What happened

soon after made this still clearer to me.

'All this time I had not waked Uncle Job, but now I began to be afeared

that they might light upon us, because uncle breathed so heavily

through's nose. I put my mouth to his ear and whispered, "Uncle Job."

'"What is it, my boy?" he said, just as if he hadn't been asleep at all.

'"Hush!" says I. "Two French generals-"

'"French?" says he.

'"Yes," says I. "Come to see where to land their army!"

'I pointed 'em out; but I could say no more, for the pair were coming at

that moment much nearer to where we lay. As soon as they got as near as

eight or ten yards, the officer with a roll in his hand stooped down to

a slanting hurdle, unfastened his roll upon it, and spread it out. Then

suddenly he sprung a dark lantern open on the paper, and showed it to be

a map.

'"What be they looking at?" I whispered to Uncle Job.

'"A chart of the Channel," says the sergeant (knowing about such

things).

'The other French officer now stooped likewise, and over the map they

had a long consultation, as they pointed here and there on the paper,

and then hither and thither at places along the shore beneath us. I

noticed that the manner of one officer was very respectful toward the

other, who seemed much his superior, the second in rank calling him by a

sort of title that I did not know the sense of. The head one, on the

other hand, was quite familiar with his friend, and more than once

clapped him on the shoulder.

'Uncle Job had watched as well as I, but though the map had been in the

lantern-light, their faces had always been in shade. But when they rose

from stooping over the chart the light flashed upward, and fell smart

upon one of 'em's features. No sooner had this happened than Uncle Job

gasped, and sank down as if he'd been in a fit.

'"What is it-what is it, Uncle Job?" said I.

'"O good God!" says he, under the straw.

'"What?" says I.

'"Boney!" he groaned out.

'"Who?" says I.

'"Bonaparty," he said. "The Corsican ogre. O that I had got but my new-

flinted firelock, that there man should die! But I haven't got my new-

flinted firelock, and that there man must live. So lie low, as you value

your life!"

'I did lie low, as you mid suppose. But I couldn't help peeping. And

then I too, lad as I was, knew that it was the face of Bonaparte. Not

know Boney? I should think I did know Boney. I should have known him by

half the light o' that lantern. If I had seen a picture of his features

once, I had seen it a hundred times. There was his bullet head, his

short neck, his round yaller cheeks and chin, his gloomy face, and his

great glowing eyes. He took off his hat to blow himself a bit, and there

was the forelock in the middle of his forehead, as in all the draughts

of him. In moving, his cloak fell a little open, and I could see for a

moment his white-fronted jacket and one of his epaulets.

'But none of this lasted long. In a minute he and his general had rolled

up the map, shut the lantern, and turned to go down toward the shore.

'Then Uncle Job came to himself a bit. "Slipped across in the night-

time to see how to put his men ashore," he said. "The like o' that man's

coolness eyes will never again see! Nephew, I must act in this, and

immediate, or England's lost!"

'When they were over the brow, we crope out, and went some little way to

look after them. Half-way down they were joined by two others, and six

or seven minutes brought them to the shore. Then, from behind a rock, a

boat came out into the weak moonlight of the Cove, and they jumped in;

it put off instantly, and vanished in a few minutes between the two

rocks that stand at the mouth of the Cove as we all know. We climmed

back to where we had been before, and I could see, a little way out, a

larger vessel, though still not very large. The little boat drew up

alongside, was made fast at the stern as I suppose, for the largest

sailed away, and we saw no more.

'My uncle Job told his officers as soon as he got back to camp; but what

they thought of it I never heard-neither did he. Boney's army never

came, and a good job for me; for the Cove below my father's house was

where he meant to land, as this secret visit showed. We coast-folk

should have been cut down one and all, and I should not have sat here to

tell this tale.'

We who listened to old Selby that night have been familiar with his

simple grave-stone for these ten years past. Thanks to the incredulity

of the age his tale has been seldom repeated. But if anything short of

the direct testimony of his own eyes could persuade an auditor that

Bonaparte had examined these shores for himself with a view to a

practicable landing-place, it would have been Solomon Selby's manner of

narrating the adventure which befell him on the down.

Christmas 1882.

A FEW CRUSTED CHARACTERS

It is a Saturday afternoon of blue and yellow autumn time, and the scene

is the High Street of a well-known market-town. A large carrier's van

stands in the quadrangular fore-court of the White Hart Inn, upon the

sides of its spacious tilt being painted, in weather-beaten letters:

'Burthen, Carrier to Longpuddle.' These vans, so numerous hereabout, are

a respectable, if somewhat lumbering, class of conveyance, much resorted

to by decent travellers not overstocked with money, the better among

them roughly corresponding to the old French diligences.

The present one is timed to leave the town at four in the afternoon

precisely, and it is now half-past three by the clock in the turret at

the top of the street. In a few seconds errand-boys from the shops begin

to arrive with packages, which they fling into the vehicle, and turn

away whistling, and care for the packages no more. At twenty minutes to

four an elderly woman places her basket upon the shafts, slowly mounts,

takes up a seat inside, and folds her hands and her lips. She has

secured her corner for the journey, though there is as yet no sign of a

horse being put in, nor of a carrier. At the three-quarters, two other

women arrive, in whom the first recognizes the postmistress of Upper

Longpuddle and the registrar's wife, they recognizing her as the aged

groceress of the same village. At five minutes to the hour there

approach Mr. Profitt, the schoolmaster, in a soft felt hat, and

Christopher Twink, the master-thatcher; and as the hour strikes there

rapidly drop in the parish clerk and his wife, the seedsman and his aged

father, the registrar; also Mr. Day, the world-ignored local landscape-

painter, an elderly man who resides in his native place, and has never

sold a picture outside it, though his pretensions to art have been nobly

supported by his fellow-villagers, whose confidence in his genius has

been as remarkable as the outer neglect of it, leading them to buy his

paintings so extensively (at the price of a few shillings each, it is

true) that every dwelling in the parish exhibits three or four of those

admired productions on its walls.

Burthen, the carrier, is by this time seen bustling round the vehicle;

the horses are put in, the proprietor arranges the reins and springs up

into his seat as if he were used to it-which he is.

'Is everybody here?' he asks preparatorily over his shoulder to the

passengers within.

As those who were not there did not reply in the negative the muster was

assumed to be complete, and after a few hitches and hindrances the van

with its human freight was got under way. It jogged on at an easy pace

till it reached the bridge which formed the last outpost of the town.

The carrier pulled up suddenly.

'Bless my soul!' he said, 'I've forgot the curate!'

All who could do so gazed from the little back window of the van, but

the curate was not in sight.

'Now I wonder where that there man is?' continued the carrier.

'Poor man, he ought to have a living at his time of life.'

'And he ought to be punctual,' said the carrier. '"Four o'clock sharp is

my time for starting," I said to 'en. And he said, "I'll be there." Now

he's not here, and as a serious old church-minister he ought to be as

good as his word. Perhaps Mr. Flaxton knows, being in the same line of

life?' He turned to the parish clerk.

'I was talking an immense deal with him, that's true, half an hour ago,'

replied that ecclesiastic, as one of whom it was no erroneous

supposition that he should be on intimate terms with another of the

cloth. 'But he didn't say he would be late.'

The discussion was cut off by the appearance round the corner of the van

of rays from the curate's spectacles, followed hastily by his face and a

few white whiskers, and the swinging tails of his long gaunt coat.

Nobody reproached him, seeing how he was reproaching himself; and he

entered breathlessly and took his seat.

'Now be we all here?' said the carrier again. They started a second

time, and moved on till they were about three hundred yards out of the

town, and had nearly reached the second bridge, behind which, as every

native remembers, the road takes a turn and travellers by this highway

disappear finally from the view of gazing burghers.

'Well, as I'm alive!' cried the postmistress from the interior of the

conveyance, peering through the little square back-window along the road

townward.

'What?' said the carrier.

'A man hailing us!'

Another sudden stoppage. 'Somebody else?' the carrier asked.

'Ay, sure!' All waited silently, while those who could gaze out did so.

'Now, who can that be?' Burthen continued. 'I just put it to ye,

neighbours, can any man keep time with such hindrances? Bain't we full

a'ready? Who in the world can the man be?'

'He's a sort of gentleman,' said the schoolmaster, his position

commanding the road more comfortably than that of his comrades.

The stranger, who had been holding up his umbrella to attract their

notice, was walking forward leisurely enough, now that he found, by

their stopping, that it had been secured. His clothes were decidedly not

of a local cut, though it was difficult to point out any particular mark

of difference. In his left hand he carried a small leather travelling

bag. As soon as he had overtaken the van he glanced at the inscription

on its side, as if to assure himself that he had hailed the right

conveyance, and asked if they had room.

The carrier replied that though they were pretty well laden he supposed

they could carry one more, whereupon the stranger mounted, and took the

seat cleared for him within. And then the horses made another move, this

time for good, and swung along with their burden of fourteen souls all

told.

'You bain't one of these parts, sir?' said the carrier. 'I could tell

that as far as I could see 'ee.'

'Yes, I am one of these parts,' said the stranger.

'Oh? H'm.'

The silence which followed seemed to imply a doubt of the truth of the

new-comer's assertion. 'I was speaking of Upper Longpuddle more

particular,' continued the carrier hardily, 'and I think I know most

faces of that valley.'

'I was born at Longpuddle, and nursed at Longpuddle, and my father and

grandfather before me,' said the passenger quietly.

'Why, to be sure,' said the aged groceress in the background, 'it isn't

John Lackland's son-never-it can't be-he who went to foreign parts five-

and-thirty years ago with his wife and family? Yet-what do I hear?-

that's his father's voice!'

'That's the man,' replied the stranger. 'John Lackland was my father,

and I am John Lackland's son. Five-and-thirty years ago, when I was a

boy of eleven, my parents emigrated across the seas, taking me and my

sister with them. Kytes's boy Tony was the one who drove us and our

belongings to Casterbridge on the morning we left; and his was the last

Longpuddle face I saw. We sailed the same week across the ocean, and

there we've been ever since, and there I've left those I went with-all

three.'

'Alive or dead?'

'Dead,' he replied in a low voice. 'And I have come back to the old

place, having nourished a thought-not a definite intention, but just a

thought-that I should like to return here in a year or two, to spend the

remainder of my days.'

'Married man, Mr. Lackland?'

'No.'

'And have the world used 'ee well, sir-or rather John, knowing 'ee as a

child? In these rich new countries that we hear of so much, you've got

rich with the rest?'

'I am not very rich,' Mr. Lackland said. 'Even in new countries, you

know, there are failures. The race is not always to the swift, nor the

battle to the strong; and even if it sometimes is, you may be neither

swift nor strong. However, that's enough about me. Now, having answered

your inquiries, you must answer mine; for being in London, I have come

down here entirely to discover what Longpuddle is looking like, and who

are living there. That was why I preferred a seat in your van to hiring

a carriage for driving across.'

'Well, as for Longpuddle, we rub on there much as usual. Old figures

have dropped out o' their frames, so to speak it, and new ones have been

put in their places. You mentioned Tony Kytes as having been the one to

drive your family and your goods to Casterbridge in his father's waggon

when you left. Tony is, I believe, living still, but not at Longpuddle.

He went away and settled at Lewgate, near Mellstock, after his marriage.

Ah, Tony was a sort o' man!'

'His character had hardly come out when I knew him.'

'No. But 'twas well enough, as far as that goes-except as to women. I

shall never forget his courting-never!'

The returned villager waited silently, and the carrier went on:-

TONY KYTES, THE ARCH-DECEIVER

'I shall never forget Tony's face. 'Twas a little, round, firm, tight

face, with a seam here and there left by the smallpox, but not enough to

hurt his looks in a woman's eye, though he'd had it badish when he was a

boy. So very serious looking and unsmiling 'a was, that young man, that

it really seemed as if he couldn't laugh at all without great pain to

his conscience. He looked very hard at a small speck in your eye when

talking to 'ee. And there was no more sign of a whisker or beard on Tony

Kytes's face than on the palm of my hand. He used to sing "The Tailor's

Breeches" with a religious manner, as if it were a hymn:-

'"O the petticoats went off, and the breeches they went on!"

and all the rest of the scandalous stuff. He was quite the women's

favourite, and in return for their likings he loved 'em in shoals.

'But in course of time Tony got fixed down to one in particular, Milly

Richards, a nice, light, small, tender little thing; and it was soon

said that they were engaged to be married. One Saturday he had been to

market to do business for his father, and was driving home the waggon in

the afternoon. When he reached the foot of the very hill we shall be

going over in ten minutes who should he see waiting for him at the top

but Unity Sallet, a handsome girl, one of the young women he'd been very

tender toward before he'd got engaged to Milly.

'As soon as Tony came up to her she said, "My dear Tony, will you give

me a lift home?"

'"That I will, darling," said Tony. "You don't suppose I could refuse

'ee?"

'She smiled a smile, and up she hopped, and on drove Tony.

'"Tony," she says, in a sort of tender chide, "why did ye desert me for

that other one? In what is she better than I? I should have made 'ee a

finer wife, and a more loving one too. 'Tisn't girls that are so easily

won at first that are the best. Think how long we've known each other-

ever since we were children almost-now haven't we, Tony?"

'"Yes, that we have," says Tony, a-struck with the truth o't.

'"And you've never seen anything in me to complain of, have ye, Tony?

Now tell the truth to me?"

'"I never have, upon my life," says Tony.

'"And-can you say I'm not pretty, Tony? Now look at me!"

'He let his eyes light upon her for a long while. "I really can't," says

he. "In fact, I never knowed you was so pretty before!"

'"Prettier than she?"

'What Tony would have said to that nobody knows, for before he could

speak, what should he see ahead, over the hedge past the turning, but a

feather he knew well-the feather in Milly's hat-she to whom he had been

thinking of putting the question as to giving out the banns that very

week.

'"Unity," says he, as mild as he could, "here's Milly coming. Now I

shall catch it mightily if she sees 'ee riding here with me; and if you

get down she'll be turning the corner in a moment, and, seeing 'ee in

the road, she'll know we've been coming on together. Now, dearest Unity,

will ye, to avoid all unpleasantness, which I know ye can't bear any

more than I, will ye lie down in the back part of the waggon, and let me

cover you over with the tarpaulin till Milly has passed? It will all be

done in a minute. Do!-and I'll think over what we've said; and perhaps I

shall put a loving question to you after all, instead of to Milly.

'Tisn't true that it is all settled between her and me."

'Well, Unity Sallet agreed, and lay down at the back end of the waggon,

and Tony covered her over, so that the waggon seemed to be empty but for

the loose tarpaulin; and then he drove on to meet Milly.

'"My dear Tony!" cries Milly, looking up with a little pout at him as he

came near. "How long you've been coming home! Just as if I didn't live

at Upper Longpuddle at all! And I've come to meet you as you asked me to

do, and to ride back with you, and talk over our future home-since you

asked me, and I promised. But I shouldn't have come else, Mr. Tony!"

'"Ay, my dear, I did ask ye-to be sure I did, now I think of it-but I

had quite forgot it. To ride back with me, did you say, dear Milly?"

'"Well, of course! What can I do else? Surely you don't want me to walk,

now I've come all this way?"

'"O no, no! I was thinking you might be going on to town to meet your

mother. I saw her there-and she looked as if she might be expecting

'ee."

'"O no; she's just home. She came across the fields, and so got back

before you."

'"Ah! I didn't know that," says Tony. And there was no help for it but

to take her up beside him.

'They talked on very pleasantly, and looked at the trees, and beasts,

and birds, and insects, and at the ploughmen at work in the fields, till

presently who should they see looking out of the upper window of a house

that stood beside the road they were following, but Hannah Jolliver,

another young beauty of the place at that time, and the very first woman

that Tony had fallen in love with-before Milly and before Unity, in

fact-the one that he had almost arranged to marry instead of Milly. She

was a much more dashing girl than Milly Richards, though he'd not

thought much of her of late. The house Hannah was looking from was her

aunt's.

'"My dear Milly-my coming wife, as I may call 'ee," says Tony in his

modest way, and not so loud that Unity could overhear, "I see a young

woman alooking out of window, who I think may accost me. The fact is,

Milly, she had a notion that I was wishing to marry her, and since she's

discovered I've promised another, and a prettier than she, I'm rather

afeard of her temper if she sees us together. Now, Milly, would you do

me a favour-my coming wife, as I may say?"

'"Certainly, dearest Tony," says she.

'"Then would ye creep under the empty sacks just here in the front of

the waggon, and hide there out of sight till we've passed the house? She

hasn't seen us yet. You see, we ought to live in peace and good- will

since 'tis almost Christmas, and 'twill prevent angry passions rising,

which we always should do."

'"I don't mind, to oblige you, Tony," Milly said; and though she didn't

care much about doing it, she crept under, and crouched down just behind

the seat, Unity being snug at the other end. So they drove on till they

got near the road-side cottage. Hannah had soon seen him coming, and

waited at the window, looking down upon him. She tossed her head a

little disdainful and smiled off-hand.

'"Well, aren't you going to be civil enough to ask me to ride home with

you!" she says, seeing that he was for driving past with a nod and a

smile.

'"Ah, to be sure! What was I thinking of?" said Tony, in a flutter. "But

you seem as if you was staying at your aunt's?"

'"No, I am not," she said. "Don't you see I have my bonnet and jacket

on? I have only called to see her on my way home. How can you be so

stupid, Tony?"

'"In that case-ah-of course you must come along wi' me," says Tony,

feeling a dim sort of sweat rising up inside his clothes. And he reined

in the horse, and waited till she'd come downstairs, and then helped her

up beside him. He drove on again, his face as long as a face that was a

round one by nature well could be.

'Hannah looked round sideways into his eyes. "This is nice, isn't it,

Tony?" she says. "I like riding with you."

'Tony looked back into her eyes. "And I with you," he said after a

while. In short, having considered her, he warmed up, and the more he

looked at her the more he liked her, till he couldn't for the life of

him think why he had ever said a word about marriage to Milly or Unity

while Hannah Jolliver was in question. So they sat a little closer and

closer, their feet upon the foot-board and their shoulders touching, and

Tony thought over and over again how handsome Hannah was. He spoke

tenderer and tenderer, and called her "dear Hannah" in a whisper at

last.

'"You've settled it with Milly by this time, I suppose," said she.

'"N-no, not exactly."

'"What? How low you talk, Tony."

'"Yes-I've a kind of hoarseness. I said, not exactly."

'"I suppose you mean to?"

'"Well, as to that-" His eyes rested on her face, and hers on his. He

wondered how he could have been such a fool as not to follow up Hannah.

"My sweet Hannah!" he bursts out, taking her hand, not being really able

to help it, and forgetting Milly and Unity, and all the world besides.

"Settled it? I don't think I have!"

'"Hark!" says Hannah.

'"What?" says Tony, letting go her hand.

'"Surely I heard a sort of little screaming squeak under those sacks?

Why, you've been carrying corn, and there's mice in this waggon, I

declare!" She began to haul up the tails of her gown.

'"Oh no; 'tis the axle," said Tony in an assuring way. "It do go like

that sometimes in dry weather."

'"Perhaps it was . . . Well, now, to be quite honest, dear Tony, do you

like her better than me? Because-because, although I've held off so

independent, I'll own at last that I do like 'ee, Tony, to tell the

truth; and I wouldn't say no if you asked me-you know what."

'Tony was so won over by this pretty offering mood of a girl who had

been quite the reverse (Hannah had a backward way with her at times, if

you can mind) that he just glanced behind, and then whispered very soft,

"I haven't quite promised her, and I think I can get out of it, and ask

you that question you speak of."

'"Throw over Milly?-all to marry me! How delightful!" broke out Hannah,

quite loud, clapping her hands.

'At this there was a real squeak-an angry, spiteful squeak, and

afterward a long moan, as if something had broke its heart, and a

movement of the empty sacks.

'"Something's there!" said Hannah, starting up.

'"It's nothing, really," says Tony in a soothing voice, and praying

inwardly for a way out of this. "I wouldn't tell 'ee at first, because I

wouldn't frighten 'ee. But, Hannah, I've really a couple of ferrets in a

bag under there, for rabbiting, and they quarrel sometimes. I don't wish

it knowed, as 'twould be called poaching. Oh, they can't get out, bless

ye-you are quite safe! And-and-what a fine day it is, isn't it, Hannah,

for this time of year? Be you going to market next Saturday? How is your

aunt now?" And so on, says Tony, to keep her from talking any more about

love in Milly's hearing.

'But he found his work cut out for him, and wondering again how he

should get out of this ticklish business, he looked about for a chance.

Nearing home he saw his father in a field not far off, holding up his

hand as if he wished to speak to Tony.

'"Would you mind taking the reins a moment, Hannah," he said, much

relieved, "while I go and find out what father wants?"

'She consented, and away he hastened into the field, only too glad to

get breathing time. He found that his father was looking at him with

rather a stern eye.

'"Come, come, Tony," says old Mr. Kytes, as soon as his son was

alongside him, "this won't do, you know."

'"What?" says Tony.

'"Why, if you mean to marry Milly Richards, do it, and there's an end

o't. But don't go driving about the country with Jolliver's daughter and

making a scandal. I won't have such things done."

'"I only asked her-that is, she asked me, to ride home."

'"She? Why, now, if it had been Milly, 'twould have been quite proper;

but you and Hannah Jolliver going about by yourselves-"

'"Milly's there too, father."

'"Milly? Where?"

'"Under the corn-sacks! Yes, the truth is, father, I've got rather into

a nunny-watch, I'm afeard! Unity Sallet is there too-yes, at the other

end, under the tarpaulin. All three are in that waggon, and what to do

with 'em I know no more than the dead! The best plan is, as I'm

thinking, to speak out loud and plain to one of 'em before the rest, and

that will settle it; not but what 'twill cause 'em to kick up a bit of a

miff, for certain. Now which would you marry, father, if you was in my

place?"

'"Whichever of 'em did not ask to ride with thee."

'"That was Milly, I'm bound to say, as she only mounted by my

invitation. But Milly-"

"Then stick to Milly, she's the best . . . But look at that!"