CHAPTER IX.

DICK CALLS AT THE SCHOOL

The early days of the year drew on, and Fancy, having spent the holiday

weeks at home, returned again to Mellstock.

Every spare minute of the week following her return was used by Dick in

accidentally passing the schoolhouse in his journeys about the

neighbourhood; but not once did she make herself visible. A

handkerchief belonging to her had been providentially found by his

mother in clearing the rooms the day after that of the dance; and by

much contrivance Dick got it handed over to him, to leave with her at

any time he should be near the school after her return. But he delayed

taking the extreme measure of calling with it lest, had she really no

sentiment of interest in him, it might be regarded as a slightly absurd

errand, the reason guessed; and the sense of the ludicrous, which was

rather keen in her, do his dignity considerable injury in her eyes; and

what she thought of him, even apart from the question of her loving,

was all the world to him now.

But the hour came when the patience of love at twenty-one could endure

no longer. One Saturday he approached the school with a mild air of

indifference, and had the satisfaction of seeing the object of his

quest at the further end of her garden, trying, by the aid of a spade

and gloves, to root a bramble that had intruded itself there.

He disguised his feelings from some suspicious-looking cottage-windows

opposite by endeavouring to appear like a man in a great hurry of

business, who wished to leave the handkerchief and have done with such

trifling errands.

This endeavour signally failed; for on approaching the gate he found it

locked to keep the children, who were playing ‘cross-dadder’ in the

front, from running into her private grounds.

She did not see him; and he could only think of one thing to be done,

which was to shout her name.

“Miss Day!”

The words were uttered with a jerk and a look meant to imply to the

cottages opposite that he was now simply one who liked shouting as a

pleasant way of passing his time, without any reference to persons in

gardens. The name died away, and the unconscious Miss Day continued

digging and pulling as before.

He screwed himself up to enduring the cottage-windows yet more

stoically, and shouted again. Fancy took no notice whatever.

He shouted the third time, with desperate vehemence, turning suddenly

about and retiring a little distance, as if it were by no means for his

own pleasure that he had come.

This time she heard him, came down the garden, and entered the school

at the back. Footsteps echoed across the interior, the door opened, and

three-quarters of the blooming young schoolmistress’s face and figure

stood revealed before him; a slice on her left-hand side being cut off

by the edge of the door. Having surveyed and recognized him, she came

to the gate.

At sight of him had the pink of her cheeks increased, lessened, or did

it continue to cover its normal area of ground? It was a question

meditated several hundreds of times by her visitor in after-hours—the

meditation, after wearying involutions, always ending in one way, that

it was impossible to say.

“Your handkerchief: Miss Day: I called with.” He held it out

spasmodically and awkwardly. “Mother found it: under a chair.”

“O, thank you very much for bringing it, Mr. Dewy. I couldn’t think

where I had dropped it.”

Now Dick, not being an experienced lover—indeed, never before having

been engaged in the practice of love-making at all, except in a small

schoolboy way—could not take advantage of the situation; and out came

the blunder, which afterwards cost him so many bitter moments and a

sleepless night:-

“Good morning, Miss Day.”

“Good morning, Mr. Dewy.”

The gate was closed; she was gone; and Dick was standing outside,

unchanged in his condition from what he had been before he called. Of

course the Angel was not to blame—a young woman living alone in a house

could not ask him indoors unless she had known him better—he should

have kept her outside before floundering into that fatal farewell. He

wished that before he called he had realized more fully than he did the

pleasure of being about to call; and turned away.

PART THE SECOND—SPRING

CHAPTER I.

PASSING BY THE SCHOOL

It followed that, as the spring advanced, Dick walked abroad much more

frequently than had hitherto been usual with him, and was continually

finding that his nearest way to or from home lay by the road which

skirted the garden of the school. The first-fruits of his perseverance

were that, on turning the angle on the nineteenth journey by that

track, he saw Miss Fancy’s figure, clothed in a dark-gray dress,

looking from a high open window upon the crown of his hat. The friendly

greeting resulting from this rencounter was considered so valuable an

elixir that Dick passed still oftener; and by the time he had almost

trodden a little path under the fence where never a path was before, he

was rewarded with an actual meeting face to face on the open road

before her gate. This brought another meeting, and another, Fancy

faintly showing by her bearing that it was a pleasure to her of some

kind to see him there; but the sort of pleasure she derived, whether

exultation at the hope her exceeding fairness inspired, or the true

feeling which was alone Dick’s concern, he could not anyhow decide,

although he meditated on her every little movement for hours after it

was made.

CHAPTER II.

A MEETING OF THE QUIRE

It was the evening of a fine spring day. The descending sun appeared as

a nebulous blaze of amber light, its outline being lost in cloudy

masses hanging round it, like wild locks of hair.

The chief members of Mellstock parish choir were standing in a group in

front of Mr. Penny’s workshop in the lower village. They were all

brightly illuminated, and each was backed up by a shadow as long as a

steeple; the lowness of the source of light rendering the brims of

their hats of no use at all as a protection to the eyes.

Mr. Penny’s was the last house in that part of the parish, and stood in

a hollow by the roadside so that cart-wheels and horses’ legs were

about level with the sill of his shop-window. This was low and wide,

and was open from morning till evening, Mr. Penny himself being

invariably seen working inside, like a framed portrait of a shoemaker

by some modern Moroni. He sat facing the road, with a boot on his knees

and the awl in his hand, only looking up for a moment as he stretched

out his arms and bent forward at the pull, when his spectacles flashed

in the passer’s face with a shine of flat whiteness, and then returned

again to the boot as usual. Rows of lasts, small and large, stout and

slender, covered the wall which formed the background, in the extreme

shadow of which a kind of dummy was seen sitting, in the shape of an

apprentice with a string tied round his hair (probably to keep it out

of his eyes). He smiled at remarks that floated in from without, but

was never known to answer them in Mr. Penny’s presence. Outside the

window the upper-leather of a Wellington-boot was usually hung, pegged

to a board as if to dry. No sign was over his door; in fact—as with old

banks and mercantile houses—advertising in any shape was scorned, and

it would have been felt as beneath his dignity to paint up, for the

benefit of strangers, the name of an establishment whose trade came

solely by connection based on personal respect.

His visitors now came and stood on the outside of his window, sometimes

leaning against the sill, sometimes moving a pace or two backwards and

forwards in front of it. They talked with deliberate gesticulations to

Mr. Penny, enthroned in the shadow of the interior.

“I do like a man to stick to men who be in the same line o’ life—o’

Sundays, anyway—that I do so.”

“’Tis like all the doings of folk who don’t know what a day’s work is,

that’s what I say.”

“My belief is the man’s not to blame; ’tis _she—_she’s the bitter

weed!”

“No, not altogether. He’s a poor gawk-hammer. Look at his sermon

yesterday.”

“His sermon was well enough, a very good guessable sermon, only he

couldn’t put it into words and speak it. That’s all was the matter wi’

the sermon. He hadn’t been able to get it past his pen.”

“Well—ay, the sermon might have been good; for, ’tis true, the sermon

of Old Eccl’iastes himself lay in Eccl’iastes’s ink-bottle afore he got

it out.”

Mr. Penny, being in the act of drawing the last stitch tight, could

afford time to look up and throw in a word at this point.

“He’s no spouter—that must be said, ’a b’lieve.”

“’Tis a terrible muddle sometimes with the man, as far as spout do go,”

said Spinks.

“Well, we’ll say nothing about that,” the tranter answered; “for I

don’t believe ’twill make a penneth o’ difference to we poor martels

here or hereafter whether his sermons be good or bad, my sonnies.”

Mr. Penny made another hole with his awl, pushed in the thread, and

looked up and spoke again at the extension of arms.

“’Tis his goings-on, souls, that’s what it is.” He clenched his

features for an Herculean addition to the ordinary pull, and continued,

“The first thing he done when he came here was to be hot and strong

about church business.”

“True,” said Spinks; “that was the very first thing he done.”

Mr. Penny, having now been offered the ear of the assembly, accepted

it, ceased stitching, swallowed an unimportant quantity of air as if it

were a pill, and continued:

“The next thing he do do is to think about altering the church, until

he found ’twould be a matter o’ cost and what not, and then not to

think no more about it.”

“True: that was the next thing he done.”

“And the next thing was to tell the young chaps that they were not on

no account to put their hats in the christening font during service.”

“True.”

“And then ’twas this, and then ’twas that, and now ’tis—”

Words were not forcible enough to conclude the sentence, and Mr. Penny

gave a huge pull to signify the concluding word.

“Now ’tis to turn us out of the quire neck and crop,” said the tranter

after an interval of half a minute, not by way of explaining the pause

and pull, which had been quite understood, but as a means of keeping

the subject well before the meeting.

Mrs. Penny came to the door at this point in the discussion. Like all

good wives, however much she was inclined to play the Tory to her

husband’s Whiggism, and _vice versâ_, in times of peace, she coalesced

with him heartily enough in time of war.

“It must be owned he’s not all there,” she replied in a general way to

the fragments of talk she had heard from indoors. “Far below poor Mr.

Grinham” (the late vicar).

“Ay, there was this to be said for he, that you were quite sure he’d

never come mumbudgeting to see ye, just as you were in the middle of

your work, and put you out with his fuss and trouble about ye.”

“Never. But as for this new Mr. Maybold, though he mid be a very

well-intending party in that respect, he’s unbearable; for as to

sifting your cinders, scrubbing your floors, or emptying your slops,

why, you can’t do it. I assure you I’ve not been able to empt them for

several days, unless I throw ’em up the chimley or out of winder; for

as sure as the sun you meet him at the door, coming to ask how you are,

and ’tis such a confusing thing to meet a gentleman at the door when ye

are in the mess o’ washing.”

“’Tis only for want of knowing better, poor gentleman,” said the

tranter. “His meaning’s good enough. Ay, your pa’son comes by fate:

’tis heads or tails, like pitch-halfpenny, and no choosing; so we must

take en as he is, my sonnies, and thank God he’s no worse, I suppose.”

“I fancy I’ve seen him look across at Miss Day in a warmer way than

Christianity asked for,” said Mrs. Penny musingly; “but I don’t quite

like to say it.”

“O no; there’s nothing in that,” said grandfather William.

“If there’s nothing, we shall see nothing,” Mrs. Penny replied, in the

tone of a woman who might possibly have private opinions still.

“Ah, Mr. Grinham was the man!” said Bowman. “Why, he never troubled us

wi’ a visit from year’s end to year’s end. You might go anywhere, do

anything: you’d be sure never to see him.”

“Yes, he was a right sensible pa’son,” said Michael. “He never entered

our door but once in his life, and that was to tell my poor wife—ay,

poor soul, dead and gone now, as we all shall!—that as she was such a’

old aged person, and lived so far from the church, he didn’t at all

expect her to come any more to the service.”

“And ’a was a very jinerous gentleman about choosing the psalms and

hymns o’ Sundays. ‘Confound ye,’ says he, ‘blare and scrape what ye

will, but don’t bother me!’”

“And he was a very honourable man in not wanting any of us to come and

hear him if we were all on-end for a jaunt or spree, or to bring the

babies to be christened if they were inclined to squalling. There’s

good in a man’s not putting a parish to unnecessary trouble.”

“And there’s this here man never letting us have a bit o’ peace; but

keeping on about being good and upright till ’tis carried to such a

pitch as I never see the like afore nor since!”

“No sooner had he got here than he found the font wouldn’t hold water,

as it hadn’t for years off and on; and when I told him that Mr. Grinham

never minded it, but used to spet upon his vinger and christen ’em just

as well, ’a said, ‘Good Heavens! Send for a workman immediate. What

place have I come to!’ Which was no compliment to us, come to that.”

“Still, for my part,” said old William, “though he’s arrayed against

us, I like the hearty borussnorus ways of the new pa’son.”

“You, ready to die for the quire,” said Bowman reproachfully, “to stick

up for the quire’s enemy, William!”

“Nobody will feel the loss of our church-work so much as I,” said the

old man firmly; “that you d’all know. I’ve a-been in the quire man and

boy ever since I was a chiel of eleven. But for all that ’tisn’t in me

to call the man a bad man, because I truly and sincerely believe en to

be a good young feller.”

Some of the youthful sparkle that used to reside there animated

William’s eye as he uttered the words, and a certain nobility of aspect

was also imparted to him by the setting sun, which gave him a Titanic

shadow at least thirty feet in length, stretching away to the east in

outlines of imposing magnitude, his head finally terminating upon the

trunk of a grand old oak-tree.

“Mayble’s a hearty feller enough,” the tranter replied, “and will spak

to you be you dirty or be you clane. The first time I met en was in a

drong, and though ’a didn’t know me no more than the dead, ’a passed

the time of day. ‘D’ye do?’ he said, says he, nodding his head. ‘A fine

day.’ Then the second time I met en was full-buff in town street, when

my breeches were tore into a long strent by getting through a copse of

thorns and brimbles for a short cut home-along; and not wanting to

disgrace the man by spaking in that state, I fixed my eye on the

weathercock to let en pass me as a stranger. But no: ‘How d’ye do,

Reuben?’ says he, right hearty, and shook my hand. If I’d been dressed

in silver spangles from top to toe, the man couldn’t have been

civiller.”

At this moment Dick was seen coming up the village-street, and they

turned and watched him.

CHAPTER III.

A TURN IN THE DISCUSSION

“I’m afraid Dick’s a lost man,” said the tranter.

“What?—no!” said Mail, implying by his manner that it was a far

commoner thing for his ears to report what was not said than that his

judgment should be at fault.

“Ay,” said the tranter, still gazing at Dick’s unconscious advance. “I

don’t at all like what I see! There’s too many o’ them looks out of the

winder without noticing anything; too much shining of boots; too much

peeping round corners; too much looking at the clock; telling about

clever things _she_ did till you be sick of it; and then upon a hint to

that effect a horrible silence about her. I’ve walked the path once in

my life and know the country, neighbours; and Dick’s a lost man!” The

tranter turned a quarter round and smiled a smile of miserable satire

at the setting new moon, which happened to catch his eye.

The others became far too serious at this announcement to allow them to

speak; and they still regarded Dick in the distance.

“’Twas his mother’s fault,” the tranter continued, “in asking the young

woman to our party last Christmas. When I eyed the blue frock and light

heels o’ the maid, I had my thoughts directly. ‘God bless thee, Dicky

my sonny,’ I said to myself; ‘there’s a delusion for thee!’”

“They seemed to be rather distant in manner last Sunday, I thought?”

Mail tentatively observed, as became one who was not a member of the

family.

“Ay, that’s a part of the zickness. Distance belongs to it, slyness

belongs to it, queerest things on earth belongs to it! There, ’tmay as

well come early as late s’far as I know. The sooner begun, the sooner

over; for come it will.”

“The question I ask is,” said Mr. Spinks, connecting into one thread

the two subjects of discourse, as became a man learned in rhetoric, and

beating with his hand in a way which signified that the manner rather

than the matter of his speech was to be observed, “how did Mr. Maybold

know she could play the organ? You know we had it from her own lips, as

far as lips go, that she has never, first or last, breathed such a

thing to him; much less that she ever would play.”

In the midst of this puzzle Dick joined the party, and the news which

had caused such a convulsion among the ancient musicians was unfolded

to him. “Well,” he said, blushing at the allusion to Miss Day, “I know

by some words of hers that she has a particular wish not to play,

because she is a friend of ours; and how the alteration comes, I don’t

know.”

“Now, this is my plan,” said the tranter, reviving the spirit of the

discussion by the infusion of new ideas, as was his custom—“this is my

plan; if you don’t like it, no harm’s done. We all know one another

very well, don’t we, neighbours?”

That they knew one another very well was received as a statement which,

though familiar, should not be omitted in introductory speeches.

“Then I say this”—and the tranter in his emphasis slapped down his hand

on Mr. Spinks’s shoulder with a momentum of several pounds, upon which

Mr. Spinks tried to look not in the least startled—“I say that we all

move down-along straight as a line to Pa’son Mayble’s when the clock

has gone six to-morrow night. There we one and all stand in the

passage, then one or two of us go in and spak to en, man and man; and

say, ‘Pa’son Mayble, every tradesman d’like to have his own way in his

workshop, and Mellstock Church is yours. Instead of turning us out neck

and crop, let us stay on till Christmas, and we’ll gie way to the young

woman, Mr. Mayble, and make no more ado about it. And we shall always

be quite willing to touch our hats when we meet ye, Mr. Mayble, just as

before.’ That sounds very well? Hey?”

“Proper well, in faith, Reuben Dewy.”

“And we won’t sit down in his house; ’twould be looking too familiar

when only just reconciled?”

“No need at all to sit down. Just do our duty man and man, turn round,

and march out—he’ll think all the more of us for it.”

“I hardly think Leaf had better go wi’ us?” said Michael, turning to

Leaf and taking his measure from top to bottom by the eye. “He’s so

terrible silly that he might ruin the concern.”

“He don’t want to go much; do ye, Thomas Leaf?” said William.

“Hee-hee! no; I don’t want to. Only a teeny bit!”

“I be mortal afeard, Leaf, that you’ll never be able to tell how many

cuts d’take to sharpen a spar,” said Mail.

“I never had no head, never! that’s how it happened to happen,

hee-hee!”

They all assented to this, not with any sense of humiliating Leaf by

disparaging him after an open confession, but because it was an

accepted thing that Leaf didn’t in the least mind having no head, that

deficiency of his being an unimpassioned matter of parish history.

“But I can sing my treble!” continued Thomas Leaf, quite delighted at

being called a fool in such a friendly way; “I can sing my treble as

well as any maid, or married woman either, and better! And if Jim had

lived, I should have had a clever brother! To-morrow is poor Jim’s

birthday. He’d ha’ been twenty-six if he’d lived till to-morrow.”

“You always seem very sorry for Jim,” said old William musingly.

“Ah! I do. Such a stay to mother as he’d always ha’ been! She’d never

have had to work in her old age if he had continued strong, poor Jim!”

“What was his age when ’a died?”

“Four hours and twenty minutes, poor Jim. ’A was born as might be at

night; and ’a didn’t last as might be till the morning. No, ’a didn’t

last. Mother called en Jim on the day that would ha’ been his

christening day if he had lived; and she’s always thinking about en.

You see he died so very young.”

“Well, ’twas rather youthful,” said Michael.

“Now to my mind that woman is very romantical on the matter o’

children?” said the tranter, his eye sweeping his audience.

“Ah, well she mid be,” said Leaf. “She had twelve regular one after

another, and they all, except myself, died very young; either before

they was born or just afterwards.”

“Pore feller, too. I suppose th’st want to come wi’ us?” the tranter

murmured.

“Well, Leaf, you shall come wi’ us as yours is such a melancholy

family,” said old William rather sadly.

“I never see such a melancholy family as that afore in my life,” said

Reuben. “There’s Leaf’s mother, poor woman! Every morning I see her

eyes mooning out through the panes of glass like a pot-sick

winder-flower; and as Leaf sings a very high treble, and we don’t know

what we should do without en for upper G, we’ll let en come as a trate,

poor feller.”

“Ay, we’ll let en come, ’a b’lieve,” said Mr. Penny, looking up, as the

pull happened to be at that moment.

“Now,” continued the tranter, dispersing by a new tone of voice these

digressions about Leaf; “as to going to see the pa’son, one of us might

call and ask en his meaning, and ’twould be just as well done; but it

will add a bit of flourish to the cause if the quire waits on him as a

body. Then the great thing to mind is, not for any of our fellers to be

nervous; so before starting we’ll one and all come to my house and have

a rasher of bacon; then every man-jack het a pint of cider into his

inside; then we’ll warm up an extra drop wi’ some mead and a bit of

ginger; every one take a thimbleful—just a glimmer of a drop, mind ye,

no more, to finish off his inner man—and march off to Pa’son Mayble.

Why, sonnies, a man’s not himself till he is fortified wi’ a bit and a

drop? We shall be able to look any gentleman in the face then without

shrink or shame.”

Mail recovered from a deep meditation and downward glance into the

earth in time to give a cordial approval to this line of action, and

the meeting adjourned.

CHAPTER IV.

THE INTERVIEW WITH THE VICAR

At six o’clock the next day, the whole body of men in the choir emerged

from the tranter’s door, and advanced with a firm step down the lane.

This dignity of march gradually became obliterated as they went on, and

by the time they reached the hill behind the vicarage a faint

resemblance to a flock of sheep might have been discerned in the

venerable party. A word from the tranter, however, set them right

again; and as they descended the hill, the regular tramp, tramp, tramp

of the united feet was clearly audible from the vicarage garden. At the

opening of the gate there was another short interval of irregular

shuffling, caused by a rather peculiar habit the gate had, when swung

open quickly, of striking against the bank and slamming back into the

opener’s face.

“Now keep step again, will ye?” said the tranter. “It looks better, and

more becomes the high class of arrant which has brought us here.” Thus

they advanced to the door.

At Reuben’s ring the more modest of the group turned aside, adjusted

their hats, and looked critically at any shrub that happened to lie in

the line of vision; endeavouring thus to give a person who chanced to

look out of the windows the impression that their request, whatever it

was going to be, was rather a casual thought occurring whilst they were

inspecting the vicar’s shrubbery and grass-plot than a predetermined

thing. The tranter, who, coming frequently to the vicarage with

luggage, coals, firewood, etc., had none of the awe for its precincts

that filled the breasts of most of the others, fixed his eyes firmly on

the knocker during this interval of waiting. The knocker having no

characteristic worthy of notice, he relinquished it for a knot in one

of the door-panels, and studied the winding lines of the grain.

“O, sir, please, here’s Tranter Dewy, and old William Dewy, and young

Richard Dewy, O, and all the quire too, sir, except the boys, a-come to

see you!” said Mr. Maybold’s maid-servant to Mr. Maybold, the pupils of

her eyes dilating like circles in a pond.

“All the choir?” said the astonished vicar (who may be shortly

described as a good-looking young man with courageous eyes, timid

mouth, and neutral nose), abandoning his writing and looking at his

parlour-maid after speaking, like a man who fancied he had seen her

face before but couldn’t recollect where.

“And they looks very firm, and Tranter Dewy do turn neither to the

right hand nor to the left, but stares quite straight and solemn with

his mind made up!”

“O, all the choir,” repeated the vicar to himself, trying by that

simple device to trot out his thoughts on what the choir could come

for.

“Yes; every man-jack of ’em, as I be alive!” (The parlour-maid was

rather local in manner, having in fact been raised in the same

village.) “Really, sir, ’tis thoughted by many in town and country

that—”

“Town and country!—Heavens, I had no idea that I was public property in

this way!” said the vicar, his face acquiring a hue somewhere between

that of the rose and the peony. “Well, ‘It is thought in town and

country that—’”

“It is thought that you be going to get it hot and strong!—excusen my

incivility, sir.”

The vicar suddenly recalled to his recollection that he had long ago

settled it to be decidedly a mistake to encourage his servant Jane in

giving personal opinions. The servant Jane saw by the vicar’s face that

he recalled this fact to his mind; and removing her forehead from the

edge of the door, and rubbing away the indent that edge had made,

vanished into the passage as Mr. Maybold remarked, “Show them in,

Jane.”

A few minutes later a shuffling and jostling (reduced to as refined a

form as was compatible with the nature of shuffles and jostles) was

heard in the passage; then an earnest and prolonged wiping of shoes,

conveying the notion that volumes of mud had to be removed; but the

roads being so clean that not a particle of dirt appeared on the

choir’s boots (those of all the elder members being newly oiled, and

Dick’s brightly polished), this wiping might have been set down simply

as a desire to show that respectable men had no wish to take a mean

advantage of clean roads for curtailing proper ceremonies. Next there

came a powerful whisper from the same quarter:-

“Now stand stock-still there, my sonnies, one and all! And don’t make

no noise; and keep your backs close to the wall, that company may pass

in and out easy if they want to without squeezing through ye: and we

two are enough to go in.” . . . The voice was the tranter’s.

“I wish I could go in too and see the sight!” said a reedy voice—that

of Leaf.

“’Tis a pity Leaf is so terrible silly, or else he might,” said

another.

“I never in my life seed a quire go into a study to have it out about

the playing and singing,” pleaded Leaf; “and I should like to see it

just once!”

“Very well; we’ll let en come in,” said the tranter. “You’ll be like

chips in porridge, {1} Leaf—neither good nor hurt. All right, my sonny,

come along;” and immediately himself, old William, and Leaf appeared in

the room.

“We took the liberty to come and see ’ee, sir,” said Reuben, letting

his hat hang in his left hand, and touching with his right the brim of

an imaginary one on his head. “We’ve come to see ’ee, sir, man and man,

and no offence, I hope?”

“None at all,” said Mr. Maybold.

“This old aged man standing by my side is father; William Dewy by name,

sir.”

“Yes; I see it is,” said the vicar, nodding aside to old William, who

smiled.

“I thought you mightn’t know en without his bass-viol,” the tranter

apologized. “You see, he always wears his best clothes and his

bass-viol a-Sundays, and it do make such a difference in a’ old man’s

look.”

“And who’s that young man?” the vicar said.

“Tell the pa’son yer name,” said the tranter, turning to Leaf, who

stood with his elbows nailed back to a bookcase.

“Please, Thomas Leaf, your holiness!” said Leaf, trembling.

“I hope you’ll excuse his looks being so very thin,” continued the

tranter deprecatingly, turning to the vicar again. “But ’tisn’t his

fault, poor feller. He’s rather silly by nature, and could never get

fat; though he’s a’ excellent treble, and so we keep him on.”

“I never had no head, sir,” said Leaf, eagerly grasping at this

opportunity for being forgiven his existence.

“Ah, poor young man!” said Mr. Maybold.

“Bless you, he don’t mind it a bit, if you don’t, sir,” said the

tranter assuringly. “Do ye, Leaf?”

“Not I—not a morsel—hee, hee! I was afeard it mightn’t please your

holiness, sir, that’s all.”

The tranter, finding Leaf get on so very well through his negative

qualities, was tempted in a fit of generosity to advance him still

higher, by giving him credit for positive ones. “He’s very clever for a

silly chap, good-now, sir. You never knowed a young feller keep his

smock-frocks so clane; very honest too. His ghastly looks is all there

is against en, poor feller; but we can’t help our looks, you know,

sir.”

“True: we cannot. You live with your mother, I think, Leaf?”

The tranter looked at Leaf to express that the most friendly assistant

to his tongue could do no more for him now, and that he must be left to

his own resources.

“Yes, sir: a widder, sir. Ah, if brother Jim had lived she’d have had a

clever son to keep her without work!”

“Indeed! poor woman. Give her this half-crown. I’ll call and see your

mother.”

“Say, ‘Thank you, sir,’” the tranter whispered imperatively towards

Leaf.

“Thank you, sir!” said Leaf.

“That’s it, then; sit down, Leaf,” said Mr. Maybold.

“Y-yes, sir!”

The tranter cleared his throat after this accidental parenthesis about

Leaf, rectified his bodily position, and began his speech.

“Mr. Mayble,” he said, “I hope you’ll excuse my common way, but I

always like to look things in the face.”

Reuben made a point of fixing this sentence in the vicar’s mind by

gazing hard at him at the conclusion of it, and then out of the window.

Mr. Maybold and old William looked in the same direction, apparently

under the impression that the things’ faces alluded to were there

visible.

“What I have been thinking”—the tranter implied by this use of the past

tense that he was hardly so discourteous as to be positively thinking

it then—“is that the quire ought to be gie’d a little time, and not

done away wi’ till Christmas, as a fair thing between man and man. And,

Mr. Mayble, I hope you’ll excuse my common way?”

“I will, I will. Till Christmas,” the vicar murmured, stretching the

two words to a great length, as if the distance to Christmas might be

measured in that way. “Well, I want you all to understand that I have

no personal fault to find, and that I don’t wish to change the church

music by forcible means, or in a way which should hurt the feelings of

any parishioners. Why I have at last spoken definitely on the subject

is that a player has been brought under—I may say pressed upon—my

notice several times by one of the churchwardens. And as the organ I

brought with me is here waiting” (pointing to a cabinet-organ standing

in the study), “there is no reason for longer delay.”

“We made a mistake I suppose then, sir? But we understood the young

woman didn’t want to play particularly?” The tranter arranged his

countenance to signify that he did not want to be inquisitive in the

least.

“No, nor did she. Nor did I definitely wish her to just yet; for your

playing is very good. But, as I said, one of the churchwardens has been

so anxious for a change, that, as matters stand, I couldn’t

consistently refuse my consent.”

Now for some reason or other, the vicar at this point seemed to have an

idea that he had prevaricated; and as an honest vicar, it was a thing

he determined not to do. He corrected himself, blushing as he did so,

though why he should blush was not known to Reuben.

“Understand me rightly,” he said: “the church-warden proposed it to me,

but I had thought myself of getting—Miss Day to play.”

“Which churchwarden might that be who proposed her, sir?—excusing my

common way.” The tranter intimated by his tone that, so far from being

inquisitive, he did not even wish to ask a single question.

“Mr. Shiner, I believe.”

“Clk, my sonny!—beg your pardon, sir, that’s only a form of words of

mine, and slipped out accidental—he nourishes enmity against us for

some reason or another; perhaps because we played rather hard upon en

Christmas night. Anyhow ’tis certain sure that Mr. Shiner’s real love

for music of a particular kind isn’t his reason. He’ve no more ear than

that chair. But let that be.”

“I don’t think you should conclude that, because Mr. Shiner wants a

different music, he has any ill-feeling for you. I myself, I must own,

prefer organ-music to any other. I consider it most proper, and feel

justified in endeavouring to introduce it; but then, although other

music is better, I don’t say yours is not good.”

“Well then, Mr. Mayble, since death’s to be, we’ll die like men any day

you name (excusing my common way).”

Mr. Maybold bowed his head.

“All we thought was, that for us old ancient singers to be choked off

quiet at no time in particular, as now, in the Sundays after Easter,

would seem rather mean in the eyes of other parishes, sir. But if we

fell glorious with a bit of a flourish at Christmas, we should have a

respectable end, and not dwindle away at some nameless paltry

second-Sunday-after or Sunday-next-before something, that’s got no name

of his own.”

“Yes, yes, that’s reasonable; I own it’s reasonable.”

“You see, Mr. Mayble, we’ve got—do I keep you inconvenient long, sir?”

“No, no.”

“We’ve got our feelings—father there especially.”

The tranter, in his earnestness, had advanced his person to within six

inches of the vicar’s.

“Certainly, certainly!” said Mr. Maybold, retreating a little for

convenience of seeing. “You are all enthusiastic on the subject, and I

am all the more gratified to find you so. A Laodicean lukewarmness is

worse than wrongheadedness itself.”

“Exactly, sir. In fact now, Mr. Mayble,” Reuben continued, more

impressively, and advancing a little closer still to the vicar, “father

there is a perfect figure o’ wonder, in the way of being fond of

music!”

The vicar drew back a little further, the tranter suddenly also

standing back a foot or two, to throw open the view of his father, and

pointing to him at the same time.

Old William moved uneasily in the large chair, and with a minute smile

on the mere edge of his lips, for good-manners, said he was indeed very

fond of tunes.

“Now, you see exactly how it is,” Reuben continued, appealing to Mr.

Maybold’s sense of justice by looking sideways into his eyes. The vicar

seemed to see how it was so well that the gratified tranter walked up

to him again with even vehement eagerness, so that his

waistcoat-buttons almost rubbed against the vicar’s as he continued:

“As to father, if you or I, or any man or woman of the present

generation, at the time music is a-playing, was to shake your fist in

father’s face, as may be this way, and say, ‘Don’t you be delighted

with that music!’”—the tranter went back to where Leaf was sitting, and

held his fist so close to Leaf’s face that the latter pressed his head

back against the wall: “All right, Leaf, my sonny, I won’t hurt you;

’tis just to show my meaning to Mr. Mayble.—As I was saying, if you or

I, or any man, was to shake your fist in father’s face this way, and

say, ‘William, your life or your music!’ he’d say, ‘My life!’ Now

that’s father’s nature all over; and you see, sir, it must hurt the

feelings of a man of that kind for him and his bass-viol to be done

away wi’ neck and crop.”

The tranter went back to the vicar’s front and again looked earnestly

at his face.

“True, true, Dewy,” Mr. Maybold answered, trying to withdraw his head

and shoulders without moving his feet; but finding this impracticable,

edging back another inch. These frequent retreats had at last jammed

Mr. Maybold between his easy-chair and the edge of the table.

And at the moment of the announcement of the choir, Mr. Maybold had

just re-dipped the pen he was using; at their entry, instead of wiping

it, he had laid it on the table with the nib overhanging. At the last

retreat his coat-tails came in contact with the pen, and down it

rolled, first against the back of the chair, thence turning a

summersault into the seat, thence falling to the floor with a rattle.

The vicar stooped for his pen, and the tranter, wishing to show that,

however great their ecclesiastical differences, his mind was not so

small as to let this affect his social feelings, stooped also.

“And have you anything else you want to explain to me, Dewy?” said Mr.

Maybold from under the table.

“Nothing, sir. And, Mr. Mayble, you be not offended? I hope you see our

desire is reason?” said the tranter from under the chair.

“Quite, quite; and I shouldn’t think of refusing to listen to such a

reasonable request,” the vicar replied. Seeing that Reuben had secured

the pen, he resumed his vertical position, and added, “You know, Dewy,

it is often said how difficult a matter it is to act up to our

convictions and please all parties. It may be said with equal truth,

that it is difficult for a man of any appreciativeness to have

convictions at all. Now in my case, I see right in you, and right in

Shiner. I see that violins are good, and that an organ is good; and

when we introduce the organ, it will not be that fiddles were bad, but

that an organ was better. That you’ll clearly understand, Dewy?”

“I will; and thank you very much for such feelings, sir. Piph-h-h-h!

How the blood do get into my head, to be sure, whenever I quat down

like that!” said Reuben, who having also risen to his feet stuck the

pen vertically in the inkstand and almost through the bottom, that it

might not roll down again under any circumstances whatever.

Now the ancient body of minstrels in the passage felt their curiosity

surging higher and higher as the minutes passed. Dick, not having much

affection for this errand, soon grew tired, and went away in the

direction of the school. Yet their sense of propriety would probably

have restrained them from any attempt to discover what was going on in

the study had not the vicar’s pen fallen to the floor. The conviction

that the movement of chairs, etc., necessitated by the search, could

only have been caused by the catastrophe of a bloody fight beginning,

overpowered all other considerations; and they advanced to the door,

which had only just fallen to. Thus, when Mr. Maybold raised his eyes

after the stooping he beheld glaring through the door Mr. Penny in

full-length portraiture, Mail’s face and shoulders above Mr. Penny’s

head, Spinks’s forehead and eyes over Mail’s crown, and a fractional

part of Bowman’s countenance under Spinks’s arm—crescent-shaped

portions of other heads and faces being visible behind these—the whole

dozen and odd eyes bristling with eager inquiry.

Mr. Penny, as is the case with excitable boot-makers and men, seeing

the vicar look at him and hearing no word spoken, thought it incumbent

upon himself to say something of any kind. Nothing suggested itself

till he had looked for about half a minute at the vicar.

“You’ll excuse my naming of it, sir,” he said, regarding with much

commiseration the mere surface of the vicar’s face; “but perhaps you

don’t know that your chin have bust out a-bleeding where you cut

yourself a-shaving this morning, sir.”

“Now, that was the stooping, depend upon’t,” the tranter suggested,

also looking with much interest at the vicar’s chin. “Blood always will

bust out again if you hang down the member that’s been bleeding.”

Old William raised his eyes and watched the vicar’s bleeding chin

likewise; and Leaf advanced two or three paces from the bookcase,

absorbed in the contemplation of the same phenomenon, with parted lips

and delighted eyes.

“Dear me, dear me!” said Mr. Maybold hastily, looking very red, and

brushing his chin with his hand, then taking out his handkerchief and

wiping the place.

“That’s it, sir; all right again now, ’a b’lieve—a mere nothing,” said

Mr. Penny. “A little bit of fur off your hat will stop it in a minute

if it should bust out again.”

“I’ll let ’ee have a bit off mine,” said Reuben, to show his good

feeling; “my hat isn’t so new as yours, sir, and ’twon’t hurt mine a

bit.”

“No, no; thank you, thank you,” Mr. Maybold again nervously replied.

“’Twas rather a deep cut seemingly?” said Reuben, feeling these to be

the kindest and best remarks he could make.

“O, no; not particularly.”

“Well, sir, your hand will shake sometimes a-shaving, and just when it

comes into your head that you may cut yourself, there’s the blood.”

“I have been revolving in my mind that question of the time at which we

make the change,” said Mr. Maybold, “and I know you’ll meet me

half-way. I think Christmas-day as much too late for me as the present

time is too early for you. I suggest Michaelmas or thereabout as a

convenient time for both parties; for I think your objection to a

Sunday which has no name is not one of any real weight.”

“Very good, sir. I suppose mortal men mustn’t expect their own way

entirely; and I express in all our names that we’ll make shift and be

satisfied with what you say.” The tranter touched the brim of his

imaginary hat again, and all the choir did the same. “About Michaelmas,

then, as far as you are concerned, sir, and then we make room for the

next generation.”

“About Michaelmas,” said the vicar.

CHAPTER V.

RETURNING HOME WARD

“‘A took it very well, then?” said Mail, as they all walked up the

hill.

“He behaved like a man, ’a did so,” said the tranter. “And I’m glad

we’ve let en know our minds. And though, beyond that, we ha’n’t got

much by going, ’twas worth while. He won’t forget it. Yes, he took it

very well. Supposing this tree here was Pa’son Mayble, and I standing

here, and thik gr’t stone is father sitting in the easy-chair. ‘Dewy,’

says he, ‘I don’t wish to change the church music in a forcible way.’”

“That was very nice o’ the man, even though words be wind.”

“Proper nice—out and out nice. The fact is,” said Reuben

confidentially, “’tis how you take a man. Everybody must be managed.

Queens must be managed: kings must be managed; for men want managing

almost as much as women, and that’s saying a good deal.”

“’Tis truly!” murmured the husbands.

“Pa’son Mayble and I were as good friends all through it as if we’d

been sworn brothers. Ay, the man’s well enough; ’tis what’s put in his

head that spoils him, and that’s why we’ve got to go.”

“There’s really no believing half you hear about people nowadays.”

“Bless ye, my sonnies! ’tisn’t the pa’son’s move at all. That gentleman

over there” (the tranter nodded in the direction of Shiner’s farm) “is

at the root of the mischty.”

“What! Shiner?”

“Ay; and I see what the pa’son don’t see. Why, Shiner is for putting

forward that young woman that only last night I was saying was our

Dick’s sweet-heart, but I suppose can’t be, and making much of her in

the sight of the congregation, and thinking he’ll win her by showing

her off. Well, perhaps ’a woll.”

“Then the music is second to the woman, the other churchwarden is

second to Shiner, the pa’son is second to the churchwardens, and God

A’mighty is nowhere at all.”

“That’s true; and you see,” continued Reuben, “at the very beginning it

put me in a stud as to how to quarrel wi’ en. In short, to save my

soul, I couldn’t quarrel wi’ such a civil man without belying my

conscience. Says he to father there, in a voice as quiet as a lamb’s,

‘William, you are a’ old aged man, as all shall be, so sit down in my

easy-chair, and rest yourself.’ And down father zot. I could fain ha’

laughed at thee, father; for thou’st take it so unconcerned at first,

and then looked so frightened when the chair-bottom sunk in.”

“You see,” said old William, hastening to explain, “I was scared to

find the bottom gie way—what should I know o’ spring bottoms?—and

thought I had broke it down: and of course as to breaking down a man’s

chair, I didn’t wish any such thing.”

“And, neighbours, when a feller, ever so much up for a miff, d’see his

own father sitting in his enemy’s easy-chair, and a poor chap like Leaf

made the best of, as if he almost had brains—why, it knocks all the

wind out of his sail at once: it did out of mine.”

“If that young figure of fun—Fance Day, I mean,” said Bowman, “hadn’t

been so mighty forward wi’ showing herself off to Shiner and Dick and

the rest, ’tis my belief we should never ha’ left the gallery.”

“’Tis my belief that though Shiner fired the bullets, the parson made

’em,” said Mr. Penny. “My wife sticks to it that he’s in love wi’ her.”

“That’s a thing we shall never know. I can’t onriddle her, nohow.”

“Thou’st ought to be able to onriddle such a little chiel as she,” the

tranter observed.

“The littler the maid, the bigger the riddle, to my mind. And coming of

such a stock, too, she may well be a twister.”

“Yes; Geoffrey Day is a clever man if ever there was one. Never says

anything: not he.”

“Never.”

“You might live wi’ that man, my sonnies, a hundred years, and never

know there was anything in him.”

“Ay; one o’ these up-country London ink-bottle chaps would call

Geoffrey a fool.”

“Ye never find out what’s in that man: never,” said Spinks. “Close? ah,

he is close! He can hold his tongue well. That man’s dumbness is

wonderful to listen to.”

“There’s so much sense in it. Every moment of it is brimmen over wi’

sound understanding.”

“’A can hold his tongue very clever—very clever truly,” echoed Leaf.

“’A do look at me as if ’a could see my thoughts running round like the

works of a clock.”

“Well, all will agree that the man can halt well in his talk, be it a

long time or be it a short time. And though we can’t expect his

daughter to inherit his closeness, she may have a few dribblets from

his sense.”

“And his pocket, perhaps.”

“Yes; the nine hundred pound that everybody says he’s worth; but I call

it four hundred and fifty; for I never believe more than half I hear.”

“Well, he’ve made a pound or two, and I suppose the maid will have it,

since there’s nobody else. But ’tis rather sharp upon her, if she’s

been born to fortune, to bring her up as if not born for it, and

letting her work so hard.”

“’Tis all upon his principle. A long-headed feller!”

“Ah,” murmured Spinks, “’twould be sharper upon her if she were born

for fortune, and not to it! I suffer from that affliction.”

CHAPTER VI.

YALBURY WOOD AND THE KEEPER’S HOUSE

A mood of blitheness rarely experienced even by young men was Dick’s on

the following Monday morning. It was the week after the Easter

holidays, and he was journeying along with Smart the mare and the light

spring-cart, watching the damp slopes of the hill-sides as they

streamed in the warmth of the sun, which at this unsettled season shone

on the grass with the freshness of an occasional inspector rather than

as an accustomed proprietor. His errand was to fetch Fancy, and some

additional household goods, from her father’s house in the neighbouring

parish to her dwelling at Mellstock. The distant view was darkly shaded

with clouds; but the nearer parts of the landscape were whitely

illumined by the visible rays of the sun streaming down across the

heavy gray shade behind.

The tranter had not yet told his son of the state of Shiner’s heart

that had been suggested to him by Shiner’s movements. He preferred to

let such delicate affairs right themselves; experience having taught

him that the uncertain phenomenon of love, as it existed in other

people, was not a groundwork upon which a single action of his own life

could be founded.

Geoffrey Day lived in the depths of Yalbury Wood, which formed portion

of one of the outlying estates of the Earl of Wessex, to whom Day was

head game-keeper, timber-steward, and general overlooker for this

district. The wood was intersected by the highway from Casterbridge to

London at a place not far from the house, and some trees had of late

years been felled between its windows and the ascent of Yalbury Hill,

to give the solitary cottager a glimpse of the passers-by.

It was a satisfaction to walk into the keeper’s house, even as a

stranger, on a fine spring morning like the present. A curl of

wood-smoke came from the chimney, and drooped over the roof like a blue

feather in a lady’s hat; and the sun shone obliquely upon the patch of

grass in front, which reflected its brightness through the open doorway

and up the staircase opposite, lighting up each riser with a shiny

green radiance, and leaving the top of each step in shade.

The window-sill of the front room was between four and five feet from

the floor, dropping inwardly to a broad low bench, over which, as well

as over the whole surface of the wall beneath, there always hung a deep

shade, which was considered objectionable on every ground save one,

namely, that the perpetual sprinkling of seeds and water by the caged

canary above was not noticed as an eyesore by visitors. The window was

set with thickly-leaded diamond glazing, formed, especially in the

lower panes, of knotty glass of various shades of green. Nothing was

better known to Fancy than the extravagant manner in which these

circular knots or eyes distorted everything seen through them from the

outside—lifting hats from heads, shoulders from bodies; scattering the

spokes of cart-wheels, and bending the straight fir-trunks into

semicircles. The ceiling was carried by a beam traversing its midst,

from the side of which projected a large nail, used solely and

constantly as a peg for Geoffrey’s hat; the nail was arched by a

rainbow-shaped stain, imprinted by the brim of the said hat when it was

hung there dripping wet.

The most striking point about the room was the furniture. This was a

repetition upon inanimate objects of the old principle introduced by

Noah, consisting for the most part of two articles of every sort. The

duplicate system of furnishing owed its existence to the forethought of

Fancy’s mother, exercised from the date of Fancy’s birthday onwards.

The arrangement spoke for itself: nobody who knew the tone of the

household could look at the goods without being aware that the second

set was a provision for Fancy, when she should marry and have a house

of her own. The most noticeable instance was a pair of green-faced

eight-day clocks, ticking alternately, which were severally two and

half minutes and three minutes striking the hour of twelve, one

proclaiming, in Italian flourishes, Thomas Wood as the name of its

maker, and the other—arched at the top, and altogether of more cynical

appearance—that of Ezekiel Saunders. They were two departed clockmakers

of Casterbridge, whose desperate rivalry throughout their lives was

nowhere more emphatically perpetuated than here at Geoffrey’s. These

chief specimens of the marriage provision were supported on the right

by a couple of kitchen dressers, each fitted complete with their cups,

dishes, and plates, in their turn followed by two dumb-waiters, two

family Bibles, two warming-pans, and two intermixed sets of chairs.

But the position last reached—the chimney-corner—was, after all, the

most attractive side of the parallelogram. It was large enough to

admit, in addition to Geoffrey himself, Geoffrey’s wife, her chair, and

her work-table, entirely within the line of the mantel, without danger

or even inconvenience from the heat of the fire; and was spacious

enough overhead to allow of the insertion of wood poles for the hanging

of bacon, which were cloaked with long shreds of soot, floating on the

draught like the tattered banners on the walls of ancient aisles.

These points were common to most chimney corners of the neighbourhood;

but one feature there was which made Geoffrey’s fireside not only an

object of interest to casual aristocratic visitors—to whom every

cottage fireside was more or less a curiosity—but the admiration of

friends who were accustomed to fireplaces of the ordinary hamlet model.

This peculiarity was a little window in the chimney-back, almost over

the fire, around which the smoke crept caressingly when it left the

perpendicular course. The window-board was curiously stamped with black

circles, burnt thereon by the heated bottoms of drinking-cups, which

had rested there after previously standing on the hot ashes of the

hearth for the purpose of warming their contents, the result giving to

the ledge the look of an envelope which has passed through innumerable

post-offices.

Fancy was gliding about the room preparing dinner, her head inclining

now to the right, now to the left, and singing the tips and ends of

tunes that sprang up in her mind like mushrooms. The footsteps of Mrs.

Day could be heard in the room overhead. Fancy went finally to the

door.

“Father! Dinner.”

A tall spare figure was seen advancing by the window with periodical

steps, and the keeper entered from the garden. He appeared to be a man

who was always looking down, as if trying to recollect something he

said yesterday. The surface of his face was fissured rather than

wrinkled, and over and under his eyes were folds which seemed as a kind

of exterior eyelids. His nose had been thrown backwards by a blow in a

poaching fray, so that when the sun was low and shining in his face,

people could see far into his head. There was in him a quiet grimness,

which would in his moments of displeasure have become surliness, had it

not been tempered by honesty of soul, and which was often

wrongheadedness because not allied with subtlety.

Although not an extraordinarily taciturn man among friends slightly

richer than himself, he never wasted words upon outsiders, and to his

trapper Enoch his ideas were seldom conveyed by any other means than

nods and shakes of the head. Their long acquaintance with each other’s

ways, and the nature of their labours, rendered words between them

almost superfluous as vehicles of thought, whilst the coincidence of

their horizons, and the astonishing equality of their social views, by

startling the keeper from time to time as very damaging to the theory

of master and man, strictly forbade any indulgence in words as

courtesies.

Behind the keeper came Enoch (who had been assisting in the garden) at

the well-considered chronological distance of three minutes—an interval

of non-appearance on the trapper’s part not arrived at without some

reflection. Four minutes had been found to express indifference to

indoor arrangements, and simultaneousness had implied too great an

anxiety about meals.

“A little earlier than usual, Fancy,” the keeper said, as he sat down

and looked at the clocks. “That Ezekiel Saunders o’ thine is tearing on

afore Thomas Wood again.”

“I kept in the middle between them,” said Fancy, also looking at the

two clocks.

“Better stick to Thomas,” said her father. “There’s a healthy beat in

Thomas that would lead a man to swear by en offhand. He is as true as

the town time. How is it your stap-mother isn’t here?”

As Fancy was about to reply, the rattle of wheels was heard, and

“Weh-hey, Smart!” in Mr. Richard Dewy’s voice rolled into the cottage

from round the corner of the house.

“Hullo! there’s Dewy’s cart come for thee, Fancy—Dick driving—afore

time, too. Well, ask the lad to have pot-luck with us.”

Dick on entering made a point of implying by his general bearing that

he took an interest in Fancy simply as in one of the same race and

country as himself; and they all sat down. Dick could have wished her

manner had not been so entirely free from all apparent consciousness of

those accidental meetings of theirs: but he let the thought pass. Enoch

sat diagonally at a table afar off, under the corner cupboard, and

drank his cider from a long perpendicular pint cup, having tall

fir-trees done in brown on its sides. He threw occasional remarks into

the general tide of conversation, and with this advantage to himself,

that he participated in the pleasures of a talk (slight as it was) at

meal-times, without saddling himself with the responsibility of

sustaining it.

“Why don’t your stap-mother come down, Fancy?” said Geoffrey. “You’ll

excuse her, Mister Dick, she’s a little queer sometimes.”

“O yes,—quite,” said Richard, as if he were in the habit of excusing

people every day.

“She d’belong to that class of womankind that become second wives: a

rum class rather.”

“Indeed,” said Dick, with sympathy for an indefinite something.

“Yes; and ’tis trying to a female, especially if you’ve been a first

wife, as she hev.”

“Very trying it must be.”

“Yes: you see her first husband was a young man, who let her go too

far; in fact, she used to kick up Bob’s-a-dying at the least thing in

the world. And when I’d married her and found it out, I thought, thinks

I, ‘’Tis too late now to begin to cure ’e;’ and so I let her bide. But

she’s queer,—very queer, at times!”

“I’m sorry to hear that.”

“Yes: there; wives be such a provoking class o’ society, because though

they be never right, they be never more than half wrong.”

Fancy seemed uneasy under the infliction of this household moralizing,

which might tend to damage the airy-fairy nature that Dick, as maiden

shrewdness told her, had accredited her with. Her dead silence

impressed Geoffrey with the notion that something in his words did not

agree with her educated ideas, and he changed the conversation.

“Did Fred Shiner send the cask o’ drink, Fancy?”

“I think he did: O yes, he did.”

“Nice solid feller, Fred Shiner!” said Geoffrey to Dick as he helped

himself to gravy, bringing the spoon round to his plate by way of the

potato-dish, to obviate a stain on the cloth in the event of a spill.

Now Geoffrey’s eyes had been fixed upon his plate for the previous four

or five minutes, and in removing them he had only carried them to the

spoon, which, from its fulness and the distance of its transit,

necessitated a steady watching through the whole of the route. Just as

intently as the keeper’s eyes had been fixed on the spoon, Fancy’s had

been fixed on her father’s, without premeditation or the slightest

phase of furtiveness; but there they were fastened. This was the reason

why:

Dick was sitting next to her on the right side, and on the side of the

table opposite to her father. Fancy had laid her right hand lightly

down upon the table-cloth for an instant, and to her alarm Dick, after

dropping his fork and brushing his forehead as a reason, flung down his

own left hand, overlapping a third of Fancy’s with it, and keeping it

there. So the innocent Fancy, instead of pulling her hand from the

trap, settled her eyes on her father’s, to guard against his discovery

of this perilous game of Dick’s. Dick finished his mouthful; Fancy

finished her crumb, and nothing was done beyond watching Geoffrey’s

eyes. Then the hands slid apart; Fancy’s going over six inches of

cloth, Dick’s over one. Geoffrey’s eye had risen.

“I said Fred Shiner is a nice solid feller,” he repeated, more

emphatically.

“He is; yes, he is,” stammered Dick; “but to me he is little more than

a stranger.”

“O, sure. Now I know en as well as any man can be known. And you know

en very well too, don’t ye, Fancy?”

Geoffrey put on a tone expressing that these words signified at present

about one hundred times the amount of meaning they conveyed literally.

Dick looked anxious.

“Will you pass me some bread?” said Fancy in a flurry, the red of her

face becoming slightly disordered, and looking as solicitous as a human

being could look about a piece of bread.

“Ay, that I will,” replied the unconscious Geoffrey. “Ay,” he

continued, returning to the displaced idea, “we are likely to remain

friendly wi’ Mr. Shiner if the wheels d’run smooth.”

“An excellent thing—a very capital thing, as I should say,” the youth

answered with exceeding relevance, considering that his thoughts,

instead of following Geoffrey’s remark, were nestling at a distance of

about two feet on his left the whole time.

“A young woman’s face will turn the north wind, Master Richard: my

heart if ’twon’t.” Dick looked more anxious and was attentive in

earnest at these words. “Yes; turn the north wind,” added Geoffrey

after an impressive pause. “And though she’s one of my own flesh and

blood . . . ”

“Will you fetch down a bit of raw-mil’ cheese from pantry-shelf?” Fancy

interrupted, as if she were famishing.

“Ay, that I will, chiel; chiel, says I, and Mr. Shiner only asking last

Saturday night . . . cheese you said, Fancy?”

Dick controlled his emotion at these mysterious allusions to Mr.

Shiner,—the better enabled to do so by perceiving that Fancy’s heart

went not with her father’s—and spoke like a stranger to the affairs of

the neighbourhood. “Yes, there’s a great deal to be said upon the power

of maiden faces in settling your courses,” he ventured, as the keeper

retreated for the cheese.

“The conversation is taking a very strange turn: nothing that _I_ have

ever done warrants such things being said!” murmured Fancy with

emphasis, just loud enough to reach Dick’s ears.

“You think to yourself, ’twas to be,” cried Enoch from his distant

corner, by way of filling up the vacancy caused by Geoffrey’s momentary

absence. “And so you marry her, Master Dewy, and there’s an end o’t.”

“Pray don’t say such things, Enoch,” came from Fancy severely, upon

which Enoch relapsed into servitude.

“If we be doomed to marry, we marry; if we be doomed to remain single,

we do,” replied Dick.

Geoffrey had by this time sat down again, and he now made his lips thin

by severely straining them across his gums, and looked out of the

window along the vista to the distant highway up Yalbury Hill. “That’s

not the case with some folk,” he said at length, as if he read the

words on a board at the further end of the vista.

Fancy looked interested, and Dick said, “No?”

“There’s that wife o’ mine. It was her doom to be nobody’s wife at all

in the wide universe. But she made up her mind that she would, and did

it twice over. Doom? Doom is nothing beside a elderly woman—quite a

chiel in her hands!”

A movement was now heard along the upstairs passage, and footsteps

descending. The door at the foot of the stairs opened, and the second

Mrs. Day appeared in view, looking fixedly at the table as she advanced

towards it, with apparent obliviousness of the presence of any other

human being than herself. In short, if the table had been the

personages, and the persons the table, her glance would have been the

most natural imaginable.

She showed herself to possess an ordinary woman’s face, iron-grey hair,

hardly any hips, and a great deal of cleanliness in a broad white

apron-string, as it appeared upon the waist of her dark stuff dress.

“People will run away with a story now, I suppose,” she began saying,

“that Jane Day’s tablecloths are as poor and ragged as any union

beggar’s!”

Dick now perceived that the tablecloth was a little the worse for wear,

and reflecting for a moment, concluded that ‘people’ in step-mother

language probably meant himself. On lifting his eyes he found that Mrs.

Day had vanished again upstairs, and presently returned with an armful

of new damask-linen tablecloths, folded square and hard as boards by

long compression. These she flounced down into a chair; then took one,

shook it out from its folds, and spread it on the table by instalments,

transferring the plates and dishes one by one from the old to the new

cloth.

“And I suppose they’ll say, too, that she ha’n’t a decent knife and

fork in her house!”

“I shouldn’t say any such ill-natured thing, I am sure—” began Dick.

But Mrs. Day had vanished into the next room. Fancy appeared

distressed.

“Very strange woman, isn’t she?” said Geoffrey, quietly going on with

his dinner. “But ’tis too late to attempt curing. My heart! ’tis so

growed into her that ’twould kill her to take it out. Ay, she’s very

queer: you’d be amazed to see what valuable goods we’ve got stowed away

upstairs.”

Back again came Mrs. Day with a box of bright steel horn-handled

knives, silver-plated forks, carver, and all complete. These were wiped

of the preservative oil which coated them, and then a knife and fork

were laid down to each individual with a bang, the carving knife and

fork thrust into the meat dish, and the old ones they had hitherto used

tossed away.

Geoffrey placidly cut a slice with the new knife and fork, and asked

Dick if he wanted any more.

The table had been spread for the mixed midday meal of dinner and tea,

which was common among frugal countryfolk. “The parishioners about

here,” continued Mrs. Day, not looking at any living being, but

snatching up the brown delf tea-things, “are the laziest, gossipest,

poachest, jailest set of any ever I came among. And they’ll talk about

my teapot and tea-things next, I suppose!” She vanished with the

teapot, cups, and saucers, and reappeared with a tea-service in white

china, and a packet wrapped in brown paper. This was removed, together

with folds of tissue-paper underneath; and a brilliant silver teapot

appeared.

“I’ll help to put the things right,” said Fancy soothingly, and rising

from her seat. “I ought to have laid out better things, I suppose. But”

(here she enlarged her looks so as to include Dick) “I have been away

from home a good deal, and I make shocking blunders in my

housekeeping.” Smiles and suavity were then dispensed all around by

this bright little bird.

After a little more preparation and modification, Mrs. Day took her

seat at the head of the table, and during the latter or tea division of

the meal, presided with much composure. It may cause some surprise to

learn that, now her vagary was over, she showed herself to be an

excellent person with much common sense, and even a religious

seriousness of tone on matters pertaining to her afflictions.

CHAPTER VII.

DICK MAKES HIMSELF USEFUL

The effect of Geoffrey’s incidental allusions to Mr. Shiner was to

restrain a considerable flow of spontaneous chat that would otherwise

have burst from young Dewy along the drive homeward. And a certain

remark he had hazarded to her, in rather too blunt and eager a manner,

kept the young lady herself even more silent than Dick. On both sides

there was an unwillingness to talk on any but the most trivial

subjects, and their sentences rarely took a larger form than could be

expressed in two or three words.

Owing to Fancy being later in the day than she had promised, the

charwoman had given up expecting her; whereupon Dick could do no less

than stay and see her comfortably tided over the disagreeable time of

entering and establishing herself in an empty house after an absence of

a week. The additional furniture and utensils that had been brought (a

canary and cage among the rest) were taken out of the vehicle, and the

horse was unharnessed and put in the plot opposite, where there was

some tender grass. Dick lighted the fire already laid; and activity

began to loosen their tongues a little.

“There!” said Fancy, “we forgot to bring the fire-irons!”

She had originally found in her sitting-room, to bear out the

expression ‘nearly furnished’ which the school-manager had used in his

letter to her, a table, three chairs, a fender, and a piece of carpet.

This ‘nearly’ had been supplemented hitherto by a kind friend, who had

lent her fire-irons and crockery until she should fetch some from home.

Dick attended to the young lady’s fire, using his whip-handle for a

poker till it was spoilt, and then flourishing a hurdle stick for the

remainder of the time.

“The kettle boils; now you shall have a cup of tea,” said Fancy, diving

into the hamper she had brought.

“Thank you,” said Dick, whose drive had made him ready for some,

especially in her company.

“Well, here’s only one cup-and-saucer, as I breathe! Whatever could

mother be thinking about? Do you mind making shift, Mr. Dewy?”

“Not at all, Miss Day,” said that civil person.

“—And only having a cup by itself? or a saucer by itself?”

“Don’t mind in the least.”

“Which do you mean by that?”

“I mean the cup, if you like the saucer.”

“And the saucer, if I like the cup?”

“Exactly, Miss Day.”

“Thank you, Mr. Dewy, for I like the cup decidedly. Stop a minute;

there are no spoons now!” She dived into the hamper again, and at the

end of two or three minutes looked up and said, “I suppose you don’t

mind if I can’t find a spoon?”

“Not at all,” said the agreeable Richard.

“The fact is, the spoons have slipped down somewhere; right under the

other things. O yes, here’s one, and only one. You would rather have

one than not, I suppose, Mr. Dewy?”

“Rather not. I never did care much about spoons.”

“Then I’ll have it. I do care about them. You must stir up your tea

with a knife. Would you mind lifting the kettle off, that it may not

boil dry?”

Dick leapt to the fireplace, and earnestly removed the kettle.

“There! you did it so wildly that you have made your hand black. We

always use kettle-holders; didn’t you learn housewifery as far as that,

Mr. Dewy? Well, never mind the soot on your hand. Come here. I am going

to rinse mine, too.”

They went to a basin she had placed in the back room. “This is the only

basin I have,” she said. “Turn up your sleeves, and by that time my

hands will be washed, and you can come.”

Her hands were in the water now. “O, how vexing!” she exclaimed.

“There’s not a drop of water left for you, unless you draw it, and the

well is I don’t know how many furlongs deep; all that was in the

pitcher I used for the kettle and this basin. Do you mind dipping the

tips of your fingers in the same?”

“Not at all. And to save time I won’t wait till you have done, if you

have no objection?”

Thereupon he plunged in his hands, and they paddled together. It being

the first time in his life that he had touched female fingers under

water, Dick duly registered the sensation as rather a nice one.

“Really, I hardly know which are my own hands and which are yours, they

have got so mixed up together,” she said, withdrawing her own very

suddenly.

“It doesn’t matter at all,” said Dick, “at least as far as I am

concerned.”

“There! no towel! Whoever thinks of a towel till the hands are wet?”

“Nobody.”

“‘Nobody.’ How very dull it is when people are so friendly! Come here,

Mr. Dewy. Now do you think you could lift the lid of that box with your

elbow, and then, with something or other, take out a towel you will

find under the clean clothes? Be _sure_ don’t touch any of them with

your wet hands, for the things at the top are all Starched and Ironed.”

Dick managed, by the aid of a knife and fork, to extract a towel from

under a muslin dress without wetting the latter; and for a moment he

ventured to assume a tone of criticism.

“I fear for that dress,” he said, as they wiped their hands together.

“What?” said Miss Day, looking into the box at the dress alluded to.

“O, I know what you mean—that the vicar will never let me wear muslin?”

“Yes.”

“Well, I know it is condemned by all orders in the church as flaunting,

and unfit for common wear for girls who’ve their living to get; but

we’ll see.”

“In the interest of the church, I hope you don’t speak seriously.”

“Yes, I do; but we’ll see.” There was a comely determination on her

lip, very pleasant to a beholder who was neither bishop, priest, nor

deacon. “I think I can manage any vicar’s views about me if he’s under

forty.”

Dick rather wished she had never thought of managing vicars.

“I certainly shall be glad to get some of your delicious tea,” he said

in rather a free way, yet modestly, as became one in a position between

that of visitor and inmate, and looking wistfully at his lonely saucer.

“So shall I. Now is there anything else we want, Mr Dewy?”

“I really think there’s nothing else, Miss Day.”

She prepared to sit down, looking musingly out of the window at Smart’s

enjoyment of the rich grass. “Nobody seems to care about me,” she

murmured, with large lost eyes fixed upon the sky beyond Smart.

“Perhaps Mr. Shiner does,” said Dick, in the tone of a slightly injured

man.

“Yes, I forgot—he does, I know.” Dick precipitately regretted that he

had suggested Shiner, since it had produced such a miserable result as

this.

“I’ll warrant you’ll care for somebody very much indeed another day,

won’t you, Mr. Dewy?” she continued, looking very feelingly into the

mathematical centre of his eyes.

“Ah, I’ll warrant I shall,” said Dick, feelingly too, and looking back

into her dark pupils, whereupon they were turned aside.

“I meant,” she went on, preventing him from speaking just as he was

going to narrate a forcible story about his feelings; “I meant that

nobody comes to see if I have returned—not even the vicar.”

“If you want to see him, I’ll call at the vicarage directly we have had

some tea.”

“No, no! Don’t let him come down here, whatever you do, whilst I am in

such a state of disarrangement. Parsons look so miserable and awkward

when one’s house is in a muddle; walking about, and making impossible

suggestions in quaint academic phrases till your flesh creeps and you

wish them dead. Do you take sugar?”

Mr. Maybold was at this instant seen coming up the path.

“There! That’s he coming! How I wish you were not here!—that is, how

awkward—dear, dear!” she exclaimed, with a quick ascent of blood to her

face, and irritated with Dick rather than the vicar, as it seemed.

“Pray don’t be alarmed on my account, Miss Day—good-afternoon!” said

Dick in a huff, putting on his hat, and leaving the room hastily by the

back-door.

The horse was caught and put in, and on mounting the shafts to start he

saw through the window the vicar, standing upon some books piled in a

chair, and driving a nail into the wall; Fancy, with a demure glance,

holding the canary-cage up to him, as if she had never in her life

thought of anything but vicars and canaries.

CHAPTER VIII.

DICK MEETS HIS FATHER

For several minutes Dick drove along homeward, with the inner eye of

reflection so anxiously set on his passages at arms with Fancy, that

the road and scenery were as a thin mist over the real pictures of his

mind. Was she a coquette? The balance between the evidence that she did

love him and that she did not was so nicely struck, that his opinion

had no stability. She had let him put his hand upon hers; she had

allowed her gaze to drop plumb into the depths of his—his into

hers—three or four times; her manner had been very free with regard to

the basin and towel; she had appeared vexed at the mention of Shiner.

On the other hand, she had driven him about the house like a quiet dog

or cat, said Shiner cared for her, and seemed anxious that Mr. Maybold

should do the same.

Thinking thus as he neared the handpost at Mellstock Cross, sitting on

the front board of the spring cart—his legs on the outside, and his

whole frame jigging up and down like a candle-flame to the time of

Smart’s trotting—who should he see coming down the hill but his father

in the light wagon, quivering up and down on a smaller scale of shakes,

those merely caused by the stones in the road. They were soon crossing

each other’s front.

“Weh-hey!” said the tranter to Smiler.

“Weh-hey!” said Dick to Smart, in an echo of the same voice.

“Th’st hauled her back, I suppose?” Reuben inquired peaceably.

“Yes,” said Dick, with such a clinching period at the end that it

seemed he was never going to add another word. Smiler, thinking this

the close of the conversation, prepared to move on.

“Weh-hey!” said the tranter. “I tell thee what it is, Dick. That there

maid is taking up thy thoughts more than’s good for thee, my sonny.

Thou’rt never happy now unless th’rt making thyself miserable about her

in one way or another.”

“I don’t know about that, father,” said Dick rather stupidly.

“But I do—Wey, Smiler!—’Od rot the women, ’tis nothing else wi’ ’em

nowadays but getting young men and leading ’em astray.”

“Pooh, father! you just repeat what all the common world says; that’s

all you do.”

“The world’s a very sensible feller on things in jineral, Dick; very

sensible indeed.”

Dick looked into the distance at a vast expanse of mortgaged estate. “I

wish I was as rich as a squire when he’s as poor as a crow,” he

murmured; “I’d soon ask Fancy something.”

“I wish so too, wi’ all my heart, sonny; that I do. Well, mind what

beest about, that’s all.”

Smart moved on a step or two. “Supposing now, father,—We-hey, Smart!—I

did think a little about her, and I had a chance, which I ha’n’t; don’t

you think she’s a very good sort of—of—one?”

“Ay, good; she’s good enough. When you’ve made up your mind to marry,

take the first respectable body that comes to hand—she’s as good as any

other; they be all alike in the groundwork; ’tis only in the flourishes

there’s a difference. She’s good enough; but I can’t see what the

nation a young feller like you—wi’ a comfortable house and home, and

father and mother to take care o’ thee, and who sent ’ee to a school so

good that ’twas hardly fair to the other children—should want to go

hollering after a young woman for, when she’s quietly making a husband

in her pocket, and not troubled by chick nor chiel, to make a

poverty-stric’ wife and family of her, and neither hat, cap, wig, nor

waistcoat to set ’em up with: be drowned if I can see it, and that’s

the long and the short o’t, my sonny.”

Dick looked at Smart’s ears, then up the hill; but no reason was

suggested by any object that met his gaze.

“For about the same reason that you did, father, I suppose.”

“Dang it, my sonny, thou’st got me there!” And the tranter gave vent to

a grim admiration, with the mien of a man who was too magnanimous not

to appreciate artistically a slight rap on the knuckles, even if they

were his own.

“Whether or no,” said Dick, “I asked her a thing going along the road.”

“Come to that, is it? Turk! won’t thy mother be in a taking! Well,

she’s ready, I don’t doubt?”

“I didn’t ask her anything about having me; and if you’ll let me speak,

I’ll tell ’ee what I want to know. I just said, Did she care about me?”

“Piph-ph-ph!”

“And then she said nothing for a quarter of a mile, and then she said

she didn’t know. Now, what I want to know is, what was the meaning of

that speech?” The latter words were spoken resolutely, as if he didn’t

care for the ridicule of all the fathers in creation.

“The meaning of that speech is,” the tranter replied deliberately,

“that the meaning is meant to be rather hid at present. Well, Dick, as

an honest father to thee, I don’t pretend to deny what you d’know well

enough; that is, that her father being rather better in the pocket than

we, I should welcome her ready enough if it must be somebody.”

“But what d’ye think she really did mean?” said the unsatisfied Dick.

“I’m afeard I am not o’ much account in guessing, especially as I was

not there when she said it, and seeing that your mother was the only

’ooman I ever cam’ into such close quarters as that with.”

“And what did mother say to you when you asked her?” said Dick

musingly.

“I don’t see that that will help ’ee.”

“The principle is the same.”

“Well—ay: what did she say? Let’s see. I was oiling my working-day

boots without taking ’em off, and wi’ my head hanging down, when she

just brushed on by the garden hatch like a flittering leaf. ‘Ann,’ I

said, says I, and then,—but, Dick I’m afeard ’twill be no help to thee;

for we were such a rum couple, your mother and I, leastways one half

was, that is myself—and your mother’s charms was more in the manner

than the material.”

“Never mind! ‘Ann,’ said you.”

“‘Ann,’ said I, as I was saying . . . ‘Ann,’ I said to her when I was

oiling my working-day boots wi’ my head hanging down, ‘Woot hae me?’ .

. . What came next I can’t quite call up at this distance o’ time.

Perhaps your mother would know,—she’s got a better memory for her

little triumphs than I. However, the long and the short o’ the story is

that we were married somehow, as I found afterwards. ’Twas on White

Tuesday,—Mellstock Club walked the same day, every man two and two, and

a fine day ’twas,—hot as fire,—how the sun did strike down upon my back

going to church! I well can mind what a bath o’ sweating I was in, body

and soul! But Fance will ha’ thee, Dick—she won’t walk with another

chap—no such good luck.”

“I don’t know about that,” said Dick, whipping at Smart’s flank in a

fanciful way, which, as Smart knew, meant nothing in connection with

going on. “There’s Pa’son Maybold, too—that’s all against me.”

“What about he? She’s never been stuffing into thy innocent heart that

he’s in hove with her? Lord, the vanity o’ maidens!”

“No, no. But he called, and she looked at him in such a way, and at me

in such a way—quite different the ways were,—and as I was coming off,

there was he hanging up her birdcage.”

“Well, why shouldn’t the man hang up her bird-cage? Turk seize it all,

what’s that got to do wi’ it? Dick, that thou beest a white-lyvered

chap I don’t say, but if thou beestn’t as mad as a cappel-faced bull,

let me smile no more.”

“O, ay.”

“And what’s think now, Dick?”

“I don’t know.”

“Here’s another pretty kettle o’ fish for thee. Who d’ye think’s the

bitter weed in our being turned out? Did our party tell ’ee?”

“No. Why, Pa’son Maybold, I suppose.”

“Shiner,—because he’s in love with thy young woman, and d’want to see

her young figure sitting up at that queer instrument, and her young

fingers rum-strumming upon the keys.”

A sharp ado of sweet and bitter was going on in Dick during this

communication from his father. “Shiner’s a fool!—no, that’s not it; I

don’t believe any such thing, father. Why, Shiner would never take a

bold step like that, unless she’d been a little made up to, and had

taken it kindly. Pooh!”

“Who’s to say she didn’t?”

“I do.”

“The more fool you.”

“Why, father of me?”

“Has she ever done more to thee?”

“No.”

“Then she has done as much to he—rot ’em! Now, Dick, this is how a maid

is. She’ll swear she’s dying for thee, and she is dying for thee, and

she will die for thee; but she’ll fling a look over t’other shoulder at

another young feller, though never leaving off dying for thee just the

same.”

“She’s not dying for me, and so she didn’t fling a look at him.”

“But she may be dying for him, for she looked at thee.”

“I don’t know what to make of it at all,” said Dick gloomily.

“All I can make of it is,” the tranter said, raising his whip,

arranging his different joints and muscles, and motioning to the horse

to move on, “that if you can’t read a maid’s mind by her motions,

nature d’seem to say thou’st ought to be a bachelor. Clk, clk! Smiler!”

And the tranter moved on.

Dick held Smart’s rein firmly, and the whole concern of horse, cart,

and man remained rooted in the lane. How long this condition would have

lasted is unknown, had not Dick’s thoughts, after adding up numerous

items of misery, gradually wandered round to the fact that as something

must be done, it could not be done by staying there all night.

Reaching home he went up to his bedroom, shut the door as if he were

going to be seen no more in this life, and taking a sheet of paper and

uncorking the ink-bottle, he began a letter. The dignity of the

writer’s mind was so powerfully apparent in every line of this effusion

that it obscured the logical sequence of facts and intentions to an

appreciable degree; and it was not at all clear to a reader whether he

there and then left off loving Miss Fancy Day; whether he had never

loved her seriously, and never meant to; whether he had been dying up

to the present moment, and now intended to get well again; or whether

he had hitherto been in good health, and intended to die for her

forthwith.

He put this letter in an envelope, sealed it up, directed it in a stern

handwriting of straight dashes—easy flourishes being rigorously

excluded. He walked with it in his pocket down the lane in strides not

an inch less than three feet long. Reaching her gate he put on a

resolute expression—then put it off again, turned back homeward, tore

up his letter, and sat down.

That letter was altogether in a wrong tone—that he must own. A

heartless man-of-the-world tone was what the juncture required. That he

rather wanted her, and rather did not want her—the latter for choice;

but that as a member of society he didn’t mind making a query in jaunty

terms, which could only be answered in the same way: did she mean

anything by her bearing towards him, or did she not?

This letter was considered so satisfactory in every way that, being put

into the hands of a little boy, and the order given that he was to run

with it to the school, he was told in addition not to look behind him

if Dick called after him to bring it back, but to run along with it

just the same. Having taken this precaution against vacillation, Dick

watched his messenger down the road, and turned into the house

whistling an air in such ghastly jerks and starts, that whistling

seemed to be the act the very furthest removed from that which was

instinctive in such a youth.

The letter was left as ordered: the next morning came and passed—and no

answer. The next. The next. Friday night came. Dick resolved that if no

answer or sign were given by her the next day, on Sunday he would meet

her face to face, and have it all out by word of mouth.

“Dick,” said his father, coming in from the garden at that moment—in

each hand a hive of bees tied in a cloth to prevent their egress—“I

think you’d better take these two swarms of bees to Mrs. Maybold’s

to-morrow, instead o’ me, and I’ll go wi’ Smiler and the wagon.”

It was a relief; for Mrs. Maybold, the vicar’s mother, who had just

taken into her head a fancy for keeping bees (pleasantly disguised

under the pretence of its being an economical wish to produce her own

honey), lived near the watering-place of Budmouth-Regis, ten miles off,

and the business of transporting the hives thither would occupy the

whole day, and to some extent annihilate the vacant time between this

evening and the coming Sunday. The best spring-cart was washed

throughout, the axles oiled, and the bees placed therein for the

journey.

PART THE THIRD—SUMMER

CHAPTER I.

DRIVING OUT OF BUDMOUTH

An easy bend of neck and graceful set of head; full and wavy bundles of

dark-brown hair; light fall of little feet; pretty devices on the skirt

of the dress; clear deep eyes; in short, a bunch of sweets: it was

Fancy! Dick’s heart went round to her with a rush.

The scene was the corner of Mary Street in Budmouth-Regis, near the

King’s statue, at which point the white angle of the last house in the

row cut perpendicularly an embayed and nearly motionless expanse of

salt water projected from the outer ocean—to-day lit in bright tones of

green and opal. Dick and Smart had just emerged from the street, and

there on the right, against the brilliant sheet of liquid colour, stood

Fancy Day; and she turned and recognized him.

Dick suspended his thoughts of the letter and wonder at how she came

there by driving close to the chains of the Esplanade—incontinently

displacing two chairmen, who had just come to life for the summer in

new clean shirts and revivified clothes, and being almost displaced in

turn by a rigid boy rattling along with a baker’s cart, and looking

neither to the right nor the left. He asked if she were going to

Mellstock that night.

“Yes, I’m waiting for the carrier,” she replied, seeming, too, to

suspend thoughts of the letter.

“Now I can drive you home nicely, and you save half an hour. Will ye

come with me?”

As Fancy’s power to will anything seemed to have departed in some

mysterious manner at that moment, Dick settled the matter by getting

out and assisting her into the vehicle without another word.

The temporary flush upon her cheek changed to a lesser hue, which was

permanent, and at length their eyes met; there was present between them

a certain feeling of embarrassment, which arises at such moments when

all the instinctive acts dictated by the position have been performed.

Dick, being engaged with the reins, thought less of this awkwardness

than did Fancy, who had nothing to do but to feel his presence, and to

be more and more conscious of the fact, that by accepting a seat beside

him in this way she succumbed to the tone of his note. Smart jogged

along, and Dick jogged, and the helpless Fancy necessarily jogged, too;

and she felt that she was in a measure captured and made a prisoner.

“I am so much obliged to you for your company, Miss Day,” he observed,

as they drove past the two semicircular bays of the Old Royal Hotel,

where His Majesty King George the Third had many a time attended the

balls of the burgesses.

To Miss Day, crediting him with the same consciousness of mastery—a

consciousness of which he was perfectly innocent—this remark sounded

like a magnanimous intention to soothe her, the captive.

“I didn’t come for the pleasure of obliging you with my company,” she

said.

The answer had an unexpected manner of incivility in it that must have

been rather surprising to young Dewy. At the same time it may be

observed, that when a young woman returns a rude answer to a young

man’s civil remark, her heart is in a state which argues rather

hopefully for his case than otherwise.

There was silence between them till they had left the sea-front and

passed about twenty of the trees that ornamented the road leading up

out of the town towards Casterbridge and Mellstock.

“Though I didn’t come for that purpose either, I would have done it,”

said Dick at the twenty-first tree.

“Now, Mr. Dewy, no flirtation, because it’s wrong, and I don’t wish

it.”

Dick seated himself afresh just as he had been sitting before, arranged

his looks very emphatically, and cleared his throat.

“Really, anybody would think you had met me on business and were just

going to commence,” said the lady intractably.

“Yes, they would.”

“Why, you never have, to be sure!”

This was a shaky beginning. He chopped round, and said cheerily, as a

man who had resolved never to spoil his jollity by loving one of

womankind—

“Well, how are you getting on, Miss Day, at the present time? Gaily, I

don’t doubt for a moment.”

“I am not gay, Dick; you know that.”

“Gaily doesn’t mean decked in gay dresses.”

“I didn’t suppose gaily was gaily dressed. Mighty me, what a scholar

you’ve grown!”

“Lots of things have happened to you this spring, I see.”

“What have you seen?”

“O, nothing; I’ve heard, I mean!”

“What have you heard?”

“The name of a pretty man, with brass studs and a copper ring and a tin

watch-chain, a little mixed up with your own. That’s all.”

“That’s a very unkind picture of Mr. Shiner, for that’s who you mean!

The studs are gold, as you know, and it’s a real silver chain; the ring

I can’t conscientiously defend, and he only wore it once.”

“He might have worn it a hundred times without showing it half so

much.”

“Well, he’s nothing to me,” she serenely observed.

“Not any more than I am?”

“Now, Mr. Dewy,” said Fancy severely, “certainly he isn’t any more to

me than you are!”

“Not so much?”

She looked aside to consider the precise compass of that question.

“That I can’t exactly answer,” she replied with soft archness.

As they were going rather slowly, another spring-cart, containing a

farmer, farmer’s wife, and farmer’s man, jogged past them; and the

farmer’s wife and farmer’s man eyed the couple very curiously. The

farmer never looked up from the horse’s tail.

“Why can’t you exactly answer?” said Dick, quickening Smart a little,

and jogging on just behind the farmer and farmer’s wife and man.

As no answer came, and as their eyes had nothing else to do, they both

contemplated the picture presented in front, and noticed how the

farmer’s wife sat flattened between the two men, who bulged over each

end of the seat to give her room, till they almost sat upon their

respective wheels; and they looked too at the farmer’s wife’s silk

mantle, inflating itself between her shoulders like a balloon and

sinking flat again, at each jog of the horse. The farmer’s wife,

feeling their eyes sticking into her back, looked over her shoulder.

Dick dropped ten yards further behind.

“Fancy, why can’t you answer?” he repeated.

“Because how much you are to me depends upon how much I am to you,”

said she in low tones.

“Everything,” said Dick, putting his hand towards hers, and casting

emphatic eyes upon the upper curve of her cheek.

“Now, Richard Dewy, no touching me! I didn’t say in what way your

thinking of me affected the question—perhaps inversely, don’t you see?

No touching, sir! Look; goodness me, don’t, Dick!”

The cause of her sudden start was the unpleasant appearance over Dick’s

right shoulder of an empty timber-wagon and four journeymen-carpenters

reclining in lazy postures inside it, their eyes directed upwards at

various oblique angles into the surrounding world, the chief object of

their existence being apparently to criticize to the very backbone and

marrow every animate object that came within the compass of their

vision. This difficulty of Dick’s was overcome by trotting on till the

wagon and carpenters were beginning to look rather misty by reason of a

film of dust that accompanied their wagon-wheels, and rose around their

heads like a fog.

“Say you love me, Fancy.”

“No, Dick, certainly not; ’tisn’t time to do that yet.”

“Why, Fancy?”

“‘Miss Day’ is better at present—don’t mind my saying so; and I ought

not to have called you Dick.”

“Nonsense! when you know that I would do anything on earth for your

love. Why, you make any one think that loving is a thing that can be

done and undone, and put on and put off at a mere whim.”

“No, no, I don’t,” she said gently; “but there are things which tell me

I ought not to give way to much thinking about you, even if—”

“But you want to, don’t you? Yes, say you do; it is best to be

truthful. Whatever they may say about a woman’s right to conceal where

her love lies, and pretend it doesn’t exist, and things like that, it

is not best; I do know it, Fancy. And an honest woman in that, as well

as in all her daily concerns, shines most brightly, and is thought most

of in the long-run.”

“Well then, perhaps, Dick, I do love you a little,” she whispered

tenderly; “but I wish you wouldn’t say any more now.”

“I won’t say any more now, then, if you don’t like it, dear. But you do

love me a little, don’t you?”

“Now you ought not to want me to keep saying things twice; I can’t say

any more now, and you must be content with what you have.”

“I may at any rate call you Fancy? There’s no harm in that.”

“Yes, you may.”

“And you’ll not call me Mr. Dewy any more?”

“Very well.”

CHAPTER II.

FURTHER ALONG THE ROAD

Dick’s spirits having risen in the course of these admissions of his

sweetheart, he now touched Smart with the whip; and on Smart’s neck,

not far behind his ears. Smart, who had been lost in thought for some

time, never dreaming that Dick could reach so far with a whip which, on

this particular journey, had never been extended further than his

flank, tossed his head, and scampered along with exceeding briskness,

which was very pleasant to the young couple behind him till, turning a

bend in the road, they came instantly upon the farmer, farmer’s man,

and farmer’s wife with the flapping mantle, all jogging on just the

same as ever.

“Bother those people! Here we are upon them again.”

“Well, of course. They have as much right to the road as we.”

“Yes, but it is provoking to be overlooked so. I like a road all to

myself. Look what a lumbering affair theirs is!” The wheels of the

farmer’s cart, just at that moment, jogged into a depression running

across the road, giving the cart a twist, whereupon all three nodded to

the left, and on coming out of it all three nodded to the right, and

went on jerking their backs in and out as usual. “We’ll pass them when

the road gets wider.”

When an opportunity seemed to offer itself for carrying this intention

into effect, they heard light flying wheels behind, and on their

quartering there whizzed along past them a brand-new gig, so brightly

polished that the spokes of the wheels sent forth a continual quivering

light at one point in their circle, and all the panels glared like

mirrors in Dick and Fancy’s eyes. The driver, and owner as it appeared,

was really a handsome man; his companion was Shiner. Both turned round

as they passed Dick and Fancy, and stared with bold admiration in her

face till they were obliged to attend to the operation of passing the

farmer. Dick glanced for an instant at Fancy while she was undergoing

their scrutiny; then returned to his driving with rather a sad

countenance.

“Why are you so silent?” she said, after a while, with real concern.

“Nothing.”

“Yes, it is, Dick. I couldn’t help those people passing.”

“I know that.”

“You look offended with me. What have I done?”

“I can’t tell without offending you.”

“Better out.”

“Well,” said Dick, who seemed longing to tell, even at the risk of

offending her, “I was thinking how different you in love are from me in

love. Whilst those men were staring, you dismissed me from your

thoughts altogether, and—”

“You can’t offend me further now; tell all!”

“And showed upon your face a pleased sense of being attractive to ’em.”

“Don’t be silly, Dick! You know very well I didn’t.”

Dick shook his head sceptically, and smiled.

“Dick, I always believe flattery _if possible—_and it was possible

then. Now there’s an open confession of weakness. But I showed no

consciousness of it.”

Dick, perceiving by her look that she would adhere to her statement,

charitably forbore saying anything that could make her prevaricate. The

sight of Shiner, too, had recalled another branch of the subject to his

mind; that which had been his greatest trouble till her company and

words had obscured its probability.

“By the way, Fancy, do you know why our quire is to be dismissed?”

“No: except that it is Mr. Maybold’s wish for me to play the organ.”

“Do you know how it came to be his wish?”

“That I don’t.”

“Mr. Shiner, being churchwarden, has persuaded the vicar; who, however,

was willing enough before. Shiner, I know, is crazy to see you playing

every Sunday; I suppose he’ll turn over your music, for the organ will

be close to his pew. But—I know you have never encouraged him?”

“Never once!” said Fancy emphatically, and with eyes full of earnest

truth. “I don’t like him indeed, and I never heard of his doing this

before! I have always felt that I should like to play in a church, but

I never wished to turn you and your choir out; and I never even said

that I could play till I was asked. You don’t think for a moment that I

did, surely, do you?”

“I know you didn’t, dear.”

“Or that I care the least morsel of a bit for him?”

“I know you don’t.”

The distance between Budmouth and Mellstock was ten or eleven miles,

and there being a good inn, ‘The Ship,’ four miles out of Budmouth,

with a mast and cross-trees in front, Dick’s custom in driving thither

was to divide the journey into three stages by resting at this inn

going and coming, and not troubling the Budmouth stables at all,

whenever his visit to the town was a mere call and deposit, as to-day.

Fancy was ushered into a little tea-room, and Dick went to the stables

to see to the feeding of Smart. In face of the significant twitches of

feature that were visible in the ostler and labouring men idling

around, Dick endeavoured to look unconscious of the fact that there was

any sentiment between him and Fancy beyond a tranter’s desire to carry

a passenger home. He presently entered the inn and opened the door of

Fancy’s room.

“Dick, do you know, it has struck me that it is rather awkward, my

being here alone with you like this. I don’t think you had better come

in with me.”

“That’s rather unpleasant, dear.”

“Yes, it is, and I wanted you to have some tea as well as myself too,

because you must be tired.”

“Well, let me have some with you, then. I was denied once before, if

you recollect, Fancy.”

“Yes, yes, never mind! And it seems unfriendly of me now, but I don’t

know what to do.”

“It shall be as you say, then.” Dick began to retreat with a

dissatisfied wrinkling of face, and a farewell glance at the cosy

tea-tray.

“But you don’t see how it is, Dick, when you speak like that,” she

said, with more earnestness than she had ever shown before. “You do

know, that even if I care very much for you, I must remember that I

have a difficult position to maintain. The vicar would not like me, as

his schoolmistress, to indulge in a _tête-à-tête_ anywhere with

anybody.”

“But I am not _any_ body!” exclaimed Dick.

“No, no, I mean with a young man;” and she added softly, “unless I were

really engaged to be married to him.”

“Is that all? Then, dearest, dearest, why we’ll be engaged at once, to

be sure we will, and down I sit! There it is, as easy as a glove!”

“Ah! but suppose I won’t! And, goodness me, what have I done!” she

faltered, getting very red. “Positively, it seems as if I meant you to

say that!”

“Let’s do it! I mean get engaged,” said Dick. “Now, Fancy, will you be

my wife?”

“Do you know, Dick, it was rather unkind of you to say what you did

coming along the road,” she remarked, as if she had not heard the

latter part of his speech; though an acute observer might have noticed

about her breast, as the word ‘wife’ fell from Dick’s lips, a soft

silent escape of breaths, with very short rests between each.

“What did I say?”

“About my trying to look attractive to those men in the gig.”

“You couldn’t help looking so, whether you tried or no. And, Fancy, you

do care for me?”

“Yes.”

“Very much?”

“Yes.”

“And you’ll be my own wife?”

Her heart quickened, adding to and withdrawing from her cheek varying

tones of red to match each varying thought. Dick looked expectantly at

the ripe tint of her delicate mouth, waiting for what was coming forth.

“Yes—if father will let me.”

Dick drew himself close to her, compressing his lips and pouting them

out, as if he were about to whistle the softest melody known.

“O no!” said Fancy solemnly.

The modest Dick drew back a little.

“Dick, Dick, kiss me and let me go instantly!—here’s somebody coming!”

she whisperingly exclaimed.

Half an hour afterwards Dick emerged from the inn, and if Fancy’s lips

had been real cherries probably Dick’s would have appeared deeply

stained. The landlord was standing in the yard.

“Heu-heu! hay-hay, Master Dewy! Ho-ho!” he laughed, letting the laugh

slip out gently and by degrees that it might make little noise in its

exit, and smiting Dick under the fifth rib at the same time. “This will

never do, upon my life, Master Dewy! calling for tay for a feymel

passenger, and then going in and sitting down and having some too, and

biding such a fine long time!”

“But surely you know?” said Dick, with great apparent surprise. “Yes,

yes! Ha-ha!” smiting the landlord under the ribs in return.

“Why, what? Yes, yes; ha-ha!”

“You know, of course!”

“Yes, of course! But—that is—I don’t.”

“Why about—between that young lady and me?” nodding to the window of

the room that Fancy occupied.

“No; not I!” said the innkeeper, bringing his eyes into circles.

“And you don’t!”

“Not a word, I’ll take my oath!”

“But you laughed when I laughed.”

“Ay, that was me sympathy; so did you when I laughed!”

“Really, you don’t know? Goodness—not knowing that!”

“I’ll take my oath I don’t!”

“O yes,” said Dick, with frigid rhetoric of pitying astonishment,

“we’re engaged to be married, you see, and I naturally look after her.”

“Of course, of course! I didn’t know that, and I hope ye’ll excuse any

little freedom of mine, Mr. Dewy. But it is a very odd thing; I was

talking to your father very intimate about family matters only last

Friday in the world, and who should come in but Keeper Day, and we all

then fell a-talking o’ family matters; but neither one o’ them said a

mortal word about it; knowen me too so many years, and I at your

father’s own wedding. ’Tisn’t what I should have expected from an old

neighbour!”

“Well, to say the truth, we hadn’t told father of the engagement at

that time; in fact, ’twasn’t settled.”

“Ah! the business was done Sunday. Yes, yes, Sunday’s the courting day.

Heu-heu!”

“No, ’twasn’t done Sunday in particular.”

“After school-hours this week? Well, a very good time, a very proper

good time.”

“O no, ’twasn’t done then.”

“Coming along the road to-day then, I suppose?”

“Not at all; I wouldn’t think of getting engaged in a dog-cart.”

“Dammy—might as well have said at once, the _when_ be blowed! Anyhow,

’tis a fine day, and I hope next time you’ll come as one.”

Fancy was duly brought out and assisted into the vehicle, and the newly

affianced youth and maiden passed up the steep hill to the Ridgeway,

and vanished in the direction of Mellstock.

CHAPTER III.

A CONFESSION

It was a morning of the latter summer-time; a morning of lingering

dews, when the grass is never dry in the shade. Fuchsias and dahlias

were laden till eleven o’clock with small drops and dashes of water,

changing the colour of their sparkle at every movement of the air; and

elsewhere hanging on twigs like small silver fruit. The threads of

garden spiders appeared thick and polished. In the dry and sunny

places, dozens of long-legged crane-flies whizzed off the grass at

every step the passer took.

Fancy Day and her friend Susan Dewy the tranter’s daughter, were in

such a spot as this, pulling down a bough laden with early apples.

Three months had elapsed since Dick and Fancy had journeyed together

from Budmouth, and the course of their love had run on vigorously

during the whole time. There had been just enough difficulty attending

its development, and just enough finesse required in keeping it

private, to lend the passion an ever-increasing freshness on Fancy’s

part, whilst, whether from these accessories or not, Dick’s heart had

been at all times as fond as could be desired. But there was a cloud on

Fancy’s horizon now.

“She is so well off—better than any of us,” Susan Dewy was saying. “Her

father farms five hundred acres, and she might marry a doctor or curate

or anything of that kind if she contrived a little.”

“I don’t think Dick ought to have gone to that gipsy-party at all when

he knew I couldn’t go,” replied Fancy uneasily.

“He didn’t know that you would not be there till it was too late to

refuse the invitation,” said Susan.

“And what was she like? Tell me.”

“Well, she was rather pretty, I must own.”

“Tell straight on about her, can’t you! Come, do, Susan. How many times

did you say he danced with her?”

“Once.”

“Twice, I think you said?”

“Indeed I’m sure I didn’t.”

“Well, and he wanted to again, I expect.”

“No; I don’t think he did. She wanted to dance with him again bad

enough, I know. Everybody does with Dick, because he’s so handsome and

such a clever courter.”

“O, I wish!—How did you say she wore her hair?”

“In long curls,—and her hair is light, and it curls without being put

in paper: that’s how it is she’s so attractive.”

“She’s trying to get him away! yes, yes, she is! And through keeping

this miserable school I mustn’t wear my hair in curls! But I will; I

don’t care if I leave the school and go home, I will wear my curls!

Look, Susan, do! is her hair as soft and long as this?” Fancy pulled

from its coil under her hat a twine of her own hair, and stretched it

down her shoulder to show its length, looking at Susan to catch her

opinion from her eyes.

“It is about the same length as that, I think,” said Miss Dewy.

Fancy paused hopelessly. “I wish mine was lighter, like hers!” she

continued mournfully. “But hers isn’t so soft, is it? Tell me, now.”

“I don’t know.”

Fancy abstractedly extended her vision to survey a yellow butterfly and

a red-and-black butterfly that were flitting along in company, and then

became aware that Dick was advancing up the garden.

“Susan, here’s Dick coming; I suppose that’s because we’ve been talking

about him.”

“Well, then, I shall go indoors now—you won’t want me;” and Susan

turned practically and walked off.

Enter the single-minded Dick, whose only fault at the gipsying, or

picnic, had been that of loving Fancy too exclusively, and depriving

himself of the innocent pleasure the gathering might have afforded him,

by sighing regretfully at her absence,—who had danced with the rival in

sheer despair of ever being able to get through that stale, flat, and

unprofitable afternoon in any other way; but this she would not

believe.

Fancy had settled her plan of emotion. To reproach Dick? O no, no. “I

am in great trouble,” said she, taking what was intended to be a

hopelessly melancholy survey of a few small apples lying under the

tree; yet a critical ear might have noticed in her voice a tentative

tone as to the effect of the words upon Dick when she uttered them.

“What are you in trouble about? Tell me of it,” said Dick earnestly.

“Darling, I will share it with ’ee and help ’ee.”

“No, no: you can’t! Nobody can!”

“Why not? You don’t deserve it, whatever it is. Tell me, dear.”

“O, it isn’t what you think! It is dreadful: my own sin!”

“Sin, Fancy! as if you could sin! I know it can’t be.”

“’Tis, ’tis!” said the young lady, in a pretty little frenzy of sorrow.

“I have done wrong, and I don’t like to tell it! Nobody will forgive

me, nobody! and you above all will not! . . . I have allowed myself

to—to—fl—”

“What,—not flirt!” he said, controlling his emotion as it were by a

sudden pressure inward from his surface. “And you said only the day

before yesterday that you hadn’t flirted in your life!”

“Yes, I did; and that was a wicked story! I have let another love me,

and—”

“Good G—! Well, I’ll forgive you,—yes, if you couldn’t help it,—yes, I

will!” said the now dismal Dick. “Did you encourage him?”

“O,—I don’t know,—yes—no. O, I think so!”

“Who was it?” A pause. “Tell me!”

“Mr. Shiner.”

After a silence that was only disturbed by the fall of an apple, a

long-checked sigh from Dick, and a sob from Fancy, he said with real

austerity—

“Tell it all;—every word!”

“He looked at me, and I looked at him, and he said, ‘Will you let me

show you how to catch bullfinches down here by the stream?’ And

I—wanted to know very much—I did so long to have a bullfinch! I

couldn’t help that and I said, ‘Yes!’ and then he said, ‘Come here.’

And I went with him down to the lovely river, and then he said to me,

‘Look and see how I do it, and then you’ll know: I put this birdlime

round this twig, and then I go here,’ he said, ‘and hide away under a

bush; and presently clever Mister Bird comes and perches upon the twig,

and flaps his wings, and you’ve got him before you can say

Jack’—something; O, O, O, I forget what!”

“Jack Sprat,” mournfully suggested Dick through the cloud of his

misery.

“No, not Jack Sprat,” she sobbed.

“Then ’twas Jack Robinson!” he said, with the emphasis of a man who had

resolved to discover every iota of the truth, or die.