Wessex Tales
by Thomas Hardy
Contents
Preface
An Imaginative Woman
The Three Strangers
The Withered Arm
Fellow-Townsmen
Interlopers at the Knap
The Distracted Preacher
PREFACE
An apology is perhaps needed for the neglect of contrast which is shown
by presenting two consecutive stories of hangmen in such a small
collection as the following. But in the neighbourhood of county-towns
tales of executions used to form a large proportion of the local
traditions; and though never personally acquainted with any chief
operator at such scenes, the writer of these pages had as a boy the
privilege of being on speaking terms with a man who applied for the
office, and who sank into an incurable melancholy because he failed to
get it, some slight mitigation of his grief being to dwell upon
striking episodes in the lives of those happier ones who had held it
with success and renown. His tale of disappointment used to cause some
wonder why his ambition should have taken such an unfortunate form, but
its nobleness was never questioned. In those days, too, there was still
living an old woman who, for the cure of some eating disease, had been
taken in her youth to have her ‘blood turned’ by a convict’s corpse, in
the manner described in ‘The Withered Arm.’
Since writing this story some years ago I have been reminded by an aged
friend who knew ‘Rhoda Brook’ that, in relating her dream, my
forgetfulness has weakened the facts out of which the tale grew. In
reality it was while lying down on a hot afternoon that the incubus
oppressed her and she flung it off, with the results upon the body of
the original as described. To my mind the occurrence of such a vision
in the daytime is more impressive than if it had happened in a midnight
dream. Readers are therefore asked to correct the misrelation, which
affords an instance of how our imperfect memories insensibly formalize
the fresh originality of living fact—from whose shape they slowly
depart, as machine-made castings depart by degrees from the sharp
hand-work of the mould.
Among the many devices for concealing smuggled goods in caves and pits
of the earth, that of planting an apple-tree in a tray or box which was
placed over the mouth of the pit is, I believe, unique, and it is
detailed in one of the tales precisely as described by an old carrier
of ‘tubs’—a man who was afterwards in my father’s employ for over
thirty years. I never gathered from his reminiscences what means were
adopted for lifting the tree, which, with its roots, earth, and
receptacle, must have been of considerable weight. There is no doubt,
however, that the thing was done through many years. My informant often
spoke, too, of the horribly suffocating sensation produced by the pair
of spirit-tubs slung upon the chest and back, after stumbling with the
burden of them for several miles inland over a rough country and in
darkness. He said that though years of his youth and young manhood were
spent in this irregular business, his profits from the same, taken all
together, did not average the wages he might have earned in a steady
employment, whilst the fatigues and risks were excessive.
I may add that the first story in the series turns upon a physical
possibility that may attach to women of imaginative temperament, and
that is well supported by the experiences of medical men and other
observers of such manifestations.
T. H.
_April_ 1896.
AN IMAGINATIVE WOMAN
When William Marchmill had finished his inquiries for lodgings at a
well-known watering-place in Upper Wessex, he returned to the hotel to
find his wife. She, with the children, had rambled along the shore, and
Marchmill followed in the direction indicated by the military-looking
hall-porter
‘By Jove, how far you’ve gone! I am quite out of breath,’ Marchmill
said, rather impatiently, when he came up with his wife, who was
reading as she walked, the three children being considerably further
ahead with the nurse.
Mrs. Marchmill started out of the reverie into which the book had
thrown her. ‘Yes,’ she said, ‘you’ve been such a long time. I was tired
of staying in that dreary hotel. But I am sorry if you have wanted me,
Will?’
‘Well, I have had trouble to suit myself. When you see the airy and
comfortable rooms heard of, you find they are stuffy and uncomfortable.
Will you come and see if what I’ve fixed on will do? There is not much
room, I am afraid; hut I can light on nothing better. The town is
rather full.’
The pair left the children and nurse to continue their ramble, and went
back together.
In age well-balanced, in personal appearance fairly matched, and in
domestic requirements conformable, in temper this couple differed,
though even here they did not often clash, he being equable, if not
lymphatic, and she decidedly nervous and sanguine. It was to their
tastes and fancies, those smallest, greatest particulars, that no
common denominator could be applied. Marchmill considered his wife’s
likes and inclinations somewhat silly; she considered his sordid and
material. The husband’s business was that of a gunmaker in a thriving
city northwards, and his soul was in that business always; the lady was
best characterized by that superannuated phrase of elegance ‘a votary
of the muse.’ An impressionable, palpitating creature was Ella,
shrinking humanely from detailed knowledge of her husband’s trade
whenever she reflected that everything he manufactured had for its
purpose the destruction of life. She could only recover her equanimity
by assuring herself that some, at least, of his weapons were sooner or
later used for the extermination of horrid vermin and animals almost as
cruel to their inferiors in species as human beings were to theirs.
She had never antecedently regarded this occupation of his as any
objection to having him for a husband. Indeed, the necessity of getting
life-leased at all cost, a cardinal virtue which all good mothers
teach, kept her from thinking of it at all till she had closed with
William, had passed the honeymoon, and reached the reflecting stage.
Then, like a person who has stumbled upon some object in the dark, she
wondered what she had got; mentally walked round it, estimated it;
whether it were rare or common; contained gold, silver, or lead; were a
clog or a pedestal, everything to her or nothing.
She came to some vague conclusions, and since then had kept her heart
alive by pitying her proprietor’s obtuseness and want of refinement,
pitying herself, and letting off her delicate and ethereal emotions in
imaginative occupations, day-dreams, and night-sighs, which perhaps
would not much have disturbed William if he had known of them.
Her figure was small, elegant, and slight in build, tripping, or rather
bounding, in movement. She was dark-eyed, and had that marvellously
bright and liquid sparkle in each pupil which characterizes persons of
Ella’s cast of soul, and is too often a cause of heartache to the
possessor’s male friends, ultimately sometimes to herself. Her husband
was a tall, long-featured man, with a brown beard; he had a pondering
regard; and was, it must be added, usually kind and tolerant to her. He
spoke in squarely shaped sentences, and was supremely satisfied with a
condition of sublunary things which made weapons a necessity.
Husband and wife walked till they had reached the house they were in
search of, which stood in a terrace facing the sea, and was fronted by
a small garden of wind-proof and salt-proof evergreens, stone steps
leading up to the porch. It had its number in the row, but, being
rather larger than the rest, was in addition sedulously distinguished
as Coburg House by its landlady, though everybody else called it
‘Thirteen, New Parade.’ The spot was bright and lively now; but in
winter it became necessary to place sandbags against the door, and to
stuff up the keyhole against the wind and rain, which had worn the
paint so thin that the priming and knotting showed through.
The householder, who had been watching for the gentleman’s return, met
them in the passage, and showed the rooms. She informed them that she
was a professional man’s widow, left in needy circumstances by the
rather sudden death of her husband, and she spoke anxiously of the
conveniences of the establishment.
Mrs. Marchmill said that she liked the situation and the house; but, it
being small, there would not be accommodation enough, unless she could
have all the rooms.
The landlady mused with an air of disappointment. She wanted the
visitors to be her tenants very badly, she said, with obvious honesty.
But unfortunately two of the rooms were occupied permanently by a
bachelor gentleman. He did not pay season prices, it was true; but as
he kept on his apartments all the year round, and was an extremely nice
and interesting young man, who gave no trouble, she did not like to
turn him out for a month’s ‘let,’ even at a high figure. ‘Perhaps,
however,’ she added, ‘he might offer to go for a time.’
They would not hear of this, and went back to the hotel, intending to
proceed to the agent’s to inquire further. Hardly had they sat down to
tea when the landlady called. Her gentleman, she said, had been so
obliging as to offer to give up his rooms for three or four weeks
rather than drive the new-comers away.
‘It is very kind, but we won’t inconvenience him in that way,’ said the
Marchmills.
‘O, it won’t inconvenience him, I assure you!’ said the landlady
eloquently. ‘You see, he’s a different sort of young man from
most—dreamy, solitary, rather melancholy—and he cares more to be here
when the south-westerly gales are beating against the door, and the sea
washes over the Parade, and there’s not a soul in the place, than he
does now in the season. He’d just as soon be where, in fact, he’s going
temporarily, to a little cottage on the Island opposite, for a change.’
She hoped therefore that they would come.
The Marchmill family accordingly took possession of the house next day,
and it seemed to suit them very well. After luncheon Mr. Marchmill
strolled out towards the pier, and Mrs. Marchmill, having despatched
the children to their outdoor amusements on the sands, settled herself
in more completely, examining this and that article, and testing the
reflecting powers of the mirror in the wardrobe door.
In the small back sitting-room, which had been the young bachelor’s,
she found furniture of a more personal nature than in the rest. Shabby
books, of correct rather than rare editions, were piled up in a queerly
reserved manner in corners, as if the previous occupant had not
conceived the possibility that any incoming person of the season’s
bringing could care to look inside them. The landlady hovered on the
threshold to rectify anything that Mrs. Marchmill might not find to her
satisfaction.
‘I’ll make this my own little room,’ said the latter, ‘because the
books are here. By the way, the person who has left seems to have a
good many. He won’t mind my reading some of them, Mrs. Hooper, I hope?’
‘O dear no, ma’am. Yes, he has a good many. You see, he is in the
literary line himself somewhat. He is a poet—yes, really a poet—and he
has a little income of his own, which is enough to write verses on, but
not enough for cutting a figure, even if he cared to.’
‘A poet! O, I did not know that.’
Mrs. Marchmill opened one of the books, and saw the owner’s name
written on the title-page. ‘Dear me!’ she continued; ‘I know his name
very well—Robert Trewe—of course I do; and his writings! And it is
_his_ rooms we have taken, and _him_ we have turned out of his home?’
Ella Marchmill, sitting down alone a few minutes later, thought with
interested surprise of Robert Trewe. Her own latter history will best
explain that interest. Herself the only daughter of a struggling man of
letters, she had during the last year or two taken to writing poems, in
an endeavour to find a congenial channel in which to let flow her
painfully embayed emotions, whose former limpidity and sparkle seemed
departing in the stagnation caused by the routine of a practical
household and the gloom of bearing children to a commonplace father.
These poems, subscribed with a masculine pseudonym, had appeared in
various obscure magazines, and in two cases in rather prominent ones.
In the second of the latter the page which bore her effusion at the
bottom, in smallish print, bore at the top, in large print, a few
verses on the same subject by this very man, Robert Trewe. Both of them
had, in fact, been struck by a tragic incident reported in the daily
papers, and had used it simultaneously as an inspiration, the editor
remarking in a note upon the coincidence, and that the excellence of
both poems prompted him to give them together.
After that event Ella, otherwise ‘John Ivy,’ had watched with much
attention the appearance anywhere in print of verse bearing the
signature of Robert Trewe, who, with a man’s unsusceptibility on the
question of sex, had never once thought of passing himself off as a
woman. To be sure, Mrs. Marchmill had satisfied herself with a sort of
reason for doing the contrary in her case; that nobody might believe in
her inspiration if they found that the sentiments came from a pushing
tradesman’s wife, from the mother of three children by a matter-of-fact
small-arms manufacturer.
Trewe’s verse contrasted with that of the rank and file of recent minor
poets in being impassioned rather than ingenious, luxuriant rather than
finished. Neither _symboliste_ nor _décadent_, he was a pessimist in so
far as that character applies to a man who looks at the worst
contingencies as well as the best in the human condition. Being little
attracted by excellences of form and rhythm apart from content, he
sometimes, when feeling outran his artistic speed, perpetrated sonnets
in the loosely rhymed Elizabethan fashion, which every right-minded
reviewer said he ought not to have done.
With sad and hopeless envy, Ella Marchmill had often and often scanned
the rival poet’s work, so much stronger as it always was than her own
feeble lines. She had imitated him, and her inability to touch his
level would send her into fits of despondency. Months passed away thus,
till she observed from the publishers’ list that Trewe had collected
his fugitive pieces into a volume, which was duly issued, and was much
or little praised according to chance, and had a sale quite sufficient
to pay for the printing.
This step onward had suggested to John Ivy the idea of collecting her
pieces also, or at any rate of making up a book of her rhymes by adding
many in manuscript to the few that had seen the light, for she had been
able to get no great number into print. A ruinous charge was made for
costs of publication; a few reviews noticed her poor little volume; but
nobody talked of it, nobody bought it, and it fell dead in a
fortnight—if it had ever been alive.
The author’s thoughts were diverted to another groove just then by the
discovery that she was going to have a third child, and the collapse of
her poetical venture had perhaps less effect upon her mind than it
might have done if she had been domestically unoccupied. Her husband
had paid the publisher’s bill with the doctor’s, and there it all had
ended for the time. But, though less than a poet of her century, Ella
was more than a mere multiplier of her kind, and latterly she had begun
to feel the old afflatus once more. And now by an odd conjunction she
found herself in the rooms of Robert Trewe.
She thoughtfully rose from her chair and searched the apartment with
the interest of a fellow-tradesman. Yes, the volume of his own verse
was among the rest. Though quite familiar with its contents, she read
it here as if it spoke aloud to her, then called up Mrs. Hooper, the
landlady, for some trivial service, and inquired again about the young
man.
‘Well, I’m sure you’d be interested in him, ma’am, if you could see
him, only he’s so shy that I don’t suppose you will.’ Mrs. Hooper
seemed nothing loth to minister to her tenant’s curiosity about her
predecessor. ‘Lived here long? Yes, nearly two years. He keeps on his
rooms even when he’s not here: the soft air of this place suits his
chest, and he likes to be able to come back at any time. He is mostly
writing or reading, and doesn’t see many people, though, for the matter
of that, he is such a good, kind young fellow that folks would only be
too glad to be friendly with him if they knew him. You don’t meet
kind-hearted people every day.’
‘Ah, he’s kind-hearted . . . and good.’
‘Yes; he’ll oblige me in anything if I ask him. “Mr. Trewe,” I say to
him sometimes, “you are rather out of spirits.” “Well, I am, Mrs.
Hooper,” he’ll say, “though I don’t know how you should find it out.”
“Why not take a little change?” I ask. Then in a day or two he’ll say
that he will take a trip to Paris, or Norway, or somewhere; and I
assure you he comes back all the better for it.’
‘Ah, indeed! His is a sensitive nature, no doubt.’
‘Yes. Still he’s odd in some things. Once when he had finished a poem
of his composition late at night he walked up and down the room
rehearsing it; and the floors being so thin—jerry-built houses, you
know, though I say it myself—he kept me awake up above him till I
wished him further . . . But we get on very well.’
This was but the beginning of a series of conversations about the
rising poet as the days went on. On one of these occasions Mrs. Hooper
drew Ella’s attention to what she had not noticed before: minute
scribblings in pencil on the wall-paper behind the curtains at the head
of the bed.
‘O! let me look,’ said Mrs. Marchmill, unable to conceal a rush of
tender curiosity as she bent her pretty face close to the wall.
‘These,’ said Mrs. Hooper, with the manner of a woman who knew things,
‘are the very beginnings and first thoughts of his verses. He has tried
to rub most of them out, but you can read them still. My belief is that
he wakes up in the night, you know, with some rhyme in his head, and
jots it down there on the wall lest he should forget it by the morning.
Some of these very lines you see here I have seen afterwards in print
in the magazines. Some are newer; indeed, I have not seen that one
before. It must have been done only a few days ago.’
‘O yes! . . . ’
Ella Marchmill flushed without knowing why, and suddenly wished her
companion would go away, now that the information was imparted. An
indescribable consciousness of personal interest rather than literary
made her anxious to read the inscription alone; and she accordingly
waited till she could do so, with a sense that a great store of emotion
would be enjoyed in the act.
Perhaps because the sea was choppy outside the Island, Ella’s husband
found it much pleasanter to go sailing and steaming about without his
wife, who was a bad sailor, than with her. He did not disdain to go
thus alone on board the steamboats of the cheap-trippers, where there
was dancing by moonlight, and where the couples would come suddenly
down with a lurch into each other’s arms; for, as he blandly told her,
the company was too mixed for him to take her amid such scenes. Thus,
while this thriving manufacturer got a great deal of change and sea-air
out of his sojourn here, the life, external at least, of Ella was
monotonous enough, and mainly consisted in passing a certain number of
hours each day in bathing and walking up and down a stretch of shore.
But the poetic impulse having again waxed strong, she was possessed by
an inner flame which left her hardly conscious of what was proceeding
around her.
She had read till she knew by heart Trewe’s last little volume of
verses, and spent a great deal of time in vainly attempting to rival
some of them, till, in her failure, she burst into tears. The personal
element in the magnetic attraction exercised by this circumambient,
unapproachable master of hers was so much stronger than the
intellectual and abstract that she could not understand it. To be sure,
she was surrounded noon and night by his customary environment, which
literally whispered of him to her at every moment; but he was a man she
had never seen, and that all that moved her was the instinct to
specialize a waiting emotion on the first fit thing that came to hand
did not, of course, suggest itself to Ella.
In the natural way of passion under the too practical conditions which
civilization has devised for its fruition, her husband’s love for her
had not survived, except in the form of fitful friendship, any more
than, or even so much as, her own for him; and, being a woman of very
living ardours, that required sustenance of some sort, they were
beginning to feed on this chancing material, which was, indeed, of a
quality far better than chance usually offers.
One day the children had been playing hide-and-seek in a closet,
whence, in their excitement, they pulled out some clothing. Mrs. Hooper
explained that it belonged to Mr. Trewe, and hung it up in the closet
again. Possessed of her fantasy, Ella went later in the afternoon, when
nobody was in that part of the house, opened the closet, unhitched one
of the articles, a mackintosh, and put it on, with the waterproof cap
belonging to it.
‘The mantle of Elijah!’ she said. ‘Would it might inspire me to rival
him, glorious genius that he is!’
Her eyes always grew wet when she thought like that, and she turned to
look at herself in the glass. _His_ heart had beat inside that coat,
and _his_ brain had worked under that hat at levels of thought she
would never reach. The consciousness of her weakness beside him made
her feel quite sick. Before she had got the things off her the door
opened, and her husband entered the room.
‘What the devil—’
She blushed, and removed them
‘I found them in the closet here,’ she said, ‘and put them on in a
freak. What have I else to do? You are always away!’
‘Always away? Well . . . ’
That evening she had a further talk with the landlady, who might
herself have nourished a half-tender regard for the poet, so ready was
she to discourse ardently about him.
‘You are interested in Mr. Trewe, I know, ma’am,’ she said; ‘and he has
just sent to say that he is going to call to-morrow afternoon to look
up some books of his that he wants, if I’ll be in, and he may select
them from your room?’
‘O yes!’
‘You could very well meet Mr Trewe then, if you’d like to be in the
way!’
She promised with secret delight, and went to bed musing of him.
Next morning her husband observed: ‘I’ve been thinking of what you
said, Ell: that I have gone about a good deal and left you without much
to amuse you. Perhaps it’s true. To-day, as there’s not much sea, I’ll
take you with me on board the yacht.’
For the first time in her experience of such an offer Ella was not
glad. But she accepted it for the moment. The time for setting out drew
near, and she went to get ready. She stood reflecting. The longing to
see the poet she was now distinctly in love with overpowered all other
considerations.
‘I don’t want to go,’ she said to herself. ‘I can’t bear to be away!
And I won’t go.’
She told her husband that she had changed her mind about wishing to
sail. He was indifferent, and went his way.
For the rest of the day the house was quiet, the children having gone
out upon the sands. The blinds waved in the sunshine to the soft,
steady stroke of the sea beyond the wall; and the notes of the Green
Silesian band, a troop of foreign gentlemen hired for the season, had
drawn almost all the residents and promenaders away from the vicinity
of Coburg House. A knock was audible at the door.
Mrs. Marchmill did not hear any servant go to answer it, and she became
impatient. The books were in the room where she sat; but nobody came
up. She rang the bell.
‘There is some person waiting at the door,’ she said.
‘O no, ma’am! He’s gone long ago. I answered it.’
Mrs. Hooper came in herself.
‘So disappointing!’ she said. ‘Mr. Trewe not coming after all!’
‘But I heard him knock, I fancy!’
‘No; that was somebody inquiring for lodgings who came to the wrong
house. I forgot to tell you that Mr. Trewe sent a note just before
lunch to say I needn’t get any tea for him, as he should not require
the books, and wouldn’t come to select them.’
Ella was miserable, and for a long time could not even re-read his
mournful ballad on ‘Severed Lives,’ so aching was her erratic little
heart, and so tearful her eyes. When the children came in with wet
stockings, and ran up to her to tell her of their adventures, she could
not feel that she cared about them half as much as usual.
‘Mrs. Hooper, have you a photograph of—the gentleman who lived here?’
She was getting to be curiously shy in mentioning his name.
‘Why, yes. It’s in the ornamental frame on the mantelpiece in your own
bedroom, ma’am.’
‘No; the Royal Duke and Duchess are in that.’
‘Yes, so they are; but he’s behind them. He belongs rightly to that
frame, which I bought on purpose; but as he went away he said: “Cover
me up from those strangers that are coming, for God’s sake. I don’t
want them staring at me, and I am sure they won’t want me staring at
them.” So I slipped in the Duke and Duchess temporarily in front of
him, as they had no frame, and Royalties are more suitable for letting
furnished than a private young man. If you take ’em out you’ll see him
under. Lord, ma’am, he wouldn’t mind if he knew it! He didn’t think the
next tenant would be such an attractive lady as you, or he wouldn’t
have thought of hiding himself; perhaps.’
‘Is he handsome?’ she asked timidly.
‘_I_ call him so. Some, perhaps, wouldn’t.’
‘Should I?’ she asked, with eagerness.
‘I think you would, though some would say he’s more striking than
handsome; a large-eyed thoughtful fellow, you know, with a very
electric flash in his eye when he looks round quickly, such as you’d
expect a poet to be who doesn’t get his living by it.’
‘How old is he?’
‘Several years older than yourself, ma’am; about thirty-one or two, I
think.’
Ella was, as a matter of fact, a few months over thirty herself; but
she did not look nearly so much. Though so immature in nature, she was
entering on that tract of life in which emotional women begin to
suspect that last love may be stronger than first love; and she would
soon, alas, enter on the still more melancholy tract when at least the
vainer ones of her sex shrink from receiving a male visitor otherwise
than with their backs to the window or the blinds half down. She
reflected on Mrs. Hooper’s remark, and said no more about age.
Just then a telegram was brought up. It came from her husband, who had
gone down the Channel as far as Budmouth with his friends in the yacht,
and would not be able to get back till next day.
After her light dinner Ella idled about the shore with the children
till dusk, thinking of the yet uncovered photograph in her room, with a
serene sense of something ecstatic to come. For, with the subtle
luxuriousness of fancy in which this young woman was an adept, on
learning that her husband was to be absent that night she had refrained
from incontinently rushing upstairs and opening the picture-frame,
preferring to reserve the inspection till she could be alone, and a
more romantic tinge be imparted to the occasion by silence, candles,
solemn sea and stars outside, than was afforded by the garish afternoon
sunlight.
The children had been sent to bed, and Ella soon followed, though it
was not yet ten o’clock. To gratify her passionate curiosity she now
made her preparations, first getting rid of superfluous garments and
putting on her dressing-gown, then arranging a chair in front of the
table and reading several pages of Trewe’s tenderest utterances. Then
she fetched the portrait-frame to the light, opened the back, took out
the likeness, and set it up before her.
It was a striking countenance to look upon. The poet wore a luxuriant
black moustache and imperial, and a slouched hat which shaded the
forehead. The large dark eyes, described by the landlady, showed an
unlimited capacity for misery; they looked out from beneath well-shaped
brows as if they were reading the universe in the microcosm of the
confronter’s face, and were not altogether overjoyed at what the
spectacle portended.
Ella murmured in her lowest, richest, tenderest tone: ‘And it’s _you_
who’ve so cruelly eclipsed me these many times!’
As she gazed long at the portrait she fell into thought, till her eyes
filled with tears, and she touched the cardboard with her lips. Then
she laughed with a nervous lightness, and wiped her eyes.
She thought how wicked she was, a woman having a husband and three
children, to let her mind stray to a stranger in this unconscionable
manner. No, he was not a stranger! She knew his thoughts and feelings
as well as she knew her own; they were, in fact, the self-same thoughts
and feelings as hers, which her husband distinctly lacked; perhaps
luckily for himself; considering that he had to provide for family
expenses.
‘He’s nearer my real self, he’s more intimate with the real me than
Will is, after all, even though I’ve never seen him,’ she said.
She laid his book and picture on the table at the bedside, and when she
was reclining on the pillow she re-read those of Robert Trewe’s verses
which she had marked from time to time as most touching and true.
Putting these aside, she set up the photograph on its edge upon the
coverlet, and contemplated it as she lay. Then she scanned again by the
light of the candle the half-obliterated pencillings on the wall-paper
beside her head. There they were—phrases, couplets, _bouts-rimés_,
beginnings and middles of lines, ideas in the rough, like Shelley’s
scraps, and the least of them so intense, so sweet, so palpitating,
that it seemed as if his very breath, warm and loving, fanned her
cheeks from those walls, walls that had surrounded his head times and
times as they surrounded her own now. He must often have put up his
hand so—with the pencil in it. Yes, the writing was sideways, as it
would be if executed by one who extended his arm thus.
These inscribed shapes of the poet’s world,
‘Forms more real than living man,
Nurslings of immortality,’
were, no doubt, the thoughts and spirit-strivings which had come to him
in the dead of night, when he could let himself go and have no fear of
the frost of criticism. No doubt they had often been written up hastily
by the light of the moon, the rays of the lamp, in the blue-grey dawn,
in full daylight perhaps never. And now her hair was dragging where his
arm had lain when he secured the fugitive fancies; she was sleeping on
a poet’s lips, immersed in the very essence of him, permeated by his
spirit as by an ether.
While she was dreaming the minutes away thus, a footstep came upon the
stairs, and in a moment she heard her husband’s heavy step on the
landing immediately without.
‘Ell, where are you?’
What possessed her she could not have described, but, with an
instinctive objection to let her husband know what she had been doing,
she slipped the photograph under the pillow just as he flung open the
door, with the air of a man who had dined not badly.
‘O, I beg pardon,’ said William Marchmill. ‘Have you a headache? I am
afraid I have disturbed you.’
‘No, I’ve not got a headache,’ said she. ‘How is it you’ve come?’
‘Well, we found we could get back in very good time after all, and I
didn’t want to make another day of it, because of going somewhere else
to-morrow.’
‘Shall I come down again?’
‘O no. I’m as tired as a dog. I’ve had a good feed, and I shall turn in
straight off. I want to get out at six o’clock to-morrow if I can . . .
I shan’t disturb you by my getting up; it will be long before you are
awake.’ And he came forward into the room.
While her eyes followed his movements, Ella softly pushed the
photograph further out of sight.
‘Sure you’re not ill?’ he asked, bending over her.
‘No, only wicked!’
‘Never mind that.’ And he stooped and kissed her.
Next morning Marchmill was called at six o’clock; and in waking and
yawning she heard him muttering to himself: ‘What the deuce is this
that’s been crackling under me so?’ Imagining her asleep he searched
round him and withdrew something. Through her half-opened eyes she
perceived it to be Mr. Trewe.
‘Well, I’m damned!’ her husband exclaimed.
‘What, dear?’ said she.
‘O, you are awake? Ha! ha!’
‘What _do_ you mean?’
‘Some bloke’s photograph—a friend of our landlady’s, I suppose. I
wonder how it came here; whisked off the table by accident perhaps when
they were making the bed.’
‘I was looking at it yesterday, and it must have dropped in then.’
‘O, he’s a friend of yours? Bless his picturesque heart!’
Ella’s loyalty to the object of her admiration could not endure to hear
him ridiculed. ‘He’s a clever man!’ she said, with a tremor in her
gentle voice which she herself felt to be absurdly uncalled for.
‘He is a rising poet—the gentleman who occupied two of these rooms
before we came, though I’ve never seen him.’
‘How do you know, if you’ve never seen him?’
‘Mrs. Hooper told me when she showed me the photograph.’
‘O; well, I must up and be off. I shall be home rather early. Sorry I
can’t take you to-day, dear. Mind the children don’t go getting
drowned.’
That day Mrs. Marchmill inquired if Mr. Trewe were likely to call at
any other time.
‘Yes,’ said Mrs. Hooper. ‘He’s coming this day week to stay with a
friend near here till you leave. He’ll be sure to call.’
Marchmill did return quite early in the afternoon; and, opening some
letters which had arrived in his absence, declared suddenly that he and
his family would have to leave a week earlier than they had expected to
do—in short, in three days.
‘Surely we can stay a week longer?’ she pleaded. ‘I like it here.’
‘I don’t. It is getting rather slow.’
‘Then you might leave me and the children!’
‘How perverse you are, Ell! What’s the use? And have to come to fetch
you! No: we’ll all return together; and we’ll make out our time in
North Wales or Brighton a little later on. Besides, you’ve three days
longer yet.’
It seemed to be her doom not to meet the man for whose rival talent she
had a despairing admiration, and to whose person she was now absolutely
attached. Yet she determined to make a last effort; and having gathered
from her landlady that Trewe was living in a lonely spot not far from
the fashionable town on the Island opposite, she crossed over in the
packet from the neighbouring pier the following afternoon.
What a useless journey it was! Ella knew but vaguely where the house
stood, and when she fancied she had found it, and ventured to inquire
of a pedestrian if he lived there, the answer returned by the man was
that he did not know. And if he did live there, how could she call upon
him? Some women might have the assurance to do it, but she had not. How
crazy he would think her. She might have asked him to call upon her,
perhaps; but she had not the courage for that, either. She lingered
mournfully about the picturesque seaside eminence till it was time to
return to the town and enter the steamer for recrossing, reaching home
for dinner without having been greatly missed.
At the last moment, unexpectedly enough, her husband said that he
should have no objection to letting her and the children stay on till
the end of the week, since she wished to do so, if she felt herself
able to get home without him. She concealed the pleasure this extension
of time gave her; and Marchmill went off the next morning alone.
But the week passed, and Trewe did not call.
On Saturday morning the remaining members of the Marchmill family
departed from the place which had been productive of so much fervour in
her. The dreary, dreary train; the sun shining in moted beams upon the
hot cushions; the dusty permanent way; the mean rows of wire—these
things were her accompaniment: while out of the window the deep blue
sea-levels disappeared from her gaze, and with them her poet’s home.
Heavy-hearted, she tried to read, and wept instead.
Mr. Marchmill was in a thriving way of business, and he and his family
lived in a large new house, which stood in rather extensive grounds a
few miles outside the city wherein he carried on his trade. Ella’s life
was lonely here, as the suburban life is apt to be, particularly at
certain seasons; and she had ample time to indulge her taste for lyric
and elegiac composition. She had hardly got back when she encountered a
piece by Robert Trewe in the new number of her favourite magazine,
which must have been written almost immediately before her visit to
Solentsea, for it contained the very couplet she had seen pencilled on
the wallpaper by the bed, and Mrs. Hooper had declared to be recent.
Ella could resist no longer, but seizing a pen impulsively, wrote to
him as a brother-poet, using the name of John Ivy, congratulating him
in her letter on his triumphant executions in metre and rhythm of
thoughts that moved his soul, as compared with her own brow-beaten
efforts in the same pathetic trade.
To this address there came a response in a few days, little as she had
dared to hope for it—a civil and brief note, in which the young poet
stated that, though he was not well acquainted with Mr. Ivy’s verse, he
recalled the name as being one he had seen attached to some very
promising pieces; that he was glad to gain Mr. Ivy’s acquaintance by
letter, and should certainly look with much interest for his
productions in the future.
There must have been something juvenile or timid in her own epistle, as
one ostensibly coming from a man, she declared to herself; for Trewe
quite adopted the tone of an elder and superior in this reply. But what
did it matter? he had replied; he had written to her with his own hand
from that very room she knew so well, for he was now back again in his
quarters.
The correspondence thus begun was continued for two months or more,
Ella Marchmill sending him from time to time some that she considered
to be the best of her pieces, which he very kindly accepted, though he
did not say he sedulously read them, nor did he send her any of his own
in return. Ella would have been more hurt at this than she was if she
had not known that Trewe laboured under the impression that she was one
of his own sex.
Yet the situation was unsatisfactory. A flattering little voice told
her that, were he only to see her, matters would be otherwise. No doubt
she would have helped on this by making a frank confession of
womanhood, to begin with, if something had not happened, to her
delight, to render it unnecessary. A friend of her husband’s, the
editor of the most important newspaper in the city and county, who was
dining with them one day, observed during their conversation about the
poet that his (the editor’s) brother the landscape-painter was a friend
of Mr. Trewe’s, and that the two men were at that very moment in Wales
together.
Ella was slightly acquainted with the editor’s brother. The next
morning down she sat and wrote, inviting him to stay at her house for a
short time on his way back, and requesting him to bring with him, if
practicable, his companion Mr. Trewe, whose acquaintance she was
anxious to make. The answer arrived after some few days. Her
correspondent and his friend Trewe would have much satisfaction in
accepting her invitation on their way southward, which would be on such
and such a day in the following week.
Ella was blithe and buoyant. Her scheme had succeeded; her beloved
though as yet unseen one was coming. “Behold, he standeth behind our
wall; he looked forth at the windows, showing himself through the
lattice,” she thought ecstatically. “And, lo, the winter is past, the
rain is over and gone, the flowers appear on the earth, the time of the
singing of birds is come, and the voice of the turtle is heard in our
land.”
But it was necessary to consider the details of lodging and feeding
him. This she did most solicitously, and awaited the pregnant day and
hour.
It was about five in the afternoon when she heard a ring at the door
and the editor’s brother’s voice in the hall. Poetess as she was, or as
she thought herself, she had not been too sublime that day to dress
with infinite trouble in a fashionable robe of rich material, having a
faint resemblance to the _chiton_ of the Greeks, a style just then in
vogue among ladies of an artistic and romantic turn, which had been
obtained by Ella of her Bond Street dressmaker when she was last in
London. Her visitor entered the drawing-room. She looked towards his
rear; nobody else came through the door. Where, in the name of the God
of Love, was Robert Trewe?
‘O, I’m sorry,’ said the painter, after their introductory words had
been spoken. ‘Trewe is a curious fellow, you know, Mrs. Marchmill. He
said he’d come; then he said he couldn’t. He’s rather dusty. We’ve been
doing a few miles with knapsacks, you know; and he wanted to get on
home.’
‘He—he’s not coming?’
‘He’s not; and he asked me to make his apologies.’
‘When did you p-p-part from him?’ she asked, her nether lip starting
off quivering so much that it was like a _tremolo_-stop opened in her
speech. She longed to run away from this dreadful bore and cry her eyes
out.
‘Just now, in the turnpike road yonder there.’
‘What! he has actually gone past my gates?’
‘Yes. When we got to them—handsome gates they are, too, the finest bit
of modern wrought-iron work I have seen—when we came to them we
stopped, talking there a little while, and then he wished me good-bye
and went on. The truth is, he’s a little bit depressed just now, and
doesn’t want to see anybody. He’s a very good fellow, and a warm
friend, but a little uncertain and gloomy sometimes; he thinks too much
of things. His poetry is rather too erotic and passionate, you know,
for some tastes; and he has just come in for a terrible slating from
the —— _Review_ that was published yesterday; he saw a copy of it at
the station by accident. Perhaps you’ve read it?’
‘No.’
‘So much the better. O, it is not worth thinking of; just one of those
articles written to order, to please the narrow-minded set of
subscribers upon whom the circulation depends. But he’s upset by it. He
says it is the misrepresentation that hurts him so; that, though he can
stand a fair attack, he can’t stand lies that he’s powerless to refute
and stop from spreading. That’s just Trewe’s weak point. He lives so
much by himself that these things affect him much more than they would
if he were in the bustle of fashionable or commercial life. So he
wouldn’t come here, making the excuse that it all looked so new and
monied—if you’ll pardon—’
‘But—he must have known—there was sympathy here! Has he never said
anything about getting letters from this address?’
‘Yes, yes, he has, from John Ivy—perhaps a relative of yours, he
thought, visiting here at the time?’
‘Did he—like Ivy, did he say?’
‘Well, I don’t know that he took any great interest in Ivy.’
‘Or in his poems?’
‘Or in his poems—so far as I know, that is.’
Robert Trewe took no interest in her house, in her poems, or in their
writer. As soon as she could get away she went into the nursery and
tried to let off her emotion by unnecessarily kissing the children,
till she had a sudden sense of disgust at being reminded how
plain-looking they were, like their father.
The obtuse and single-minded landscape-painter never once perceived
from her conversation that it was only Trewe she wanted, and not
himself. He made the best of his visit, seeming to enjoy the society of
Ella’s husband, who also took a great fancy to him, and showed him
everywhere about the neighbourhood, neither of them noticing Ella’s
mood.
The painter had been gone only a day or two when, while sitting
upstairs alone one morning, she glanced over the London paper just
arrived, and read the following paragraph:-
‘SUICIDE OF A POET
‘Mr. Robert Trewe, who has been favourably known for some years as one
of our rising lyrists, committed suicide at his lodgings at Solentsea
on Saturday evening last by shooting himself in the right temple with a
revolver. Readers hardly need to be reminded that Mr. Trewe has
recently attracted the attention of a much wider public than had
hitherto known him, by his new volume of verse, mostly of an
impassioned kind, entitled “Lyrics to a Woman Unknown,” which has been
already favourably noticed in these pages for the extraordinary gamut
of feeling it traverses, and which has been made the subject of a
severe, if not ferocious, criticism in the —— Review. It is supposed,
though not certainly known, that the article may have partially
conduced to the sad act, as a copy of the review in question was found
on his writing-table; and he has been observed to be in a somewhat
depressed state of mind since the critique appeared.’
Then came the report of the inquest, at which the following letter was
read, it having been addressed to a friend at a distance:-
‘DEAR ——,—Before these lines reach your hands I shall be delivered from
the inconveniences of seeing, hearing, and knowing more of the things
around me. I will not trouble you by giving my reasons for the step I
have taken, though I can assure you they were sound and logical.
Perhaps had I been blessed with a mother, or a sister, or a female
friend of another sort tenderly devoted to me, I might have thought it
worth while to continue my present existence. I have long dreamt of
such an unattainable creature, as you know, and she, this
undiscoverable, elusive one, inspired my last volume; the imaginary
woman alone, for, in spite of what has been said in some quarters,
there is no real woman behind the title. She has continued to the last
unrevealed, unmet, unwon. I think it desirable to mention this in order
that no blame may attach to any real woman as having been the cause of
my decease by cruel or cavalier treatment of me. Tell my landlady that
I am sorry to have caused her this unpleasantness; but my occupancy of
the rooms will soon be forgotten. There are ample funds in my name at
the bank to pay all expenses. R. TREWE.’
Ella sat for a while as if stunned, then rushed into the adjoining
chamber and flung herself upon her face on the bed.
Her grief and distraction shook her to pieces; and she lay in this
frenzy of sorrow for more than an hour. Broken words came every now and
then from her quivering lips: ‘O, if he had only known of me—known of
me—me! . . . O, if I had only once met him—only once; and put my hand
upon his hot forehead—kissed him—let him know how I loved him—that I
would have suffered shame and scorn, would have lived and died, for
him! Perhaps it would have saved his dear life! . . . But no—it was not
allowed! God is a jealous God; and that happiness was not for him and
me!’
All possibilities were over; the meeting was stultified. Yet it was
almost visible to her in her fantasy even now, though it could never be
substantiated—
‘The hour which might have been, yet might not be,
Which man’s and woman’s heart conceived and bore,
Yet whereof life was barren.’
She wrote to the landlady at Solentsea in the third person, in as
subdued a style as she could command, enclosing a postal order for a
sovereign, and informing Mrs. Hooper that Mrs. Marchmill had seen in
the papers the sad account of the poet’s death, and having been, as
Mrs. Hooper was aware, much interested in Mr. Trewe during her stay at
Coburg House, she would be obliged if Mrs. Hooper could obtain a small
portion of his hair before his coffin was closed down, and send it her
as a memorial of him, as also the photograph that was in the frame.
By the return-post a letter arrived containing what had been requested.
Ella wept over the portrait and secured it in her private drawer; the
lock of hair she tied with white ribbon and put in her bosom, whence
she drew it and kissed it every now and then in some unobserved nook.
‘What’s the matter?’ said her husband, looking up from his newspaper on
one of these occasions. ‘Crying over something? A lock of hair? Whose
is it?’
‘He’s dead!’ she murmured.
‘Who?’
‘I don’t want to tell you, Will, just now, unless you insist!’ she
said, a sob hanging heavy in her voice.
‘O, all right.’
‘Do you mind my refusing? I will tell you some day.’
‘It doesn’t matter in the least, of course.’
He walked away whistling a few bars of no tune in particular; and when
he had got down to his factory in the city the subject came into
Marchmill’s head again.
He, too, was aware that a suicide had taken place recently at the house
they had occupied at Solentsea. Having seen the volume of poems in his
wife’s hand of late, and heard fragments of the landlady’s conversation
about Trewe when they were her tenants, he all at once said to himself;
‘Why of course it’s he! How the devil did she get to know him? What sly
animals women are!’
Then he placidly dismissed the matter, and went on with his daily
affairs. By this time Ella at home had come to a determination. Mrs.
Hooper, in sending the hair and photograph, had informed her of the day
of the funeral; and as the morning and noon wore on an overpowering
wish to know where they were laying him took possession of the
sympathetic woman. Caring very little now what her husband or any one
else might think of her eccentricities; she wrote Marchmill a brief
note, stating that she was called away for the afternoon and evening,
but would return on the following morning. This she left on his desk,
and having given the same information to the servants, went out of the
house on foot.
When Mr. Marchmill reached home early in the afternoon the servants
looked anxious. The nurse took him privately aside, and hinted that her
mistress’s sadness during the past few days had been such that she
feared she had gone out to drown herself. Marchmill reflected. Upon the
whole he thought that she had not done that. Without saying whither he
was bound he also started off, telling them not to sit up for him. He
drove to the railway-station, and took a ticket for Solentsea.
It was dark when he reached the place, though he had come by a fast
train, and he knew that if his wife had preceded him thither it could
only have been by a slower train, arriving not a great while before his
own. The season at Solentsea was now past: the parade was gloomy, and
the flys were few and cheap. He asked the way to the Cemetery, and soon
reached it. The gate was locked, but the keeper let him in, declaring,
however, that there was nobody within the precincts. Although it was
not late, the autumnal darkness had now become intense; and he found
some difficulty in keeping to the serpentine path which led to the
quarter where, as the man had told him, the one or two interments for
the day had taken place. He stepped upon the grass, and, stumbling over
some pegs, stooped now and then to discern if possible a figure against
the sky.
He could see none; but lighting on a spot where the soil was trodden,
beheld a crouching object beside a newly made grave. She heard him, and
sprang up.
‘Ell, how silly this is!’ he said indignantly. ‘Running away from
home—I never heard such a thing! Of course I am not jealous of this
unfortunate man; but it is too ridiculous that you, a married woman
with three children and a fourth coming, should go losing your head
like this over a dead lover! . . . Do you know you were locked in? You
might not have been able to get out all night.’
She did not answer.
‘I hope it didn’t go far between you and him, for your own sake.’
‘Don’t insult me, Will.’
‘Mind, I won’t have any more of this sort of thing; do you hear?’
‘Very well,’ she said.
He drew her arm within his own, and conducted her out of the Cemetery.
It was impossible to get back that night; and not wishing to be
recognized in their present sorry condition, he took her to a miserable
little coffee-house close to the station, whence they departed early in
the morning, travelling almost without speaking, under the sense that
it was one of those dreary situations occurring in married life which
words could not mend, and reaching their own door at noon.
The months passed, and neither of the twain ever ventured to start a
conversation upon this episode. Ella seemed to be only too frequently
in a sad and listless mood, which might almost have been called pining.
The time was approaching when she would have to undergo the stress of
childbirth for a fourth time, and that apparently did not tend to raise
her spirits.
‘I don’t think I shall get over it this time!’ she said one day.
‘Pooh! what childish foreboding! Why shouldn’t it be as well now as
ever?’
She shook her head. ‘I feel almost sure I am going to die; and I should
be glad, if it were not for Nelly, and Frank, and Tiny.’
‘And me!’
‘You’ll soon find somebody to fill my place,’ she murmured, with a sad
smile. ‘And you’ll have a perfect right to; I assure you of that.’
‘Ell, you are not thinking still about that—poetical friend of yours?’
She neither admitted nor denied the charge. ‘I am not going to get over
my illness this time,’ she reiterated. ‘Something tells me I shan’t.’
This view of things was rather a bad beginning, as it usually is; and,
in fact, six weeks later, in the month of May, she was lying in her
room, pulseless and bloodless, with hardly strength enough left to
follow up one feeble breath with another, the infant for whose
unnecessary life she was slowly parting with her own being fat and
well. Just before her death she spoke to Marchmill softly:-
‘Will, I want to confess to you the entire circumstances of that—about
you know what—that time we visited Solentsea. I can’t tell what
possessed me—how I could forget you so, my husband! But I had got into
a morbid state: I thought you had been unkind; that you had neglected
me; that you weren’t up to my intellectual level, while he was, and far
above it. I wanted a fuller appreciator, perhaps, rather than another
lover—’
She could get no further then for very exhaustion; and she went off in
sudden collapse a few hours later, without having said anything more to
her husband on the subject of her love for the poet. William Marchmill,
in truth, like most husbands of several years’ standing, was little
disturbed by retrospective jealousies, and had not shown the least
anxiety to press her for confessions concerning a man dead and gone
beyond any power of inconveniencing him more.
But when she had been buried a couple of years it chanced one day that,
in turning over some forgotten papers that he wished to destroy before
his second wife entered the house, he lighted on a lock of hair in an
envelope, with the photograph of the deceased poet, a date being
written on the back in his late wife’s hand. It was that of the time
they spent at Solentsea.
Marchmill looked long and musingly at the hair and portrait, for
something struck him. Fetching the little boy who had been the death of
his mother, now a noisy toddler, he took him on his knee, held the lock
of hair against the child’s head, and set up the photograph on the
table behind, so that he could closely compare the features each
countenance presented. There were undoubtedly strong traces of
resemblance; the dreamy and peculiar expression of the poet’s face sat,
as the transmitted idea, upon the child’s, and the hair was of the same
hue.
‘I’m damned if I didn’t think so!’ murmured Marchmill. ‘Then she _did_
play me false with that fellow at the lodgings! Let me see: the
dates—the second week in August . . . the third week in May . . . Yes .
. . yes . . . Get away, you poor little brat! You are nothing to me!’
1893.
THE THREE STRANGERS
Among the few features of agricultural England which retain an
appearance but little modified by the lapse of centuries, may be
reckoned the high, grassy and furzy downs, coombs, or ewe-leases, as
they are indifferently called, that fill a large area of certain
counties in the south and south-west. If any mark of human occupation
is met with hereon, it usually takes the form of the solitary cottage
of some shepherd.
Fifty years ago such a lonely cottage stood on such a down, and may
possibly be standing there now. In spite of its loneliness, however,
the spot, by actual measurement, was not more than five miles from a
county-town. Yet that affected it little. Five miles of irregular
upland, during the long inimical seasons, with their sleets, snows,
rains, and mists, afford withdrawing space enough to isolate a Timon or
a Nebuchadnezzar; much less, in fair weather, to please that less
repellent tribe, the poets, philosophers, artists, and others who
‘conceive and meditate of pleasant things.’
Some old earthen camp or barrow, some clump of trees, at least some
starved fragment of ancient hedge is usually taken advantage of in the
erection of these forlorn dwellings. But, in the present case, such a
kind of shelter had been disregarded. Higher Crowstairs, as the house
was called, stood quite detached and undefended. The only reason for
its precise situation seemed to be the crossing of two footpaths at
right angles hard by, which may have crossed there and thus for a good
five hundred years. Hence the house was exposed to the elements on all
sides. But, though the wind up here blew unmistakably when it did blow,
and the rain hit hard whenever it fell, the various weathers of the
winter season were not quite so formidable on the coomb as they were
imagined to be by dwellers on low ground. The raw rimes were not so
pernicious as in the hollows, and the frosts were scarcely so severe.
When the shepherd and his family who tenanted the house were pitied for
their sufferings from the exposure, they said that upon the whole they
were less inconvenienced by ‘wuzzes and flames’ (hoarses and phlegms)
than when they had lived by the stream of a snug neighbouring valley.
The night of March 28, 182-, was precisely one of the nights that were
wont to call forth these expressions of commiseration. The level
rainstorm smote walls, slopes, and hedges like the clothyard shafts of
Senlac and Crecy. Such sheep and outdoor animals as had no shelter
stood with their buttocks to the winds; while the tails of little birds
trying to roost on some scraggy thorn were blown inside-out like
umbrellas. The gable-end of the cottage was stained with wet, and the
eavesdroppings flapped against the wall. Yet never was commiseration
for the shepherd more misplaced. For that cheerful rustic was
entertaining a large party in glorification of the christening of his
second girl.
The guests had arrived before the rain began to fall, and they were all
now assembled in the chief or living room of the dwelling. A glance
into the apartment at eight o’clock on this eventful evening would have
resulted in the opinion that it was as cosy and comfortable a nook as
could be wished for in boisterous weather. The calling of its
inhabitant was proclaimed by a number of highly-polished sheep-crooks
without stems that were hung ornamentally over the fireplace, the curl
of each shining crook varying from the antiquated type engraved in the
patriarchal pictures of old family Bibles to the most approved fashion
of the last local sheep-fair. The room was lighted by half-a-dozen
candles, having wicks only a trifle smaller than the grease which
enveloped them, in candlesticks that were never used but at high-days,
holy-days, and family feasts. The lights were scattered about the room,
two of them standing on the chimney-piece. This position of candles was
in itself significant. Candles on the chimney-piece always meant a
party.
On the hearth, in front of a back-brand to give substance, blazed a
fire of thorns, that crackled ‘like the laughter of the fool.’
Nineteen persons were gathered here. Of these, five women, wearing
gowns of various bright hues, sat in chairs along the wall; girls shy
and not shy filled the window-bench; four men, including Charley Jake
the hedge-carpenter, Elijah New the parish-clerk, and John Pitcher, a
neighbouring dairyman, the shepherd’s father-in-law, lolled in the
settle; a young man and maid, who were blushing over tentative
_pourparlers_ on a life-companionship, sat beneath the corner-cupboard;
and an elderly engaged man of fifty or upward moved restlessly about
from spots where his betrothed was not to the spot where she was.
Enjoyment was pretty general, and so much the more prevailed in being
unhampered by conventional restrictions. Absolute confidence in each
other’s good opinion begat perfect ease, while the finishing stroke of
manner, amounting to a truly princely serenity, was lent to the
majority by the absence of any expression or trait denoting that they
wished to get on in the world, enlarge their minds, or do any eclipsing
thing whatever—which nowadays so generally nips the bloom and
_bonhomie_ of all except the two extremes of the social scale.
Shepherd Fennel had married well, his wife being a dairyman’s daughter
from a vale at a distance, who brought fifty guineas in her pocket—and
kept them there, till they should be required for ministering to the
needs of a coming family. This frugal woman had been somewhat exercised
as to the character that should be given to the gathering. A sit-still
party had its advantages; but an undisturbed position of ease in chairs
and settles was apt to lead on the men to such an unconscionable deal
of toping that they would sometimes fairly drink the house dry. A
dancing-party was the alternative; but this, while avoiding the
foregoing objection on the score of good drink, had a counterbalancing
disadvantage in the matter of good victuals, the ravenous appetites
engendered by the exercise causing immense havoc in the buttery.
Shepherdess Fennel fell back upon the intermediate plan of mingling
short dances with short periods of talk and singing, so as to hinder
any ungovernable rage in either. But this scheme was entirely confined
to her own gentle mind: the shepherd himself was in the mood to exhibit
the most reckless phases of hospitality.
The fiddler was a boy of those parts, about twelve years of age, who
had a wonderful dexterity in jigs and reels, though his fingers were so
small and short as to necessitate a constant shifting for the high
notes, from which he scrambled back to the first position with sounds
not of unmixed purity of tone. At seven the shrill tweedle-dee of this
youngster had begun, accompanied by a booming ground-bass from Elijah
New, the parish-clerk, who had thoughtfully brought with him his
favourite musical instrument, the serpent. Dancing was instantaneous,
Mrs. Fennel privately enjoining the players on no account to let the
dance exceed the length of a quarter of an hour.
But Elijah and the boy, in the excitement of their position, quite
forgot the injunction. Moreover, Oliver Giles, a man of seventeen, one
of the dancers, who was enamoured of his partner, a fair girl of
thirty-three rolling years, had recklessly handed a new crown-piece to
the musicians, as a bribe to keep going as long as they had muscle and
wind. Mrs. Fennel, seeing the steam begin to generate on the
countenances of her guests, crossed over and touched the fiddler’s
elbow and put her hand on the serpent’s mouth. But they took no notice,
and fearing she might lose her character of genial hostess if she were
to interfere too markedly, she retired and sat down helpless. And so
the dance whizzed on with cumulative fury, the performers moving in
their planet-like courses, direct and retrograde, from apogee to
perigee, till the hand of the well-kicked clock at the bottom of the
room had travelled over the circumference of an hour.
While these cheerful events were in course of enactment within Fennel’s
pastoral dwelling, an incident having considerable bearing on the party
had occurred in the gloomy night without. Mrs. Fennel’s concern about
the growing fierceness of the dance corresponded in point of time with
the ascent of a human figure to the solitary hill of Higher Crowstairs
from the direction of the distant town. This personage strode on
through the rain without a pause, following the little-worn path which,
further on in its course, skirted the shepherd’s cottage.
It was nearly the time of full moon, and on this account, though the
sky was lined with a uniform sheet of dripping cloud, ordinary objects
out of doors were readily visible. The sad wan light revealed the
lonely pedestrian to be a man of supple frame; his gait suggested that
he had somewhat passed the period of perfect and instinctive agility,
though not so far as to be otherwise than rapid of motion when occasion
required. At a rough guess, he might have been about forty years of
age. He appeared tall, but a recruiting sergeant, or other person
accustomed to the judging of men’s heights by the eye, would have
discerned that this was chiefly owing to his gauntness, and that he was
not more than five-feet-eight or nine.
Notwithstanding the regularity of his tread, there was caution in it,
as in that of one who mentally feels his way; and despite the fact that
it was not a black coat nor a dark garment of any sort that he wore,
there was something about him which suggested that he naturally
belonged to the black-coated tribes of men. His clothes were of
fustian, and his boots hobnailed, yet in his progress he showed not the
mud-accustomed bearing of hobnailed and fustianed peasantry.
By the time that he had arrived abreast of the shepherd’s premises the
rain came down, or rather came along, with yet more determined
violence. The outskirts of the little settlement partially broke the
force of wind and rain, and this induced him to stand still. The most
salient of the shepherd’s domestic erections was an empty sty at the
forward corner of his hedgeless garden, for in these latitudes the
principle of masking the homelier features of your establishment by a
conventional frontage was unknown. The traveller’s eye was attracted to
this small building by the pallid shine of the wet slates that covered
it. He turned aside, and, finding it empty, stood under the pent-roof
for shelter.
While he stood, the boom of the serpent within the adjacent house, and
the lesser strains of the fiddler, reached the spot as an accompaniment
to the surging hiss of the flying rain on the sod, its louder beating
on the cabbage-leaves of the garden, on the eight or ten beehives just
discernible by the path, and its dripping from the eaves into a row of
buckets and pans that had been placed under the walls of the cottage.
For at Higher Crowstairs, as at all such elevated domiciles, the grand
difficulty of housekeeping was an insufficiency of water; and a casual
rainfall was utilized by turning out, as catchers, every utensil that
the house contained. Some queer stories might be told of the
contrivances for economy in suds and dish-waters that are absolutely
necessitated in upland habitations during the droughts of summer. But
at this season there were no such exigencies; a mere acceptance of what
the skies bestowed was sufficient for an abundant store.
At last the notes of the serpent ceased and the house was silent. This
cessation of activity aroused the solitary pedestrian from the reverie
into which he had lapsed, and, emerging from the shed, with an
apparently new intention, he walked up the path to the house-door.
Arrived here, his first act was to kneel down on a large stone beside
the row of vessels, and to drink a copious draught from one of them.
Having quenched his thirst he rose and lifted his hand to knock, but
paused with his eye upon the panel. Since the dark surface of the wood
revealed absolutely nothing, it was evident that he must be mentally
looking through the door, as if he wished to measure thereby all the
possibilities that a house of this sort might include, and how they
might bear upon the question of his entry.
In his indecision he turned and surveyed the scene around. Not a soul
was anywhere visible. The garden-path stretched downward from his feet,
gleaming like the track of a snail; the roof of the little well (mostly
dry), the well-cover, the top rail of the garden-gate, were varnished
with the same dull liquid glaze; while, far away in the vale, a faint
whiteness of more than usual extent showed that the rivers were high in
the meads. Beyond all this winked a few bleared lamplights through the
beating drops—lights that denoted the situation of the county-town from
which he had appeared to come. The absence of all notes of life in that
direction seemed to clinch his intentions, and he knocked at the door.
Within, a desultory chat had taken the place of movement and musical
sound. The hedge-carpenter was suggesting a song to the company, which
nobody just then was inclined to undertake, so that the knock afforded
a not unwelcome diversion.
‘Walk in!’ said the shepherd promptly.
The latch clicked upward, and out of the night our pedestrian appeared
upon the door-mat. The shepherd arose, snuffed two of the nearest
candles, and turned to look at him.
Their light disclosed that the stranger was dark in complexion and not
unprepossessing as to feature. His hat, which for a moment he did not
remove, hung low over his eyes, without concealing that they were
large, open, and determined, moving with a flash rather than a glance
round the room. He seemed pleased with his survey, and, baring his
shaggy head, said, in a rich deep voice, ‘The rain is so heavy,
friends, that I ask leave to come in and rest awhile.’
‘To be sure, stranger,’ said the shepherd. ‘And faith, you’ve been
lucky in choosing your time, for we are having a bit of a fling for a
glad cause—though, to be sure, a man could hardly wish that glad cause
to happen more than once a year.’
‘Nor less,’ spoke up a woman. ‘For ’tis best to get your family over
and done with, as soon as you can, so as to be all the earlier out of
the fag o’t.’
‘And what may be this glad cause?’ asked the stranger.
‘A birth and christening,’ said the shepherd.
The stranger hoped his host might not be made unhappy either by too
many or too few of such episodes, and being invited by a gesture to a
pull at the mug, he readily acquiesced. His manner, which, before
entering, had been so dubious, was now altogether that of a careless
and candid man.
‘Late to be traipsing athwart this coomb—hey?’ said the engaged man of
fifty.
‘Late it is, master, as you say.—I’ll take a seat in the
chimney-corner, if you have nothing to urge against it, ma’am; for I am
a little moist on the side that was next the rain.’
Mrs. Shepherd Fennel assented, and made room for the self-invited
comer, who, having got completely inside the chimney-corner, stretched
out his legs and his arms with the expansiveness of a person quite at
home.
‘Yes, I am rather cracked in the vamp,’ he said freely, seeing that the
eyes of the shepherd’s wife fell upon his boots, ‘and I am not well
fitted either. I have had some rough times lately, and have been forced
to pick up what I can get in the way of wearing, but I must find a suit
better fit for working-days when I reach home.’
‘One of hereabouts?’ she inquired.
‘Not quite that—further up the country.’
‘I thought so. And so be I; and by your tongue you come from my
neighbourhood.’
‘But you would hardly have heard of me,’ he said quickly. ‘My time
would be long before yours, ma’am, you see.’
This testimony to the youthfulness of his hostess had the effect of
stopping her cross-examination.
‘There is only one thing more wanted to make me happy,’ continued the
new-comer. ‘And that is a little baccy, which I am sorry to say I am
out of.’
‘I’ll fill your pipe,’ said the shepherd.
‘I must ask you to lend me a pipe likewise.’
‘A smoker, and no pipe about ‘ee?’
‘I have dropped it somewhere on the road.’
The shepherd filled and handed him a new clay pipe, saying, as he did
so, ‘Hand me your baccy-box—I’ll fill that too, now I am about it.’
The man went through the movement of searching his pockets.
‘Lost that too?’ said his entertainer, with some surprise.
‘I am afraid so,’ said the man with some confusion. ‘Give it to me in a
screw of paper.’ Lighting his pipe at the candle with a suction that
drew the whole flame into the bowl, he resettled himself in the corner
and bent his looks upon the faint steam from his damp legs, as if he
wished to say no more.
Meanwhile the general body of guests had been taking little notice of
this visitor by reason of an absorbing discussion in which they were
engaged with the band about a tune for the next dance. The matter being
settled, they were about to stand up when an interruption came in the
shape of another knock at the door.
At sound of the same the man in the chimney-corner took up the poker
and began stirring the brands as if doing it thoroughly were the one
aim of his existence; and a second time the shepherd said, ‘Walk in!’
In a moment another man stood upon the straw-woven door-mat. He too was
a stranger.
This individual was one of a type radically different from the first.
There was more of the commonplace in his manner, and a certain jovial
cosmopolitanism sat upon his features. He was several years older than
the first arrival, his hair being slightly frosted, his eyebrows
bristly, and his whiskers cut back from his cheeks. His face was rather
full and flabby, and yet it was not altogether a face without power. A
few grog-blossoms marked the neighbourhood of his nose. He flung back
his long drab greatcoat, revealing that beneath it he wore a suit of
cinder-gray shade throughout, large heavy seals, of some metal or other
that would take a polish, dangling from his fob as his only personal
ornament. Shaking the water-drops from his low-crowned glazed hat, he
said, ‘I must ask for a few minutes’ shelter, comrades, or I shall be
wetted to my skin before I get to Casterbridge.’
‘Make yourself at home, master,’ said the shepherd, perhaps a trifle
less heartily than on the first occasion. Not that Fennel had the least
tinge of niggardliness in his composition; but the room was far from
large, spare chairs were not numerous, and damp companions were not
altogether desirable at close quarters for the women and girls in their
bright-coloured gowns.
However, the second comer, after taking off his greatcoat, and hanging
his hat on a nail in one of the ceiling-beams as if he had been
specially invited to put it there, advanced and sat down at the table.
This had been pushed so closely into the chimney-corner, to give all
available room to the dancers, that its inner edge grazed the elbow of
the man who had ensconced himself by the fire; and thus the two
strangers were brought into close companionship. They nodded to each
other by way of breaking the ice of unacquaintance, and the first
stranger handed his neighbour the family mug—a huge vessel of brown
ware, having its upper edge worn away like a threshold by the rub of
whole generations of thirsty lips that had gone the way of all flesh,
and bearing the following inscription burnt upon its rotund side in
yellow letters
THERE IS NO FUN
UNTiLL i CUM.
The other man, nothing loth, raised the mug to his lips, and drank on,
and on, and on—till a curious blueness overspread the countenance of
the shepherd’s wife, who had regarded with no little surprise the first
stranger’s free offer to the second of what did not belong to him to
dispense.
‘I knew it!’ said the toper to the shepherd with much satisfaction.
‘When I walked up your garden before coming in, and saw the hives all
of a row, I said to myself; “Where there’s bees there’s honey, and
where there’s honey there’s mead.” But mead of such a truly comfortable
sort as this I really didn’t expect to meet in my older days.’ He took
yet another pull at the mug, till it assumed an ominous elevation.
‘Glad you enjoy it!’ said the shepherd warmly.
‘It is goodish mead,’ assented Mrs. Fennel, with an absence of
enthusiasm which seemed to say that it was possible to buy praise for
one’s cellar at too heavy a price. ‘It is trouble enough to make—and
really I hardly think we shall make any more. For honey sells well, and
we ourselves can make shift with a drop o’ small mead and metheglin for
common use from the comb-washings.’
‘O, but you’ll never have the heart!’ reproachfully cried the stranger
in cinder-gray, after taking up the mug a third time and setting it
down empty. ‘I love mead, when ’tis old like this, as I love to go to
church o’ Sundays, or to relieve the needy any day of the week.’
‘Ha, ha, ha!’ said the man in the chimney-corner, who, in spite of the
taciturnity induced by the pipe of tobacco, could not or would not
refrain from this slight testimony to his comrade’s humour.
Now the old mead of those days, brewed of the purest first-year or
maiden honey, four pounds to the gallon—with its due complement of
white of eggs, cinnamon, ginger, cloves, mace, rosemary, yeast, and
processes of working, bottling, and cellaring—tasted remarkably strong;
but it did not taste so strong as it actually was. Hence, presently,
the stranger in cinder-gray at the table, moved by its creeping
influence, unbuttoned his waistcoat, threw himself back in his chair,
spread his legs, and made his presence felt in various ways.
‘Well, well, as I say,’ he resumed, ‘I am going to Casterbridge, and to
Casterbridge I must go. I should have been almost there by this time;
but the rain drove me into your dwelling, and I’m not sorry for it.’
‘You don’t live in Casterbridge?’ said the shepherd.
‘Not as yet; though I shortly mean to move there.’
‘Going to set up in trade, perhaps?’
‘No, no,’ said the shepherd’s wife. ‘It is easy to see that the
gentleman is rich, and don’t want to work at anything.’
The cinder-gray stranger paused, as if to consider whether he would
accept that definition of himself. He presently rejected it by
answering, ‘Rich is not quite the word for me, dame. I do work, and I
must work. And even if I only get to Casterbridge by midnight I must
begin work there at eight to-morrow morning. Yes, het or wet, blow or
snow, famine or sword, my day’s work to-morrow must be done.’
‘Poor man! Then, in spite o’ seeming, you be worse off than we?’
replied the shepherd’s wife.
‘’Tis the nature of my trade, men and maidens. ’Tis the nature of my
trade more than my poverty . . . But really and truly I must up and
off, or I shan’t get a lodging in the town.’ However, the speaker did
not move, and directly added, ‘There’s time for one more draught of
friendship before I go; and I’d perform it at once if the mug were not
dry.’
‘Here’s a mug o’ small,’ said Mrs. Fennel. ‘Small, we call it, though
to be sure ’tis only the first wash o’ the combs.’
‘No,’ said the stranger disdainfully. ‘I won’t spoil your first
kindness by partaking o’ your second.’
‘Certainly not,’ broke in Fennel. ‘We don’t increase and multiply every
day, and I’ll fill the mug again.’ He went away to the dark place under
the stairs where the barrel stood. The shepherdess followed him.
‘Why should you do this?’ she said reproachfully, as soon as they were
alone. ‘He’s emptied it once, though it held enough for ten people; and
now he’s not contented wi’ the small, but must needs call for more o’
the strong! And a stranger unbeknown to any of us. For my part, I don’t
like the look o’ the man at all.’
‘But he’s in the house, my honey; and ’tis a wet night, and a
christening. Daze it, what’s a cup of mead more or less? There’ll be
plenty more next bee-burning.’
‘Very well—this time, then,’ she answered, looking wistfully at the
barrel. ‘But what is the man’s calling, and where is he one of; that he
should come in and join us like this?’
‘I don’t know. I’ll ask him again.’
The catastrophe of having the mug drained dry at one pull by the
stranger in cinder-gray was effectually guarded against this time by
Mrs. Fennel. She poured out his allowance in a small cup, keeping the
large one at a discreet distance from him. When he had tossed off his
portion the shepherd renewed his inquiry about the stranger’s
occupation.
The latter did not immediately reply, and the man in the
chimney-corner, with sudden demonstrativeness, said, ‘Anybody may know
my trade—I’m a wheelwright.’
‘A very good trade for these parts,’ said the shepherd.
‘And anybody may know mine—if they’ve the sense to find it out,’ said
the stranger in cinder-gray.
‘You may generally tell what a man is by his claws,’ observed the
hedge-carpenter, looking at his own hands. ‘My fingers be as full of
thorns as an old pin-cushion is of pins.’
The hands of the man in the chimney-corner instinctively sought the
shade, and he gazed into the fire as he resumed his pipe. The man at
the table took up the hedge-carpenter’s remark, and added smartly,
‘True; but the oddity of my trade is that, instead of setting a mark
upon me, it sets a mark upon my customers.’
No observation being offered by anybody in elucidation of this enigma,
the shepherd’s wife once more called for a song. The same obstacles
presented themselves as at the former time—one had no voice, another
had forgotten the first verse. The stranger at the table, whose soul
had now risen to a good working temperature, relieved the difficulty by
exclaiming that, to start the company, he would sing himself. Thrusting
one thumb into the arm-hole of his waistcoat, he waved the other hand
in the air, and, with an extemporizing gaze at the shining sheep-crooks
above the mantelpiece, began:—
‘O my trade it is the rarest one,
Simple shepherds all—
My trade is a sight to see;
For my customers I tie, and take them up on high,
And waft ’em to a far countree!’
The room was silent when he had finished the verse—with one exception,
that of the man in the chimney-corner, who, at the singer’s word,
‘Chorus! ‘joined him in a deep bass voice of musical relish—
‘And waft ’em to a far countree!’
Oliver Giles, John Pitcher the dairyman, the parish-clerk, the engaged
man of fifty, the row of young women against the wall, seemed lost in
thought not of the gayest kind. The shepherd looked meditatively on the
ground, the shepherdess gazed keenly at the singer, and with some
suspicion; she was doubting whether this stranger were merely singing
an old song from recollection, or was composing one there and then for
the occasion. All were as perplexed at the obscure revelation as the
guests at Belshazzar’s Feast, except the man in the chimney-corner, who
quietly said, ‘Second verse, stranger,’ and smoked on.
The singer thoroughly moistened himself from his lips inwards, and went
on with the next stanza as requested:-
My tools are but common ones,
Simple shepherds all—
My tools are no sight to see:
A little hempen string, and a post whereon to swing,
Are implements enough for me!’
Shepherd Fennel glanced round. There was no longer any doubt that the
stranger was answering his question rhythmically. The guests one and
all started back with suppressed exclamations. The young woman engaged
to the man of fifty fainted half-way, and would have proceeded, but
finding him wanting in alacrity for catching her she sat down
trembling.
‘O, he’s the—!’ whispered the people in the background, mentioning the
name of an ominous public officer. ‘He’s come to do it! ’Tis to be at
Casterbridge jail to-morrow—the man for sheep-stealing—the poor
clock-maker we heard of; who used to live away at Shottsford and had no
work to do—Timothy Summers, whose family were a-starving, and so he
went out of Shottsford by the high-road, and took a sheep in open
daylight, defying the farmer and the farmer’s wife and the farmer’s
lad, and every man jack among ’em. He’ (and they nodded towards the
stranger of the deadly trade) ‘is come from up the country to do it
because there’s not enough to do in his own county-town, and he’s got
the place here now our own county man’s dead; he’s going to live in the
same cottage under the prison wall.’
The stranger in cinder-gray took no notice of this whispered string of
observations, but again wetted his lips. Seeing that his friend in the
chimney-corner was the only one who reciprocated his joviality in any
way, he held out his cup towards that appreciative comrade, who also
held out his own. They clinked together, the eyes of the rest of the
room hanging upon the singer’s actions. He parted his lips for the
third verse; but at that moment another knock was audible upon the
door. This time the knock was faint and hesitating.
The company seemed scared; the shepherd looked with consternation
towards the entrance, and it was with some effort that he resisted his
alarmed wife’s deprecatory glance, and uttered for the third time the
welcoming words, ‘Walk in!’
The door was gently opened, and another man stood upon the mat. He,
like those who had preceded him, was a stranger. This time it was a
short, small personage, of fair complexion, and dressed in a decent
suit of dark clothes.
‘Can you tell me the way to—?’ he began: when, gazing round the room to
observe the nature of the company amongst whom he had fallen, his eyes
lighted on the stranger in cinder-gray. It was just at the instant when
the latter, who had thrown his mind into his song with such a will that
he scarcely heeded the interruption, silenced all whispers and
inquiries by bursting into his third verse:-
To-morrow is my working day,
Simple shepherds all—
To-morrow is a working day for me:
For the farmer’s sheep is slain, and the lad who did it ta’en,
And on his soul may God ha’ merc-y!’
The stranger in the chimney-corner, waving cups with the singer so
heartily that his mead splashed over on the hearth, repeated in his
bass voice as before:-
‘And on his soul may God ha’ merc-y!’
All this time the third stranger had been standing in the doorway.
Finding now that he did not come forward or go on speaking, the guests
particularly regarded him. They noticed to their surprise that he stood
before them the picture of abject terror—his knees trembling, his hand
shaking so violently that the door-latch by which he supported himself
rattled audibly: his white lips were parted, and his eyes fixed on the
merry officer of justice in the middle of the room. A moment more and
he had turned, closed the door, and fled.
‘What a man can it be?’ said the shepherd.
The rest, between the awfulness of their late discovery and the odd
conduct of this third visitor, looked as if they knew not what to
think, and said nothing. Instinctively they withdrew further and
further from the grim gentleman in their midst, whom some of them
seemed to take for the Prince of Darkness himself; till they formed a
remote circle, an empty space of floor being left between them and him—
‘ . . . circulus, cujus centrum diabolus.’
The room was so silent—though there were more than twenty people in
it—that nothing could be heard but the patter of the rain against the
window-shutters, accompanied by the occasional hiss of a stray drop
that fell down the chimney into the fire, and the steady puffing of the
man in the corner, who had now resumed his pipe of long clay.
The stillness was unexpectedly broken. The distant sound of a gun
reverberated through the air—apparently from the direction of the
county-town.
‘Be jiggered!’ cried the stranger who had sung the song, jumping up.
‘What does that mean?’ asked several.
‘A prisoner escaped from the jail—that’s what it means.’
All listened. The sound was repeated, and none of them spoke but the
man in the chimney-corner, who said quietly, ‘I’ve often been told that
in this county they fire a gun at such times; but I never heard it till
now.’
‘I wonder if it is _my_ man?’ murmured the personage in cinder-gray.
‘Surely it is!’ said the shepherd involuntarily. ‘And surely we’ve zeed
him! That little man who looked in at the door by now, and quivered
like a leaf when he zeed ye and heard your song!’
‘His teeth chattered, and the breath went out of his body,’ said the
dairyman.
‘And his heart seemed to sink within him like a stone,’ said Oliver
Giles.
‘And he bolted as if he’d been shot at,’ said the hedge-carpenter.
‘True—his teeth chattered, and his heart seemed to sink; and he bolted
as if he’d been shot at,’ slowly summed up the man in the
chimney-corner.
‘I didn’t notice it,’ remarked the hangman.
‘We were all a-wondering what made him run off in such a fright,’
faltered one of the women against the wall, ‘and now ’tis explained!’
The firing of the alarm-gun went on at intervals, low and sullenly, and
their suspicions became a certainty. The sinister gentleman in
cinder-gray roused himself. ‘Is there a constable here?’ he asked, in
thick tones. ‘If so, let him step forward.’
The engaged man of fifty stepped quavering out from the wall, his
betrothed beginning to sob on the back of the chair.
‘You are a sworn constable?’
‘I be, sir.’
‘Then pursue the criminal at once, with assistance, and bring him back
here. He can’t have gone far.’
‘I will, sir, I will—when I’ve got my staff. I’ll go home and get it,
and come sharp here, and start in a body.’
‘Staff!—never mind your staff; the man’ll be gone!’
‘But I can’t do nothing without my staff—can I, William, and John, and
Charles Jake? No; for there’s the king’s royal crown a painted on en in
yaller and gold, and the lion and the unicorn, so as when I raise en up
and hit my prisoner, ’tis made a lawful blow thereby. I wouldn’t ‘tempt
to take up a man without my staff—no, not I. If I hadn’t the law to gie
me courage, why, instead o’ my taking up him he might take up me!’
‘Now, I’m a king’s man myself; and can give you authority enough for
this,’ said the formidable officer in gray. ‘Now then, all of ye, be
ready. Have ye any lanterns?’
‘Yes—have ye any lanterns?—I demand it!’ said the constable.
‘And the rest of you able-bodied—’
‘Able-bodied men—yes—the rest of ye!’ said the constable.
‘Have you some good stout staves and pitch-forks—’
‘Staves and pitchforks—in the name o’ the law! And take ’em in yer
hands and go in quest, and do as we in authority tell ye!’
Thus aroused, the men prepared to give chase. The evidence was, indeed,
though circumstantial, so convincing, that but little argument was
needed to show the shepherd’s guests that after what they had seen it
would look very much like connivance if they did not instantly pursue
the unhappy third stranger, who could not as yet have gone more than a
few hundred yards over such uneven country.
A shepherd is always well provided with lanterns; and, lighting these
hastily, and with hurdle-staves in their hands, they poured out of the
door, taking a direction along the crest of the hill, away from the
town, the rain having fortunately a little abated.
Disturbed by the noise, or possibly by unpleasant dreams of her
baptism, the child who had been christened began to cry heart-brokenly
in the room overhead. These notes of grief came down through the chinks
of the floor to the ears of the women below, who jumped up one by one,
and seemed glad of the excuse to ascend and comfort the baby, for the
incidents of the last half-hour greatly oppressed them. Thus in the
space of two or three minutes the room on the ground-floor was deserted
quite.
But it was not for long. Hardly had the sound of footsteps died away
when a man returned round the corner of the house from the direction
the pursuers had taken. Peeping in at the door, and seeing nobody
there, he entered leisurely. It was the stranger of the chimney-corner,
who had gone out with the rest. The motive of his return was shown by
his helping himself to a cut piece of skimmer-cake that lay on a ledge
beside where he had sat, and which he had apparently forgotten to take
with him. He also poured out half a cup more mead from the quantity
that remained, ravenously eating and drinking these as he stood. He had
not finished when another figure came in just as quietly—his friend in
cinder-gray.
‘O—you here?’ said the latter, smiling. ‘I thought you had gone to help
in the capture.’ And this speaker also revealed the object of his
return by looking solicitously round for the fascinating mug of old
mead.
‘And I thought you had gone,’ said the other, continuing his
skimmer-cake with some effort.
‘Well, on second thoughts, I felt there were enough without me,’ said
the first confidentially, ‘and such a night as it is, too. Besides,
’tis the business o’ the Government to take care of its criminals—not
mine.’
‘True; so it is. And I felt as you did, that there were enough without
me.’
‘I don’t want to break my limbs running over the humps and hollows of
this wild country.’
‘Nor I neither, between you and me.’
‘These shepherd-people are used to it—simple-minded souls, you know,
stirred up to anything in a moment. They’ll have him ready for me
before the morning, and no trouble to me at all.’
‘They’ll have him, and we shall have saved ourselves all labour in the
matter.’
‘True, true. Well, my way is to Casterbridge; and ’tis as much as my
legs will do to take me that far. Going the same way?’
‘No, I am sorry to say! I have to get home over there’ (he nodded
indefinitely to the right), ‘and I feel as you do, that it is quite
enough for my legs to do before bedtime.’
The other had by this time finished the mead in the mug, after which,
shaking hands heartily at the door, and wishing each other well, they
went their several ways.
In the meantime the company of pursuers had reached the end of the
hog’s-back elevation which dominated this part of the down. They had
decided on no particular plan of action; and, finding that the man of
the baleful trade was no longer in their company, they seemed quite
unable to form any such plan now. They descended in all directions down
the hill, and straightway several of the party fell into the snare set
by Nature for all misguided midnight ramblers over this part of the
cretaceous formation. The ‘lanchets,’ or flint slopes, which belted the
escarpment at intervals of a dozen yards, took the less cautious ones
unawares, and losing their footing on the rubbly steep they slid
sharply downwards, the lanterns rolling from their hands to the bottom,
and there lying on their sides till the horn was scorched through.
When they had again gathered themselves together, the shepherd, as the
man who knew the country best, took the lead, and guided them round
these treacherous inclines. The lanterns, which seemed rather to dazzle
their eyes and warn the fugitive than to assist them in the
exploration, were extinguished, due silence was observed; and in this
more rational order they plunged into the vale. It was a grassy,
briery, moist defile, affording some shelter to any person who had
sought it; but the party perambulated it in vain, and ascended on the
other side. Here they wandered apart, and after an interval closed
together again to report progress.
At the second time of closing in they found themselves near a lonely
ash, the single tree on this part of the coomb, probably sown there by
a passing bird some fifty years before. And here, standing a little to
one side of the trunk, as motionless as the trunk itself; appeared the
man they were in quest of; his outline being well defined against the
sky beyond. The band noiselessly drew up and faced him.
‘Your money or your life!’ said the constable sternly to the still
figure.
‘No, no,’ whispered John Pitcher. ‘’Tisn’t our side ought to say that.
That’s the doctrine of vagabonds like him, and we be on the side of the
law.’
‘Well, well,’ replied the constable impatiently; ‘I must say something,
mustn’t I? and if you had all the weight o’ this undertaking upon your
mind, perhaps you’d say the wrong thing too!—Prisoner at the bar,
surrender, in the name of the Father—the Crown, I mane!’
The man under the tree seemed now to notice them for the first time,
and, giving them no opportunity whatever for exhibiting their courage,
he strolled slowly towards them. He was, indeed, the little man, the
third stranger; but his trepidation had in a great measure gone.
‘Well, travellers,’ he said, ‘did I hear ye speak to me?’
‘You did: you’ve got to come and be our prisoner at once!’ said the
constable. ‘We arrest ‘ee on the charge of not biding in Casterbridge
jail in a decent proper manner to be hung to-morrow morning.
Neighbours, do your duty, and seize the culpet!’
On hearing the charge, the man seemed enlightened, and, saying not
another word, resigned himself with preternatural civility to the
search-party, who, with their staves in their hands, surrounded him on
all sides, and marched him back towards the shepherd’s cottage.
It was eleven o’clock by the time they arrived. The light shining from
the open door, a sound of men’s voices within, proclaimed to them as
they approached the house that some new events had arisen in their
absence. On entering they discovered the shepherd’s living room to be
invaded by two officers from Casterbridge jail, and a well-known
magistrate who lived at the nearest country-seat, intelligence of the
escape having become generally circulated.
‘Gentlemen,’ said the constable, ‘I have brought back your man—not
without risk and danger; but every one must do his duty! He is inside
this circle of able-bodied persons, who have lent me useful aid,
considering their ignorance of Crown work. Men, bring forward your
prisoner!’ And the third stranger was led to the light.
‘Who is this?’ said one of the officials.
‘The man,’ said the constable.
‘Certainly not,’ said the turnkey; and the first corroborated his
statement.
‘But how can it be otherwise?’ asked the constable. ‘Or why was he so
terrified at sight o’ the singing instrument of the law who sat there?’
Here he related the strange behaviour of the third stranger on entering
the house during the hangman’s song.
‘Can’t understand it,’ said the officer coolly. ‘All I know is that it
is not the condemned man. He’s quite a different character from this
one; a gauntish fellow, with dark hair and eyes, rather good-looking,
and with a musical bass voice that if you heard it once you’d never
mistake as long as you lived.’
‘Why, souls—’twas the man in the chimney-corner!’
‘Hey—what?’ said the magistrate, coming forward after inquiring
particulars from the shepherd in the background. ‘Haven’t you got the
man after all?’
‘Well, sir,’ said the constable, ‘he’s the man we were in search of,
that’s true; and yet he’s not the man we were in search of. For the man
we were in search of was not the man we wanted, sir, if you understand
my everyday way; for ’twas the man in the chimney-corner!’
‘A pretty kettle of fish altogether!’ said the magistrate. ‘You had
better start for the other man at once.’
The prisoner now spoke for the first time. The mention of the man in
the chimney-corner seemed to have moved him as nothing else could do.
‘Sir,’ he said, stepping forward to the magistrate, ‘take no more
trouble about me. The time is come when I may as well speak. I have
done nothing; my crime is that the condemned man is my brother. Early
this afternoon I left home at Shottsford to tramp it all the way to
Casterbridge jail to bid him farewell. I was benighted, and called here
to rest and ask the way. When I opened the door I saw before me the
very man, my brother, that I thought to see in the condemned cell at
Casterbridge. He was in this chimney-corner; and jammed close to him,
so that he could not have got out if he had tried, was the executioner
who’d come to take his life, singing a song about it and not knowing
that it was his victim who was close by, joining in to save
appearances. My brother looked a glance of agony at me, and I knew he
meant, “Don’t reveal what you see; my life depends on it.” I was so
terror-struck that I could hardly stand, and, not knowing what I did, I
turned and hurried away.’
The narrator’s manner and tone had the stamp of truth, and his story
made a great impression on all around. ‘And do you know where your
brother is at the present time?’ asked the magistrate.
‘I do not. I have never seen him since I closed this door.’
‘I can testify to that, for we’ve been between ye ever since,’ said the
constable.
‘Where does he think to fly to?—what is his occupation?’
‘He’s a watch-and-clock-maker, sir.’
‘’A said ’a was a wheelwright—a wicked rogue,’ said the constable.
‘The wheels of clocks and watches he meant, no doubt,’ said Shepherd
Fennel. ‘I thought his hands were palish for’s trade.’
‘Well, it appears to me that nothing can be gained by retaining this
poor man in custody,’ said the magistrate; ‘your business lies with the
other, unquestionably.’
And so the little man was released off-hand; but he looked nothing the
less sad on that account, it being beyond the power of magistrate or
constable to raze out the written troubles in his brain, for they
concerned another whom he regarded with more solicitude than himself.
When this was done, and the man had gone his way, the night was found
to be so far advanced that it was deemed useless to renew the search
before the next morning.
Next day, accordingly, the quest for the clever sheep-stealer became
general and keen, to all appearance at least. But the intended
punishment was cruelly disproportioned to the transgression, and the
sympathy of a great many country-folk in that district was strongly on
the side of the fugitive. Moreover, his marvellous coolness and daring
in hob-and-nobbing with the hangman, under the unprecedented
circumstances of the shepherd’s party, won their admiration. So that it
may be questioned if all those who ostensibly made themselves so busy
in exploring woods and fields and lanes were quite so thorough when it
came to the private examination of their own lofts and outhouses.
Stories were afloat of a mysterious figure being occasionally seen in
some old overgrown trackway or other, remote from turnpike roads; but
when a search was instituted in any of these suspected quarters nobody
was found. Thus the days and weeks passed without tidings.
In brief; the bass-voiced man of the chimney-corner was never
recaptured. Some said that he went across the sea, others that he did
not, but buried himself in the depths of a populous city. At any rate,
the gentleman in cinder-gray never did his morning’s work at
Casterbridge, nor met anywhere at all, for business purposes, the
genial comrade with whom he had passed an hour of relaxation in the
lonely house on the coomb.
The grass has long been green on the graves of Shepherd Fennel and his
frugal wife; the guests who made up the christening party have mainly
followed their entertainers to the tomb; the baby in whose honour they
all had met is a matron in the sere and yellow leaf. But the arrival of
the three strangers at the shepherd’s that night, and the details
connected therewith, is a story as well known as ever in the country
about Higher Crowstairs.
March 1883.
THE WITHERED ARM
CHAPTER I—A LORN MILKMAID
It was an eighty-cow dairy, and the troop of milkers, regular and
supernumerary, were all at work; for, though the time of year was as
yet but early April, the feed lay entirely in water-meadows, and the
cows were ‘in full pail.’ The hour was about six in the evening, and
three-fourths of the large, red, rectangular animals having been
finished off, there was opportunity for a little conversation.
‘He do bring home his bride to-morrow, I hear. They’ve come as far as
Anglebury to-day.’
The voice seemed to proceed from the belly of the cow called Cherry,
but the speaker was a milking-woman, whose face was buried in the flank
of that motionless beast.
‘Hav’ anybody seen her?’ said another.
There was a negative response from the first. ‘Though they say she’s a
rosy-cheeked, tisty-tosty little body enough,’ she added; and as the
milkmaid spoke she turned her face so that she could glance past her
cow’s tail to the other side of the barton, where a thin, fading woman
of thirty milked somewhat apart from the rest.
‘Years younger than he, they say,’ continued the second, with also a
glance of reflectiveness in the same direction.
‘How old do you call him, then?’
‘Thirty or so.’
‘More like forty,’ broke in an old milkman near, in a long white
pinafore or ‘wropper,’ and with the brim of his hat tied down, so that
he looked like a woman. ‘’A was born before our Great Weir was builded,
and I hadn’t man’s wages when I laved water there.’
The discussion waxed so warm that the purr of the milk-streams became
jerky, till a voice from another cow’s belly cried with authority, ‘Now
then, what the Turk do it matter to us about Farmer Lodge’s age, or
Farmer Lodge’s new mis’ess? I shall have to pay him nine pound a year
for the rent of every one of these milchers, whatever his age or hers.
Get on with your work, or ’twill be dark afore we have done. The
evening is pinking in a’ready.’ This speaker was the dairyman himself;
by whom the milkmaids and men were employed.
Nothing more was said publicly about Farmer Lodge’s wedding, but the
first woman murmured under her cow to her next neighbour, ‘’Tis hard
for _she_,’ signifying the thin worn milkmaid aforesaid.
‘O no,’ said the second. ‘He ha’n’t spoke to Rhoda Brook for years.’
When the milking was done they washed their pails and hung them on a
many-forked stand made of the peeled limb of an oak-tree, set upright
in the earth, and resembling a colossal antlered horn. The majority
then dispersed in various directions homeward. The thin woman who had
not spoken was joined by a boy of twelve or thereabout, and the twain
went away up the field also.
Their course lay apart from that of the others, to a lonely spot high
above the water-meads, and not far from the border of Egdon Heath,
whose dark countenance was visible in the distance as they drew nigh to
their home.
‘They’ve just been saying down in barton that your father brings his
young wife home from Anglebury to-morrow,’ the woman observed. ‘I shall
want to send you for a few things to market, and you’ll be pretty sure
to meet ’em.’
‘Yes, mother,’ said the boy. ‘Is father married then?’
‘Yes . . . You can give her a look, and tell me what’s she’s like, if
you do see her.’
‘Yes, mother.’
‘If she’s dark or fair, and if she’s tall—as tall as I. And if she
seems like a woman who has ever worked for a living, or one that has
been always well off, and has never done anything, and shows marks of
the lady on her, as I expect she do.’
‘Yes.’
They crept up the hill in the twilight, and entered the cottage. It was
built of mud-walls, the surface of which had been washed by many rains
into channels and depressions that left none of the original flat face
visible; while here and there in the thatch above a rafter showed like
a bone protruding through the skin.
She was kneeling down in the chimney-corner, before two pieces of turf
laid together with the heather inwards, blowing at the red-hot ashes
with her breath till the turves flamed. The radiance lit her pale
cheek, and made her dark eyes, that had once been handsome, seem
handsome anew. ‘Yes,’ she resumed, ‘see if she is dark or fair, and if
you can, notice if her hands be white; if not, see if they look as
though she had ever done housework, or are milker’s hands like mine.’
The boy again promised, inattentively this time, his mother not
observing that he was cutting a notch with his pocket-knife in the
beech-backed chair.
CHAPTER II—THE YOUNG WIFE
The road from Anglebury to Holmstoke is in general level; but there is
one place where a sharp ascent breaks its monotony. Farmers
homeward-bound from the former market-town, who trot all the rest of
the way, walk their horses up this short incline.
The next evening, while the sun was yet bright, a handsome new gig,
with a lemon-coloured body and red wheels, was spinning westward along
the level highway at the heels of a powerful mare. The driver was a
yeoman in the prime of life, cleanly shaven like an actor, his face
being toned to that bluish-vermilion hue which so often graces a
thriving farmer’s features when returning home after successful
dealings in the town. Beside him sat a woman, many years his
junior—almost, indeed, a girl. Her face too was fresh in colour, but it
was of a totally different quality—soft and evanescent, like the light
under a heap of rose-petals.
Few people travelled this way, for it was not a main road; and the long
white riband of gravel that stretched before them was empty, save of
one small scarce-moving speck, which presently resolved itself into the
figure of boy, who was creeping on at a snail’s pace, and continually
looking behind him—the heavy bundle he carried being some excuse for,
if not the reason of, his dilatoriness. When the bouncing gig-party
slowed at the bottom of the incline above mentioned, the pedestrian was
only a few yards in front. Supporting the large bundle by putting one
hand on his hip, he turned and looked straight at the farmer’s wife as
though he would read her through and through, pacing along abreast of
the horse.
The low sun was full in her face, rendering every feature, shade, and
contour distinct, from the curve of her little nostril to the colour of
her eyes. The farmer, though he seemed annoyed at the boy’s persistent
presence, did not order him to get out of the way; and thus the lad
preceded them, his hard gaze never leaving her, till they reached the
top of the ascent, when the farmer trotted on with relief in his
lineaments—having taken no outward notice of the boy whatever.
‘How that poor lad stared at me!’ said the young wife.
‘Yes, dear; I saw that he did.’
‘He is one of the village, I suppose?’
‘One of the neighbourhood. I think he lives with his mother a mile or
two off.’
‘He knows who we are, no doubt?’
‘O yes. You must expect to be stared at just at first, my pretty
Gertrude.’
‘I do,—though I think the poor boy may have looked at us in the hope we
might relieve him of his heavy load, rather than from curiosity.’
‘O no,’ said her husband off-handedly. ‘These country lads will carry a
hundredweight once they get it on their backs; besides his pack had
more size than weight in it. Now, then, another mile and I shall be
able to show you our house in the distance—if it is not too dark before
we get there.’ The wheels spun round, and particles flew from their
periphery as before, till a white house of ample dimensions revealed
itself, with farm-buildings and ricks at the back.
Meanwhile the boy had quickened his pace, and turning up a by-lane some
mile and half short of the white farmstead, ascended towards the leaner
pastures, and so on to the cottage of his mother.
She had reached home after her day’s milking at the outlying dairy, and
was washing cabbage at the doorway in the declining light. ‘Hold up the
net a moment,’ she said, without preface, as the boy came up.
He flung down his bundle, held the edge of the cabbage-net, and as she
filled its meshes with the dripping leaves she went on, ‘Well, did you
see her?’
‘Yes; quite plain.’
‘Is she ladylike?’
‘Yes; and more. A lady complete.’
‘Is she young?’
‘Well, she’s growed up, and her ways be quite a woman’s.’
‘Of course. What colour is her hair and face?’
‘Her hair is lightish, and her face as comely as a live doll’s.’
‘Her eyes, then, are not dark like mine?’
‘No—of a bluish turn, and her mouth is very nice and red; and when she
smiles, her teeth show white.’
‘Is she tall?’ said the woman sharply.
‘I couldn’t see. She was sitting down.’
‘Then do you go to Holmstoke church to-morrow morning: she’s sure to be
there. Go early and notice her walking in, and come home and tell me if
she’s taller than I.’
‘Very well, mother. But why don’t you go and see for yourself?’
_‘I_ go to see her! I wouldn’t look up at her if she were to pass my
window this instant. She was with Mr. Lodge, of course. What did he say
or do?’
‘Just the same as usual.’
‘Took no notice of you?’
‘None.’
Next day the mother put a clean shirt on the boy, and started him off
for Holmstoke church. He reached the ancient little pile when the door
was just being opened, and he was the first to enter. Taking his seat
by the font, he watched all the parishioners file in. The well-to-do
Farmer Lodge came nearly last; and his young wife, who accompanied him,
walked up the aisle with the shyness natural to a modest woman who had
appeared thus for the first time. As all other eyes were fixed upon
her, the youth’s stare was not noticed now.
When he reached home his mother said, ‘Well?’ before he had entered the
room.
‘She is not tall. She is rather short,’ he replied.
‘Ah!’ said his mother, with satisfaction.
‘But she’s very pretty—very. In fact, she’s lovely.’
The youthful freshness of the yeoman’s wife had evidently made an
impression even on the somewhat hard nature of the boy.
‘That’s all I want to hear,’ said his mother quickly. ‘Now, spread the
table-cloth. The hare you caught is very tender; but mind that nobody
catches you.—You’ve never told me what sort of hands she had.’
‘I have never seen ’em. She never took off her gloves.’
‘What did she wear this morning?’
‘A white bonnet and a silver-coloured gownd. It whewed and whistled so
loud when it rubbed against the pews that the lady coloured up more
than ever for very shame at the noise, and pulled it in to keep it from
touching; but when she pushed into her seat, it whewed more than ever.
Mr. Lodge, he seemed pleased, and his waistcoat stuck out, and his
great golden seals hung like a lord’s; but she seemed to wish her noisy
gownd anywhere but on her.’
‘Not she! However, that will do now.’
These descriptions of the newly-married couple were continued from time
to time by the boy at his mother’s request, after any chance encounter
he had had with them. But Rhoda Brook, though she might easily have
seen young Mrs. Lodge for herself by walking a couple of miles, would
never attempt an excursion towards the quarter where the farmhouse lay.
Neither did she, at the daily milking in the dairyman’s yard on Lodge’s
outlying second farm, ever speak on the subject of the recent marriage.
The dairyman, who rented the cows of Lodge, and knew perfectly the tall
milkmaid’s history, with manly kindliness always kept the gossip in the
cow-barton from annoying Rhoda. But the atmosphere thereabout was full
of the subject during the first days of Mrs. Lodge’s arrival; and from
her boy’s description and the casual words of the other milkers, Rhoda
Brook could raise a mental image of the unconscious Mrs Lodge that was
realistic as a photograph.
CHAPTER III—A VISION
One night, two or three weeks after the bridal return, when the boy was
gone to bed, Rhoda sat a long time over the turf ashes that she had
raked out in front of her to extinguish them. She contemplated so
intently the new wife, as presented to her in her mind’s eye over the
embers, that she forgot the lapse of time. At last, wearied with her
day’s work, she too retired.
But the figure which had occupied her so much during this and the
previous days was not to be banished at night. For the first time
Gertrude Lodge visited the supplanted woman in her dreams. Rhoda Brook
dreamed—since her assertion that she really saw, before falling asleep,
was not to be believed—that the young wife, in the pale silk dress and
white bonnet, but with features shockingly distorted, and wrinkled as
by age, was sitting upon her chest as she lay. The pressure of Mrs.
Lodge’s person grew heavier; the blue eyes peered cruelly into her
face; and then the figure thrust forward its left hand mockingly, so as
to make the wedding-ring it wore glitter in Rhoda’s eyes. Maddened
mentally, and nearly suffocated by pressure, the sleeper struggled; the
incubus, still regarding her, withdrew to the foot of the bed, only,
however, to come forward by degrees, resume her seat, and flash her
left hand as before.
Gasping for breath, Rhoda, in a last desperate effort, swung out her
right hand, seized the confronting spectre by its obtrusive left arm,
and whirled it backward to the floor, starting up herself as she did so
with a low cry.
‘O, merciful heaven!’ she cried, sitting on the edge of the bed in a
cold sweat; ‘that was not a dream—she was here!’
She could feel her antagonist’s arm within her grasp even now—the very
flesh and bone of it, as it seemed. She looked on the floor whither she
had whirled the spectre, but there was nothing to be seen.
Rhoda Brook slept no more that night, and when she went milking at the
next dawn they noticed how pale and haggard she looked. The milk that
she drew quivered into the pail; her hand had not calmed even yet, and
still retained the feel of the arm. She came home to breakfast as
wearily as if it had been suppertime.
‘What was that noise in your chimmer, mother, last night?’ said her
son. ‘You fell off the bed, surely?’
‘Did you hear anything fall? At what time?’
‘Just when the clock struck two.’
She could not explain, and when the meal was done went silently about
her household work, the boy assisting her, for he hated going afield on
the farms, and she indulged his reluctance. Between eleven and twelve
the garden-gate clicked, and she lifted her eyes to the window. At the
bottom of the garden, within the gate, stood the woman of her vision.
Rhoda seemed transfixed.
‘Ah, she said she would come!’ exclaimed the boy, also observing her.
‘Said so—when? How does she know us?’
‘I have seen and spoken to her. I talked to her yesterday.’
‘I told you,’ said the mother, flushing indignantly, ‘never to speak to
anybody in that house, or go near the place.’
‘I did not speak to her till she spoke to me. And I did not go near the
place. I met her in the road.’
‘What did you tell her?’
‘Nothing. She said, “Are you the poor boy who had to bring the heavy
load from market?” And she looked at my boots, and said they would not
keep my feet dry if it came on wet, because they were so cracked. I
told her I lived with my mother, and we had enough to do to keep
ourselves, and that’s how it was; and she said then, “I’ll come and
bring you some better boots, and see your mother.” She gives away
things to other folks in the meads besides us.’
Mrs. Lodge was by this time close to the door—not in her silk, as Rhoda
had seen her in the bed-chamber, but in a morning hat, and gown of
common light material, which became her better than silk. On her arm
she carried a basket.
The impression remaining from the night’s experience was still strong.
Brook had almost expected to see the wrinkles, the scorn, and the
cruelty on her visitor’s face.
She would have escaped an interview, had escape been possible. There
was, however, no backdoor to the cottage, and in an instant the boy had
lifted the latch to Mrs. Lodge’s gentle knock.
‘I see I have come to the right house,’ said she, glancing at the lad,
and smiling. ‘But I was not sure till you opened the door.’
The figure and action were those of the phantom; but her voice was so
indescribably sweet, her glance so winning, her smile so tender, so
unlike that of Rhoda’s midnight visitant, that the latter could hardly
believe the evidence of her senses. She was truly glad that she had not
hidden away in sheer aversion, as she had been inclined to do. In her
basket Mrs. Lodge brought the pair of boots that she had promised to
the boy, and other useful articles.
At these proofs of a kindly feeling towards her and hers Rhoda’s heart
reproached her bitterly. This innocent young thing should have her
blessing and not her curse. When she left them a light seemed gone from
the dwelling. Two days later she came again to know if the boots
fitted; and less than a fortnight after that paid Rhoda another call.
On this occasion the boy was absent.
‘I walk a good deal,’ said Mrs. Lodge, ‘and your house is the nearest
outside our own parish. I hope you are well. You don’t look quite
well.’
Rhoda said she was well enough; and, indeed, though the paler of the
two, there was more of the strength that endures in her well-defined
features and large frame, than in the soft-cheeked young woman before
her. The conversation became quite confidential as regarded their
powers and weaknesses; and when Mrs. Lodge was leaving, Rhoda said, ‘I
hope you will find this air agree with you, ma’am, and not suffer from
the damp of the water-meads.’
The younger one replied that there was not much doubt of it, her
general health being usually good. ‘Though, now you remind me,’ she
added, ‘I have one little ailment which puzzles me. It is nothing
serious, but I cannot make it out.’
She uncovered her left hand and arm; and their outline confronted
Rhoda’s gaze as the exact original of the limb she had beheld and
seized in her dream. Upon the pink round surface of the arm were faint
marks of an unhealthy colour, as if produced by a rough grasp. Rhoda’s
eyes became riveted on the discolorations; she fancied that she
discerned in them the shape of her own four fingers.
‘How did it happen?’ she said mechanically.
‘I cannot tell,’ replied Mrs. Lodge, shaking her head. ‘One night when
I was sound asleep, dreaming I was away in some strange place, a pain
suddenly shot into my arm there, and was so keen as to awaken me. I
must have struck it in the daytime, I suppose, though I don’t remember
doing so.’ She added, laughing, ‘I tell my dear husband that it looks
just as if he had flown into a rage and struck me there. O, I daresay
it will soon disappear.’
‘Ha, ha! Yes . . . On what night did it come?’
Mrs. Lodge considered, and said it would be a fortnight ago on the
morrow. ‘When I awoke I could not remember where I was,’ she added,
’till the clock striking two reminded me.’
She had named the night and the hour of Rhoda’s spectral encounter, and
Brook felt like a guilty thing. The artless disclosure startled her;
she did not reason on the freaks of coincidence; and all the scenery of
that ghastly night returned with double vividness to her mind.
‘O, can it be,’ she said to herself, when her visitor had departed,
‘that I exercise a malignant power over people against my own will?’
She knew that she had been slily called a witch since her fall; but
never having understood why that particular stigma had been attached to
her, it had passed disregarded. Could this be the explanation, and had
such things as this ever happened before?
CHAPTER IV—A SUGGESTION
The summer drew on, and Rhoda Brook almost dreaded to meet Mrs. Lodge
again, notwithstanding that her feeling for the young wife amounted
well-nigh to affection. Something in her own individuality seemed to
convict Rhoda of crime. Yet a fatality sometimes would direct the steps
of the latter to the outskirts of Holmstoke whenever she left her house
for any other purpose than her daily work; and hence it happened that
their next encounter was out of doors. Rhoda could not avoid the
subject which had so mystified her, and after the first few words she
stammered, ‘I hope your—arm is well again, ma’am?’ She had perceived
with consternation that Gertrude Lodge carried her left arm stiffly.
‘No; it is not quite well. Indeed it is no better at all; it is rather
worse. It pains me dreadfully sometimes.’
‘Perhaps you had better go to a doctor, ma’am.’
She replied that she had already seen a doctor. Her husband had
insisted upon her going to one. But the surgeon had not seemed to
understand the afflicted limb at all; he had told her to bathe it in
hot water, and she had bathed it, but the treatment had done no good.
‘Will you let me see it?’ said the milkwoman.
Mrs. Lodge pushed up her sleeve and disclosed the place, which was a
few inches above the wrist. As soon as Rhoda Brook saw it, she could
hardly preserve her composure. There was nothing of the nature of a
wound, but the arm at that point had a shrivelled look, and the outline
of the four fingers appeared more distinct than at the former time.
Moreover, she fancied that they were imprinted in precisely the
relative position of her clutch upon the arm in the trance; the first
finger towards Gertrude’s wrist, and the fourth towards her elbow.
What the impress resembled seemed to have struck Gertrude herself since
their last meeting. ‘It looks almost like finger-marks,’ she said;
adding with a faint laugh, ‘my husband says it is as if some witch, or
the devil himself, had taken hold of me there, and blasted the flesh.’
Rhoda shivered. ‘That’s fancy,’ she said hurriedly. ‘I wouldn’t mind
it, if I were you.’
‘I shouldn’t so much mind it,’ said the younger, with hesitation,
‘if—if I hadn’t a notion that it makes my husband—dislike me—no, love
me less. Men think so much of personal appearance.’
‘Some do—he for one.’
‘Yes; and he was very proud of mine, at first.’
‘Keep your arm covered from his sight.’
‘Ah—he knows the disfigurement is there!’ She tried to hide the tears
that filled her eyes.
‘Well, ma’am, I earnestly hope it will go away soon.’
And so the milkwoman’s mind was chained anew to the subject by a horrid
sort of spell as she returned home. The sense of having been guilty of
an act of malignity increased, affect as she might to ridicule her
superstition. In her secret heart Rhoda did not altogether object to a
slight diminution of her successor’s beauty, by whatever means it had
come about; but she did not wish to inflict upon her physical pain. For
though this pretty young woman had rendered impossible any reparation
which Lodge might have made Rhoda for his past conduct, everything like
resentment at the unconscious usurpation had quite passed away from the
elder’s mind.
If the sweet and kindly Gertrude Lodge only knew of the scene in the
bed-chamber, what would she think? Not to inform her of it seemed
treachery in the presence of her friendliness; but tell she could not
of her own accord—neither could she devise a remedy.
She mused upon the matter the greater part of the night; and the next
day, after the morning milking, set out to obtain another glimpse of
Gertrude Lodge if she could, being held to her by a gruesome
fascination. By watching the house from a distance the milkmaid was
presently able to discern the farmer’s wife in a ride she was taking
alone—probably to join her husband in some distant field. Mrs. Lodge
perceived her, and cantered in her direction.
‘Good morning, Rhoda!’ Gertrude said, when she had come up. ‘I was
going to call.’
Rhoda noticed that Mrs. Lodge held the reins with some difficulty.
‘I hope—the bad arm,’ said Rhoda.
‘They tell me there is possibly one way by which I might be able to
find out the cause, and so perhaps the cure, of it,’ replied the other
anxiously. ‘It is by going to some clever man over in Egdon Heath. They
did not know if he was still alive—and I cannot remember his name at
this moment; but they said that you knew more of his movements than
anybody else hereabout, and could tell me if he were still to be
consulted. Dear me—what was his name? But you know.’
‘Not Conjuror Trendle?’ said her thin companion, turning pale.
‘Trendle—yes. Is he alive?’
‘I believe so,’ said Rhoda, with reluctance.
‘Why do you call him conjuror?’
‘Well—they say—they used to say he was a—he had powers other folks have
not.’
‘O, how could my people be so superstitious as to recommend a man of
that sort! I thought they meant some medical man. I shall think no more
of him.’
Rhoda looked relieved, and Mrs. Lodge rode on. The milkwoman had
inwardly seen, from the moment she heard of her having been mentioned
as a reference for this man, that there must exist a sarcastic feeling
among the work-folk that a sorceress would know the whereabouts of the
exorcist. They suspected her, then. A short time ago this would have
given no concern to a woman of her common-sense. But she had a haunting
reason to be superstitious now; and she had been seized with sudden
dread that this Conjuror Trendle might name her as the malignant
influence which was blasting the fair person of Gertrude, and so lead
her friend to hate her for ever, and to treat her as some fiend in
human shape.
But all was not over. Two days after, a shadow intruded into the
window-pattern thrown on Rhoda Brook’s floor by the afternoon sun. The
woman opened the door at once, almost breathlessly.
‘Are you alone?’ said Gertrude. She seemed to be no less harassed and
anxious than Brook herself.
‘Yes,’ said Rhoda.
‘The place on my arm seems worse, and troubles me!’ the young farmer’s
wife went on. ‘It is so mysterious! I do hope it will not be an
incurable wound. I have again been thinking of what they said about
Conjuror Trendle. I don’t really believe in such men, but I should not
mind just visiting him, from curiosity—though on no account must my
husband know. Is it far to where he lives?’
‘Yes—five miles,’ said Rhoda backwardly. ‘In the heart of Egdon.’
‘Well, I should have to walk. Could not you go with me to show me the
way—say to-morrow afternoon?’
‘O, not I—that is,’ the milkwoman murmured, with a start of dismay.
Again the dread seized her that something to do with her fierce act in
the dream might be revealed, and her character in the eyes of the most
useful friend she had ever had be ruined irretrievably.
Mrs. Lodge urged, and Rhoda finally assented, though with much
misgiving. Sad as the journey would be to her, she could not
conscientiously stand in the way of a possible remedy for her patron’s
strange affliction. It was agreed that, to escape suspicion of their
mystic intent, they should meet at the edge of the heath at the corner
of a plantation which was visible from the spot where they now stood.
CHAPTER V—CONJUROR TRENDLE
By the next afternoon Rhoda would have done anything to escape this
inquiry. But she had promised to go. Moreover, there was a horrid
fascination at times in becoming instrumental in throwing such possible
light on her own character as would reveal her to be something greater
in the occult world than she had ever herself suspected.
She started just before the time of day mentioned between them, and
half-an-hour’s brisk walking brought her to the south-eastern extension
of the Egdon tract of country, where the fir plantation was. A slight
figure, cloaked and veiled, was already there. Rhoda recognized, almost
with a shudder, that Mrs. Lodge bore her left arm in a sling.
They hardly spoke to each other, and immediately set out on their climb
into the interior of this solemn country, which stood high above the
rich alluvial soil they had left half-an-hour before. It was a long
walk; thick clouds made the atmosphere dark, though it was as yet only
early afternoon; and the wind howled dismally over the hills of the
heath—not improbably the same heath which had witnessed the agony of
the Wessex King Ina, presented to after-ages as Lear. Gertrude Lodge
talked most, Rhoda replying with monosyllabic preoccupation. She had a
strange dislike to walking on the side of her companion where hung the
afflicted arm, moving round to the other when inadvertently near it.
Much heather had been brushed by their feet when they descended upon a
cart-track, beside which stood the house of the man they sought.
He did not profess his remedial practices openly, or care anything
about their continuance, his direct interests being those of a dealer
in furze, turf, ‘sharp sand,’ and other local products. Indeed, he
affected not to believe largely in his own powers, and when warts that
had been shown him for cure miraculously disappeared—which it must be
owned they infallibly did—he would say lightly, ‘O, I only drink a
glass of grog upon ’em—perhaps it’s all chance,’ and immediately turn
the subject.
He was at home when they arrived, having in fact seen them descending
into his valley. He was a gray-bearded man, with a reddish face, and he
looked singularly at Rhoda the first moment he beheld her. Mrs. Lodge
told him her errand; and then with words of self-disparagement he
examined her arm.
‘Medicine can’t cure it,’ he said promptly. ‘’Tis the work of an
enemy.’
Rhoda shrank into herself, and drew back.
‘An enemy? What enemy?’ asked Mrs. Lodge.
He shook his head. ‘That’s best known to yourself,’ he said. ‘If you
like, I can show the person to you, though I shall not myself know who
it is. I can do no more; and don’t wish to do that.’
She pressed him; on which he told Rhoda to wait outside where she
stood, and took Mrs. Lodge into the room. It opened immediately from
the door; and, as the latter remained ajar, Rhoda Brook could see the
proceedings without taking part in them. He brought a tumbler from the
dresser, nearly filled it with water, and fetching an egg, prepared it
in some private way; after which he broke it on the edge of the glass,
so that the white went in and the yolk remained. As it was getting
gloomy, he took the glass and its contents to the window, and told
Gertrude to watch them closely. They leant over the table together, and
the milkwoman could see the opaline hue of the egg-fluid changing form
as it sank in the water, but she was not near enough to define the
shape that it assumed.
‘Do you catch the likeness of any face or figure as you look?’ demanded
the conjuror of the young woman.
She murmured a reply, in tones so low as to be inaudible to Rhoda, and
continued to gaze intently into the glass. Rhoda turned, and walked a
few steps away.
When Mrs. Lodge came out, and her face was met by the light, it
appeared exceedingly pale—as pale as Rhoda’s—against the sad dun shades
of the upland’s garniture. Trendle shut the door behind her, and they
at once started homeward together. But Rhoda perceived that her
companion had quite changed.
‘Did he charge much?’ she asked tentatively.
‘O no—nothing. He would not take a farthing,’ said Gertrude.
‘And what did you see?’ inquired Rhoda.
‘Nothing I—care to speak of.’ The constraint in her manner was
remarkable; her face was so rigid as to wear an oldened aspect, faintly
suggestive of the face in Rhoda’s bed-chamber.
‘Was it you who first proposed coming here?’ Mrs. Lodge suddenly
inquired, after a long pause. ‘How very odd, if you did!’
‘No. But I am not sorry we have come, all things considered,’ she
replied. For the first time a sense of triumph possessed her, and she
did not altogether deplore that the young thing at her side should
learn that their lives had been antagonized by other influences than
their own.
The subject was no more alluded to during the long and dreary walk
home. But in some way or other a story was whispered about the
many-dairied lowland that winter that Mrs. Lodge’s gradual loss of the
use of her left arm was owing to her being ‘overlooked’ by Rhoda Brook.
The latter kept her own counsel about the incubus, but her face grew
sadder and thinner; and in the spring she and her boy disappeared from
the neighbourhood of Holmstoke.
CHAPTER VI—A SECOND ATTEMPT
Half-a-dozen years passed away, and Mr. and Mrs. Lodge’s married
experience sank into prosiness, and worse. The farmer was usually
gloomy and silent: the woman whom he had wooed for her grace and beauty
was contorted and disfigured in the left limb; moreover, she had
brought him no child, which rendered it likely that he would be the
last of a family who had occupied that valley for some two hundred
years. He thought of Rhoda Brook and her son; and feared this might be
a judgment from heaven upon him.
The once blithe-hearted and enlightened Gertrude was changing into an
irritable, superstitious woman, whose whole time was given to
experimenting upon her ailment with every quack remedy she came across.
She was honestly attached to her husband, and was ever secretly hoping
against hope to win back his heart again by regaining some at least of
her personal beauty. Hence it arose that her closet was lined with
bottles, packets, and ointment-pots of every description—nay, bunches
of mystic herbs, charms, and books of necromancy, which in her
schoolgirl time she would have ridiculed as folly.
‘Damned if you won’t poison yourself with these apothecary messes and
witch mixtures some time or other,’ said her husband, when his eye
chanced to fall upon the multitudinous array.
She did not reply, but turned her sad, soft glance upon him in such
heart-swollen reproach that he looked sorry for his words, and added,
‘I only meant it for your good, you know, Gertrude.’
‘I’ll clear out the whole lot, and destroy them,’ said she huskily,
‘and try such remedies no more!’
‘You want somebody to cheer you,’ he observed. ‘I once thought of
adopting a boy; but he is too old now. And he is gone away I don’t know
where.’
She guessed to whom he alluded; for Rhoda Brook’s story had in the
course of years become known to her; though not a word had ever passed
between her husband and herself on the subject. Neither had she ever
spoken to him of her visit to Conjuror Trendle, and of what was
revealed to her, or she thought was revealed to her, by that solitary
heath-man.
She was now five-and-twenty; but she seemed older.
‘Six years of marriage, and only a few months of love,’ she sometimes
whispered to herself. And then she thought of the apparent cause, and
said, with a tragic glance at her withering limb, ‘If I could only
again be as I was when he first saw me!’
She obediently destroyed her nostrums and charms; but there remained a
hankering wish to try something else—some other sort of cure
altogether. She had never revisited Trendle since she had been
conducted to the house of the solitary by Rhoda against her will; but
it now suddenly occurred to Gertrude that she would, in a last
desperate effort at deliverance from this seeming curse, again seek out
the man, if he yet lived. He was entitled to a certain credence, for
the indistinct form he had raised in the glass had undoubtedly
resembled the only woman in the world who—as she now knew, though not
then—could have a reason for bearing her ill-will. The visit should be
paid.
This time she went alone, though she nearly got lost on the heath, and
roamed a considerable distance out of her way. Trendle’s house was
reached at last, however: he was not indoors, and instead of waiting at
the cottage, she went to where his bent figure was pointed out to her
at work a long way off. Trendle remembered her, and laying down the
handful of furze-roots which he was gathering and throwing into a heap,
he offered to accompany her in her homeward direction, as the distance
was considerable and the days were short. So they walked together, his
head bowed nearly to the earth, and his form of a colour with it.
‘You can send away warts and other excrescences I know,’ she said; ‘why
can’t you send away this?’ And the arm was uncovered.
‘You think too much of my powers!’ said Trendle; ‘and I am old and weak
now, too. No, no; it is too much for me to attempt in my own person.
What have ye tried?’
She named to him some of the hundred medicaments and counterspells
which she had adopted from time to time. He shook his head.
‘Some were good enough,’ he said approvingly; ‘but not many of them for
such as this. This is of the nature of a blight, not of the nature of a
wound; and if you ever do throw it off; it will be all at once.’
‘If I only could!’
‘There is only one chance of doing it known to me. It has never failed
in kindred afflictions,—that I can declare. But it is hard to carry
out, and especially for a woman.’
‘Tell me!’ said she.
‘You must touch with the limb the neck of a man who’s been hanged.’
She started a little at the image he had raised.
‘Before he’s cold—just after he’s cut down,’ continued the conjuror
impassively.
‘How can that do good?’
‘It will turn the blood and change the constitution. But, as I say, to
do it is hard. You must get into jail, and wait for him when he’s
brought off the gallows. Lots have done it, though perhaps not such
pretty women as you. I used to send dozens for skin complaints. But
that was in former times. The last I sent was in ‘13—near twenty years
ago.’
He had no more to tell her; and, when he had put her into a straight
track homeward, turned and left her, refusing all money as at first.
CHAPTER VII—A RIDE
The communication sank deep into Gertrude’s mind. Her nature was rather
a timid one; and probably of all remedies that the white wizard could
have suggested there was not one which would have filled her with so
much aversion as this, not to speak of the immense obstacles in the way
of its adoption.
Casterbridge, the county-town, was a dozen or fifteen miles off; and
though in those days, when men were executed for horse-stealing, arson,
and burglary, an assize seldom passed without a hanging, it was not
likely that she could get access to the body of the criminal unaided.
And the fear of her husband’s anger made her reluctant to breathe a
word of Trendle’s suggestion to him or to anybody about him.
She did nothing for months, and patiently bore her disfigurement as
before. But her woman’s nature, craving for renewed love, through the
medium of renewed beauty (she was but twenty-five), was ever
stimulating her to try what, at any rate, could hardly do her any harm.
‘What came by a spell will go by a spell surely,’ she would say.
Whenever her imagination pictured the act she shrank in terror from the
possibility of it: then the words of the conjuror, ‘It will turn your
blood,’ were seen to be capable of a scientific no less than a ghastly
interpretation; the mastering desire returned, and urged her on again.
There was at this time but one county paper, and that her husband only
occasionally borrowed. But old-fashioned days had old-fashioned means,
and news was extensively conveyed by word of mouth from market to
market, or from fair to fair, so that, whenever such an event as an
execution was about to take place, few within a radius of twenty miles
were ignorant of the coming sight; and, so far as Holmstoke was
concerned, some enthusiasts had been known to walk all the way to
Casterbridge and back in one day, solely to witness the spectacle. The
next assizes were in March; and when Gertrude Lodge heard that they had
been held, she inquired stealthily at the inn as to the result, as soon
as she could find opportunity.
She was, however, too late. The time at which the sentences were to be
carried out had arrived, and to make the journey and obtain admission
at such short notice required at least her husband’s assistance. She
dared not tell him, for she had found by delicate experiment that these
smouldering village beliefs made him furious if mentioned, partly
because he half entertained them himself. It was therefore necessary to
wait for another opportunity.
Her determination received a fillip from learning that two epileptic
children had attended from this very village of Holmstoke many years
before with beneficial results, though the experiment had been strongly
condemned by the neighbouring clergy. April, May, June, passed; and it
is no overstatement to say that by the end of the last-named month
Gertrude well-nigh longed for the death of a fellow-creature. Instead
of her formal prayers each night, her unconscious prayer was, ‘O Lord,
hang some guilty or innocent person soon!’
This time she made earlier inquiries, and was altogether more
systematic in her proceedings. Moreover, the season was summer, between
the haymaking and the harvest, and in the leisure thus afforded him her
husband had been holiday-taking away from home.
The assizes were in July, and she went to the inn as before. There was
to be one execution—only one—for arson.
Her greatest problem was not how to get to Casterbridge, but what means
she should adopt for obtaining admission to the jail. Though access for
such purposes had formerly never been denied, the custom had fallen
into desuetude; and in contemplating her possible difficulties, she was
again almost driven to fall back upon her husband. But, on sounding him
about the assizes, he was so uncommunicative, so more than usually
cold, that she did not proceed, and decided that whatever she did she
would do alone.
Fortune, obdurate hitherto, showed her unexpected favour. On the
Thursday before the Saturday fixed for the execution, Lodge remarked to
her that he was going away from home for another day or two on business
at a fair, and that he was sorry he could not take her with him.
She exhibited on this occasion so much readiness to stay at home that
he looked at her in surprise. Time had been when she would have shown
deep disappointment at the loss of such a jaunt. However, he lapsed
into his usual taciturnity, and on the day named left Holmstoke.
It was now her turn. She at first had thought of driving, but on
reflection held that driving would not do, since it would necessitate
her keeping to the turnpike-road, and so increase by tenfold the risk
of her ghastly errand being found out. She decided to ride, and avoid
the beaten track, notwithstanding that in her husband’s stables there
was no animal just at present which by any stretch of imagination could
be considered a lady’s mount, in spite of his promise before marriage
to always keep a mare for her. He had, however, many cart-horses, fine
ones of their kind; and among the rest was a serviceable creature, an
equine Amazon, with a back as broad as a sofa, on which Gertrude had
occasionally taken an airing when unwell. This horse she chose.
On Friday afternoon one of the men brought it round. She was dressed,
and before going down looked at her shrivelled arm. ‘Ah!’ she said to
it, ‘if it had not been for you this terrible ordeal would have been
saved me!’
When strapping up the bundle in which she carried a few articles of
clothing, she took occasion to say to the servant, ‘I take these in
case I should not get back to-night from the person I am going to
visit. Don’t be alarmed if I am not in by ten, and close up the house
as usual. I shall be at home to-morrow for certain.’ She meant then to
privately tell her husband: the deed accomplished was not like the deed
projected. He would almost certainly forgive her.
And then the pretty palpitating Gertrude Lodge went from her husband’s
homestead; but though her goal was Casterbridge she did not take the
direct route thither through Stickleford. Her cunning course at first
was in precisely the opposite direction. As soon as she was out of
sight, however, she turned to the left, by a road which led into Egdon,
and on entering the heath wheeled round, and set out in the true
course, due westerly. A more private way down the county could not be
imagined; and as to direction, she had merely to keep her horse’s head
to a point a little to the right of the sun. She knew that she would
light upon a furze-cutter or cottager of some sort from time to time,
from whom she might correct her bearing.
Though the date was comparatively recent, Egdon was much less
fragmentary in character than now. The attempts—successful and
otherwise—at cultivation on the lower slopes, which intrude and break
up the original heath into small detached heaths, had not been carried
far; Enclosure Acts had not taken effect, and the banks and fences
which now exclude the cattle of those villagers who formerly enjoyed
rights of commonage thereon, and the carts of those who had turbary
privileges which kept them in firing all the year round, were not
erected. Gertrude, therefore, rode along with no other obstacles than
the prickly furze bushes, the mats of heather, the white water-courses,
and the natural steeps and declivities of the ground.
Her horse was sure, if heavy-footed and slow, and though a draught
animal, was easy-paced; had it been otherwise, she was not a woman who
could have ventured to ride over such a bit of country with a half-dead
arm. It was therefore nearly eight o’clock when she drew rein to
breathe the mare on the last outlying high point of heath-land towards
Casterbridge, previous to leaving Egdon for the cultivated valleys.
She halted before a pool called Rushy-pond, flanked by the ends of two
hedges; a railing ran through the centre of the pond, dividing it in
half. Over the railing she saw the low green country; over the green
trees the roofs of the town; over the roofs a white flat façade,
denoting the entrance to the county jail. On the roof of this front
specks were moving about; they seemed to be workmen erecting something.
Her flesh crept. She descended slowly, and was soon amid corn-fields
and pastures. In another half-hour, when it was almost dusk, Gertrude
reached the White Hart, the first inn of the town on that side.
Little surprise was excited by her arrival; farmers’ wives rode on
horseback then more than they do now; though, for that matter, Mrs.
Lodge was not imagined to be a wife at all; the innkeeper supposed her
some harum-skarum young woman who had come to attend ‘hang-fair’ next
day. Neither her husband nor herself ever dealt in Casterbridge market,
so that she was unknown. While dismounting she beheld a crowd of boys
standing at the door of a harness-maker’s shop just above the inn,
looking inside it with deep interest.
‘What is going on there?’ she asked of the ostler.
‘Making the rope for to-morrow.’
She throbbed responsively, and contracted her arm.
‘’Tis sold by the inch afterwards,’ the man continued. ‘I could get you
a bit, miss, for nothing, if you’d like?’
She hastily repudiated any such wish, all the more from a curious
creeping feeling that the condemned wretch’s destiny was becoming
interwoven with her own; and having engaged a room for the night, sat
down to think.
Up to this time she had formed but the vaguest notions about her means
of obtaining access to the prison. The words of the cunning-man
returned to her mind. He had implied that she should use her beauty,
impaired though it was, as a pass-key. In her inexperience she knew
little about jail functionaries; she had heard of a high-sheriff and an
under-sheriff; but dimly only. She knew, however, that there must be a
hangman, and to the hangman she determined to apply.
CHAPTER VIII—A WATER-SIDE HERMIT
At this date, and for several years after, there was a hangman to
almost every jail. Gertrude found, on inquiry, that the Casterbridge
official dwelt in a lonely cottage by a deep slow river flowing under
the cliff on which the prison buildings were situate—the stream being
the self-same one, though she did not know it, which watered the
Stickleford and Holmstoke meads lower down in its course.
Having changed her dress, and before she had eaten or drunk—for she
could not take her ease till she had ascertained some
particulars—Gertrude pursued her way by a path along the water-side to
the cottage indicated. Passing thus the outskirts of the jail, she
discerned on the level roof over the gateway three rectangular lines
against the sky, where the specks had been moving in her distant view;
she recognized what the erection was, and passed quickly on. Another
hundred yards brought her to the executioner’s house, which a boy
pointed out It stood close to the same stream, and was hard by a weir,
the waters of which emitted a steady roar.
While she stood hesitating the door opened, and an old man came forth
shading a candle with one hand. Locking the door on the outside, he
turned to a flight of wooden steps fixed against the end of the
cottage, and began to ascend them, this being evidently the staircase
to his bedroom. Gertrude hastened forward, but by the time she reached
the foot of the ladder he was at the top. She called to him loudly
enough to be heard above the roar of the weir; he looked down and said,
‘What d’ye want here?’
‘To speak to you a minute.’
The candle-light, such as it was, fell upon her imploring, pale,
upturned face, and Davies (as the hangman was called) backed down the
ladder. ‘I was just going to bed,’ he said; ‘“Early to bed and early to
rise,” but I don’t mind stopping a minute for such a one as you. Come
into house.’ He reopened the door, and preceded her to the room within.
The implements of his daily work, which was that of a jobbing gardener,
stood in a corner, and seeing probably that she looked rural, he said,
‘If you want me to undertake country work I can’t come, for I never
leave Casterbridge for gentle nor simple—not I. My real calling is
officer of justice,’ he added formally.
‘Yes, yes! That’s it. To-morrow!’
‘Ah! I thought so. Well, what’s the matter about that? ’Tis no use to
come here about the knot—folks do come continually, but I tell ’em one
knot is as merciful as another if ye keep it under the ear. Is the
unfortunate man a relation; or, I should say, perhaps’ (looking at her
dress) ‘a person who’s been in your employ?’
‘No. What time is the execution?’
‘The same as usual—twelve o’clock, or as soon after as the London
mail-coach gets in. We always wait for that, in case of a reprieve.’
‘O—a reprieve—I hope not!’ she said involuntarily,
‘Well,—hee, hee!—as a matter of business, so do I! But still, if ever a
young fellow deserved to be let off, this one does; only just turned
eighteen, and only present by chance when the rick was fired.
Howsomever, there’s not much risk of it, as they are obliged to make an
example of him, there having been so much destruction of property that
way lately.’
‘I mean,’ she explained, ‘that I want to touch him for a charm, a cure
of an affliction, by the advice of a man who has proved the virtue of
the remedy.’
‘O yes, miss! Now I understand. I’ve had such people come in past
years. But it didn’t strike me that you looked of a sort to require
blood-turning. What’s the complaint? The wrong kind for this, I’ll be
bound.’
‘My arm.’ She reluctantly showed the withered skin.
‘Ah—’tis all a-scram!’ said the hangman, examining it.
‘Yes,’ said she.
‘Well,’ he continued, with interest, ‘that _is_ the class o’ subject,
I’m bound to admit! I like the look of the place; it is truly as
suitable for the cure as any I ever saw. ’Twas a knowing-man that sent
‘ee, whoever he was.’
‘You can contrive for me all that’s necessary?’ she said breathlessly.
‘You should really have gone to the governor of the jail, and your
doctor with ‘ee, and given your name and address—that’s how it used to
be done, if I recollect. Still, perhaps, I can manage it for a trifling
fee.’
‘O, thank you! I would rather do it this way, as I should like it kept
private.’
‘Lover not to know, eh?’
‘No—husband.’
‘Aha! Very well. I’ll get ee’ a touch of the corpse.’
‘Where is it now?’ she said, shuddering.
‘It?_—he_, you mean; he’s living yet. Just inside that little small
winder up there in the glum.’ He signified the jail on the cliff above.
She thought of her husband and her friends. ‘Yes, of course,’ she said;
‘and how am I to proceed?’
He took her to the door. ‘Now, do you be waiting at the little wicket
in the wall, that you’ll find up there in the lane, not later than one
o’clock. I will open it from the inside, as I shan’t come home to
dinner till he’s cut down. Good-night. Be punctual; and if you don’t
want anybody to know ‘ee, wear a veil. Ah—once I had such a daughter as
you!’
She went away, and climbed the path above, to assure herself that she
would be able to find the wicket next day. Its outline was soon visible
to her—a narrow opening in the outer wall of the prison precincts. The
steep was so great that, having reached the wicket, she stopped a
moment to breathe; and, looking back upon the water-side cot, saw the
hangman again ascending his outdoor staircase. He entered the loft or
chamber to which it led, and in a few minutes extinguished his light.
The town clock struck ten, and she returned to the White Hart as she
had come.
CHAPTER IX—A RENCOUNTER
It was one o’clock on Saturday. Gertrude Lodge, having been admitted to
the jail as above described, was sitting in a waiting-room within the
second gate, which stood under a classic archway of ashlar, then
comparatively modern, and bearing the inscription, ‘COVNTY JAIL: 1793.’
This had been the façade she saw from the heath the day before. Near at
hand was a passage to the roof on which the gallows stood.
The town was thronged, and the market suspended; but Gertrude had seen
scarcely a soul. Having kept her room till the hour of the appointment,
she had proceeded to the spot by a way which avoided the open space
below the cliff where the spectators had gathered; but she could, even
now, hear the multitudinous babble of their voices, out of which rose
at intervals the hoarse croak of a single voice uttering the words,
‘Last dying speech and confession!’ There had been no reprieve, and the
execution was over; but the crowd still waited to see the body taken
down.
Soon the persistent girl heard a trampling overhead, then a hand
beckoned to her, and, following directions, she went out and crossed
the inner paved court beyond the gatehouse, her knees trembling so that
she could scarcely walk. One of her arms was out of its sleeve, and
only covered by her shawl.
On the spot at which she had now arrived were two trestles, and before
she could think of their purpose she heard heavy feet descending stairs
somewhere at her back. Turn her head she would not, or could not, and,
rigid in this position, she was conscious of a rough coffin passing her
shoulder, borne by four men. It was open, and in it lay the body of a
young man, wearing the smockfrock of a rustic, and fustian breeches.
The corpse had been thrown into the coffin so hastily that the skirt of
the smockfrock was hanging over. The burden was temporarily deposited
on the trestles.
By this time the young woman’s state was such that a gray mist seemed
to float before her eyes, on account of which, and the veil she wore,
she could scarcely discern anything: it was as though she had nearly
died, but was held up by a sort of galvanism.
‘Now!’ said a voice close at hand, and she was just conscious that the
word had been addressed to her.
By a last strenuous effort she advanced, at the same time hearing
persons approaching behind her. She bared her poor curst arm; and
Davies, uncovering the face of the corpse, took Gertrude’s hand, and
held it so that her arm lay across the dead man’s neck, upon a line the
colour of an unripe blackberry, which surrounded it.
Gertrude shrieked: ‘the turn o’ the blood,’ predicted by the conjuror,
had taken place. But at that moment a second shriek rent the air of the
enclosure: it was not Gertrude’s, and its effect upon her was to make
her start round.
Immediately behind her stood Rhoda Brook, her face drawn, and her eyes
red with weeping. Behind Rhoda stood Gertrude’s own husband; his
countenance lined, his eyes dim, but without a tear.
‘D-n you! what are you doing here?’ he said hoarsely.
‘Hussy—to come between us and our child now!’ cried Rhoda. ‘This is the
meaning of what Satan showed me in the vision! You are like her at
last!’ And clutching the bare arm of the younger woman, she pulled her
unresistingly back against the wall. Immediately Brook had loosened her
hold the fragile young Gertrude slid down against the feet of her
husband. When he lifted her up she was unconscious.
The mere sight of the twain had been enough to suggest to her that the
dead young man was Rhoda’s son. At that time the relatives of an
executed convict had the privilege of claiming the body for burial, if
they chose to do so; and it was for this purpose that Lodge was
awaiting the inquest with Rhoda. He had been summoned by her as soon as
the young man was taken in the crime, and at different times since; and
he had attended in court during the trial. This was the ‘holiday’ he
had been indulging in of late. The two wretched parents had wished to
avoid exposure; and hence had come themselves for the body, a waggon
and sheet for its conveyance and covering being in waiting outside.
Gertrude’s case was so serious that it was deemed advisable to call to
her the surgeon who was at hand. She was taken out of the jail into the
town; but she never reached home alive. Her delicate vitality, sapped
perhaps by the paralyzed arm, collapsed under the double shock that
followed the severe strain, physical and mental, to which she had
subjected herself during the previous twenty-four hours. Her blood had
been ‘turned’ indeed—too far. Her death took place in the town three
days after.
Her husband was never seen in Casterbridge again; once only in the old
market-place at Anglebury, which he had so much frequented, and very
seldom in public anywhere. Burdened at first with moodiness and
remorse, he eventually changed for the better, and appeared as a
chastened and thoughtful man. Soon after attending the funeral of his
poor young wife he took steps towards giving up the farms in Holmstoke
and the adjoining parish, and, having sold every head of his stock, he
went away to Port-Bredy, at the other end of the county, living there
in solitary lodgings till his death two years later of a painless
decline. It was then found that he had bequeathed the whole of his not
inconsiderable property to a reformatory for boys, subject to the
payment of a small annuity to Rhoda Brook, if she could be found to
claim it.
For some time she could not be found; but eventually she reappeared in
her old parish,—absolutely refusing, however, to have anything to do
with the provision made for her. Her monotonous milking at the dairy
was resumed, and followed for many long years, till her form became
bent, and her once abundant dark hair white and worn away at the
forehead—perhaps by long pressure against the cows. Here, sometimes,
those who knew her experiences would stand and observe her, and wonder
what sombre thoughts were beating inside that impassive, wrinkled brow,
to the rhythm of the alternating milk-streams.
(‘_Blackwood’s Magazine_,’ _January_ 1888.)
FELLOW-TOWNSMEN
CHAPTER I
The shepherd on the east hill could shout out lambing intelligence to
the shepherd on the west hill, over the intervening town chimneys,
without great inconvenience to his voice, so nearly did the steep
pastures encroach upon the burghers’ backyards. And at night it was
possible to stand in the very midst of the town and hear from their
native paddocks on the lower levels of greensward the mild lowing of
the farmer’s heifers, and the profound, warm blowings of breath in
which those creatures indulge. But the community which had jammed
itself in the valley thus flanked formed a veritable town, with a real
mayor and corporation, and a staple manufacture.
During a certain damp evening five-and-thirty years ago, before the
twilight was far advanced, a pedestrian of professional appearance,
carrying a small bag in his hand and an elevated umbrella, was
descending one of these hills by the turnpike road when he was
overtaken by a phaeton.
‘Hullo, Downe—is that you?’ said the driver of the vehicle, a young man
of pale and refined appearance. ‘Jump up here with me, and ride down to
your door.’
The other turned a plump, cheery, rather self-indulgent face over his
shoulder towards the hailer.
‘O, good evening, Mr. Barnet—thanks,’ he said, and mounted beside his
acquaintance.
They were fellow-burgesses of the town which lay beneath them, but
though old and very good friends, they were differently circumstanced.
Barnet was a richer man than the struggling young lawyer Downe, a fact
which was to some extent perceptible in Downe’s manner towards his
companion, though nothing of it ever showed in Barnet’s manner towards
the solicitor. Barnet’s position in the town was none of his own
making; his father had been a very successful flax-merchant in the same
place, where the trade was still carried on as briskly as the small
capacities of its quarters would allow. Having acquired a fair fortune,
old Mr. Barnet had retired from business, bringing up his son as a
gentleman-burgher, and, it must be added, as a well-educated,
liberal-minded young man.
‘How is Mrs. Barnet?’ asked Downe.
‘Mrs. Barnet was very well when I left home,’ the other answered
constrainedly, exchanging his meditative regard of the horse for one of
self-consciousness.
Mr. Downe seemed to regret his inquiry, and immediately took up another
thread of conversation. He congratulated his friend on his election as
a council-man; he thought he had not seen him since that event took
place; Mrs. Downe had meant to call and congratulate Mrs. Barnet, but
he feared that she had failed to do so as yet.
Barnet seemed hampered in his replies. _‘We_ should have been glad to
see you. I—my wife would welcome Mrs. Downe at any time, as you know .
. . Yes, I am a member of the corporation—rather an inexperienced
member, some of them say. It is quite true; and I should have declined
the honour as premature—having other things on my hands just now,
too—if it had not been pressed upon me so very heartily.’
‘There is one thing you have on your hands which I can never quite see
the necessity for,’ said Downe, with good-humoured freedom. ‘What the
deuce do you want to build that new mansion for, when you have already
got such an excellent house as the one you live in?’
Barnet’s face acquired a warmer shade of colour; but as the question
had been idly asked by the solicitor while regarding the surrounding
flocks and fields, he answered after a moment with no apparent
embarrassment—
‘Well, we wanted to get out of the town, you know: the house I am
living in is rather old and inconvenient.’ Mr. Downe declared that he
had chosen a pretty site for the new building. They would be able to
see for miles and miles from the windows. Was he going to give it a
name? He supposed so.
Barnet thought not. There was no other house near that was likely to be
mistaken for it. And he did not care for a name.
‘But I think it has a name!’ Downe observed: ‘I went past—when was
it?—this morning; and I saw something,—“Château Ringdale,” I think it
was, stuck up on a board!’
‘It was an idea she—we had for a short time,’ said Barnet hastily. ‘But
we have decided finally to do without a name—at any rate such a name as
that. It must have been a week ago that you saw it. It was taken down
last Saturday . . . Upon that matter I am firm!’ he added grimly.
Downe murmured in an unconvinced tone that he thought he had seen it
yesterday.
Talking thus they drove into the town. The street was unusually still
for the hour of seven in the evening; an increasing drizzle had
prevailed since the afternoon, and now formed a gauze across the yellow
lamps, and trickled with a gentle rattle down the heavy roofs of stone
tile, that bent the house-ridges hollow-backed with its weight, and in
some instances caused the walls to bulge outwards in the upper story.
Their route took them past the little town-hall, the Black-Bull Hotel,
and onward to the junction of a small street on the right, consisting
of a row of those two-and-two windowed brick residences of no
particular age, which are exactly alike wherever found, except in the
people they contain.
‘Wait—I’ll drive you up to your door,’ said Barnet, when Downe prepared
to alight at the corner. He thereupon turned into the narrow street,
when the faces of three little girls could be discerned close to the
panes of a lighted window a few yards ahead, surmounted by that of a
young matron, the gaze of all four being directed eagerly up the empty
street. ‘You are a fortunate fellow, Downe,’ Barnet continued, as
mother and children disappeared from the window to run to the door.
‘You must be happy if any man is. I would give a hundred such houses as
my new one to have a home like yours.’
‘Well—yes, we get along pretty comfortably,’ replied Downe
complacently.
‘That house, Downe, is none of my ordering,’ Barnet broke out,
revealing a bitterness hitherto suppressed, and checking the horse a
moment to finish his speech before delivering up his passenger. ‘The
house I have already is good enough for me, as you supposed. It is my
own freehold; it was built by my grandfather, and is stout enough for a
castle. My father was born there, lived there, and died there. I was
born there, and have always lived there; yet I must needs build a new
one.’
‘Why do you?’ said Downe.
‘Why do I? To preserve peace in the household. I do anything for that;
but I don’t succeed. I was firm in resisting “Château Ringdale,”
however; not that I would not have put up with the absurdity of the
name, but it was too much to have your house christened after Lord
Ringdale, because your wife once had a fancy for him. If you only knew
everything, you would think all attempt at reconciliation hopeless. In
your happy home you have had no such experiences; and God forbid that
you ever should. See, here they are all ready to receive you!’
‘Of course! And so will your wife be waiting to receive you,’ said
Downe. ‘Take my word for it she will! And with a dinner prepared for
you far better than mine.’
‘I hope so,’ Barnet replied dubiously.
He moved on to Downe’s door, which the solicitor’s family had already
opened. Downe descended, but being encumbered with his bag and
umbrella, his foot slipped, and he fell upon his knees in the gutter.
‘O, my dear Charles!’ said his wife, running down the steps; and, quite
ignoring the presence of Barnet, she seized hold of her husband, pulled
him to his feet, and kissed him, exclaiming, ‘I hope you are not hurt,
darling!’ The children crowded round, chiming in piteously, ‘Poor
papa!’
‘He’s all right,’ said Barnet, perceiving that Downe was only a little
muddy, and looking more at the wife than at the husband. Almost at any
other time—certainly during his fastidious bachelor years—he would have
thought her a too demonstrative woman; but those recent circumstances
of his own life to which he had just alluded made Mrs. Downe’s
solicitude so affecting that his eye grew damp as he witnessed it.
Bidding the lawyer and his family good-night he left them, and drove
slowly into the main street towards his own house.
The heart of Barnet was sufficiently impressionable to be influenced by
Downe’s parting prophecy that he might not be so unwelcome home as he
imagined: the dreary night might, at least on this one occasion, make
Downe’s forecast true. Hence it was in a suspense that he could hardly
have believed possible that he halted at his door. On entering his wife
was nowhere to be seen, and he inquired for her. The servant informed
him that her mistress had the dressmaker with her, and would be engaged
for some time.
‘Dressmaker at this time of day!’
‘She dined early, sir, and hopes you will excuse her joining you this
evening.’
‘But she knew I was coming to-night?’
‘O yes, sir.’
‘Go up and tell her I am come.’
The servant did so; but the mistress of the house merely transmitted
her former words.
Barnet said nothing more, and presently sat down to his lonely meal,
which was eaten abstractedly, the domestic scene he had lately
witnessed still impressing him by its contrast with the situation here.
His mind fell back into past years upon a certain pleasing and gentle
being whose face would loom out of their shades at such times as these.
Barnet turned in his chair, and looked with unfocused eyes in a
direction southward from where he sat, as if he saw not the room but a
long way beyond. ‘I wonder if she lives there still!’ he said.