five miles eastward. Here, without a moment’s warning, and in the midst
of a general conversation between her father, sister, and the young man
before alluded to, who devotedly wooed her in ignorance of her
infatuation, she would start from her seat in the chimney-corner as if
she had received a galvanic shock, and spring convulsively towards the
ceiling; then she would burst into tears, and it was not till some
half-hour had passed that she grew calm as usual. Her father, knowing
her hysterical tendencies, was always excessively anxious about this
trait in his youngest girl, and feared the attack to be a species of
epileptic fit. Not so her sister Julia. Julia had found out what was
the cause. At the moment before the jumping, only an exceptionally
sensitive ear situated in the chimney-nook could have caught from down
the flue the beat of a man’s footstep along the highway without. But it
was in that footfall, for which she had been waiting, that the origin
of Car’line’s involuntary springing lay. The pedestrian was Mop
Ollamoor, as the girl well knew; but his business that way was not to
visit her; he sought another woman whom he spoke of as his Intended,
and who lived at Moreford, two miles farther on. On one, and only one,
occasion did it happen that Car’line could not control her utterance;
it was when her sister alone chanced to be present. ‘Oh—oh—oh—!’ she
cried. ‘He’s going to _her_, and not coming to _me_!’

To do the fiddler justice he had not at first thought greatly of, or
spoken much to, this girl of impressionable mould. But he had soon
found out her secret, and could not resist a little by-play with her
too easily hurt heart, as an interlude between his more serious
performances at Moreford. The two became well acquainted, though only
by stealth, hardly a soul in Stickleford except her sister, and her
lover Ned Hipcroft, being aware of the attachment. Her father
disapproved of her coldness to Ned; her sister, too, hoped she might
get over this nervous passion for a man of whom so little was known.
The ultimate result was that Car’line’s manly and simple wooer Edward
found his suit becoming practically hopeless. He was a respectable
mechanic, in a far sounder position than Mop the nominal horse-doctor;
but when, before leaving her, Ned put his flat and final question,
would she marry him, then and there, now or never, it was with little
expectation of obtaining more than the negative she gave him. Though
her father supported him and her sister supported him, he could not
play the fiddle so as to draw your soul out of your body like a
spider’s thread, as Mop did, till you felt as limp as withy-wind and
yearned for something to cling to. Indeed, Hipcroft had not the
slightest ear for music; could not sing two notes in tune, much less
play them.

The No he had expected and got from her, in spite of a preliminary
encouragement, gave Ned a new start in life. It had been uttered in
such a tone of sad entreaty that he resolved to persecute her no more;
she should not even be distressed by a sight of his form in the distant
perspective of the street and lane. He left the place, and his natural
course was to London.

The railway to South Wessex was in process of construction, but it was
not as yet opened for traffic; and Hipcroft reached the capital by a
six days’ trudge on foot, as many a better man had done before him. He
was one of the last of the artisan class who used that now extinct
method of travel to the great centres of labour, so customary then from
time immemorial.

In London he lived and worked regularly at his trade. More fortunate
than many, his disinterested willingness recommended him from the
first. During the ensuing four years he was never out of employment. He
neither advanced nor receded in the modern sense; he improved as a
workman, but he did not shift one jot in social position. About his
love for Car’line he maintained a rigid silence. No doubt he often
thought of her; but being always occupied, and having no relations at
Stickleford, he held no communication with that part of the country,
and showed no desire to return. In his quiet lodging in Lambeth he
moved about after working-hours with the facility of a woman, doing his
own cooking, attending to his stocking-heels, and shaping himself by
degrees to a life-long bachelorhood. For this conduct one is bound to
advance the canonical reason that time could not efface from his heart
the image of little Car’line Aspent—and it may be in part true; but
there was also the inference that his was a nature not greatly
dependent upon the ministrations of the other sex for its comforts.

The fourth year of his residence as a mechanic in London was the year
of the Hyde-Park Exhibition already mentioned, and at the construction
of this huge glass-house, then unexampled in the world’s history, he
worked daily. It was an era of great hope and activity among the
nations and industries. Though Hipcroft was, in his small way, a
central man in the movement, he plodded on with his usual outward
placidity. Yet for him, too, the year was destined to have its
surprises, for when the bustle of getting the building ready for the
opening day was past, the ceremonies had been witnessed, and people
were flocking thither from all parts of the globe, he received a letter
from Car’line. Till that day the silence of four years between himself
and Stickleford had never been broken.

She informed her old lover, in an uncertain penmanship which suggested
a trembling hand, of the trouble she had been put to in ascertaining
his address, and then broached the subject which had prompted her to
write. Four years ago, she said with the greatest delicacy of which she
was capable, she had been so foolish as to refuse him. Her wilful
wrong-headedness had since been a grief to her many times, and of late
particularly. As for Mr. Ollamoor, he had been absent almost as long as
Ned—she did not know where. She would gladly marry Ned now if he were
to ask her again, and be a tender little wife to him till her life’s
end.

A tide of warm feeling must have surged through Ned Hipcroft’s frame on
receipt of this news, if we may judge by the issue. Unquestionably he
loved her still, even if not to the exclusion of every other happiness.
This from his Car’line, she who had been dead to him these many years,
alive to him again as of old, was in itself a pleasant, gratifying
thing. Ned had grown so resigned to, or satisfied with, his lonely lot,
that he probably would not have shown much jubilation at anything.
Still, a certain ardour of preoccupation, after his first surprise,
revealed how deeply her confession of faith in him had stirred him.
Measured and methodical in his ways, he did not answer the letter that
day, nor the next, nor the next. He was having ‘a good think.’ When he
did answer it, there was a great deal of sound reasoning mixed in with
the unmistakable tenderness of his reply; but the tenderness itself was
sufficient to reveal that he was pleased with her straightforward
frankness; that the anchorage she had once obtained in his heart was
renewable, if it had not been continuously firm.

He told her—and as he wrote his lips twitched humorously over the few
gentle words of raillery he indited among the rest of his
sentences—that it was all very well for her to come round at this time
of day. Why wouldn’t she have him when he wanted her? She had no doubt
learned that he was not married, but suppose his affections had since
been fixed on another? She ought to beg his pardon. Still, he was not
the man to forget her. But considering how he had been used, and what
he had suffered, she could not quite expect him to go down to
Stickleford and fetch her. But if she would come to him, and say she
was sorry, as was only fair; why, yes, he would marry her, knowing what
a good little woman she was at the core. He added that the request for
her to come to him was a less one to make than it would have been when
he first left Stickleford, or even a few months ago; for the new
railway into South Wessex was now open, and there had just begun to be
run wonderfully contrived special trains, called excursion-trains, on
account of the Great Exhibition; so that she could come up easily
alone.

She said in her reply how good it was of him to treat her so
generously, after her hot and cold treatment of him; that though she
felt frightened at the magnitude of the journey, and was never as yet
in a railway-train, having only seen one pass at a distance, she
embraced his offer with all her heart; and would, indeed, own to him
how sorry she was, and beg his pardon, and try to be a good wife
always, and make up for lost time.

The remaining details of when and where were soon settled, Car’line
informing him, for her ready identification in the crowd, that she
would be wearing ‘my new sprigged-laylock cotton gown,’ and Ned gaily
responding that, having married her the morning after her arrival, he
would make a day of it by taking her to the Exhibition. One early
summer afternoon, accordingly, he came from his place of work, and
hastened towards Waterloo Station to meet her. It was as wet and chilly
as an English June day can occasionally be, but as he waited on the
platform in the drizzle he glowed inwardly, and seemed to have
something to live for again.

The ‘excursion-train’—an absolutely new departure in the history of
travel—was still a novelty on the Wessex line, and probably everywhere.
Crowds of people had flocked to all the stations on the way up to
witness the unwonted sight of so long a train’s passage, even where
they did not take advantage of the opportunity it offered. The seats
for the humbler class of travellers in these early experiments in
steam-locomotion, were open trucks, without any protection whatever
from the wind and rain; and damp weather having set in with the
afternoon, the unfortunate occupants of these vehicles were, on the
train drawing up at the London terminus, found to be in a pitiable
condition from their long journey; blue-faced, stiff-necked, sneezing,
rain-beaten, chilled to the marrow, many of the men being hatless; in
fact, they resembled people who had been out all night in an open boat
on a rough sea, rather than inland excursionists for pleasure. The
women had in some degree protected themselves by turning up the skirts
of their gowns over their heads, but as by this arrangement they were
additionally exposed about the hips, they were all more or less in a
sorry plight.

In the bustle and crush of alighting forms of both sexes which followed
the entry of the huge concatenation into the station, Ned Hipcroft soon
discerned the slim little figure his eye was in search of, in the
sprigged lilac, as described. She came up to him with a frightened
smile—still pretty, though so damp, weather-beaten, and shivering from
long exposure to the wind.

‘O Ned!’ she sputtered, ‘I—I—’ He clasped her in his arms and kissed
her, whereupon she burst into a flood of tears.

‘You are wet, my poor dear! I hope you’ll not get cold,’ he said. And
surveying her and her multifarious surrounding packages, he noticed
that by the hand she led a toddling child—a little girl of three or
so—whose hood was as clammy and tender face as blue as those of the
other travellers.

‘Who is this—somebody you know?’ asked Ned curiously.

‘Yes, Ned. She’s mine.’

‘Yours?’

‘Yes—my own!’

‘Your own child?’

‘Yes!’

‘Well—as God’s in—’

‘Ned, I didn’t name it in my letter, because, you see, it would have
been so hard to explain! I thought that when we met I could tell you
how she happened to be born, so much better than in writing! I hope
you’ll excuse it this once, dear Ned, and not scold me, now I’ve come
so many, many miles!’

‘This means Mr. Mop Ollamoor, I reckon!’ said Hipcroft, gazing palely
at them from the distance of the yard or two to which he had withdrawn
with a start.

Car’line gasped. ‘But he’s been gone away for years!’ she supplicated.
‘And I never had a young man before! And I was so onlucky to be catched
the first time, though some of the girls down there go on like
anything!’

Ned remained in silence, pondering.

‘You’ll forgive me, dear Ned?’ she added, beginning to sob outright. ‘I
haven’t taken ’ee in after all, because—because you can pack us back
again, if you want to; though ’tis hundreds o’ miles, and so wet, and
night a-coming on, and I with no money!’

‘What the devil can I do!’ Hipcroft groaned.

A more pitiable picture than the pair of helpless creatures presented
was never seen on a rainy day, as they stood on the great, gaunt,
puddled platform, a whiff of drizzle blowing under the roof upon them
now and then; the pretty attire in which they had started from
Stickleford in the early morning bemuddled and sodden, weariness on
their faces, and fear of him in their eyes; for the child began to look
as if she thought she too had done some wrong, remaining in an appalled
silence till the tears rolled down her chubby cheeks.

‘What’s the matter, my little maid?’ said Ned mechanically.

‘I do want to go home!’ she let out, in tones that told of a bursting
heart. ‘And my totties be cold, an’ I shan’t have no bread an’ butter
no more!’

‘I don’t know what to say to it all!’ declared Ned, his own eye moist
as he turned and walked a few steps with his head down; then regarded
them again point blank. From the child escaped troubled breaths and
silently welling tears.

‘Want some bread and butter, do ’ee?’ he said, with factitious
hardness.

‘Ye-e-s!’

‘Well, I daresay I can get ’ee a bit! Naturally, you must want some.
And you, too, for that matter, Car’line.’

‘I do feel a little hungered. But I can keep it off,’ she murmured.

‘Folk shouldn’t do that,’ he said gruffly. . . . ‘There come along!’ he
caught up the child, as he added, ‘You must bide here to-night, anyhow,
I s’pose! What can you do otherwise? I’ll get ’ee some tea and
victuals; and as for this job, I’m sure I don’t know what to say! This
is the way out.’

They pursued their way, without speaking, to Ned’s lodgings, which were
not far off. There he dried them and made them comfortable, and
prepared tea; they thankfully sat down. The ready-made household of
which he suddenly found himself the head imparted a cosy aspect to his
room, and a paternal one to himself. Presently he turned to the child
and kissed her now blooming cheeks; and, looking wistfully at Car’line,
kissed her also.

‘I don’t see how I can send ’ee back all them miles,’ he growled, ‘now
you’ve come all the way o’ purpose to join me. But you must trust me,
Car’line, and show you’ve real faith in me. Well, do you feel better
now, my little woman?’

The child nodded, her mouth being otherwise occupied.

‘I did trust you, Ned, in coming; and I shall always!’

Thus, without any definite agreement to forgive her, he tacitly
acquiesced in the fate that Heaven had sent him; and on the day of
their marriage (which was not quite so soon as he had expected it could
be, on account of the time necessary for banns) he took her to the
Exhibition when they came back from church, as he had promised. While
standing near a large mirror in one of the courts devoted to furniture,
Car’line started, for in the glass appeared the reflection of a form
exactly resembling Mop Ollamoor’s—so exactly, that it seemed impossible
to believe anybody but that artist in person to be the original. On
passing round the objects which hemmed in Ned, her, and the child from
a direct view, no Mop was to be seen. Whether he were really in London
or not at that time was never known; and Car’line always stoutly denied
that her readiness to go and meet Ned in town arose from any rumour
that Mop had also gone thither; which denial there was no reasonable
ground for doubting.

And then the year glided away, and the Exhibition folded itself up and
became a thing of the past. The park trees that had been enclosed for
six months were again exposed to the winds and storms, and the sod grew
green anew. Ned found that Car’line resolved herself into a very good
wife and companion, though she had made herself what is called cheap to
him; but in that she was like another domestic article, a cheap
tea-pot, which often brews better tea than a dear one. One autumn
Hipcroft found himself with but little work to do, and a prospect of
less for the winter. Both being country born and bred, they fancied
they would like to live again in their natural atmosphere. It was
accordingly decided between them that they should leave the pent-up
London lodging, and that Ned should seek out employment near his native
place, his wife and her daughter staying with Car’line’s father during
the search for occupation and an abode of their own.

Tinglings of pleasure pervaded Car’line’s spasmodic little frame as she
journeyed down with Ned to the place she had left two or three years
before, in silence and under a cloud. To return to where she had once
been despised, a smiling London wife with a distinct London accent, was
a triumph which the world did not witness every day.

The train did not stop at the petty roadside station that lay nearest
to Stickleford, and the trio went on to Casterbridge. Ned thought it a
good opportunity to make a few preliminary inquiries for employment at
workshops in the borough where he had been known; and feeling cold from
her journey, and it being dry underfoot and only dusk as yet, with a
moon on the point of rising, Car’line and her little girl walked on
toward Stickleford, leaving Ned to follow at a quicker pace, and pick
her up at a certain half-way house, widely known as an inn.

The woman and child pursued the well-remembered way comfortably enough,
though they were both becoming wearied. In the course of three miles
they had passed Heedless-William’s Pond, the familiar landmark by
Bloom’s End, and were drawing near the Quiet Woman Inn, a lone roadside
hostel on the lower verge of the Egdon Heath, since and for many years
abolished. In stepping up towards it Car’line heard more voices within
than had formerly been customary at such an hour, and she learned that
an auction of fat stock had been held near the spot that afternoon. The
child would be the better for a rest as well as herself, she thought,
and she entered.

The guests and customers overflowed into the passage, and Car’line had
no sooner crossed the threshold than a man whom she remembered by sight
came forward with glass and mug in his hands towards a friend leaning
against the wall; but, seeing her, very gallantly offered her a drink
of the liquor, which was gin-and-beer hot, pouring her out a tumblerful
and saying, in a moment or two: ‘Surely, ’tis little Car’line Aspent
that was—down at Stickleford?’

She assented, and, though she did not exactly want this beverage, she
drank it since it was offered, and her entertainer begged her to come
in farther and sit down. Once within the room she found that all the
persons present were seated close against the walls, and there being a
chair vacant she did the same. An explanation of their position
occurred the next moment. In the opposite corner stood Mop, rosining
his bow and looking just the same as ever. The company had cleared the
middle of the room for dancing, and they were about to dance again. As
she wore a veil to keep off the wind she did not think he had
recognized her, or could possibly guess the identity of the child; and
to her satisfied surprise she found that she could confront him quite
calmly—mistress of herself in the dignity her London life had given
her. Before she had quite emptied her glass the dance was called, the
dancers formed in two lines, the music sounded, and the figure began.

Then matters changed for Car’line. A tremor quickened itself to life in
her, and her hand so shook that she could hardly set down her glass. It
was not the dance nor the dancers, but the notes of that old violin
which thrilled the London wife, these having still all the witchery
that she had so well known of yore, and under which she had used to
lose her power of independent will. How it all came back! There was the
fiddling figure against the wall; the large, oily, mop-like head of
him, and beneath the mop the face with closed eyes.

After the first moments of paralyzed reverie the familiar tune in the
familiar rendering made her laugh and shed tears simultaneously. Then a
man at the bottom of the dance, whose partner had dropped away,
stretched out his hand and beckoned to her to take the place. She did
not want to dance; she entreated by signs to be left where she was, but
she was entreating of the tune and its player rather than of the
dancing man. The saltatory tendency which the fiddler and his cunning
instrument had ever been able to start in her was seizing Car’line just
as it had done in earlier years, possibly assisted by the gin-and-beer
hot. Tired as she was she grasped her little girl by the hand, and
plunging in at the bottom of the figure, whirled about with the rest.
She found that her companions were mostly people of the neighbouring
hamlets and farms—Bloom’s End, Mellstock, Lewgate, and elsewhere; and
by degrees she was recognized as she convulsively danced on, wishing
that Mop would cease and let her heart rest from the aching he caused,
and her feet also.

After long and many minutes the dance ended, when she was urged to
fortify herself with more gin-and-beer; which she did, feeling very
weak and overpowered with hysteric emotion. She refrained from
unveiling, to keep Mop in ignorance of her presence, if possible.
Several of the guests having left, Car’line hastily wiped her lips and
also turned to go; but, according to the account of some who remained,
at that very moment a five-handed reel was proposed, in which two or
three begged her to join.

She declined on the plea of being tired and having to walk to
Stickleford, when Mop began aggressively tweedling ‘My Fancy-Lad,’ in D
major, as the air to which the reel was to be footed. He must have
recognized her, though she did not know it, for it was the strain of
all seductive strains which she was least able to resist—the one he had
played when she was leaning over the bridge at the date of their first
acquaintance. Car’line stepped despairingly into the middle of the room
with the other four.

Reels were resorted to hereabouts at this time by the more robust
spirits, for the reduction of superfluous energy which the ordinary
figure-dances were not powerful enough to exhaust. As everybody knows,
or does not know, the five reelers stood in the form of a cross, the
reel being performed by each line of three alternately, the persons who
successively came to the middle place dancing in both directions.
Car’line soon found herself in this place, the axis of the whole
performance, and could not get out of it, the tune turning into the
first part without giving her opportunity. And now she began to suspect
that Mop did know her, and was doing this on purpose, though whenever
she stole a glance at him his closed eyes betokened obliviousness to
everything outside his own brain. She continued to wend her way through
the figure of 8 that was formed by her course, the fiddler introducing
into his notes the wild and agonizing sweetness of a living voice in
one too highly wrought; its pathos running high and running low in
endless variation, projecting through her nerves excruciating spasms, a
sort of blissful torture. The room swam, the tune was endless; and in
about a quarter of an hour the only other woman in the figure dropped
out exhausted, and sank panting on a bench.

The reel instantly resolved itself into a four-handed one. Car’line
would have given anything to leave off; but she had, or fancied she
had, no power, while Mop played such tunes; and thus another ten
minutes slipped by, a haze of dust now clouding the candles, the floor
being of stone, sanded. Then another dancer fell out—one of the men—and
went into the passage, in a frantic search for liquor. To turn the
figure into a three-handed reel was the work of a second, Mop
modulating at the same time into ‘The Fairy Dance,’ as better suited to
the contracted movement, and no less one of those foods of love which,
as manufactured by his bow, had always intoxicated her.

In a reel for three there was no rest whatever, and four or five
minutes were enough to make her remaining two partners, now thoroughly
blown, stamp their last bar and, like their predecessors, limp off into
the next room to get something to drink. Car’line, half-stifled inside
her veil, was left dancing alone, the apartment now being empty of
everybody save herself, Mop, and their little girl.

She flung up the veil, and cast her eyes upon him, as if imploring him
to withdraw himself and his acoustic magnetism from the atmosphere. Mop
opened one of his own orbs, as though for the first time, fixed it
peeringly upon her, and smiling dreamily, threw into his strains the
reserve of expression which he could not afford to waste on a big and
noisy dance. Crowds of little chromatic subtleties, capable of drawing
tears from a statue, proceeded straightway from the ancient fiddle, as
if it were dying of the emotion which had been pent up within it ever
since its banishment from some Italian city where it first took shape
and sound. There was that in the look of Mop’s one dark eye which said:
‘You cannot leave off, dear, whether you would or no!’ and it bred in
her a paroxysm of desperation that defied him to tire her down.

She thus continued to dance alone, defiantly as she thought, but in
truth slavishly and abjectly, subject to every wave of the melody, and
probed by the gimlet-like gaze of her fascinator’s open eye; keeping up
at the same time a feeble smile in his face, as a feint to signify it
was still her own pleasure which led her on. A terrified embarrassment
as to what she could say to him if she were to leave off, had its
unrecognized share in keeping her going. The child, who was beginning
to be distressed by the strange situation, came up and said: ‘Stop,
mother, stop, and let’s go home!’ as she seized Car’line’s hand.

Suddenly Car’line sank staggering to the floor; and rolling over on her
face, prone she remained. Mop’s fiddle thereupon emitted an elfin
shriek of finality; stepping quickly down from the nine-gallon
beer-cask which had formed his rostrum, he went to the little girl, who
disconsolately bent over her mother.

The guests who had gone into the back-room for liquor and change of
air, hearing something unusual, trooped back hitherward, where they
endeavoured to revive poor, weak Car’line by blowing her with the
bellows and opening the window. Ned, her husband, who had been detained
in Casterbridge, as aforesaid, came along the road at this juncture,
and hearing excited voices through the open casement, and to his great
surprise, the mention of his wife’s name, he entered amid the rest upon
the scene. Car’line was now in convulsions, weeping violently, and for
a long time nothing could be done with her. While he was sending for a
cart to take her onward to Stickleford Hipcroft anxiously inquired how
it had all happened; and then the assembly explained that a fiddler
formerly known in the locality had lately revisited his old haunts, and
had taken upon himself without invitation to play that evening at the
inn.

Ned demanded the fiddler’s name, and they said Ollamoor.

‘Ah!’ exclaimed Ned, looking round him. ‘Where is he, and where—where’s
my little girl?’

Ollamoor had disappeared, and so had the child. Hipcroft was in
ordinary a quiet and tractable fellow, but a determination which was to
be feared settled in his face now. ‘Blast him!’ he cried. ‘I’ll beat
his skull in for’n, if I swing for it to-morrow!’

He had rushed to the poker which lay on the hearth, and hastened down
the passage, the people following. Outside the house, on the other side
of the highway, a mass of dark heath-land rose sullenly upward to its
not easily accessible interior, a ravined plateau, whereon jutted into
the sky, at the distance of a couple of miles, the fir-woods of
Mistover backed by the Yalbury coppices—a place of Dantesque gloom at
this hour, which would have afforded secure hiding for a battery of
artillery, much less a man and a child.

Some other men plunged thitherward with him, and more went along the
road. They were gone about twenty minutes altogether, returning without
result to the inn. Ned sat down in the settle, and clasped his forehead
with his hands.

‘Well—what a fool the man is, and hev been all these years, if he
thinks the child his, as a’ do seem to!’ they whispered. ‘And everybody
else knowing otherwise!’

‘No, I don’t think ’tis mine!’ cried Ned hoarsely, as he looked up from
his hands. ‘But she is mine, all the same! Ha’n’t I nussed her? Ha’n’t
I fed her and teached her? Ha’n’t I played wi’ her? O, little
Carry—gone with that rogue—gone!’

‘You ha’n’t lost your mis’ess, anyhow,’ they said to console him.
‘She’s throwed up the sperrits, and she is feeling better, and she’s
more to ’ee than a child that isn’t yours.’

‘She isn’t! She’s not so particular much to me, especially now she’s
lost the little maid! But Carry’s everything!’

‘Well, ver’ like you’ll find her to-morrow.’

‘Ah—but shall I? Yet he _can’t_ hurt her—surely he can’t! Well—how’s
Car’line now? I am ready. Is the cart here?’

She was lifted into the vehicle, and they sadly lumbered on toward
Stickleford. Next day she was calmer; but the fits were still upon her;
and her will seemed shattered. For the child she appeared to show
singularly little anxiety, though Ned was nearly distracted. It was
nevertheless quite expected that the impish Mop would restore the lost
one after a freak of a day or two; but time went on, and neither he nor
she could be heard of, and Hipcroft murmured that perhaps he was
exercising upon her some unholy musical charm, as he had done upon
Car’line herself. Weeks passed, and still they could obtain no clue
either to the fiddler’s whereabouts or the girl’s; and how he could
have induced her to go with him remained a mystery.

Then Ned, who had obtained only temporary employment in the
neighbourhood, took a sudden hatred toward his native district, and a
rumour reaching his ears through the police that a somewhat similar man
and child had been seen at a fair near London, he playing a violin, she
dancing on stilts, a new interest in the capital took possession of
Hipcroft with an intensity which would scarcely allow him time to pack
before returning thither.

He did not, however, find the lost one, though he made it the entire
business of his over-hours to stand about in by-streets in the hope of
discovering her, and would start up in the night, saying, ‘That
rascal’s torturing her to maintain him!’ To which his wife would answer
peevishly, ‘Don’t ’ee raft yourself so, Ned! You prevent my getting a
bit o’ rest! He won’t hurt her!’ and fall asleep again.

That Carry and her father had emigrated to America was the general
opinion; Mop, no doubt, finding the girl a highly desirable companion
when he had trained her to keep him by her earnings as a dancer. There,
for that matter, they may be performing in some capacity now, though he
must be an old scamp verging on threescore-and-ten, and she a woman of
four-and-forty.

May 1893,

A TRADITION OF EIGHTEEN HUNDRED AND FOUR

The widely discussed possibility of an invasion of England through a
Channel tunnel has more than once recalled old Solomon Selby’s story to
my mind.

The occasion on which I numbered myself among his audience was one
evening when he was sitting in the yawning chimney-corner of the
inn-kitchen, with some others who had gathered there, and I entered for
shelter from the rain. Withdrawing the stem of his pipe from the dental
notch in which it habitually rested, he leaned back in the recess
behind him and smiled into the fire. The smile was neither mirthful nor
sad, not precisely humorous nor altogether thoughtful. We who knew him
recognized it in a moment: it was his narrative smile. Breaking off our
few desultory remarks we drew up closer, and he thus began:—

‘My father, as you mid know, was a shepherd all his life, and lived out
by the Cove four miles yonder, where I was born and lived likewise,
till I moved here shortly afore I was married. The cottage that first
knew me stood on the top of the down, near the sea; there was no house
within a mile and a half of it; it was built o’ purpose for the
farm-shepherd, and had no other use. They tell me that it is now pulled
down, but that you can see where it stood by the mounds of earth and a
few broken bricks that are still lying about. It was a bleak and dreary
place in winter-time, but in summer it was well enough, though the
garden never came to much, because we could not get up a good shelter
for the vegetables and currant bushes; and where there is much wind
they don’t thrive.

‘Of all the years of my growing up the ones that bide clearest in my
mind were eighteen hundred and three, four, and five. This was for two
reasons: I had just then grown to an age when a child’s eyes and ears
take in and note down everything about him, and there was more at that
date to bear in mind than there ever has been since with me. It was, as
I need hardly tell ye, the time after the first peace, when Bonaparte
was scheming his descent upon England. He had crossed the great Alp
mountains, fought in Egypt, drubbed the Turks, the Austrians, and the
Proossians, and now thought he’d have a slap at us. On the other side
of the Channel, scarce out of sight and hail of a man standing on our
English shore, the French army of a hundred and sixty thousand men and
fifteen thousand horses had been brought together from all parts, and
were drilling every day. Bonaparte had been three years a-making his
preparations; and to ferry these soldiers and cannon and horses across
he had contrived a couple of thousand flat-bottomed boats. These boats
were small things, but wonderfully built. A good few of ’em were so
made as to have a little stable on board each for the two horses that
were to haul the cannon carried at the stern. To get in order all
these, and other things required, he had assembled there five or six
thousand fellows that worked at trades—carpenters, blacksmiths,
wheelwrights, saddlers, and what not. O ’twas a curious time!

‘Every morning Neighbour Boney would muster his multitude of soldiers
on the beach, draw ’em up in line, practise ’em in the manoeuvre of
embarking, horses and all, till they could do it without a single
hitch. My father drove a flock of ewes up into Sussex that year, and as
he went along the drover’s track over the high downs thereabout he
could see this drilling actually going on—the accoutrements of the rank
and file glittering in the sun like silver. It was thought and always
said by my uncle Job, sergeant of foot (who used to know all about
these matters), that Bonaparte meant to cross with oars on a calm
night. The grand query with us was, Where would my gentleman land? Many
of the common people thought it would be at Dover; others, who knew how
unlikely it was that any skilful general would make a business of
landing just where he was expected, said he’d go either east into the
River Thames, or west’ard to some convenient place, most likely one of
the little bays inside the Isle of Portland, between the Beal and St.
Alban’s Head—and for choice the three-quarter-round Cove, screened from
every mortal eye, that seemed made o’ purpose, out by where we lived,
and which I’ve climmed up with two tubs of brandy across my shoulders
on scores o’ dark nights in my younger days. Some had heard that a part
o’ the French fleet would sail right round Scotland, and come up the
Channel to a suitable haven. However, there was much doubt upon the
matter; and no wonder, for after-years proved that Bonaparte himself
could hardly make up his mind upon that great and very particular
point, where to land. His uncertainty came about in this wise, that he
could get no news as to where and how our troops lay in waiting, and
that his knowledge of possible places where flat-bottomed boats might
be quietly run ashore, and the men they brought marshalled in order,
was dim to the last degree. Being flat-bottomed, they didn’t require a
harbour for unshipping their cargo of men, but a good shelving beach
away from sight, and with a fair open road toward London. How the
question posed that great Corsican tyrant (as we used to call him),
what pains he took to settle it, and, above all, what a risk he ran on
one particular night in trying to do so, were known only to one man
here and there; and certainly to no maker of newspapers or printer of
books, or my account o’t would not have had so many heads shaken over
it as it has by gentry who only believe what they see in printed lines.

‘The flocks my father had charge of fed all about the downs near our
house, overlooking the sea and shore each way for miles. In winter and
early spring father was up a deal at nights, watching and tending the
lambing. Often he’d go to bed early, and turn out at twelve or one; and
on the other hand, he’d sometimes stay up till twelve or one, and then
turn in to bed. As soon as I was old enough I used to help him, mostly
in the way of keeping an eye upon the ewes while he was gone home to
rest. This is what I was doing in a particular month in either the year
four or five—I can’t certainly fix which, but it was long before I was
took away from the sheepkeeping to be bound prentice to a trade. Every
night at that time I was at the fold, about half a mile, or it may be a
little more, from our cottage, and no living thing at all with me but
the ewes and young lambs. Afeard? No; I was never afeard of being alone
at these times; for I had been reared in such an out-step place that
the lack o’ human beings at night made me less fearful than the sight
of ’em. Directly I saw a man’s shape after dark in a lonely place I was
frightened out of my senses.

‘One day in that month we were surprised by a visit from my uncle Job,
the sergeant in the Sixty-first foot, then in camp on the downs above
King George’s watering-place, several miles to the west yonder. Uncle
Job dropped in about dusk, and went up with my father to the fold for
an hour or two. Then he came home, had a drop to drink from the tub of
sperrits that the smugglers kept us in for housing their liquor when
they’d made a run, and for burning ’em off when there was danger. After
that he stretched himself out on the settle to sleep. I went to bed: at
one o’clock father came home, and waking me to go and take his place,
according to custom, went to bed himself. On my way out of the house I
passed Uncle Job on the settle. He opened his eyes, and upon my telling
him where I was going he said it was a shame that such a youngster as I
should go up there all alone; and when he had fastened up his stock and
waist-belt he set off along with me, taking a drop from the sperrit-tub
in a little flat bottle that stood in the corner-cupboard.

‘By and by we drew up to the fold, saw that all was right, and then, to
keep ourselves warm, curled up in a heap of straw that lay inside the
thatched hurdles we had set up to break the stroke of the wind when
there was any. To-night, however, there was none. It was one of those
very still nights when, if you stand on the high hills anywhere within
two or three miles of the sea, you can hear the rise and fall of the
tide along the shore, coming and going every few moments like a sort of
great snore of the sleeping world. Over the lower ground there was a
bit of a mist, but on the hill where we lay the air was clear, and the
moon, then in her last quarter, flung a fairly good light on the grass
and scattered straw.

‘While we lay there Uncle Job amused me by telling me strange stories
of the wars he had served in and the wounds he had got. He had already
fought the French in the Low Countries, and hoped to fight ’em again.
His stories lasted so long that at last I was hardly sure that I was
not a soldier myself, and had seen such service as he told of. The
wonders of his tales quite bewildered my mind, till I fell asleep and
dreamed of battle, smoke, and flying soldiers, all of a kind with the
doings he had been bringing up to me.

‘How long my nap lasted I am not prepared to say. But some faint sounds
over and above the rustle of the ewes in the straw, the bleat of the
lambs, and the tinkle of the sheep-bell brought me to my waking senses.
Uncle Job was still beside me; but he too had fallen asleep. I looked
out from the straw, and saw what it was that had aroused me. Two men,
in boat-cloaks, cocked hats, and swords, stood by the hurdles about
twenty yards off.

‘I turned my ear thitherward to catch what they were saying, but though
I heard every word o’t, not one did I understand. They spoke in a
tongue that was not ours—in French, as I afterward found. But if I
could not gain the meaning of a word, I was shrewd boy enough to find
out a deal of the talkers’ business. By the light o’ the moon I could
see that one of ’em carried a roll of paper in his hand, while every
moment he spoke quick to his comrade, and pointed right and left with
the other hand to spots along the shore. There was no doubt that he was
explaining to the second gentleman the shapes and features of the
coast. What happened soon after made this still clearer to me.

‘All this time I had not waked Uncle Job, but now I began to be afeared
that they might light upon us, because uncle breathed so heavily
through’s nose. I put my mouth to his ear and whispered, “Uncle Job.”

‘“What is it, my boy?” he said, just as if he hadn’t been asleep at
all.

‘“Hush!” says I. “Two French generals—”

‘“French?” says he.

‘“Yes,” says I. “Come to see where to land their army!”

‘I pointed ’em out; but I could say no more, for the pair were coming
at that moment much nearer to where we lay. As soon as they got as near
as eight or ten yards, the officer with a roll in his hand stooped down
to a slanting hurdle, unfastened his roll upon it, and spread it out.
Then suddenly he sprung a dark lantern open on the paper, and showed it
to be a map.

‘“What be they looking at?” I whispered to Uncle Job.

‘“A chart of the Channel,” says the sergeant (knowing about such
things).

‘The other French officer now stooped likewise, and over the map they
had a long consultation, as they pointed here and there on the paper,
and then hither and thither at places along the shore beneath us. I
noticed that the manner of one officer was very respectful toward the
other, who seemed much his superior, the second in rank calling him by
a sort of title that I did not know the sense of. The head one, on the
other hand, was quite familiar with his friend, and more than once
clapped him on the shoulder.

‘Uncle Job had watched as well as I, but though the map had been in the
lantern-light, their faces had always been in shade. But when they rose
from stooping over the chart the light flashed upward, and fell smart
upon one of ’em’s features. No sooner had this happened than Uncle Job
gasped, and sank down as if he’d been in a fit.

‘“What is it—what is it, Uncle Job?” said I.

‘“O good God!” says he, under the straw.

‘“What?” says I.

‘“Boney!” he groaned out.

‘“Who?” says I.

‘“Bonaparty,” he said. “The Corsican ogre. O that I had got but my
new-flinted firelock, that there man should die! But I haven’t got my
new-flinted firelock, and that there man must live. So lie low, as you
value your life!”

‘I did lie low, as you mid suppose. But I couldn’t help peeping. And
then I too, lad as I was, knew that it was the face of Bonaparte. Not
know Boney? I should think I did know Boney. I should have known him by
half the light o’ that lantern. If I had seen a picture of his features
once, I had seen it a hundred times. There was his bullet head, his
short neck, his round yaller cheeks and chin, his gloomy face, and his
great glowing eyes. He took off his hat to blow himself a bit, and
there was the forelock in the middle of his forehead, as in all the
draughts of him. In moving, his cloak fell a little open, and I could
see for a moment his white-fronted jacket and one of his epaulets.

‘But none of this lasted long. In a minute he and his general had
rolled up the map, shut the lantern, and turned to go down toward the
shore.

‘Then Uncle Job came to himself a bit. “Slipped across in the
night-time to see how to put his men ashore,” he said. “The like o’
that man’s coolness eyes will never again see! Nephew, I must act in
this, and immediate, or England’s lost!”

‘When they were over the brow, we crope out, and went some little way
to look after them. Half-way down they were joined by two others, and
six or seven minutes brought them to the shore. Then, from behind a
rock, a boat came out into the weak moonlight of the Cove, and they
jumped in; it put off instantly, and vanished in a few minutes between
the two rocks that stand at the mouth of the Cove as we all know. We
climmed back to where we had been before, and I could see, a little way
out, a larger vessel, though still not very large. The little boat drew
up alongside, was made fast at the stern as I suppose, for the largest
sailed away, and we saw no more.

‘My uncle Job told his officers as soon as he got back to camp; but
what they thought of it I never heard—neither did he. Boney’s army
never came, and a good job for me; for the Cove below my father’s house
was where he meant to land, as this secret visit showed. We coast-folk
should have been cut down one and all, and I should not have sat here
to tell this tale.’

We who listened to old Selby that night have been familiar with his
simple grave-stone for these ten years past. Thanks to the incredulity
of the age his tale has been seldom repeated. But if anything short of
the direct testimony of his own eyes could persuade an auditor that
Bonaparte had examined these shores for himself with a view to a
practicable landing-place, it would have been Solomon Selby’s manner of
narrating the adventure which befell him on the down.

_Christmas_ 1882.

A FEW CRUSTED CHARACTERS

It is a Saturday afternoon of blue and yellow autumn time, and the
scene is the High Street of a well-known market-town. A large carrier’s
van stands in the quadrangular fore-court of the White Hart Inn, upon
the sides of its spacious tilt being painted, in weather-beaten
letters: ‘Burthen, Carrier to Longpuddle.’ These vans, so numerous
hereabout, are a respectable, if somewhat lumbering, class of
conveyance, much resorted to by decent travellers not overstocked with
money, the better among them roughly corresponding to the old French
_diligences_.

The present one is timed to leave the town at four in the afternoon
precisely, and it is now half-past three by the clock in the turret at
the top of the street. In a few seconds errand-boys from the shops
begin to arrive with packages, which they fling into the vehicle, and
turn away whistling, and care for the packages no more. At twenty
minutes to four an elderly woman places her basket upon the shafts,
slowly mounts, takes up a seat inside, and folds her hands and her
lips. She has secured her corner for the journey, though there is as
yet no sign of a horse being put in, nor of a carrier. At the
three-quarters, two other women arrive, in whom the first recognizes
the postmistress of Upper Longpuddle and the registrar’s wife, they
recognizing her as the aged groceress of the same village. At five
minutes to the hour there approach Mr. Profitt, the schoolmaster, in a
soft felt hat, and Christopher Twink, the master-thatcher; and as the
hour strikes there rapidly drop in the parish clerk and his wife, the
seedsman and his aged father, the registrar; also Mr. Day, the
world-ignored local landscape-painter, an elderly man who resides in
his native place, and has never sold a picture outside it, though his
pretensions to art have been nobly supported by his fellow-villagers,
whose confidence in his genius has been as remarkable as the outer
neglect of it, leading them to buy his paintings so extensively (at the
price of a few shillings each, it is true) that every dwelling in the
parish exhibits three or four of those admired productions on its
walls.

Burthen, the carrier, is by this time seen bustling round the vehicle;
the horses are put in, the proprietor arranges the reins and springs up
into his seat as if he were used to it—which he is.

‘Is everybody here?’ he asks preparatorily over his shoulder to the
passengers within.

As those who were not there did not reply in the negative the muster
was assumed to be complete, and after a few hitches and hindrances the
van with its human freight was got under way. It jogged on at an easy
pace till it reached the bridge which formed the last outpost of the
town. The carrier pulled up suddenly.

‘Bless my soul!’ he said, ‘I’ve forgot the curate!’

All who could do so gazed from the little back window of the van, but
the curate was not in sight.

‘Now I wonder where that there man is?’ continued the carrier.

‘Poor man, he ought to have a living at his time of life.’

‘And he ought to be punctual,’ said the carrier. ‘“Four o’clock sharp
is my time for starting,” I said to ’en. And he said, “I’ll be there.”
Now he’s not here, and as a serious old church-minister he ought to be
as good as his word. Perhaps Mr. Flaxton knows, being in the same line
of life?’ He turned to the parish clerk.

‘I was talking an immense deal with him, that’s true, half an hour
ago,’ replied that ecclesiastic, as one of whom it was no erroneous
supposition that he should be on intimate terms with another of the
cloth. ‘But he didn’t say he would be late.’

The discussion was cut off by the appearance round the corner of the
van of rays from the curate’s spectacles, followed hastily by his face
and a few white whiskers, and the swinging tails of his long gaunt
coat. Nobody reproached him, seeing how he was reproaching himself; and
he entered breathlessly and took his seat.

‘Now be we all here?’ said the carrier again. They started a second
time, and moved on till they were about three hundred yards out of the
town, and had nearly reached the second bridge, behind which, as every
native remembers, the road takes a turn and travellers by this highway
disappear finally from the view of gazing burghers.

‘Well, as I’m alive!’ cried the postmistress from the interior of the
conveyance, peering through the little square back-window along the
road townward.

‘What?’ said the carrier.

‘A man hailing us!’

Another sudden stoppage. ‘Somebody else?’ the carrier asked.

‘Ay, sure!’ All waited silently, while those who could gaze out did so.

‘Now, who can that be?’ Burthen continued. ‘I just put it to ye,
neighbours, can any man keep time with such hindrances? Bain’t we full
a’ready? Who in the world can the man be?’

‘He’s a sort of gentleman,’ said the schoolmaster, his position
commanding the road more comfortably than that of his comrades.

The stranger, who had been holding up his umbrella to attract their
notice, was walking forward leisurely enough, now that he found, by
their stopping, that it had been secured. His clothes were decidedly
not of a local cut, though it was difficult to point out any particular
mark of difference. In his left hand he carried a small leather
travelling bag. As soon as he had overtaken the van he glanced at the
inscription on its side, as if to assure himself that he had hailed the
right conveyance, and asked if they had room.

The carrier replied that though they were pretty well laden he supposed
they could carry one more, whereupon the stranger mounted, and took the
seat cleared for him within. And then the horses made another move,
this time for good, and swung along with their burden of fourteen souls
all told.

‘You bain’t one of these parts, sir?’ said the carrier. ‘I could tell
that as far as I could see ’ee.’

‘Yes, I am one of these parts,’ said the stranger.

‘Oh? H’m.’

The silence which followed seemed to imply a doubt of the truth of the
new-comer’s assertion. ‘I was speaking of Upper Longpuddle more
particular,’ continued the carrier hardily, ‘and I think I know most
faces of that valley.’

‘I was born at Longpuddle, and nursed at Longpuddle, and my father and
grandfather before me,’ said the passenger quietly.

‘Why, to be sure,’ said the aged groceress in the background, ‘it isn’t
John Lackland’s son—never—it can’t be—he who went to foreign parts
five-and-thirty years ago with his wife and family? Yet—what do I
hear?—that’s his father’s voice!’

‘That’s the man,’ replied the stranger. ‘John Lackland was my father,
and I am John Lackland’s son. Five-and-thirty years ago, when I was a
boy of eleven, my parents emigrated across the seas, taking me and my
sister with them. Kytes’s boy Tony was the one who drove us and our
belongings to Casterbridge on the morning we left; and his was the last
Longpuddle face I saw. We sailed the same week across the ocean, and
there we’ve been ever since, and there I’ve left those I went with—all
three.’

‘Alive or dead?’

‘Dead,’ he replied in a low voice. ‘And I have come back to the old
place, having nourished a thought—not a definite intention, but just a
thought—that I should like to return here in a year or two, to spend
the remainder of my days.’

‘Married man, Mr. Lackland?’

‘No.’

‘And have the world used ’ee well, sir—or rather John, knowing ’ee as a
child? In these rich new countries that we hear of so much, you’ve got
rich with the rest?’

‘I am not very rich,’ Mr. Lackland said. ‘Even in new countries, you
know, there are failures. The race is not always to the swift, nor the
battle to the strong; and even if it sometimes is, you may be neither
swift nor strong. However, that’s enough about me. Now, having answered
your inquiries, you must answer mine; for being in London, I have come
down here entirely to discover what Longpuddle is looking like, and who
are living there. That was why I preferred a seat in your van to hiring
a carriage for driving across.’

‘Well, as for Longpuddle, we rub on there much as usual. Old figures
have dropped out o’ their frames, so to speak it, and new ones have
been put in their places. You mentioned Tony Kytes as having been the
one to drive your family and your goods to Casterbridge in his father’s
waggon when you left. Tony is, I believe, living still, but not at
Longpuddle. He went away and settled at Lewgate, near Mellstock, after
his marriage. Ah, Tony was a sort o’ man!’

‘His character had hardly come out when I knew him.’

‘No. But ’twas well enough, as far as that goes—except as to women. I
shall never forget his courting—never!’

The returned villager waited silently, and the carrier went on:—

TONY KYTES, THE ARCH-DECEIVER

‘I shall never forget Tony’s face. ’Twas a little, round, firm, tight
face, with a seam here and there left by the smallpox, but not enough
to hurt his looks in a woman’s eye, though he’d had it badish when he
was a boy. So very serious looking and unsmiling ’a was, that young
man, that it really seemed as if he couldn’t laugh at all without great
pain to his conscience. He looked very hard at a small speck in your
eye when talking to ’ee. And there was no more sign of a whisker or
beard on Tony Kytes’s face than on the palm of my hand. He used to sing
“The Tailor’s Breeches” with a religious manner, as if it were a hymn:—

‘“O the petticoats went off, and the breeches they went on!”

and all the rest of the scandalous stuff. He was quite the women’s
favourite, and in return for their likings he loved ’em in shoals.

‘But in course of time Tony got fixed down to one in particular, Milly
Richards, a nice, light, small, tender little thing; and it was soon
said that they were engaged to be married. One Saturday he had been to
market to do business for his father, and was driving home the waggon
in the afternoon. When he reached the foot of the very hill we shall be
going over in ten minutes who should he see waiting for him at the top
but Unity Sallet, a handsome girl, one of the young women he’d been
very tender toward before he’d got engaged to Milly.

‘As soon as Tony came up to her she said, “My dear Tony, will you give
me a lift home?”

‘“That I will, darling,” said Tony. “You don’t suppose I could refuse
’ee?”

‘She smiled a smile, and up she hopped, and on drove Tony.

‘“Tony,” she says, in a sort of tender chide, “why did ye desert me for
that other one? In what is she better than I? I should have made ’ee a
finer wife, and a more loving one too. ’Tisn’t girls that are so easily
won at first that are the best. Think how long we’ve known each
other—ever since we were children almost—now haven’t we, Tony?”

‘“Yes, that we have,” says Tony, a-struck with the truth o’t.

‘“And you’ve never seen anything in me to complain of, have ye, Tony?
Now tell the truth to me?”

‘“I never have, upon my life,” says Tony.

‘“And—can you say I’m not pretty, Tony? Now look at me!”

‘He let his eyes light upon her for a long while. “I really can’t,”
says he. “In fact, I never knowed you was so pretty before!”

‘“Prettier than she?”

‘What Tony would have said to that nobody knows, for before he could
speak, what should he see ahead, over the hedge past the turning, but a
feather he knew well—the feather in Milly’s hat—she to whom he had been
thinking of putting the question as to giving out the banns that very
week.

‘“Unity,” says he, as mild as he could, “here’s Milly coming. Now I
shall catch it mightily if she sees ’ee riding here with me; and if you
get down she’ll be turning the corner in a moment, and, seeing ’ee in
the road, she’ll know we’ve been coming on together. Now, dearest
Unity, will ye, to avoid all unpleasantness, which I know ye can’t bear
any more than I, will ye lie down in the back part of the waggon, and
let me cover you over with the tarpaulin till Milly has passed? It will
all be done in a minute. Do!—and I’ll think over what we’ve said; and
perhaps I shall put a loving question to you after all, instead of to
Milly. ’Tisn’t true that it is all settled between her and me.”

‘Well, Unity Sallet agreed, and lay down at the back end of the waggon,
and Tony covered her over, so that the waggon seemed to be empty but
for the loose tarpaulin; and then he drove on to meet Milly.

‘“My dear Tony!” cries Milly, looking up with a little pout at him as
he came near. “How long you’ve been coming home! Just as if I didn’t
live at Upper Longpuddle at all! And I’ve come to meet you as you asked
me to do, and to ride back with you, and talk over our future
home—since you asked me, and I promised. But I shouldn’t have come
else, Mr. Tony!”

‘“Ay, my dear, I did ask ye—to be sure I did, now I think of it—but I
had quite forgot it. To ride back with me, did you say, dear Milly?”

‘“Well, of course! What can I do else? Surely you don’t want me to
walk, now I’ve come all this way?”

‘“O no, no! I was thinking you might be going on to town to meet your
mother. I saw her there—and she looked as if she might be expecting
’ee.”

‘“O no; she’s just home. She came across the fields, and so got back
before you.”

‘“Ah! I didn’t know that,” says Tony. And there was no help for it but
to take her up beside him.

‘They talked on very pleasantly, and looked at the trees, and beasts,
and birds, and insects, and at the ploughmen at work in the fields,
till presently who should they see looking out of the upper window of a
house that stood beside the road they were following, but Hannah
Jolliver, another young beauty of the place at that time, and the very
first woman that Tony had fallen in love with—before Milly and before
Unity, in fact—the one that he had almost arranged to marry instead of
Milly. She was a much more dashing girl than Milly Richards, though
he’d not thought much of her of late. The house Hannah was looking from
was her aunt’s.

‘“My dear Milly—my coming wife, as I may call ’ee,” says Tony in his
modest way, and not so loud that Unity could overhear, “I see a young
woman alooking out of window, who I think may accost me. The fact is,
Milly, she had a notion that I was wishing to marry her, and since
she’s discovered I’ve promised another, and a prettier than she, I’m
rather afeard of her temper if she sees us together. Now, Milly, would
you do me a favour—my coming wife, as I may say?”

‘“Certainly, dearest Tony,” says she.

‘“Then would ye creep under the empty sacks just here in the front of
the waggon, and hide there out of sight till we’ve passed the house?
She hasn’t seen us yet. You see, we ought to live in peace and
good-will since ’tis almost Christmas, and ’twill prevent angry
passions rising, which we always should do.”

‘“I don’t mind, to oblige you, Tony,” Milly said; and though she didn’t
care much about doing it, she crept under, and crouched down just
behind the seat, Unity being snug at the other end. So they drove on
till they got near the road-side cottage. Hannah had soon seen him
coming, and waited at the window, looking down upon him. She tossed her
head a little disdainful and smiled off-hand.

‘“Well, aren’t you going to be civil enough to ask me to ride home with
you!” she says, seeing that he was for driving past with a nod and a
smile.

‘“Ah, to be sure! What was I thinking of?” said Tony, in a flutter.
“But you seem as if you was staying at your aunt’s?”

‘“No, I am not,” she said. “Don’t you see I have my bonnet and jacket
on? I have only called to see her on my way home. How can you be so
stupid, Tony?”

‘“In that case—ah—of course you must come along wi’ me,” says Tony,
feeling a dim sort of sweat rising up inside his clothes. And he reined
in the horse, and waited till she’d come downstairs, and then helped
her up beside him. He drove on again, his face as long as a face that
was a round one by nature well could be.

‘Hannah looked round sideways into his eyes. “This is nice, isn’t it,
Tony?” she says. “I like riding with you.”

‘Tony looked back into her eyes. “And I with you,” he said after a
while. In short, having considered her, he warmed up, and the more he
looked at her the more he liked her, till he couldn’t for the life of
him think why he had ever said a word about marriage to Milly or Unity
while Hannah Jolliver was in question. So they sat a little closer and
closer, their feet upon the foot-board and their shoulders touching,
and Tony thought over and over again how handsome Hannah was. He spoke
tenderer and tenderer, and called her “dear Hannah” in a whisper at
last.

‘“You’ve settled it with Milly by this time, I suppose,” said she.

‘“N-no, not exactly.”

‘“What? How low you talk, Tony.”

‘“Yes—I’ve a kind of hoarseness. I said, not exactly.”

‘“I suppose you mean to?”

‘“Well, as to that—” His eyes rested on her face, and hers on his. He
wondered how he could have been such a fool as not to follow up Hannah.
“My sweet Hannah!” he bursts out, taking her hand, not being really
able to help it, and forgetting Milly and Unity, and all the world
besides. “Settled it? I don’t think I have!”

‘“Hark!” says Hannah.

‘“What?” says Tony, letting go her hand.

‘“Surely I heard a sort of little screaming squeak under those sacks?
Why, you’ve been carrying corn, and there’s mice in this waggon, I
declare!” She began to haul up the tails of her gown.

‘“Oh no; ’tis the axle,” said Tony in an assuring way. “It do go like
that sometimes in dry weather.”

‘“Perhaps it was . . . Well, now, to be quite honest, dear Tony, do you
like her better than me? Because—because, although I’ve held off so
independent, I’ll own at last that I do like ’ee, Tony, to tell the
truth; and I wouldn’t say no if you asked me—you know what.”

‘Tony was so won over by this pretty offering mood of a girl who had
been quite the reverse (Hannah had a backward way with her at times, if
you can mind) that he just glanced behind, and then whispered very
soft, “I haven’t quite promised her, and I think I can get out of it,
and ask you that question you speak of.”

‘“Throw over Milly?—all to marry me! How delightful!” broke out Hannah,
quite loud, clapping her hands.

‘At this there was a real squeak—an angry, spiteful squeak, and
afterward a long moan, as if something had broke its heart, and a
movement of the empty sacks.

‘“Something’s there!” said Hannah, starting up.

‘“It’s nothing, really,” says Tony in a soothing voice, and praying
inwardly for a way out of this. “I wouldn’t tell ’ee at first, because
I wouldn’t frighten ’ee. But, Hannah, I’ve really a couple of ferrets
in a bag under there, for rabbiting, and they quarrel sometimes. I
don’t wish it knowed, as ’twould be called poaching. Oh, they can’t get
out, bless ye—you are quite safe! And—and—what a fine day it is, isn’t
it, Hannah, for this time of year? Be you going to market next
Saturday? How is your aunt now?” And so on, says Tony, to keep her from
talking any more about love in Milly’s hearing.

‘But he found his work cut out for him, and wondering again how he
should get out of this ticklish business, he looked about for a chance.
Nearing home he saw his father in a field not far off, holding up his
hand as if he wished to speak to Tony.

‘“Would you mind taking the reins a moment, Hannah,” he said, much
relieved, “while I go and find out what father wants?”

‘She consented, and away he hastened into the field, only too glad to
get breathing time. He found that his father was looking at him with
rather a stern eye.

‘“Come, come, Tony,” says old Mr. Kytes, as soon as his son was
alongside him, “this won’t do, you know.”

‘“What?” says Tony.

‘“Why, if you mean to marry Milly Richards, do it, and there’s an end
o’t. But don’t go driving about the country with Jolliver’s daughter
and making a scandal. I won’t have such things done.”

‘“I only asked her—that is, she asked me, to ride home.”

‘“She? Why, now, if it had been Milly, ’twould have been quite proper;
but you and Hannah Jolliver going about by yourselves—”

‘“Milly’s there too, father.”

‘“Milly? Where?”

‘“Under the corn-sacks! Yes, the truth is, father, I’ve got rather into
a nunny-watch, I’m afeard! Unity Sallet is there too—yes, at the other
end, under the tarpaulin. All three are in that waggon, and what to do
with ’em I know no more than the dead! The best plan is, as I’m
thinking, to speak out loud and plain to one of ’em before the rest,
and that will settle it; not but what ’twill cause ’em to kick up a bit
of a miff, for certain. Now which would you marry, father, if you was
in my place?”

‘“Whichever of ’em did _not_ ask to ride with thee.”

‘“That was Milly, I’m bound to say, as she only mounted by my
invitation. But Milly—”

“Then stick to Milly, she’s the best . . . But look at that!”

‘His father pointed toward the waggon. “She can’t hold that horse in.
You shouldn’t have left the reins in her hands. Run on and take the
horse’s head, or there’ll be some accident to them maids!”

‘Tony’s horse, in fact, in spite of Hannah’s tugging at the reins, had
started on his way at a brisk walking pace, being very anxious to get
back to the stable, for he had had a long day out. Without another word
Tony rushed away from his father to overtake the horse.

‘Now of all things that could have happened to wean him from Milly
there was nothing so powerful as his father’s recommending her. No; it
could not be Milly, after all. Hannah must be the one, since he could
not marry all three. This he thought while running after the waggon.
But queer things were happening inside it.

‘It was, of course, Milly who had screamed under the sack-bags, being
obliged to let off her bitter rage and shame in that way at what Tony
was saying, and never daring to show, for very pride and dread o’ being
laughed at, that she was in hiding. She became more and more restless,
and in twisting herself about, what did she see but another woman’s
foot and white stocking close to her head. It quite frightened her, not
knowing that Unity Sallet was in the waggon likewise. But after the
fright was over she determined to get to the bottom of all this, and
she crept and crept along the bed of the waggon, under the tarpaulin,
like a snake, when lo and behold she came face to face with Unity.

‘“Well, if this isn’t disgraceful!” says Milly in a raging whisper to
Unity.

‘“’Tis,” says Unity, “to see you hiding in a young man’s waggon like
this, and no great character belonging to either of ye!”

‘“Mind what you are saying!” replied Milly, getting louder. “I am
engaged to be married to him, and haven’t I a right to be here? What
right have you, I should like to know? What has he been promising you?
A pretty lot of nonsense, I expect! But what Tony says to other women
is all mere wind, and no concern to me!”

‘“Don’t you be too sure!” says Unity. “He’s going to have Hannah, and
not you, nor me either; I could hear that.”

‘Now at these strange voices sounding from under the cloth Hannah was
thunderstruck a’most into a swound; and it was just at this time that
the horse moved on. Hannah tugged away wildly, not knowing what she was
doing; and as the quarrel rose louder and louder Hannah got so
horrified that she let go the reins altogether. The horse went on at
his own pace, and coming to the corner where we turn round to drop down
the hill to Lower Longpuddle he turned too quick, the off wheels went
up the bank, the waggon rose sideways till it was quite on edge upon
the near axles, and out rolled the three maidens into the road in a
heap.

‘When Tony came up, frightened and breathless, he was relieved enough
to see that neither of his darlings was hurt, beyond a few scratches
from the brambles of the hedge. But he was rather alarmed when he heard
how they were going on at one another.

‘“Don’t ye quarrel, my dears—don’t ye!” says he, taking off his hat out
of respect to ’em. And then he would have kissed them all round, as
fair and square as a man could, but they were in too much of a taking
to let him, and screeched and sobbed till they was quite spent.

‘“Now I’ll speak out honest, because I ought to,” says Tony, as soon as
he could get heard. “And this is the truth,” says he. “I’ve asked
Hannah to be mine, and she is willing, and we are going to put up the
banns next—”

‘Tony had not noticed that Hannah’s father was coming up behind, nor
had he noticed that Hannah’s face was beginning to bleed from the
scratch of a bramble. Hannah had seen her father, and had run to him,
crying worse than ever.

‘“My daughter is _not_ willing, sir!” says Mr. Jolliver hot and strong.
“Be you willing, Hannah? I ask ye to have spirit enough to refuse him,
if yer virtue is left to ’ee and you run no risk?”

‘“She’s as sound as a bell for me, that I’ll swear!” says Tony, flaring
up. “And so’s the others, come to that, though you may think it an
onusual thing in me!”

‘“I have spirit, and I do refuse him!” says Hannah, partly because her
father was there, and partly, too, in a tantrum because of the
discovery, and the scratch on her face. “Little did I think when I was
so soft with him just now that I was talking to such a false deceiver!”

‘“What, you won’t have me, Hannah?” says Tony, his jaw hanging down
like a dead man’s.

‘“Never—I would sooner marry no—nobody at all!” she gasped out, though
with her heart in her throat, for she would not have refused Tony if he
had asked her quietly, and her father had not been there, and her face
had not been scratched by the bramble. And having said that, away she
walked upon her father’s arm, thinking and hoping he would ask her
again.

‘Tony didn’t know what to say next. Milly was sobbing her heart out;
but as his father had strongly recommended her he couldn’t feel
inclined that way. So he turned to Unity.

‘“Well, will you, Unity dear, be mine?” he says.

‘“Take her leavings? Not I!” says Unity. “I’d scorn it!” And away walks
Unity Sallet likewise, though she looked back when she’d gone some way,
to see if he was following her.

‘So there at last were left Milly and Tony by themselves, she crying in
watery streams, and Tony looking like a tree struck by lightning.

‘“Well, Milly,” he says at last, going up to her, “it do seem as if
fate had ordained that it should be you and I, or nobody. And what must
be must be, I suppose. Hey, Milly?”

‘“If you like, Tony. You didn’t really mean what you said to them?”

‘“Not a word of it!” declares Tony, bringing down his fist upon his
palm.

‘And then he kissed her, and put the waggon to rights, and they mounted
together; and their banns were put up the very next Sunday. I was not
able to go to their wedding, but it was a rare party they had, by all
account. Everybody in Longpuddle was there almost; you among the rest,
I think, Mr. Flaxton?’ The speaker turned to the parish clerk.

‘I was,’ said Mr. Flaxton. ‘And that party was the cause of a very
curious change in some other people’s affairs; I mean in Steve
Hardcome’s and his cousin James’s.’

‘Ah! the Hardcomes,’ said the stranger. ‘How familiar that name is to
me! What of them?’

The clerk cleared his throat and began:—

THE HISTORY OF THE HARDCOMES

‘Yes, Tony’s was the very best wedding-randy that ever I was at; and
I’ve been at a good many, as you may suppose’—turning to the
newly-arrived one—‘having as a church-officer, the privilege to attend
all christening, wedding, and funeral parties—such being our Wessex
custom.

‘’Twas on a frosty night in Christmas week, and among the folk invited
were the said Hardcomes o’ Climmerston—Steve and James—first cousins,
both of them small farmers, just entering into business on their own
account. With them came, as a matter of course, their intended wives,
two young women of the neighbourhood, both very pretty and sprightly
maidens, and numbers of friends from Abbot’s-Cernel, and Weatherbury,
and Mellstock, and I don’t know where—a regular houseful.

‘The kitchen was cleared of furniture for dancing, and the old folk
played at “Put” and “All-fours” in the parlour, though at last they
gave that up to join in the dance. The top of the figure was by the
large front window of the room, and there were so many couples that the
lower part of the figure reached through the door at the back, and into
the darkness of the out-house; in fact, you couldn’t see the end of the
row at all, and ’twas never known exactly how long that dance was, the
lowest couples being lost among the faggots and brushwood in the
out-house.

‘When we had danced a few hours, and the crowns of we taller men were
swelling into lumps with bumping the beams of the ceiling, the first
fiddler laid down his fiddle-bow, and said he should play no more, for
he wished to dance. And in another hour the second fiddler laid down
his, and said he wanted to dance too; so there was only the third
fiddler left, and he was a’ old, veteran man, very weak in the wrist.
However, he managed to keep up a faltering tweedle-dee; but there being
no chair in the room, and his knees being as weak as his wrists, he was
obliged to sit upon as much of the little corner-table as projected
beyond the corner-cupboard fixed over it, which was not a very wide
seat for a man advanced in years.

‘Among those who danced most continually were the two engaged couples,
as was natural to their situation. Each pair was very well matched, and
very unlike the other. James Hardcome’s intended was called Emily
Darth, and both she and James were gentle, nice-minded, in-door people,
fond of a quiet life. Steve and his chosen, named Olive Pawle, were
different; they were of a more bustling nature, fond of racketing about
and seeing what was going on in the world. The two couples had arranged
to get married on the same day, and that not long thence; Tony’s
wedding being a sort of stimulant, as is often the case; I’ve noticed
it professionally many times.

‘They danced with such a will as only young people in that stage of
courtship can dance; and it happened that as the evening wore on James
had for his partner Stephen’s plighted one, Olive, at the same time
that Stephen was dancing with James’s Emily. It was noticed that in
spite o’ the exchange the young men seemed to enjoy the dance no less
than before. By and by they were treading another tune in the same
changed order as we had noticed earlier, and though at first each one
had held the other’s mistress strictly at half-arm’s length, lest there
should be shown any objection to too close quarters by the lady’s
proper man, as time passed there was a little more closeness between
’em; and presently a little more closeness still.

‘The later it got the more did each of the two cousins dance with the
wrong young girl, and the tighter did he hold her to his side as he
whirled her round; and, what was very remarkable, neither seemed to
mind what the other was doing. The party began to draw towards its end,
and I saw no more that night, being one of the first to leave, on
account of my morning’s business. But I learnt the rest of it from
those that knew.

‘After finishing a particularly warming dance with the changed
partners, as I’ve mentioned, the two young men looked at one another,
and in a moment or two went out into the porch together.

‘“James,” says Steve, “what were you thinking of when you were dancing
with my Olive?”

‘“Well,” said James, “perhaps what you were thinking of when you were
dancing with my Emily.”

‘“I was thinking,” said Steve, with some hesitation, “that I wouldn’t
mind changing for good and all!”

‘“It was what I was feeling likewise,” said James.

‘“I willingly agree to it, if you think we could manage it.”

‘“So do I. But what would the girls say?”

‘“’Tis my belief,” said Steve, “that they wouldn’t particularly object.
Your Emily clung as close to me as if she already belonged to me, dear
girl.”

‘“And your Olive to me,” says James. “I could feel her heart beating
like a clock.”

‘Well, they agreed to put it to the girls when they were all four
walking home together. And they did so. When they parted that night the
exchange was decided on—all having been done under the hot excitement
of that evening’s dancing. Thus it happened that on the following
Sunday morning, when the people were sitting in church with mouths wide
open to hear the names published as they had expected, there was no
small amazement to hear them coupled the wrong way, as it seemed. The
congregation whispered, and thought the parson had made a mistake; till
they discovered that his reading of the names was verily the true way.
As they had decided, so they were married, each one to the other’s
original property.

‘Well, the two couples lived on for a year or two ordinarily enough,
till the time came when these young people began to grow a little less
warm to their respective spouses, as is the rule of married life; and
the two cousins wondered more and more in their hearts what had made
’em so mad at the last moment to marry crosswise as they did, when they
might have married straight, as was planned by nature, and as they had
fallen in love. ’Twas Tony’s party that had done _it_, plain enough,
and they half wished they had never gone there. James, being a quiet,
fireside, perusing man, felt at times a wide gap between himself and
Olive, his wife, who loved riding and driving and out-door jaunts to a
degree; while Steve, who was always knocking about hither and thither,
had a very domestic wife, who worked samplers, and made hearthrugs,
scarcely ever wished to cross the threshold, and only drove out with
him to please him.

‘However, they said very little about this mismating to any of their
acquaintances, though sometimes Steve would look at James’s wife and
sigh, and James would look at Steve’s wife and do the same. Indeed, at
last the two men were frank enough towards each other not to mind
mentioning it quietly to themselves, in a long-faced, sorry-smiling,
whimsical sort of way, and would shake their heads together over their
foolishness in upsetting a well-considered choice on the strength of an
hour’s fancy in the whirl and wildness of a dance. Still, they were
sensible and honest young fellows enough, and did their best to make
shift with their lot as they had arranged it, and not to repine at what
could not now be altered or mended.

‘So things remained till one fine summer day they went for their yearly
little outing together, as they had made it their custom to do for a
long while past. This year they chose Budmouth-Regis as the place to
spend their holiday in; and off they went in their best clothes at nine
o’clock in the morning.

‘When they had reached Budmouth-Regis they walked two and two along the
shore—their new boots going squeakity-squash upon the clammy velvet
sands. I can seem to see ’em now! Then they looked at the ships in the
harbour; and then went up to the Look-out; and then had dinner at an
inn; and then again walked two and two, squeakity-squash, upon the
velvet sands. As evening drew on they sat on one of the public seats
upon the Esplanade, and listened to the band; and then they said “What
shall we do next?”

‘“Of all things,” said Olive (Mrs. James Hardcome, that is), “I should
like to row in the bay! We could listen to the music from the water as
well as from here, and have the fun of rowing besides.”

‘“The very thing; so should I,” says Stephen, his tastes being always
like hers.

Here the clerk turned to the curate.

‘But you, sir, know the rest of the strange particulars of that strange
evening of their lives better than anybody else, having had much of it
from their own lips, which I had not; and perhaps you’ll oblige the
gentleman?’

‘Certainly, if it is wished,’ said the curate. And he took up the
clerk’s tale:—

‘Stephen’s wife hated the sea, except from land, and couldn’t bear the
thought of going into a boat. James, too, disliked the water, and said
that for his part he would much sooner stay on and listen to the band
in the seat they occupied, though he did not wish to stand in his
wife’s way if she desired a row. The end of the discussion was that
James and his cousin’s wife Emily agreed to remain where they were
sitting and enjoy the music, while they watched the other two hire a
boat just beneath, and take their water-excursion of half an hour or
so, till they should choose to come back and join the sitters on the
Esplanade; when they would all start homeward together.

‘Nothing could have pleased the other two restless ones better than
this arrangement; and Emily and James watched them go down to the
boatman below and choose one of the little yellow skiffs, and walk
carefully out upon the little plank that was laid on trestles to enable
them to get alongside the craft. They saw Stephen hand Olive in, and
take his seat facing her; when they were settled they waved their hands
to the couple watching them, and then Stephen took the pair of sculls
and pulled off to the tune beat by the band, she steering through the
other boats skimming about, for the sea was as smooth as glass that
evening, and pleasure-seekers were rowing everywhere.

‘“How pretty they look moving on, don’t they?” said Emily to James (as
I’ve been assured). “They both enjoy it equally. In everything their
likings are the same.”

‘“That’s true,” said James.

‘“They would have made a handsome pair if they had married,” said she.

‘“Yes,” said he. “’Tis a pity we should have parted ’em”

‘“Don’t talk of that, James,” said she. “For better or for worse we
decided to do as we did, and there’s an end of it.”

‘They sat on after that without speaking, side by side, and the band
played as before; the people strolled up and down; and Stephen and
Olive shrank smaller and smaller as they shot straight out to sea. The
two on shore used to relate how they saw Stephen stop rowing a moment,
and take off his coat to get at his work better; but James’s wife sat
quite still in the stern, holding the tiller-ropes by which she steered
the boat. When they had got very small indeed she turned her head to
shore.

‘“She is waving her handkerchief to us,” said Stephen’s wife, who
thereupon pulled out her own, and waved it as a return signal.

‘The boat’s course had been a little awry while Mrs. James neglected
her steering to wave her handkerchief to her husband and Mrs. Stephen;
but now the light skiff went straight onward again, and they could soon
see nothing more of the two figures it contained than Olive’s light
mantle and Stephen’s white shirt sleeves behind.

‘The two on the shore talked on. “’Twas very curious—our changing
partners at Tony Kytes’s wedding,” Emily declared. “Tony was of a
fickle nature by all account, and it really seemed as if his character
had infected us that night. Which of you two was it that first proposed
not to marry as we were engaged?”

‘“H’m—I can’t remember at this moment,” says James. “We talked it over,
you know; and no sooner said than done.”

‘“’Twas the dancing,” said she. “People get quite crazy sometimes in a
dance.”

‘“They do,” he owned.

‘“James—do you think they care for one another still?” asks Mrs.
Stephen.

‘James Hardcome mused and admitted that perhaps a little tender feeling
might flicker up in their hearts for a moment now and then. “Still,
nothing of any account,” he said.

‘“I sometimes think that Olive is in Steve’s mind a good deal,” murmurs
Mrs. Stephen; “particularly when she pleases his fancy by riding past
our window at a gallop on one of the draught-horses . . . I never could
do anything of that sort; I could never get over my fear of a horse.”

‘“And I am no horseman, though I pretend to be on her account,”
murmured James Hardcome. “But isn’t it almost time for them to turn and
sweep round to the shore, as the other boating folk have done? I wonder
what Olive means by steering away straight to the horizon like that?
She has hardly swerved from a direct line seaward since they started.”

‘“No doubt they are talking, and don’t think of where they are going,”
suggests Stephen’s wife.

‘“Perhaps so,” said James. “I didn’t know Steve could row like that.”

‘“O yes,” says she. “He often comes here on business, and generally has
a pull round the bay.”

‘“I can hardly see the boat or them,” says James again; “and it is
getting dark.”

‘The heedless pair afloat now formed a mere speck in the films of the
coming night, which thickened apace, till it completely swallowed up
their distant shapes. They had disappeared while still following the
same straight course away from the world of land-livers, as if they
were intending to drop over the sea-edge into space, and never return
to earth again.

‘The two on the shore continued to sit on, punctually abiding by their
agreement to remain on the same spot till the others returned. The
Esplanade lamps were lit one by one, the bandsmen folded up their
stands and departed, the yachts in the bay hung out their riding
lights, and the little boats came back to shore one after another,
their hirers walking on to the sands by the plank they had climbed to
go afloat; but among these Stephen and Olive did not appear.

‘“What a time they are!” said Emily. “I am getting quite chilly. I did
not expect to have to sit so long in the evening air.”

‘Thereupon James Hardcome said that he did not require his overcoat,
and insisted on lending it to her.

‘He wrapped it round Emily’s shoulders.

‘“Thank you, James,” she said. “How cold Olive must be in that thin
jacket!”

‘He said he was thinking so too. “Well, they are sure to be quite close
at hand by this time, though we can’t see ’em. The boats are not all in
yet. Some of the rowers are fond of paddling along the shore to finish
out their hour of hiring.”

‘“Shall we walk by the edge of the water,” said she, “to see if we can
discover them?”

‘He assented, reminding her that they must not lose sight of the seat,
lest the belated pair should return and miss them, and be vexed that
they had not kept the appointment.

‘They walked a sentry beat up and down the sands immediately opposite
the seat; and still the others did not come. James Hardcome at last
went to the boatman, thinking that after all his wife and cousin might
have come in under shadow of the dusk without being perceived, and
might have forgotten the appointment at the bench.

‘“All in?” asked James.

‘“All but one boat,” said the lessor. “I can’t think where that couple
is keeping to. They might run foul of something or other in the dark.”

‘Again Stephen’s wife and Olive’s husband waited, with more and more
anxiety. But no little yellow boat returned. Was it possible they could
have landed further down the Esplanade?

‘“It may have been done to escape paying,” said the boat-owner. “But
they didn’t look like people who would do that.”

‘James Hardcome knew that he could found no hope on such a reason as
that. But now, remembering what had been casually discussed between
Steve and himself about their wives from time to time, he admitted for
the first time the possibility that their old tenderness had been
revived by their face-to-face position more strongly than either had
anticipated at starting—the excursion having been so obviously
undertaken for the pleasure of the performance only,—and that they had
landed at some steps he knew of further down toward the pier, to be
longer alone together.

‘Still he disliked to harbour the thought, and would not mention its
existence to his companion. He merely said to her, “Let us walk further
on.”

‘They did so, and lingered between the boat-stage and the pier till
Stephen Hardcome’s wife was uneasy, and was obliged to accept James’s
offered arm. Thus the night advanced. Emily was presently so worn out
by fatigue that James felt it necessary to conduct her home; there was,
too, a remote chance that the truants had landed in the harbour on the
other side of the town, or elsewhere, and hastened home in some
unexpected way, in the belief that their consorts would not have waited
so long.

‘However, he left a direction in the town that a lookout should be
kept, though this was arranged privately, the bare possibility of an
elopement being enough to make him reticent; and, full of misgivings,
the two remaining ones hastened to catch the last train out of
Budmouth-Regis; and when they got to Casterbridge drove back to Upper
Longpuddle.’

‘Along this very road as we do now,’ remarked the parish clerk.

‘To be sure—along this very road,’ said the curate. ‘However, Stephen
and Olive were not at their homes; neither had entered the village
since leaving it in the morning. Emily and James Hardcome went to their
respective dwellings to snatch a hasty night’s rest, and at daylight
the next morning they drove again to Casterbridge and entered the
Budmouth train, the line being just opened.

‘Nothing had been heard of the couple there during this brief absence.
In the course of a few hours some young men testified to having seen
such a man and woman rowing in a frail hired craft, the head of the
boat kept straight to sea; they had sat looking in each other’s faces
as if they were in a dream, with no consciousness of what they were
doing, or whither they were steering. It was not till late that day
that more tidings reached James’s ears. The boat had been found
drifting bottom upward a long way from land. In the evening the sea
rose somewhat, and a cry spread through the town that two bodies were
cast ashore in Lullstead Bay, several miles to the eastward. They were
brought to Budmouth, and inspection revealed them to be the missing
pair. It was said that they had been found tightly locked in each
other’s arms, his lips upon hers, their features still wrapt in the
same calm and dream-like repose which had been observed in their
demeanour as they had glided along.

‘Neither James nor Emily questioned the original motives of the
unfortunate man and woman in putting to sea. They were both above
suspicion as to intention. Whatever their mutual feelings might have
led them on to, underhand behaviour was foreign to the nature of
either. Conjecture pictured that they might have fallen into tender
reverie while gazing each into a pair of eyes that had formerly flashed
for him and her alone, and, unwilling to avow what their mutual
sentiments were, they had continued thus, oblivious of time and space,
till darkness suddenly overtook them far from land. But nothing was
truly known. It had been their destiny to die thus. The two halves,
intended by Nature to make the perfect whole, had failed in that result
during their lives, though “in their death they were not divided.”
Their bodies were brought home, and buried on one day. I remember that,
on looking round the churchyard while reading the service, I observed
nearly all the parish at their funeral.’

‘It was so, sir,’ said the clerk.

‘The remaining two,’ continued the curate (whose voice had grown husky
while relating the lovers’ sad fate), ‘were a more thoughtful and
far-seeing, though less romantic, couple than the first. They were now
mutually bereft of a companion, and found themselves by this accident
in a position to fulfil their destiny according to Nature’s plan and
their own original and calmly-formed intention. James Hardcome took
Emily to wife in the course of a year and a half; and the marriage
proved in every respect a happy one. I solemnized the service, Hardcome
having told me, when he came to give notice of the proposed wedding,
the story of his first wife’s loss almost word for word as I have told
it to you.’

‘And are they living in Longpuddle still?’ asked the new-comer.

‘O no, sir,’ interposed the clerk. ‘James has been dead these dozen
years, and his mis’ess about six or seven. They had no children.
William Privett used to be their odd man till he died.’

‘Ah—William Privett! He dead too?—dear me!’ said the other. ‘All passed
away!’

‘Yes, sir. William was much older than I. He’d ha’ been over eighty if
he had lived till now.’

‘There was something very strange about William’s death—very strange
indeed!’ sighed a melancholy man in the back of the van. It was the
seedsman’s father, who had hitherto kept silence.

‘And what might that have been?’ asked Mr. Lackland.

THE SUPERSTITIOUS MAN’S STORY

‘William, as you may know, was a curious, silent man; you could feel
when he came near ’ee; and if he was in the house or anywhere behind
your back without your seeing him, there seemed to be something clammy
in the air, as if a cellar door was opened close by your elbow. Well,
one Sunday, at a time that William was in very good health to all
appearance, the bell that was ringing for church went very heavy all of
a sudden; the sexton, who told me o’t, said he’d not known the bell go
so heavy in his hand for years—it was just as if the gudgeons wanted
oiling. That was on the Sunday, as I say. During the week after, it
chanced that William’s wife was staying up late one night to finish her
ironing, she doing the washing for Mr. and Mrs. Hardcome. Her husband
had finished his supper and gone to bed as usual some hour or two
before. While she ironed she heard him coming down stairs; he stopped
to put on his boots at the stair-foot, where he always left them, and
then came on into the living-room where she was ironing, passing
through it towards the door, this being the only way from the staircase
to the outside of the house. No word was said on either side, William
not being a man given to much speaking, and his wife being occupied
with her work. He went out and closed the door behind him. As her
husband had now and then gone out in this way at night before when
unwell, or unable to sleep for want of a pipe, she took no particular
notice, and continued at her ironing. This she finished shortly after,
and as he had not come in she waited awhile for him, putting away the
irons and things, and preparing the table for his breakfast in the
morning. Still he did not return, but supposing him not far off, and
wanting to get to bed herself, tired as she was, she left the door
unbarred and went to the stairs, after writing on the back of the door
with chalk: _Mind and do the door_ (because he was a forgetful man).

‘To her great surprise, and I might say alarm, on reaching the foot of
the stairs his boots were standing there as they always stood when he
had gone to rest; going up to their chamber she found him in bed
sleeping as sound as a rock. How he could have got back again without
her seeing or hearing him was beyond her comprehension. It could only
have been by passing behind her very quietly while she was bumping with
the iron. But this notion did not satisfy her: it was surely impossible
that she should not have seen him come in through a room so small. She
could not unravel the mystery, and felt very queer and uncomfortable
about it. However, she would not disturb him to question him then, and
went to bed herself.

‘He rose and left for his work very early the next morning, before she
was awake, and she waited his return to breakfast with much anxiety for
an explanation, for thinking over the matter by daylight made it seem
only the more startling. When he came in to the meal he said, before
she could put her question, “What’s the meaning of them words chalked
on the door?”

‘She told him, and asked him about his going out the night before.
William declared that he had never left the bedroom after entering it,
having in fact undressed, lain down, and fallen asleep directly, never
once waking till the clock struck five, and he rose up to go to his
labour.

‘Betty Privett was as certain in her own mind that he did go out as she
was of her own existence, and was little less certain that he did not
return. She felt too disturbed to argue with him, and let the subject
drop as though she must have been mistaken. When she was walking down
Longpuddle street later in the day she met Jim Weedle’s daughter Nancy,
and said, “Well, Nancy, you do look sleepy to-day!”

‘“Yes, Mrs. Privett,” says Nancy. “Now don’t tell anybody, but I don’t
mind letting you know what the reason o’t is. Last night, being Old
Midsummer Eve, some of us went to church porch, and didn’t get home
till near one.”

‘“Did ye?” says Mrs. Privett. “Old Midsummer yesterday was it? Faith I
didn’t think whe’r ’twas Midsummer or Michaelmas; I’d too much work to
do.”

‘“Yes. And we were frightened enough, I can tell ’ee, by what we saw.”

‘“What did ye see?”

‘(You may not remember, sir, having gone off to foreign parts so young,
that on Midsummer Night it is believed hereabout that the faint shapes
of all the folk in the parish who are going to be at death’s door
within the year can be seen entering the church. Those who get over
their illness come out again after a while; those that are doomed to
die do not return.)

‘“What did you see?” asked William’s wife.

‘“Well,” says Nancy, backwardly—“we needn’t tell what we saw, or who we
saw.”

‘“You saw my husband,” says Betty Privett, in a quiet way.

‘“Well, since you put it so,” says Nancy, hanging fire, “we—thought we
did see him; but it was darkish, and we was frightened, and of course
it might not have been he.”

‘“Nancy, you needn’t mind letting it out, though ’tis kept back in
kindness. And he didn’t come out of church again: I know it as well as
you.”

‘Nancy did not answer yes or no to that, and no more was said. But
three days after, William Privett was mowing with John Chiles in Mr.
Hardcome’s meadow, and in the heat of the day they sat down to eat
their bit o’ nunch under a tree, and empty their flagon. Afterwards
both of ’em fell asleep as they sat. John Chiles was the first to wake,
and as he looked towards his fellow-mower he saw one of those great
white miller’s-souls as we call ’em—that is to say, a miller-moth—come
from William’s open mouth while he slept, and fly straight away. John
thought it odd enough, as William had worked in a mill for several
years when he was a boy. He then looked at the sun, and found by the
place o’t that they had slept a long while, and as William did not
wake, John called to him and said it was high time to begin work again.
He took no notice, and then John went up and shook him, and found he
was dead.

‘Now on that very day old Philip Hookhorn was down at Longpuddle Spring
dipping up a pitcher of water; and as he turned away, who should he see
coming down to the spring on the other side but William, looking very
pale and odd. This surprised Philip Hookhorn very much, for years
before that time William’s little son—his only child—had been drowned
in that spring while at play there, and this had so preyed upon
William’s mind that he’d never been seen near the spring afterwards,
and had been known to go half a mile out of his way to avoid the place.
On inquiry, it was found that William in body could not have stood by
the spring, being in the mead two miles off; and it also came out that
the time at which he was seen at the spring was the very time when he
died.’

‘A rather melancholy story,’ observed the emigrant, after a minute’s
silence.

‘Yes, yes. Well, we must take ups and downs together,’ said the
seedsman’s father.

‘You don’t know, Mr. Lackland, I suppose, what a rum start that was
between Andrey Satchel and Jane Vallens and the pa’son and clerk o’
Scrimpton?’ said the master-thatcher, a man with a spark of subdued
liveliness in his eye, who had hitherto kept his attention mainly upon
small objects a long way ahead, as he sat in front of the van with his
feet outside. ‘Theirs was a queerer experience of a pa’son and clerk
than some folks get, and may cheer ’ee up a little after this dampness
that’s been flung over yer soul.’

The returned one replied that he knew nothing of the history, and
should be happy to hear it, quite recollecting the personality of the
man Satchel.

‘Ah no; this Andrey Satchel is the son of the Satchel that you knew;
this one has not been married more than two or three years, and ’twas
at the time o’ the wedding that the accident happened that I could tell
’ee of, or anybody else here, for that matter.’

‘No, no; you must tell it, neighbour, if anybody,’ said several; a
request in which Mr. Lackland joined, adding that the Satchel family
was one he had known well before leaving home.

‘I’ll just mention, as you be a stranger,’ whispered the carrier to
Lackland, ‘that Christopher’s stories will bear pruning.’

The emigrant nodded.

‘Well, I can soon tell it,’ said the master-thatcher, schooling himself
to a tone of actuality. ‘Though as it has more to do with the pa’son
and clerk than with Andrey himself, it ought to be told by a better
churchman than I.’

ANDREY SATCHEL AND THE PARSON AND CLERK

‘It all arose, you must know, from Andrey being fond of a drop of drink
at that time—though he’s a sober enough man now by all account, so much
the better for him. Jane, his bride, you see, was somewhat older than
Andrey; how much older I don’t pretend to say; she was not one of our
parish, and the register alone may be able to tell that. But, at any
rate, her being a little ahead of her young man in mortal years,
coupled with other bodily circumstances—’

(‘Ah, poor thing!’ sighed the women.)

‘—made her very anxious to get the thing done before he changed his
mind; and ’twas with a joyful countenance (they say) that she, with
Andrey and his brother and sister-in-law, marched off to church one
November morning as soon as ’twas day a’most, to be made one with
Andrey for the rest of her life. He had left our place long before it
was light, and the folks that were up all waved their lanterns at him,
and flung up their hats as he went.

‘The church of her parish was a mile and more from the houses, and, as
it was a wonderful fine day for the time of year, the plan was that as
soon as they were married they would make out a holiday by driving
straight off to Port Bredy, to see the ships and the sea and the
sojers, instead of coming back to a meal at the house of the distant
relation she lived wi’, and moping about there all the afternoon.

‘Well, some folks noticed that Andrey walked with rather wambling steps
to church that morning; the truth o’t was that his nearest neighbour’s
child had been christened the day before, and Andrey, having stood
godfather, had stayed all night keeping up the christening, for he had
said to himself, “Not if I live to be thousand shall I again be made a
godfather one day, and a husband the next, and perhaps a father the
next, and therefore I’ll make the most of the blessing.” So that when
he started from home in the morning he had not been in bed at all. The
result was, as I say, that when he and his bride-to-be walked up the
church to get married, the pa’son (who was a very strict man inside the
church, whatever he was outside) looked hard at Andrey, and said, very
sharp:

‘“How’s this, my man? You are in liquor. And so early, too. I’m ashamed
of you!”

‘“Well, that’s true, sir,” says Andrey. “But I can walk straight enough
for practical purposes. I can walk a chalk line,” he says (meaning no
offence), “as well as some other folk: and—” (getting hotter)—“I reckon
that if you, Pa’son Billy Toogood, had kept up a christening all night
so thoroughly as I have done, you wouldn’t be able to stand at all;
d--- me if you would!”

‘This answer made Pa’son Billy—as they used to call him—rather spitish,
not to say hot, for he was a warm-tempered man if provoked, and he
said, very decidedly: “Well, I cannot marry you in this state; and I
will not! Go home and get sober!” And he slapped the book together like
a rat-trap.

‘Then the bride burst out crying as if her heart would break, for very
fear that she would lose Andrey after all her hard work to get him, and
begged and implored the pa’son to go on with the ceremony. But no.

‘“I won’t be a party to your solemnizing matrimony with a tipsy man,”
says Mr. Toogood. “It is not right and decent. I am sorry for you, my
young woman, but you’d better go home again. I wonder how you could
think of bringing him here drunk like this!”

‘“But if—if he don’t come drunk he won’t come at all, sir!” she says,
through her sobs.

‘“I can’t help that,” says the pa’son; and plead as she might, it did
not move him. Then she tried him another way.

‘“Well, then, if you’ll go home, sir, and leave us here, and come back
to the church in an hour or two, I’ll undertake to say that he shall be
as sober as a judge,” she cries. “We’ll bide here, with your
permission; for if he once goes out of this here church unmarried, all
Van Amburgh’s horses won’t drag him back again!”

‘“Very well,” says the parson. “I’ll give you two hours, and then I’ll
return.”

‘“And please, sir, lock the door, so that we can’t escape!” says she.

‘“Yes,” says the parson.

‘“And let nobody know that we are here.”

‘The pa’son then took off his clane white surplice, and went away; and
the others consulted upon the best means for keeping the matter a
secret, which it was not a very hard thing to do, the place being so
lonely, and the hour so early. The witnesses, Andrey’s brother and
brother’s wife, neither one o’ which cared about Andrey’s marrying
Jane, and had come rather against their will, said they couldn’t wait
two hours in that hole of a place, wishing to get home to Longpuddle
before dinner-time. They were altogether so crusty that the clerk said
there was no difficulty in their doing as they wished. They could go
home as if their brother’s wedding had actually taken place and the
married couple had gone onward for their day’s pleasure jaunt to Port
Bredy as intended, he, the clerk, and any casual passer-by would act as
witnesses when the pa’son came back.

‘This was agreed to, and away Andrey’s relations went, nothing loath,
and the clerk shut the church door and prepared to lock in the couple.
The bride went up and whispered to him, with her eyes a-streaming
still.

‘“My dear good clerk,” she says, “if we bide here in the church, folk
may see us through the winders, and find out what has happened; and
’twould cause such a talk and scandal that I never should get over it:
and perhaps, too, dear Andrey might try to get out and leave me! Will
ye lock us up in the tower, my dear good clerk?” she says. “I’ll tole
him in there if you will.”

‘The clerk had no objection to do this to oblige the poor young woman,
and they toled Andrey into the tower, and the clerk locked ’em both up
straightway, and then went home, to return at the end of the two hours.

‘Pa’son Toogood had not been long in his house after leaving the church
when he saw a gentleman in pink and top-boots ride past his windows,
and with a sudden flash of heat he called to mind that the hounds met
that day just on the edge of his parish. The pa’son was one who dearly
loved sport, and much he longed to be there.

‘In short, except o’ Sundays and at tide-times in the week, Pa’son
Billy was the life o’ the Hunt. ’Tis true that he was poor, and that he
rode all of a heap, and that his black mare was rat-tailed and old, and
his tops older, and all over of one colour, whitey-brown, and full o’
cracks. But he’d been in at the death of three thousand foxes.
And—being a bachelor man—every time he went to bed in summer he used to
open the bed at bottom and crawl up head foremost, to mind 'em of the
coming winter and the good sport he’d have, and the foxes going to
earth. And whenever there was a christening at the Squire’s, and he had
dinner there afterwards, as he always did, he never failed to christen
the chiel over again in a bottle of port wine.

‘Now the clerk was the parson’s groom and gardener and jineral manager,
and had just got back to his work in the garden when he, too, saw the
hunting man pass, and presently saw lots more of ’em, noblemen and
gentry, and then he saw the hounds, the huntsman, Jim Treadhedge, the
whipper-in, and I don’t know who besides. The clerk loved going to
cover as frantical as the pa’son, so much so that whenever he saw or
heard the pack he could no more rule his feelings than if they were the
winds of heaven. He might be bedding, or he might be sowing—all was
forgot. So he throws down his spade and rushes in to the pa’son, who
was by this time as frantical to go as he.

‘“That there mare of yours, sir, do want exercise bad, very bad, this
morning!” the clerk says, all of a tremble. “Don’t ye think I’d better
trot her round the downs for an hour, sir?”

‘“To be sure, she does want exercise badly. I’ll trot her round
myself,” says the parson.

‘“Oh—you’ll trot her yerself? Well, there’s the cob, sir. Really that
cob is getting oncontrollable through biding in a stable so long! If
you wouldn’t mind my putting on the saddle—”

‘“Very well. Take him out, certainly,” says the pa’son, never caring
what the clerk did so long as he himself could get off immediately. So,
scrambling into his riding-boots and breeches as quick as he could, he
rode off towards the meet, intending to be back in an hour. No sooner
was he gone than the clerk mounted the cob, and was off after him. When
the pa’son got to the meet, he found a lot of friends, and was as jolly
as he could be: the hounds found a’most as soon as they threw off, and
there was great excitement. So, forgetting that he had meant to go back
at once, away rides the pa’son with the rest o’ the hunt, all across
the fallow ground that lies between Lippet Wood and Green’s Copse; and
as he galloped he looked behind for a moment, and there was the clerk
close to his heels.

‘“Ha, ha, clerk—you here?” he says.

‘“Yes, sir, here be I,” says t’other.

‘“Fine exercise for the horses!”

‘“Ay, sir—hee, hee!” says the clerk.

‘So they went on and on, into Green’s Copse, then across to Higher
Jirton; then on across this very turnpike-road to Climmerston Ridge,
then away towards Yalbury Wood: up hill and down dale, like the very
wind, the clerk close to the pa’son, and the pa’son not far from the
hounds. Never was there a finer run knowed with that pack than they had
that day; and neither pa’son nor clerk thought one word about the
unmarried couple locked up in the church tower waiting to get j’ined.

‘“These hosses of yours, sir, will be much improved by this!” says the
clerk as he rode along, just a neck behind the pa’son. “’Twas a happy
thought of your reverent mind to bring ’em out to-day. Why, it may be
frosty in a day or two, and then the poor things mid not be able to
leave the stable for weeks.”

‘“They may not, they may not, it is true. A merciful man is merciful to
his beast,” says the pa’son.

‘“Hee, hee!” says the clerk, glancing sly into the pa’son’s eye.

‘“Ha, ha!” says the pa’son, a-glancing back into the clerk’s. “Halloo!”
he shouts, as he sees the fox break cover at that moment.

‘“Halloo!” cries the clerk. “There he goes! Why, dammy, there’s two
foxes—”

‘“Hush, clerk, hush! Don’t let me hear that word again! Remember our
calling.”

‘“True, sir, true. But really, good sport do carry away a man so, that
he’s apt to forget his high persuasion!” And the next minute the corner
of the clerk’s eye shot again into the corner of the pa’son’s, and the
pa’son’s back again to the clerk’s. “Hee, hee!” said the clerk.

‘“Ha, ha!” said Pa’son Toogood.

‘“Ah, sir,” says the clerk again, “this is better than crying Amen to
your Ever-and-ever on a winter’s morning!”

‘“Yes, indeed, clerk! To everything there’s a season,” says Pa’son
Toogood, quite pat, for he was a learned Christian man when he liked,
and had chapter and ve’se at his tongue’s end, as a pa’son should.

‘At last, late in the day, the hunting came to an end by the fox
running into a’ old woman’s cottage, under her table, and up the
clock-case. The pa’son and clerk were among the first in at the death,
their faces a-staring in at the old woman’s winder, and the clock
striking as he’d never been heard to strik’ before. Then came the
question of finding their way home.

‘Neither the pa’son nor the clerk knowed how they were going to do
this, for their beasts were wellnigh tired down to the ground. But they
started back-along as well as they could, though they were so done up
that they could only drag along at a’ amble, and not much of that at a
time.

‘“We shall never, never get there!” groaned Mr. Toogood, quite bowed
down.

‘“Never!” groans the clerk. “’Tis a judgment upon us for our
iniquities!”

‘“I fear it is,” murmurs the pa’son.

‘Well, ’twas quite dark afore they entered the pa’sonage gate, having
crept into the parish as quiet as if they’d stole a hammer, little
wishing their congregation to know what they’d been up to all day long.
And as they were so dog-tired, and so anxious about the horses, never
once did they think of the unmarried couple. As soon as ever the horses
had been stabled and fed, and the pa’son and clerk had had a bit and a
sup theirselves, they went to bed.

‘Next morning when Pa’son Toogood was at breakfast, thinking of the
glorious sport he’d had the day before, the clerk came in a hurry to
the door and asked to see him.

‘“It has just come into my mind, sir, that we’ve forgot all about the
couple that we was to have married yesterday!”

‘The half-chawed victuals dropped from the pa’son’s mouth as if he’d
been shot. “Bless my soul,” says he, “so we have! How very awkward!”

‘“It is, sir; very. Perhaps we’ve ruined the ’ooman!”

‘“Ah—to be sure—I remember! She ought to have been married before.”

‘“If anything has happened to her up in that there tower, and no doctor
or nuss—”

(‘Ah—poor thing!’ sighed the women.)

‘“—’twill be a quarter-sessions matter for us, not to speak of the
disgrace to the Church!”

‘“Good God, clerk, don’t drive me wild!” says the pa’son. “Why the hell
didn’t I marry ’em, drunk or sober!” (Pa’sons used to cuss in them days
like plain honest men.) “Have you been to the church to see what
happened to them, or inquired in the village?”

‘“Not I, sir! It only came into my head a moment ago, and I always like
to be second to you in church matters. You could have knocked me down
with a sparrer’s feather when I thought o’t, sir; I assure ’ee you
could!”

‘Well, the parson jumped up from his breakfast, and together they went
off to the church.

‘“It is not at all likely that they are there now,” says Mr. Toogood,
as they went; “and indeed I hope they are not. They be pretty sure to
have ’scaped and gone home.”

‘However, they opened the church-hatch, entered the churchyard, and
looking up at the tower, there they seed a little small white face at
the belfry-winder, and a little small hand waving. ’Twas the bride.

‘“God my life, clerk,” says Mr. Toogood, “I don’t know how to face
’em!” And he sank down upon a tombstone. “How I wish I hadn’t been so
cussed particular!”

‘“Yes—’twas a pity we didn’t finish it when we’d begun,” the clerk
said. “Still, since the feelings of your holy priestcraft wouldn’t let
ye, the couple must put up with it.”

‘“True, clerk, true! Does she look as if anything premature had took
place?”

‘“I can’t see her no lower down than her arm-pits, sir.”

‘“Well—how do her face look?”

‘“It do look mighty white!”

‘“Well, we must know the worst! Dear me, how the small of my back do
ache from that ride yesterday! . . . But to more godly business!”

‘They went on into the church, and unlocked the tower stairs, and
immediately poor Jane and Andrey busted out like starved mice from a
cupboard, Andrey limp and sober enough now, and his bride pale and
cold, but otherwise as usual.

‘“What,” says the pa’son, with a great breath of relief, “you haven’t
been here ever since?”

‘“Yes, we have, sir!” says the bride, sinking down upon a seat in her
weakness. “Not a morsel, wet or dry, have we had since! It was
impossible to get out without help, and here we’ve stayed!”

‘“But why didn’t you shout, good souls?” said the pa’son.

‘“She wouldn’t let me,” says Andrey.

‘“Because we were so ashamed at what had led to it,” sobs Jane. “We
felt that if it were noised abroad it would cling to us all our lives!
Once or twice Andrey had a good mind to toll the bell, but then he
said: “No; I’ll starve first. I won’t bring disgrace on my name and
yours, my dear.” And so we waited and waited, and walked round and
round; but never did you come till now!”

‘“To my regret!” says the parson. “Now, then, we will soon get it
over.”

‘“I—I should like some victuals,” said Andrey, “’twould gie me courage
if it is only a crust o’ bread and a’ onion; for I am that leery that I
can feel my stomach rubbing against my backbone.”

‘“I think we had better get it done,” said the bride, a bit anxious in
manner; “since we are all here convenient, too!”

‘Andrey gave way about the victuals, and the clerk called in a second
witness who wouldn’t be likely to gossip about it, and soon the knot
was tied, and the bride looked smiling and calm forthwith, and Andrey
limper than ever.

‘“Now,” said Pa’son Toogood, “you two must come to my house, and have a
good lining put to your insides before you go a step further.”

‘They were very glad of the offer, and went out of the churchyard by
one path while the pa’son and clerk went out by the other, and so did
not attract notice, it being still early. They entered the rectory as
if they’d just come back from their trip to Port Bredy; and then they
knocked in the victuals and drink till they could hold no more.

‘It was a long while before the story of what they had gone through was
known, but it was talked of in time, and they themselves laugh over it
now; though what Jane got for her pains was no great bargain after all.
’Tis true she saved her name.’

‘Was that the same Andrey who went to the squire’s house as one of the
Christmas fiddlers?’ asked the seedsman.

‘No, no,’ replied Mr. Profitt, the schoolmaster. ‘It was his father did
that. Ay, it was all owing to his being such a man for eating and
drinking.’ Finding that he had the ear of the audience, the
schoolmaster continued without delay:—

OLD ANDREY’S EXPERIENCE AS A MUSICIAN

‘I was one of the choir-boys at that time, and we and the players were
to appear at the manor-house as usual that Christmas week, to play and
sing in the hall to the squire’s people and visitors (among ’em being
the archdeacon, Lord and Lady Baxby, and I don’t know who); afterwards
going, as we always did, to have a good supper in the servants’ hall.
Andrew knew this was the custom, and meeting us when we were starting
to go, he said to us: “Lord, how I should like to join in that meal of
beef, and turkey, and plum-pudding, and ale, that you happy ones be
going to just now! One more or less will make no difference to the
squire. I am too old to pass as a singing boy, and too bearded to pass
as a singing girl; can ye lend me a fiddle, neighbours, that I may come
with ye as a bandsman?”

‘Well, we didn’t like to be hard upon him, and lent him an old one,
though Andrew knew no more of music than the Cerne Giant; and armed
with the instrument he walked up to the squire’s house with the others
of us at the time appointed, and went in boldly, his fiddle under his
arm. He made himself as natural as he could in opening the music-books
and moving the candles to the best points for throwing light upon the
notes; and all went well till we had played and sung “While shepherds
watch,” and “Star, arise,” and “Hark the glad sound.” Then the squire’s
mother, a tall gruff old lady, who was much interested in church-music,
said quite unexpectedly to Andrew: “My man, I see you don’t play your
instrument with the rest. How is that?”

‘Every one of the choir was ready to sink into the earth with concern
at the fix Andrew was in. We could see that he had fallen into a cold
sweat, and how he would get out of it we did not know.

‘“I’ve had a misfortune, mem,” he says, bowing as meek as a child.
“Coming along the road I fell down and broke my bow.”

‘“Oh, I am sorry to hear that,” says she. “Can’t it be mended?”

‘“Oh no, mem,” says Andrew. “’Twas broke all to splinters.”

‘“I’ll see what I can do for you,” says she.

‘And then it seemed all over, and we played “Rejoice, ye drowsy mortals
all,” in D and two sharps. But no sooner had we got through it than she
says to Andrew,

‘“I’ve sent up into the attic, where we have some old musical
instruments, and found a bow for you.” And she hands the bow to poor
wretched Andrew, who didn’t even know which end to take hold of. “Now
we shall have the full accompaniment,” says she.

‘Andrew’s face looked as if it were made of rotten apple as he stood in
the circle of players in front of his book; for if there was one person
in the parish that everybody was afraid of, ’twas this hook-nosed old
lady. However, by keeping a little behind the next man he managed to
make pretence of beginning, sawing away with his bow without letting it
touch the strings, so that it looked as if he were driving into the
tune with heart and soul. ’Tis a question if he wouldn’t have got
through all right if one of the squire’s visitors (no other than the
archdeacon) hadn’t noticed that he held the fiddle upside down, the nut
under his chin, and the tail-piece in his hand; and they began to crowd
round him, thinking ’twas some new way of performing.

‘This revealed everything; the squire’s mother had Andrew turned out of
the house as a vile impostor, and there was great interruption to the
harmony of the proceedings, the squire declaring he should have notice
to leave his cottage that day fortnight. However, when we got to the
servants’ hall there sat Andrew, who had been let in at the back door
by the orders of the squire’s wife, after being turned out at the front
by the orders of the squire, and nothing more was heard about his
leaving his cottage. But Andrew never performed in public as a musician
after that night; and now he’s dead and gone, poor man, as we all shall
be!’

‘I had quite forgotten the old choir, with their fiddles and
bass-viols,’ said the home-comer, musingly. ‘Are they still going on
the same as of old?’

‘Bless the man!’ said Christopher Twink, the master-thatcher; ‘why,
they’ve been done away with these twenty year. A young teetotaler plays
the organ in church now, and plays it very well; though ’tis not quite
such good music as in old times, because the organ is one of them that
go with a winch, and the young teetotaler says he can’t always throw
the proper feeling into the tune without wellnigh working his arms
off.’

‘Why did they make the change, then?’

‘Well, partly because of fashion, partly because the old musicians got
into a sort of scrape. A terrible scrape ’twas too—wasn’t it, John? I
shall never forget it—never! They lost their character as officers of
the church as complete as if they’d never had any character at all.’

‘That was very bad for them.’

‘Yes.’ The master-thatcher attentively regarded past times as if they
lay about a mile off, and went on:—

ABSENT-MINDEDNESS IN A PARISH CHOIR

‘It happened on Sunday after Christmas—the last Sunday ever they played
in Longpuddle church gallery, as it turned out, though they didn’t know
it then. As you may know, sir, the players formed a very good
band—almost as good as the Mellstock parish players that were led by
the Dewys; and that’s saying a great deal. There was Nicholas
Puddingcome, the leader, with the first fiddle; there was Timothy
Thomas, the bass-viol man; John Biles, the tenor fiddler; Dan’l
Hornhead, with the serpent; Robert Dowdle, with the clarionet; and Mr.
Nicks, with the oboe—all sound and powerful musicians, and
strong-winded men—they that blowed. For that reason they were very much
in demand Christmas week for little reels and dancing parties; for they
could turn a jig or a hornpipe out of hand as well as ever they could
turn out a psalm, and perhaps better, not to speak irreverent. In
short, one half-hour they could be playing a Christmas carol in the
squire’s hall to the ladies and gentlemen, and drinking tea and coffee
with ’em as modest as saints; and the next, at The Tinker’s Arms,
blazing away like wild horses with the “Dashing White Sergeant” to nine
couple of dancers and more, and swallowing rum-and-cider hot as flame.

‘Well, this Christmas they’d been out to one rattling randy after
another every night, and had got next to no sleep at all. Then came the
Sunday after Christmas, their fatal day. ’Twas so mortal cold that year
that they could hardly sit in the gallery; for though the congregation
down in the body of the church had a stove to keep off the frost, the
players in the gallery had nothing at all. So Nicholas said at morning
service, when ’twas freezing an inch an hour, “Please the Lord I won’t
stand this numbing weather no longer: this afternoon we’ll have
something in our insides to make us warm, if it cost a king’s ransom.”

‘So he brought a gallon of hot brandy and beer, ready mixed, to church
with him in the afternoon, and by keeping the jar well wrapped up in
Timothy Thomas’s bass-viol bag it kept drinkably warm till they wanted
it, which was just a thimbleful in the Absolution, and another after
the Creed, and the remainder at the beginning o’ the sermon. When
they’d had the last pull they felt quite comfortable and warm, and as
the sermon went on—most unfortunately for ’em it was a long one that
afternoon—they fell asleep, every man jack of ’em; and there they slept
on as sound as rocks.

‘’Twas a very dark afternoon, and by the end of the sermon all you
could see of the inside of the church were the pa’son’s two candles
alongside of him in the pulpit, and his spaking face behind ’em. The
sermon being ended at last, the pa’son gie’d out the Evening Hymn. But
no choir set about sounding up the tune, and the people began to turn
their heads to learn the reason why, and then Levi Limpet, a boy who
sat in the gallery, nudged Timothy and Nicholas, and said, “Begin!
begin!”

‘“Hey? what?” says Nicholas, starting up; and the church being so dark
and his head so muddled he thought he was at the party they had played
at all the night before, and away he went, bow and fiddle, at “The