Free Books To Read Audio Library - Interlopers at the Knap by Thomas Hardy

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Title:  Wessex Tales

Author:  Thomas Hardy

Release Date:  February, 2002  [Etext #3056]

Edition:  10

Language: English

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WESSEX TALES




Contents:

Preface
An Imaginative Woman
The Three Strangers
The Withered Arm
Fellow-Townsmen
Interlopers at the Knap
The Distracted Preacher



PREFACE



An apology is perhaps needed for the neglect of contrast which is
shown by presenting two consecutive stories of hangmen in such a
small collection as the following.  But in the neighbourhood of
county-towns tales of executions used to form a large proportion of
the local traditions; and though never personally acquainted with
any chief operator at such scenes, the writer of these pages had as
a boy the privilege of being on speaking terms with a man who
applied for the office, and who sank into an incurable melancholy
because he failed to get it, some slight mitigation of his grief
being to dwell upon striking episodes in the lives of those happier
ones who had held it with success and renown.  His tale of
disappointment used to cause some wonder why his ambition should
have taken such an unfortunate form, but its nobleness was never
questioned.  In those days, too, there was still living an old woman
who, for the cure of some eating disease, had been taken in her
youth to have her 'blood turned' by a convict's corpse, in the
manner described in 'The Withered Arm.'

Since writing this story some years ago I have been reminded by an
aged friend who knew 'Rhoda Brook' that, in relating her dream, my
forgetfulness has weakened the facts our of which the tale grew.  In
reality it was while lying down on a hot afternoon that the incubus
oppressed her and she flung it off, with the results upon the body
of the original as described.  To my mind the occurrence of such a
vision in the daytime is more impressive than if it had happened in
a midnight dream.  Readers are therefore asked to correct the
misrelation, which affords an instance of how our imperfect memories
insensibly formalize the fresh originality of living fact--from
whose shape they slowly depart, as machine-made castings depart by
degrees from the sharp hand-work of the mould.

Among the many devices for concealing smuggled goods in caves and
pits of the earth, that of planting an apple-tree in a tray or box
which was placed over the mouth of the pit is, I believe, unique,
and it is detailed in one of the tales precisely as described by an
old carrier of 'tubs'--a man who was afterwards in my father's
employ for over thirty years.  I never gathered from his
reminiscences what means were adopted for lifting the tree, which,
with its roots, earth, and receptacle, must have been of
considerable weight.  There is no doubt, however, that the thing was
done through many years.  My informant often spoke, too, of the
horribly suffocating sensation produced by the pair of spirit-tubs
slung upon the chest and back, after stumbling with the burden of
them for several miles inland over a rough country and in darkness.
He said that though years of his youth and young manhood were spent
in this irregular business, his profits from the same, taken all
together, did not average the wages he might have earned in a steady
employment, whilst the fatigues and risks were excessive.

I may add that the first story in the series turns upon a physical
possibility that may attach to women of imaginative temperament, and
that is well supported by the experiences of medical men and other
observers of such manifestations.

T. H.
April 1896.




AN IMAGINATIVE WOMAN




When William Marchmill had finished his inquiries for lodgings at a
well-known watering-place in Upper Wessex, he returned to the hotel
to find his wife.  She, with the children, had rambled along the
shore, and Marchmill followed in the direction indicated by the
military-looking hall-porter

'By Jove, how far you've gone!  I am quite out of breath,' Marchmill
said, rather impatiently, when he came up with his wife, who was
reading as she walked, the three children being considerably further
ahead with the nurse.

Mrs. Marchmill started out of the reverie into which the book had
thrown her.  'Yes,' she said, 'you've been such a long time.  I was
tired of staying in that dreary hotel.  But I am sorry if you have
wanted me, Will?'

'Well, I have had trouble to suit myself.  When you see the airy and
comfortable rooms heard of, you find they are stuffy and
uncomfortable.  Will you come and see if what I've fixed on will do?
There is not much room, I am afraid; hut I can light on nothing
better.  The town is rather full.'

The pair left the children and nurse to continue their ramble, and
went back together.

In age well-balanced, in personal appearance fairly matched, and in
domestic requirements conformable, in temper this couple differed,
though even here they did not often clash, he being equable, if not
lymphatic, and she decidedly nervous and sanguine.  It was to their
tastes and fancies, those smallest, greatest particulars, that no
common denominator could be applied.  Marchmill considered his
wife's likes and inclinations somewhat silly; she considered his
sordid and material.  The husband's business was that of a gunmaker
in a thriving city northwards, and his soul was in that business
always; the lady was best characterized by that superannuated phrase
of elegance 'a votary of the muse.'  An impressionable, palpitating
creature was Ella, shrinking humanely from detailed knowledge of her
husband's trade whenever she reflected that everything he
manufactured had for its purpose the destruction of life.  She could
only recover her equanimity by assuring herself that some, at least,
of his weapons were sooner or later used for the extermination of
horrid vermin and animals almost as cruel to their inferiors in
species as human beings were to theirs.

She had never antecedently regarded this occupation of his as any
objection to having him for a husband.  Indeed, the necessity of
getting life-leased at all cost, a cardinal virtue which all good
mothers teach, kept her from thinking of it at all till she had
closed with William, had passed the honeymoon, and reached the
reflecting stage.  Then, like a person who has stumbled upon some
object in the dark, she wondered what she had got; mentally walked
round it, estimated it; whether it were rare or common; contained
gold, silver, or lead; were a clog or a pedestal, everything to her
or nothing.

She came to some vague conclusions, and since then had kept her
heart alive by pitying her proprietor's obtuseness and want of
refinement, pitying herself, and letting off her delicate and
ethereal emotions in imaginative occupations, day-dreams, and night-
sighs, which perhaps would not much have disturbed William if he had
known of them.

Her figure was small, elegant, and slight in build, tripping, or
rather bounding, in movement.  She was dark-eyed, and had that
marvellously bright and liquid sparkle in each pupil which
characterizes persons of Ella's cast of soul, and is too often a
cause of heartache to the possessor's male friends, ultimately
sometimes to herself.  Her husband was a tall, long-featured man,
with a brown beard; he had a pondering regard; and was, it must be
added, usually kind and tolerant to her.  He spoke in squarely
shaped sentences, and was supremely satisfied with a condition of
sublunary things which made weapons a necessity.

Husband and wife walked till they had reached the house they were in
search of, which stood in a terrace facing the sea, and was fronted
by a small garden of wind-proof and salt-proof evergreens, stone
steps leading up to the porch.  It had its number in the row, but,
being rather larger than the rest, was in addition sedulously
distinguished as Coburg House by its landlady, though everybody else
called it 'Thirteen, New Parade.'  The spot was bright and lively
now; but in winter it became necessary to place sandbags against the
door, and to stuff up the keyhole against the wind and rain, which
had worn the paint so thin that the priming and knotting showed
through.

The householder, who bad been watching for the gentleman's return,
met them in the passage, and showed the rooms.  She informed them
that she was a professional man's widow, left in needy circumstances
by the rather sudden death of her husband, and she spoke anxiously
of the conveniences of the establishment.

Mrs. Marchmill said that she liked the situation and the house; but,
it being small, there would not be accommodation enough, unless she
could have all the rooms.

The landlady mused with an air of disappointment.  She wanted the
visitors to be her tenants very badly, she said, with obvious
honesty.  But unfortunately two of the rooms were occupied
permanently by a bachelor gentleman.  He did not pay season prices,
it was true; but as he kept on his apartments all the year round,
and was an extremely nice and interesting young man, who gave no
trouble, she did not like to turn him out for a month's 'let,' even
at a high figure.  'Perhaps, however,' she added, 'he might offer to
go for a time.'

They would not hear of this, and went back to the hotel, intending
to proceed to the agent's to inquire further.  Hardly had they sat
down to tea when the landlady called.  Her gentleman, she said, had
been so obliging as to offer to give up his rooms for three or four
weeks rather than drive the new-comers away.

'It is very kind, but we won't inconvenience him in that way,' said
the Marchmills.

'O, it won't inconvenience him, I assure you!' said the landlady
eloquently.  'You see, he's a different sort of young man from most-
-dreamy, solitary, rather melancholy--and he cares more to be here
when the south-westerly gales are beating against the door, and the
sea washes over the Parade, and there's not a soul in the place,
than he does now in the season.  He'd just as soon be where, in
fact, he's going temporarily, to a little cottage on the Island
opposite, for a change.'  She hoped therefore that they would come.

The Marchmill family accordingly took possession of the house next
day, and it seemed to suit them very well.  After luncheon Mr.
Marchmill strolled out towards the pier, and Mrs. Marchmill, having
despatched the children to their outdoor amusements on the sands,
settled herself in more completely, examining this and that article,
and testing the reflecting powers of the mirror in the wardrobe
door.

In the small back sitting-room, which had been the young bachelor's,
she found furniture of a more personal nature than in the rest.
Shabby books, of correct rather than rare editions, were piled up in
a queerly reserved manner in corners, as if the previous occupant
had not conceived the possibility that any incoming person of the
season's bringing could care to look inside them.  The landlady
hovered on the threshold to rectify anything that Mrs. Marchmill
might not find to her satisfaction.

'I'll make this my own little room,' said the latter, 'because the
books are here.  By the way, the person who has left seems to have a
good many.  He won't mind my reading some of them, Mrs. Hooper, I
hope?'

'O dear no, ma'am.  Yes, he has a good many.  You see, he is in the
literary line himself somewhat.  He is a poet--yes, really a poet--
and he has a little income of his own, which is enough to write
verses on, but not enough for cutting a figure, even if he cared
to.'

'A poet!  O, I did not know that.'

Mrs. Marchmill opened one of the books, and saw the owner's name
written on the title-page.  'Dear me!' she continued; 'I know his
name very well--Robert Trewe--of course I do; and his writings!  And
it is HIS rooms we have taken, and HIM we have turned out of his
home?'

Ella Marchmill, sitting down alone a few minutes later, thought with
interested surprise of Robert Trewe.  Her own latter history will
best explain that interest.  Herself the only daughter of a
struggling man of letters, she had during the last year or two taken
to writing poems, in an endeavour to find a congenial channel in
which to let flow her painfully embayed emotions, whose former
limpidity and sparkle seemed departing in the stagnation caused by
the routine of a practical household and the gloom of bearing
children to a commonplace father.  These poems, subscribed with a
masculine pseudonym, had appeared in various obscure magazines, and
in two cases in rather prominent ones.  In the second of the latter
the page which bore her effusion at the bottom, in smallish print,
bore at the top, in large print, a few verses on the same subject by
this very man, Robert Trewe.  Both of them had, in fact, been struck
by a tragic incident reported in the daily papers, and had used it
simultaneously as an inspiration, the editor remarking in a note
upon the coincidence, and that the excellence of both poems prompted
him to give them together.

After that event Ella, otherwise 'John Ivy,' had watched with much
attention the appearance anywhere in print of verse bearing the
signature of Robert Trewe, who, with a man's unsusceptibility on the
question of sex, had never once thought of passing himself off as a
woman.  To be sure, Mrs. Marchmill had satisfied herself with a sort
of reason for doing the contrary in her case; that nobody might
believe in her inspiration if they found that the sentiments came
from a pushing tradesman's wife, from the mother of three children
by a matter-of-fact small-arms manufacturer.

Trewe's verse contrasted with that of the rank and file of recent
minor poets in being impassioned rather than ingenious, luxuriant
rather than finished.  Neither symboliste nor decadent, he was a
pessimist in so far as that character applies to a man who looks at
the worst contingencies as well as the best in the human condition.
Being little attracted by excellences of form and rhythm apart from
content, he sometimes, when feeling outran his artistic speed,
perpetrated sonnets in the loosely rhymed Elizabethan fashion, which
every right-minded reviewer said he ought not to have done.

With sad and hopeless envy, Ella Marchmill had often and often
scanned the rival poet's work, so much stronger as it always was
than her own feeble lines.  She had imitated him, and her inability
to touch his level would send her into fits of despondency.  Months
passed away thus, till she observed from the publishers' list that
Trewe had collected his fugitive pieces into a volume, which was
duly issued, and was much or little praised according to chance, and
had a sale quite sufficient to pay for the printing.

This step onward had suggested to John Ivy the idea of collecting
her pieces also, or at any rate of making up a book of her rhymes by
adding many in manuscript to the few that had seen the light, for
she had been able to get no great number into print.  A ruinous
charge was made for costs of publication; a few reviews noticed her
poor little volume; but nobody talked of it, nobody bought it, and
it fell dead in a fortnight--if it had ever been alive.

The author's thoughts were diverted to another groove just then by
the discovery that she was going to have a third child, and the
collapse of her poetical venture had perhaps less effect upon her
mind than it might have done if she had been domestically
unoccupied.  Her husband had paid the publisher's bill with the
doctor's, and there it all had ended for the time.  But, though less
than a poet of her century, Ella was more than a mere multiplier of
her kind, and latterly she had begun to feel the old afflatus once
more.  And now by an odd conjunction she found herself in the rooms
of Robert Trewe.

She thoughtfully rose from her chair and searched the apartment with
the interest of a fellow-tradesman.  Yes, the volume of his own
verse was among the rest.  Though quite familiar with its contents,
she read it here as if it spoke aloud to her, then called up Mrs.
Hooper, the landlady, for some trivial service, and inquired again
about the young man.

'Well, I'm sure you'd be interested in him, ma'am, if you could see
him, only he's so shy that I don't suppose you will.'  Mrs. Hooper
seemed nothing loth to minister to her tenant's curiosity about her
predecessor.  'Lived here long?  Yes, nearly two years.  He keeps on
his rooms even when he's not here:  the soft air of this place suits
his chest, and he likes to be able to come back at any time.  He is
mostly writing or reading, and doesn't see many people, though, for
the matter of that, he is such a good, kind young fellow that folks
would only be too glad to be friendly with him if they knew him.
You don't meet kind-hearted people every day.'

'Ah, he's kind-hearted . . . and good.'

'Yes; he'll oblige me in anything if I ask him.  "Mr. Trewe," I say
to him sometimes, "you are rather out of spirits."  "Well, I am,
Mrs. Hooper," he'll say, "though I don't know how you should find it
out."  "Why not take a little change?" I ask.  Then in a day or two
he'll say that he will take a trip to Paris, or Norway, or
somewhere; and I assure you he comes back all the better for it.'

'Ah, indeed!  His is a sensitive nature, no doubt.'

'Yes.  Still he's odd in some things.  Once when he had finished a
poem of his composition late at night he walked up and down the room
rehearsing it; and the floors being so thin--jerry-built houses, you
know, though I say it myself--he kept me awake up above him till I
wished him further . . . But we get on very well.'

This was but the beginning of a series of conversations about the
rising poet as the days went on.  On one of these occasions Mrs.
Hooper drew Ella's attention to what she had not noticed before:
minute scribblings in pencil on the wall-paper behind the curtains
at the head of the bed.

'O! let me look,' said Mrs. Marchmill, unable to conceal a rush of
tender curiosity as she bent her pretty face close to the wall.

'These,' said Mrs. Hooper, with the manner of a woman who knew
things, 'are the very beginnings and first thoughts of his verses.
He has tried to rub most of them out, but you can read them still.
My belief is that he wakes up in the night, you know, with some
rhyme in his head, and jots it down there on the wall lest he should
forget it by the morning.  Some of these very lines you see here I
have seen afterwards in print in the magazines.  Some are newer;
indeed, I have not seen that one before.  It must have been done
only a few days ago.'

'O yes! . . . '

Ella Marchmill flushed without knowing why, and suddenly wished her
companion would go away, now that the information was imparted.  An
indescribable consciousness of personal interest rather than
literary made her anxious to read the inscription alone; and she
accordingly waited till she could do so, with a sense that a great
store of emotion would be enjoyed in the act.

Perhaps because the sea was choppy outside the Island, Ella's
husband found it much pleasanter to go sailing and steaming about
without his wife, who was a bad sailor, than with her.  He did not
disdain to go thus alone on board the steamboats of the cheap-
trippers, where there was dancing by moonlight, and where the
couples would come suddenly down with a lurch into each other's
arms; for, as he blandly told her, the company was too mixed for him
to take her amid such scenes.  Thus, while this thriving
manufacturer got a great deal of change and sea-air out of his
sojourn here, the life, external at least, of Ella was monotonous
enough, and mainly consisted in passing a certain number of hours
each day in bathing and walking up and down a stretch of shore.  But
the poetic impulse having again waxed strong, she was possessed by
an inner flame which left her hardly conscious of what was
proceeding around her.

She had read till she knew by heart Trewe's last little volume of
verses, and spent a great deal of time in vainly attempting to rival
some of them, till, in her failure, she burst into tears.  The
personal element in the magnetic attraction exercised by this
circumambient, unapproachable master of hers was so much stronger
than the intellectual and abstract that she could not understand it.
To be sure, she was surrounded noon and night by his customary
environment, which literally whispered of him to her at every
moment; but he was a man she had never seen, and that all that moved
her was the instinct to specialize a waiting emotion on the first
fit thing that came to hand did not, of course, suggest itself to
Ella.

In the natural way of passion under the too practical conditions
which civilization has devised for its fruition, her husband's love
for her had not survived, except in the form of fitful friendship,
any more than, or even so much as, her own for him; and, being a
woman of very living ardours, that required sustenance of some sort,
they were beginning to feed on this chancing material, which was,
indeed, of a quality far better than chance usually offers.

One day the children had been playing hide-and-seek in a closet,
whence, in their excitement, they pulled out some clothing.  Mrs.
Hooper explained that it belonged to Mr. Trewe, and hung it up in
the closet again.  Possessed of her fantasy, Ella went later in the
afternoon, when nobody was in that part of the house, opened the
closet, unhitched one of the articles, a mackintosh, and put it on,
with the waterproof cap belonging to it.

'The mantle of Elijah!' she said.  'Would it might inspire me to
rival him, glorious genius that he is!'

Her eyes always grew wet when she thought like that, and she turned
to look at herself in the glass.  HIS heart had beat inside that
coat, and HIS brain had worked under that hat at levels of thought
she would never reach.  The consciousness of her weakness beside him
made her feel quite sick.  Before she had got the things off her the
door opened, and her husband entered the room.

'What the devil--'

She blushed, and removed them

'I found them in the closet here,' she said, 'and put them on in a
freak.  What have I else to do?  You are always away!'

'Always away?  Well . . . '

That evening she had a further talk with the landlady, who might
herself have nourished a half-tender regard for the poet, so ready
was she to discourse ardently about him.

'You are interested in Mr. Trewe, I know, ma'am,' she said; 'and he
has just sent to say that he is going to call to-morrow afternoon to
look up some books of his that he wants, if I'll be in, and he may
select them from your room?'

'O yes!'

'You could very well meet Mr Trewe then, if you'd like to be in the
way!'

She promised with secret delight, and went to bed musing of him.

Next morning her husband observed:  'I've been thinking of what you
said, Ell:  that I have gone about a good deal and left you without
much to amuse you.  Perhaps it's true.  To-day, as there's not much
sea, I'll take you with me on board the yacht.'

For the first time in her experience of such an offer Ella was not
glad.  But she accepted it for the moment.  The time for setting out
drew near, and she went to get ready.  She stood reflecting.  The
longing to see the poet she was now distinctly in love with
overpowered all other considerations.

'I don't want to go,' she said to herself.  'I can't bear to be
away!  And I won't go.'

She told her husband that she had changed her mind about wishing to
sail.  He was indifferent, and went his way.

For the rest of the day the house was quiet, the children having
gone out upon the sands.  The blinds waved in the sunshine to the
soft, steady stroke of the sea beyond the wall; and the notes of the
Green Silesian band, a troop of foreign gentlemen hired for the
season, had drawn almost all the residents and promenaders away from
the vicinity of Coburg House.  A knock was audible at the door.

Mrs. Marchmill did not hear any servant go to answer it, and she
became impatient.  The books were in the room where she sat; but
nobody came up.  She rang the bell.

'There is some person waiting at the door,' she said.

'O no, ma'am!  He's gone long ago.  I answered it.'

Mrs. Hooper came in herself.

'So disappointing!' she said.  'Mr. Trewe not coming after all!'

'But I heard him knock, I fancy!'

'No; that was somebody inquiring for lodgings who came to the wrong
house.  I forgot to tell you that Mr. Trewe sent a note just before
lunch to say I needn't get any tea for him, as he should not require
the books, and wouldn't come to select them.'

Ella was miserable, and for a long time could not even re-read his
mournful ballad on 'Severed Lives,' so aching was her erratic little
heart, and so tearful her eyes.  When the children came in with wet
stockings, and ran up to her to tell her of their adventures, she
could not feel that she cared about them half as much as usual.

* * *

'Mrs. Hooper, have you a photograph of--the gentleman who lived
here?'  She was getting to be curiously shy in mentioning his name.

'Why, yes.  It's in the ornamental frame on the mantelpiece in your
own bedroom, ma'am.'

'No; the Royal Duke and Duchess are in that.'

'Yes, so they are; but he's behind them.  He belongs rightly to that
frame, which I bought on purpose; but as he went away he said:
"Cover me up from those strangers that are coming, for God's sake.
I don't want them staring at me, and I am sure they won't want me
staring at them."  So I slipped in the Duke and Duchess temporarily
in front of him, as they had no frame, and Royalties are more
suitable for letting furnished than a private young man.  If you
take 'em out you'll see him under.  Lord, ma'am, he wouldn't mind if
he knew it!  He didn't think the next tenant would be such an
attractive lady as you, or he wouldn't have thought of hiding
himself; perhaps.'

'Is he handsome?' she asked timidly.

'_I_ call him so.  Some, perhaps, wouldn't.'

'Should I?' she asked, with eagerness.

'I think you would, though some would say he's more striking than
handsome; a large-eyed thoughtful fellow, you know, with a very
electric flash in his eye when he looks round quickly, such as you'd
expect a poet to be who doesn't get his living by it.'

'How old is he?'

'Several years older than yourself, ma'am; about thirty-one or two,
I think.'

Ella was, as a matter of fact, a few months over thirty herself; but
she did not look nearly so much.  Though so immature in nature, she
was entering on that tract of life in which emotional women begin to
suspect that last love may be stronger than first love; and she
would soon, alas, enter on the still more melancholy tract when at
least the vainer ones of her sex shrink from receiving a male
visitor otherwise than with their backs to the window or the blinds
half down.  She reflected on Mrs. Hooper's remark, and said no more
about age.

Just then a telegram was brought up.  It came from her husband, who
had gone down the Channel as far as Budmouth with his friends in the
yacht, and would not be able to get back till next day.

After her light dinner Ella idled about the shore with the children
till dusk, thinking of the yet uncovered photograph in her room,
with a serene sense of something ecstatic to come.  For, with the
subtle luxuriousness of fancy in which this young woman was an
adept, on learning that her husband was to be absent that night she
had refrained from incontinently rushing upstairs and opening the
picture-frame, preferring to reserve the inspection till she could
be alone, and a more romantic tinge be imparted to the occasion by
silence, candles, solemn sea and stars outside, than was afforded by
the garish afternoon sunlight.

The children had been sent to bed, and Ella soon followed, though it
was not yet ten o'clock.  To gratify her passionate curiosity she
now made her preparations, first getting rid of superfluous garments
and putting on her dressing-gown, then arranging a chair in front of
the table and reading several pages of Trewe's tenderest utterances.
Then she fetched the portrait-frame to the light, opened the back,
took out the likeness, and set it up before her.

It was a striking countenance to look upon.  The poet wore a
luxuriant black moustache and imperial, and a slouched hat which
shaded the forehead.  The large dark eyes, described by the
landlady, showed an unlimited capacity for misery; they looked out
from beneath well-shaped brows as if they were reading the universe
in the microcosm of the confronter's face, and were not altogether
overjoyed at what the spectacle portended.

Ella murmured in her lowest, richest, tenderest tone:  'And it's YOU
who've so cruelly eclipsed me these many times!'

As she gazed long at the portrait she fell into thought, till her
eyes filled with tears, and she touched the cardboard with her lips.
Then she laughed with a nervous lightness, and wiped her eyes.

She thought how wicked she was, a woman having a husband and three
children, to let her mind stray to a stranger in this unconscionable
manner.  No, he was not a stranger!  She knew his thoughts and
feelings as well as she knew her own; they were, in fact, the self-
same thoughts and feelings as hers, which her husband distinctly
lacked; perhaps luckily for himself; considering that he had to
provide for family expenses.

'He's nearer my real self, he's more intimate with the real me than
Will is, after all, even though I've never seen him,' she said.

She laid his book and picture on the table at the bedside, and when
she was reclining on the pillow she re-read those of Robert Trewe's
verses which she had marked from time to time as most touching and
true.  Putting these aside, she set up the photograph on its edge
upon the coverlet, and contemplated it as she lay.  Then she scanned
again by the light of the candle the half-obliterated pencillings on
the wall-paper beside her head.  There they were--phrases, couplets,
bouts-rimes, beginnings and middles of lines, ideas in the rough,
like Shelley's scraps, and the least of them so intense, so sweet,
so palpitating, that it seemed as if his very breath, warm and
loving, fanned her cheeks from those walls, walls that had
surrounded his head times and times as they surrounded her own now.
He must often have put up his hand so--with the pencil in it.  Yes,
the writing was sideways, as it would be if executed by one who
extended his arm thus.

These inscribed shapes of the poet's world,


'Forms more real than living man,
Nurslings of immortality,'


were, no doubt, the thoughts and spirit-strivings which had come to
him in the dead of night, when he could let himself go and have no
fear of the frost of criticism.  No doubt they had often been
written up hastily by the light of the moon, the rays of the lamp,
in the blue-grey dawn, in full daylight perhaps never.  And now her
hair was dragging where his arm had lain when he secured the
fugitive fancies; she was sleeping on a poet's lips, immersed in the
very essence of him, permeated by his spirit as by an ether.

While she was dreaming the minutes away thus, a footstep came upon
the stairs, and in a moment she heard her husband's heavy step on
the landing immediately without.

'Ell, where are you?'

What possessed her she could not have described, but, with an
instinctive objection to let her husband know what she had been
doing, she slipped the photograph under the pillow just as he flung
open the door, with the air of a man who had dined not badly.

'O, I beg pardon,' said William Marchmill.  'Have you a headache?  I
am afraid I have disturbed you.'

'No, I've not got a headache,' said she.  'How is it you've come?'

'Well, we found we could get back in very good time after all, and I
didn't want to make another day of it, because of going somewhere
else to-morrow.'

'Shall I come down again?'

'O no.  I'm as tired as a dog.  I've had a good feed, and I shall
turn in straight off.  I want to get out at six o'clock to-morrow if
I can . . . I shan't disturb you by my getting up; it will be long
before you are awake.'  And he came forward into the room.

While her eyes followed his movements, Ella softly pushed the
photograph further out of sight.

'Sure you're not ill?' he asked, bending over her.

'No, only wicked!'

'Never mind that.'  And he stooped and kissed her.

Next morning Marchmill was called at six o'clock; and in waking and
yawning she heard him muttering to himself:  'What the deuce is this
that's been crackling under me so?'  Imagining her asleep he
searched round him and withdrew something.  Through her half-opened
eyes she perceived it to be Mr. Trewe.

'Well, I'm damned!' her husband exclaimed.

'What, dear?' said she.

'O, you are awake?  Ha! ha!'

'What DO you mean?'

'Some bloke's photograph--a friend of our landlady's, I suppose.  I
wonder how it came here; whisked off the table by accident perhaps
when they were making the bed.'

'I was looking at it yesterday, and it must have dropped in then.'

'O, he's a friend of yours?  Bless his picturesque heart!'

Ella's loyalty to the object of her admiration could not endure to
hear him ridiculed.  'He's a clever man!' she said, with a tremor in
her gentle voice which she herself felt to be absurdly uncalled for.

'He is a rising poet--the gentleman who occupied two of these rooms
before we came, though I've never seen him.'

'How do you know, if you've never seen him?'

'Mrs. Hooper told me when she showed me the photograph.'

'O; well, I must up and be off.  I shall be home rather early.
Sorry I can't take you to-day, dear.  Mind the children don't go
getting drowned.'

That day Mrs. Marchmill inquired if Mr. Trewe were likely to call at
any other time.

'Yes,' said Mrs. Hooper.  'He's coming this day week to stay with a
friend near here till you leave.  He'll be sure to call.'

Marchmill did return quite early in the afternoon; and, opening some
letters which had arrived in his absence, declared suddenly that he
and his family would have to leave a week earlier than they had
expected to do--in short, in three days.

'Surely we can stay a week longer?' she pleaded.  'I like it here.'

'I don't.  It is getting rather slow.'

'Then you might leave me and the children!'

'How perverse you are, Ell!  What's the use?  And have to come to
fetch you!  No:  we'll all return together; and we'll make out our
time in North Wales or Brighton a little later on.  Besides, you've
three days longer yet.'

It seemed to be her doom not to meet the man for whose rival talent
she had a despairing admiration, and to whose person she was now
absolutely attached.  Yet she determined to make a last effort; and
having gathered from her landlady that Trewe was living in a lonely
spot not far from the fashionable town on the Island opposite, she
crossed over in the packet from the neighbouring pier the following
afternoon.

What a useless journey it was!  Ella knew but vaguely where the
house stood, and when she fancied she had found it, and ventured to
inquire of a pedestrian if he lived there, the answer returned by
the man was that he did not know.  And if he did live there, how
could she call upon him?  Some women might have the assurance to do
it, but she had not.  How crazy he would think her.  She might have
asked him to call upon her, perhaps; but she had not the courage for
that, either.  She lingered mournfully about the picturesque seaside
eminence till it was time to return to the town and enter the
steamer for recrossing, reaching home for dinner without having been
greatly missed.

At the last moment, unexpectedly enough, her husband said that he
should have no objection to letting her and the children stay on
till the end of the week, since she wished to do so, if she felt
herself able to get home without him.  She concealed the pleasure
this extension of time gave her; and Marchmill went off the next
morning alone.

But the week passed, and Trewe did not call.

On Saturday morning the remaining members of the Marchmill family
departed from the place which had been productive of so much fervour
in her.  The dreary, dreary train; the sun shining in moted beams
upon the hot cushions; the dusty permanent way; the mean rows of
wire--these things were her accompaniment:  while out of the window
the deep blue sea-levels disappeared from her gaze, and with them
her poet's home.  Heavy-hearted, she tried to read, and wept
instead.

Mr. Marchmill was in a thriving way of business, and he and his
family lived in a large new house, which stood in rather extensive
grounds a few miles outside the city wherein he carried on his
trade.  Ella's life was lonely here, as the suburban life is apt to
be, particularly at certain seasons; and she had ample time to
indulge her taste for lyric and elegiac composition.  She had hardly
got back when she encountered a piece by Robert Trewe in the new
number of her favourite magazine, which must have been written
almost immediately before her visit to Solentsea, for it contained
the very couplet she had seen pencilled on the wallpaper by the bed,
and Mrs. Hooper had declared to be recent.  Ella could resist no
longer, but seizing a pen impulsively, wrote to him as a brother-
poet, using the name of John Ivy, congratulating him in her letter
on his triumphant executions in metre and rhythm of thoughts that
moved his soul, as compared with her own brow-beaten efforts in the
same pathetic trade.

To this address there came a response in a few days, little as she
had dared to hope for it--a civil and brief note, in which the young
poet stated that, though he was not well acquainted with Mr. Ivy's
verse, he recalled the name as being one he had seen attached to
some very promising pieces; that he was glad to gain Mr. Ivy's
acquaintance by letter, and should certainly look with much interest
for his productions in the future.

There must have been something juvenile or timid in her own epistle,
as one ostensibly coming from a man, she declared to herself; for
Trewe quite adopted the tone of an elder and superior in this reply.
But what did it matter? he had replied; he had written to her with
his own hand from that very room she knew so well, for he was now
back again in his quarters.

The correspondence thus begun was continued for two months or more,
Ella Marchmill sending him from time to time some that she
considered to be the best of her pieces, which he very kindly
accepted, though he did not say he sedulously read them, nor did he
send her any of his own in return.  Ella would have been more hurt
at this than she was if she had not known that Trewe laboured under
the impression that she was one of his own sex.

Yet the situation was unsatisfactory.  A flattering little voice
told her that, were he only to see her, matters would be otherwise.
No doubt she would have helped on this by making a frank confession
of womanhood, to begin with, if something had not happened, to her
delight, to render it unnecessary.  A friend of her husband's, the
editor of the most important newspaper in the city and county, who
was dining with them one day, observed during their conversation
about the poet that his (the editor's) brother the landscape-painter
was a friend of Mr. Trewe's, and that the two men were at that very
moment in Wales together.

Ella was slightly acquainted with the editor's brother.  The next
morning down she sat and wrote, inviting him to stay at her house
for a short time on his way back, and requesting him to bring with
him, if practicable, his companion Mr. Trewe, whose acquaintance she
was anxious to make.  The answer arrived after some few days.  Her
correspondent and his friend Trewe would have much satisfaction in
accepting her invitation on their way southward, which would be on
such and such a day in the following week.

Ella was blithe and buoyant.  Her scheme had succeeded; her beloved
though as yet unseen one was coming.  "Behold, he standeth behind
our wall; he looked forth at the windows, showing himself through
the lattice," she thought ecstatically.  "And, lo, the winter is
past, the rain is over and gone, the flowers appear on the earth,
the time of the singing of birds is come, and the voice of the
turtle is heard in our land."

But it was necessary to consider the details of lodging and feeding
him.  This she did most solicitously, and awaited the pregnant day
and hour.

It was about five in the afternoon when she heard a ring at the door
and the editor's brother's voice in the hall.  Poetess as she was,
or as she thought herself, she had not been too sublime that day to
dress with infinite trouble in a fashionable robe of rich material,
having a faint resemblance to the chiton of the Greeks, a style just
then in vogue among ladies of an artistic and romantic turn, which
had been obtained by Ella of her Bond Street dressmaker when she was
last in London.  Her visitor entered the drawing-room.  She looked
towards his rear; nobody else came through the door.  Where, in the
name of the God of Love, was Robert Trewe?

'O, I'm sorry,' said the painter, after their introductory words had
been spoken.  'Trewe is a curious fellow, you know, Mrs. Marchmill.
He said he'd come; then he said he couldn't.  He's rather dusty.
We've been doing a few miles with knapsacks, you know; and he wanted
to get on home.'

'He--he's not coming?'

'He's not; and he asked me to make his apologies.'

'When did you p-p-part from him?' she asked, her nether lip starting
off quivering so much that it was like a tremolo-stop opened in her
speech.  She longed to run away from this dreadful bore and cry her
eyes out.

'Just now, in the turnpike road yonder there.'

'What! he has actually gone past my gates?'

'Yes.  When we got to them--handsome gates they are, too, the finest
bit of modern wrought-iron work I have seen--when we came to them we
stopped, talking there a little while, and then he wished me good-
bye and went on.  The truth is, he's a little bit depressed just
now, and doesn't want to see anybody.  He's a very good fellow, and
a warm friend, but a little uncertain and gloomy sometimes; he
thinks too much of things.  His poetry is rather too erotic and
passionate, you know, for some tastes; and he has just come in for a
terrible slating from the -- Review that was published yesterday; he
saw a copy of it at the station by accident.  Perhaps you've read
it?'

'No.'

'So much the better.  O, it is not worth thinking of; just one of
those articles written to order, to please the narrow-minded set of
subscribers upon whom the circulation depends.  But he's upset by
it.  He says it is the misrepresentation that hurts him so; that,
though he can stand a fair attack, he can't stand lies that he's
powerless to refute and stop from spreading.  That's just Trewe's
weak point.  He lives so much by himself that these things affect
him much more than they would if he were in the bustle of
fashionable or commercial life.  So he wouldn't come here, making
the excuse that it all looked so new and monied--if you'll pardon--'

'But--he must have known--there was sympathy here!  Has he never
said anything about getting letters from this address?'

'Yes, yes, he has, from John Ivy--perhaps a relative of yours, he
thought, visiting here at the time?'

'Did he--like Ivy, did he say?'

'Well, I don't know that he took any great interest in Ivy.'

'Or in his poems?'

'Or in his poems--so far as I know, that is.'

Robert Trewe took no interest in her house, in her poems, or in
their writer.  As soon as she could get away she went into the
nursery and tried to let off her emotion by unnecessarily kissing
the children, till she had a sudden sense of disgust at being
reminded how plain-looking they were, like their father.

The obtuse and single-minded landscape-painter never once perceived
from her conversation that it was only Trewe she wanted, and not
himself.  He made the best of his visit, seeming to enjoy the
society of Ella's husband, who also took a great fancy to him, and
showed him everywhere about the neighbourhood, neither of them
noticing Ella's mood.

The painter had been gone only a day or two when, while sitting
upstairs alone one morning, she glanced over the London paper just
arrived, and read the following paragraph:-


'SUICIDE OF A POET

'Mr. Robert Trewe, who has been favourably known for some years as
one of our rising lyrists, committed suicide at his lodgings at
Solentsea on Saturday evening last by shooting himself in the right
temple with a revolver.  Readers hardly need to be reminded that Mr.
Trewe has recently attracted the attention of a much wider public
than had hitherto known him, by his new volume of verse, mostly of
an impassioned kind, entitled "Lyrics to a Woman Unknown," which has
been already favourably noticed in these pages for the extraordinary
gamut of feeling it traverses, and which has been made the subject
of a severe, if not ferocious, criticism in the -- Review.  It is
supposed, though not certainly known, that the article may have
partially conduced to the sad act, as a copy of the review in
question was found on his writing-table; and he has been observed to
be in a somewhat depressed state of mind since the critique
appeared.'


Then came the report of the inquest, at which the following letter
was read, it having been addressed to a friend at a distance:-


'DEAR -,--Before these lines reach your hands I shall be delivered
from the inconveniences of seeing, hearing, and knowing more of the
things around me.  I will not trouble you by giving my reasons for
the step I have taken, though I can assure you they were sound and
logical.  Perhaps had I been blessed with a mother, or a sister, or
a female friend of another sort tenderly devoted to me, I might have
thought it worth while to continue my present existence.  I have
long dreamt of such an unattainable creature, as you know, and she,
this undiscoverable, elusive one, inspired my last volume; the
imaginary woman alone, for, in spite of what has been said in some
quarters, there is no real woman behind the title.  She has
continued to the last unrevealed, unmet, unwon.  I think it
desirable to mention this in order that no blame may attach to any
real woman as having been the cause of my decease by cruel or
cavalier treatment of me.  Tell my landlady that I am sorry to have
caused her this unpleasantness; but my occupancy of the rooms will
soon be forgotten.  There are ample funds in my name at the bank to
pay all expenses.  R. TREWE.'


Ella sat for a while as if stunned, then rushed into the adjoining
chamber and flung herself upon her face on the bed.

Her grief and distraction shook her to pieces; and she lay in this
frenzy of sorrow for more than an hour.  Broken words came every now
and then from her quivering lips:  'O, if he had only known of me--
known of me--me! . . . O, if I had only once met him--only once; and
put my hand upon his hot forehead--kissed him--let him know how I
loved him--that I would have suffered shame and scorn, would have
lived and died, for him!  Perhaps it would have saved his dear life!
. . . But no--it was not allowed!  God is a jealous God; and that
happiness was not for him and me!'

All possibilities were over; the meeting was stultified.  Yet it was
almost visible to her in her fantasy even now, though it could never
be substantiated -


'The hour which might have been, yet might not be,
Which man's and woman's heart conceived and bore,
Yet whereof life was barren.'


She wrote to the landlady at Solentsea in the third person, in as
subdued a style as she could command, enclosing a postal order for a
sovereign, and informing Mrs. Hooper that Mrs. Marchmill had seen in
the papers the sad account of the poet's death, and having been, as
Mrs. Hooper was aware, much interested in Mr. Trewe during her stay
at Coburg House, she would be obliged if Mrs. Hooper could obtain a
small portion of his hair before his coffin was closed down, and
send it her as a memorial of him, as also the photograph that was in
the frame.

By the return-post a letter arrived containing what had been
requested.  Ella wept over the portrait and secured it in her
private drawer; the lock of hair she tied with white ribbon and put
in her bosom, whence she drew it and kissed it every now and then in
some unobserved nook.

'What's the matter?' said her husband, looking up from his newspaper
on one of these occasions.  'Crying over something?  A lock of hair?
Whose is it?'

'He's dead!' she murmured.

'Who?'

'I don't want to tell you, Will, just now, unless you insist!' she
said, a sob hanging heavy in her voice.

'O, all right.'

'Do you mind my refusing?  I will tell you some day.'

'It doesn't matter in the least, of course.'

He walked away whistling a few bars of no tune in particular; and
when he had got down to his factory in the city the subject came
into Marchmill's head again.

He, too, was aware that a suicide had taken place recently at the
house they had occupied at Solentsea.  Having seen the volume of
poems in his wife's hand of late, and heard fragments of the
landlady's conversation about Trewe when they were her tenants, he
all at once said to himself; 'Why of course it's he!  How the devil
did she get to know him?  What sly animals women are!'

Then he placidly dismissed the matter, and went on with his daily
affairs.  By this time Ella at home had come to a determination.
Mrs. Hooper, in sending the hair and photograph, had informed her of
the day of the funeral; and as the morning and noon wore on an
overpowering wish to know where they were laying him took possession
of the sympathetic woman.  Caring very little now what her husband
or any one else might think of her eccentricities; she wrote
Marchmill a brief note, stating that she was called away for the
afternoon and evening, but would return on the following morning.
This she left on his desk, and having given the same information to
the servants, went out of the house on foot.

When Mr. Marchmill reached home early in the afternoon the servants
looked anxious.  The nurse took him privately aside, and hinted that
her mistress's sadness during the past few days had been such that
she feared she had gone out to drown herself.  Marchmill reflected.
Upon the whole he thought that she had not done that.  Without
saying whither he was bound he also started off, telling them not to
sit up for him.  He drove to the railway-station, and took a ticket
for Solentsea.

It was dark when he reached the place, though he had come by a fast
train, and he knew that if his wife had preceded him thither it
could only have been by a slower train, arriving not a great while
before his own.  The season at Solentsea was now past:  the parade
was gloomy, and the flys were few and cheap.  He asked the way to
the Cemetery, and soon reached it.  The gate was locked, but the
keeper let him in, declaring, however, that there was nobody within
the precincts.  Although it was not late, the autumnal darkness had
now become intense; and he found some difficulty in keeping to the
serpentine path which led to the quarter where, as the man had told
him, the one or two interments for the day had taken place.  He
stepped upon the grass, and, stumbling over some pegs, stooped now
and then to discern if possible a figure against the sky.

He could see none; but lighting on a spot where the soil was
trodden, beheld a crouching object beside a newly made grave.  She
heard him, and sprang up.

'Ell, how silly this is!' he said indignantly.  'Running away from
home--I never heard such a thing!  Of course I am not jealous of
this unfortunate man; but it is too ridiculous that you, a married
woman with three children and a fourth coming, should go losing your
head like this over a dead lover! . . . Do you know you were locked
in?  You might not have been able to get out all night.'

She did not answer.

'I hope it didn't go far between you and him, for your own sake.'

'Don't insult me, Will.'

'Mind, I won't have any more of this sort of thing; do you hear?'

'Very well,' she said.

He drew her arm within his own, and conducted her out of the
Cemetery.  It was impossible to get back that night; and not wishing
to be recognized in their present sorry condition, he took her to a
miserable little coffee-house close to the station, whence they
departed early in the morning, travelling almost without speaking,
under the sense that it was one of those dreary situations occurring
in married life which words could not mend, and reaching their own
door at noon.

The months passed, and neither of the twain ever ventured to start a
conversation upon this episode.  Ella seemed to be only too
frequently in a sad and listless mood, which might almost have been
called pining.  The time was approaching when she would have to
undergo the stress of childbirth for a fourth time, and that
apparently did not tend to raise her spirits.

'I don't think I shall get over it this time!' she said one day.

'Pooh! what childish foreboding!  Why shouldn't it be as well now as
ever?'

She shook her head.  'I feel almost sure I am going to die; and I
should be glad, if it were not for Nelly, and Frank, and Tiny.'

'And me!'

'You'll soon find somebody to fill my place,' she murmured, with a
sad smile.  'And you'll have a perfect right to; I assure you of
that.'

'Ell, you are not thinking still about that--poetical friend of
yours?'

She neither admitted nor denied the charge.  'I am not going to get
over my illness this time,' she reiterated.  'Something tells me I
shan't.'

This view of things was rather a bad beginning, as it usually is;
and, in fact, six weeks later, in the month of May, she was lying in
her room, pulseless and bloodless, with hardly strength enough left
to follow up one feeble breath with another, the infant for whose
unnecessary life she was slowly parting with her own being fat and
well.  Just before her death she spoke to Marchmill softly:-

'Will, I want to confess to you the entire circumstances of that--
about you know what--that time we visited Solentsea.  I can't tell
what possessed me--how I could forget you so, my husband!  But I had
got into a morbid state:  I thought you had been unkind; that you
had neglected me; that you weren't up to my intellectual level,
while he was, and far above it.  I wanted a fuller appreciator,
perhaps, rather than another lover--'

She could get no further then for very exhaustion; and she went off
in sudden collapse a few hours later, without having said anything
more to her husband on the subject of her love for the poet.
William Marchmill, in truth, like most husbands of several years'
standing, was little disturbed by retrospective jealousies, and had
not shown the least anxiety to press her for confessions concerning
a man dead and gone beyond any power of inconveniencing him more.

But when she had been buried a couple of years it chanced one day
that, in turning over some forgotten papers that he wished to
destroy before his second wife entered the house, he lighted on a
lock of hair in an envelope, with the photograph of the deceased
poet, a date being written on the back in his late wife's hand.  It
was that of the time they spent at Solentsea.

Marchmill looked long and musingly at the hair and portrait, for
something struck him.  Fetching the little boy who had been the
death of his mother, now a noisy toddler, he took him on his knee,
held the lock of hair against the child's head, and set up the
photograph on the table behind, so that he could closely compare the
features each countenance presented.  There were undoubtedly strong
traces of resemblance; the dreamy and peculiar expression of the
poet's face sat, as the transmitted idea, upon the child's, and the
hair was of the same hue.

'I'm damned if I didn't think so!' murmured Marchmill.  'Then she
DID play me false with that fellow at the lodgings!  Let me see:
the dates--the second week in August . . . the third week in May . .
. Yes . . . yes . . . Get away, you poor little brat!  You are
nothing to me!'

1893.




THE THREE STRANGERS




Among the few features of agricultural England which retain an
appearance but little modified by the lapse of centuries, may be
reckoned the high, grassy and furzy downs, coombs, or ewe-leases, as
they are indifferently called, that fill a large area of certain
counties in the south and south-west.  If any mark of human
occupation is met with hereon, it usually takes the form of the
solitary cottage of some shepherd.

Fifty years ago such a lonely cottage stood on such a down, and may
possibly be standing there now.  In spite of its loneliness,
however, the spot, by actual measurement, was not more than five
miles from a county-town.  Yet that affected it little.  Five miles
of irregular upland, during the long inimical seasons, with their
sleets, snows, rains, and mists, afford withdrawing space enough to
isolate a Timon or a Nebuchadnezzar; much less, in fair weather, to
please that less repellent tribe, the poets, philosophers, artists,
and others who 'conceive and meditate of pleasant things.'

Some old earthen camp or barrow, some clump of trees, at least some
starved fragment of ancient hedge is usually taken advantage of in
the erection of these forlorn dwellings.  But, in the present case,
such a kind of shelter had been disregarded.  Higher Crowstairs, as
the house was called, stood quite detached and undefended.  The only
reason for its precise situation seemed to be the crossing of two
footpaths at right angles hard by, which may have crossed there and
thus for a good five hundred years.  Hence the house was exposed to
the elements on all sides.  But, though the wind up here blew
unmistakably when it did blow, and the rain hit hard whenever it
fell, the various weathers of the winter season were not quite so
formidable on the coomb as they were imagined to be by dwellers on
low ground.  The raw rimes were not so pernicious as in the hollows,
and the frosts were scarcely so severe.  When the shepherd and his
family who tenanted the house were pitied for their sufferings from
the exposure, they said that upon the whole they were less
inconvenienced by 'wuzzes and flames' (hoarses and phlegms) than
when they had lived by the stream of a snug neighbouring valley.

The night of March 28, 182-, was precisely one of the nights that
were wont to call forth these expressions of commiseration.  The
level rainstorm smote walls, slopes, and hedges like the clothyard
shafts of Senlac and Crecy.  Such sheep and outdoor animals as had
no shelter stood with their buttocks to the winds; while the tails
of little birds trying to roost on some scraggy thorn were blown
inside-out like umbrellas.  The gable-end of the cottage was stained
with wet, and the eavesdroppings flapped against the wall.  Yet
never was commiseration for the shepherd more misplaced.  For that
cheerful rustic was entertaining a large party in glorification of
the christening of his second girl.

The guests had arrived before the rain began to fall, and they were
all now assembled in the chief or living room of the dwelling.  A
glance into the apartment at eight o'clock on this eventful evening
would have resulted in the opinion that it was as cosy and
comfortable a nook as could be wished for in boisterous weather.
The calling of its inhabitant was proclaimed by a number of highly-
polished sheep-crooks without stems that were hung ornamentally over
the fireplace, the curl of each shining crook varying from the
antiquated type engraved in the patriarchal pictures of old family
Bibles to the most approved fashion of the last local sheep-fair.
The room was lighted by half-a-dozen candles, having wicks only a
trifle smaller than the grease which enveloped them, in candlesticks
that were never used but at high-days, holy-days, and family feasts.
The lights were scattered about the room, two of them standing on
the chimney-piece.  This position of candles was in itself
significant.  Candles on the chimney-piece always meant a party.

On the hearth, in front of a back-brand to give substance, blazed a
fire of thorns, that crackled 'like the laughter of the fool.'

Nineteen persons were gathered here.  Of these, five women, wearing
gowns of various bright hues, sat in chairs along the wall; girls
shy and not shy filled the window-bench; four men, including Charley
Jake the hedge-carpenter, Elijah New the parish-clerk, and John
Pitcher, a neighbouring dairyman, the shepherd's father-in-law,
lolled in the settle; a young man and maid, who were blushing over
tentative pourparlers on a life-companionship, sat beneath the
corner-cupboard; and an elderly engaged man of fifty or upward moved
restlessly about from spots where his betrothed was not to the spot
where she was.  Enjoyment was pretty general, and so much the more
prevailed in being unhampered by conventional restrictions.
Absolute confidence in each other's good opinion begat perfect ease,
while the finishing stroke of manner, amounting to a truly princely
serenity, was lent to the majority by the absence of any expression
or trait denoting that they wished to get on in the world, enlarge
their minds, or do any eclipsing thing whatever--which nowadays so
generally nips the bloom and bonhomie of all except the two extremes
of the social scale.

Shepherd Fennel had married well, his wife being a dairyman's
daughter from a vale at a distance, who brought fifty guineas in her
pocket--and kept them there, till they should be required for
ministering to the needs of a coming family.  This frugal woman had
been somewhat exercised as to the character that should be given to
the gathering.  A sit-still party had its advantages; but an
undisturbed position of ease in chairs and settles was apt to lead
on the men to such an unconscionable deal of toping that they would
sometimes fairly drink the house dry.  A dancing-party was the
alternative; but this, while avoiding the foregoing objection on the
score of good drink, had a counterbalancing disadvantage in the
matter of good victuals, the ravenous appetites engendered by the
exercise causing immense havoc in the buttery.  Shepherdess Fennel
fell back upon the intermediate plan of mingling short dances with
short periods of talk and singing, so as to hinder any ungovernable
rage in either.  But this scheme was entirely confined to her own
gentle mind:  the shepherd himself was in the mood to exhibit the
most reckless phases of hospitality.

The fiddler was a boy of those parts, about twelve years of age, who
had a wonderful dexterity in jigs and reels, though his fingers were
so small and short as to necessitate a constant shifting for the
high notes, from which he scrambled back to the first position with
sounds not of unmixed purity of tone.  At seven the shrill tweedle-
dee of this youngster had begun, accompanied by a booming ground-
bass from Elijah New, the parish-clerk, who had thoughtfully brought
with him his favourite musical instrument, the serpent.  Dancing was
instantaneous, Mrs. Fennel privately enjoining the players on no
account to let the dance exceed the length of a quarter of an hour.

But Elijah and the boy, in the excitement of their position, quite
forgot the injunction.  Moreover, Oliver Giles, a man of seventeen,
one of the dancers, who was enamoured of his partner, a fair girl of
thirty-three rolling years, had recklessly handed a new crown-piece
to the musicians, as a bribe to keep going as long as they had
muscle and wind.  Mrs. Fennel, seeing the steam begin to generate on
the countenances of her guests, crossed over and touched the
fiddler's elbow and put her hand on the serpent's mouth.  But they
took no notice, and fearing she might lose her character of genial
hostess if she were to interfere too markedly, she retired and sat
down helpless.  And so the dance whizzed on with cumulative fury,
the performers moving in their planet-like courses, direct and
retrograde, from apogee to perigee, till the hand of the well-kicked
clock at the bottom of the room had travelled over the circumference
of an hour.

While these cheerful events were in course of enactment within
Fennel's pastoral dwelling, an incident having considerable bearing
on the party had occurred in the gloomy night without.  Mrs.
Fennel's concern about the growing fierceness of the dance
corresponded in point of time with the ascent of a human figure to
the solitary hill of Higher Crowstairs from the direction of the
distant town.  This personage strode on through the rain without a
pause, following the little-worn path which, further on in its
course, skirted the shepherd's cottage.

It was nearly the time of full moon, and on this account, though the
sky was lined with a uniform sheet of dripping cloud, ordinary
objects out of doors were readily visible.  The sad wan light
revealed the lonely pedestrian to be a man of supple frame; his gait
suggested that he had somewhat passed the period of perfect and
instinctive agility, though not so far as to be otherwise than rapid
of motion when occasion required.  At a rough guess, he might have
been about forty years of age.  He appeared tall, but a recruiting
sergeant, or other person accustomed to the judging of men's heights
by the eye, would have discerned that this was chiefly owing to his
gauntness, and that he was not more than five-feet-eight or nine.

Notwithstanding the regularity of his tread, there was caution in
it, as in that of one who mentally feels his way; and despite the
fact that it was not a black coat nor a dark garment of any sort
that he wore, there was something about him which suggested that he
naturally belonged to the black-coated tribes of men.  His clothes
were of fustian, and his boots hobnailed, yet in his progress he
showed not the mud-accustomed bearing of hobnailed and fustianed
peasantry.

By the time that he had arrived abreast of the shepherd's premises
the rain came down, or rather came along, with yet more determined
violence.  The outskirts of the little settlement partially broke
the force of wind and rain, and this induced him to stand still.
The most salient of the shepherd's domestic erections was an empty
sty at the forward corner of his hedgeless garden, for in these
latitudes the principle of masking the homelier features of your
establishment by a conventional frontage was unknown.  The
traveller's eye was attracted to this small building by the pallid
shine of the wet slates that covered it.  He turned aside, and,
finding it empty, stood under the pent-roof for shelter.

While he stood, the boom of the serpent within the adjacent house,
and the lesser strains of the fiddler, reached the spot as an
accompaniment to the surging hiss of the flying rain on the sod, its
louder beating on the cabbage-leaves of the garden, on the eight or
ten beehives just discernible by the path, and its dripping from the
eaves into a row of buckets and pans that had been placed under the
walls of the cottage.  For at Higher Crowstairs, as at all such
elevated domiciles, the grand difficulty of housekeeping was an
insufficiency of water; and a casual rainfall was utilized by
turning out, as catchers, every utensil that the house contained.
Some queer stories might be told of the contrivances for economy in
suds and dish-waters that are absolutely necessitated in upland
habitations during the droughts of summer.  But at this season there
were no such exigencies; a mere acceptance of what the skies
bestowed was sufficient for an abundant store.

At last the notes of the serpent ceased and the house was silent.
This cessation of activity aroused the solitary pedestrian from the
reverie into which he had lapsed, and, emerging from the shed, with
an apparently new intention, he walked up the path to the house-
door.  Arrived here, his first act was to kneel down on a large
stone beside the row of vessels, and to drink a copious draught from
one of them.  Having quenched his thirst he rose and lifted his hand
to knock, but paused with his eye upon the panel.  Since the dark
surface of the wood revealed absolutely nothing, it was evident that
he must be mentally looking through the door, as if he wished to
measure thereby all the possibilities that a house of this sort
might include, and how they might bear upon the question of his
entry.

In his indecision he turned and surveyed the scene around.  Not a
soul was anywhere visible.  The garden-path stretched downward from
his feet, gleaming like the track of a snail; the roof of the little
well (mostly dry), the well-cover, the top rail of the garden-gate,
were varnished with the same dull liquid glaze; while, far away in
the vale, a faint whiteness of more than usual extent showed that
the rivers were high in the meads.  Beyond all this winked a few
bleared lamplights through the beating drops--lights that denoted
the situation of the county-town from which he had appeared to come.
The absence of all notes of life in that direction seemed to clinch
his intentions, and he knocked at the door.

Within, a desultory chat had taken the place of movement and musical
sound.  The hedge-carpenter was suggesting a song to the company,
which nobody just then was inclined to undertake, so that the knock
afforded a not unwelcome diversion.

'Walk in!' said the shepherd promptly.

The latch clicked upward, and out of the night our pedestrian
appeared upon the door-mat.  The shepherd arose, snuffed two of the
nearest candles, and turned to look at him.

Their light disclosed that the stranger was dark in complexion and
not unprepossessing as to feature.  His hat, which for a moment he
did not remove, hung low over his eyes, without concealing that they
were large, open, and determined, moving with a flash rather than a
glance round the room.  He seemed pleased with his survey, and,
baring his shaggy head, said, in a rich deep voice, 'The rain is so
heavy, friends, that I ask leave to come in and rest awhile.'

'To be sure, stranger,' said the shepherd.  'And faith, you've been
lucky in choosing your time, for we are having a bit of a fling for
a glad cause--though, to be sure, a man could hardly wish that glad
cause to happen more than once a year.'

'Nor less,' spoke up a woman.  'For 'tis best to get your family
over and done with, as soon as you can, so as to be all the earlier
out of the fag o't.'

'And what may be this glad cause?' asked the stranger.

'A birth and christening,' said the shepherd.

The stranger hoped his host might not be made unhappy either by too
many or too few of such episodes, and being invited by a gesture to
a pull at the mug, he readily acquiesced.  His manner, which, before
entering, had been so dubious, was now altogether that of a careless
and candid man.

'Late to be traipsing athwart this coomb--hey?' said the engaged man
of fifty.

'Late it is, master, as you say.--I'll take a seat in the chimney-
corner, if you have nothing to urge against it, ma'am; for I am a
little moist on the side that was next the rain.'

Mrs. Shepherd Fennel assented, and made room for the self-invited
comer, who, having got completely inside the chimney-corner,
stretched out his legs and his arms with the expansiveness of a
person quite at home.

'Yes, I am rather cracked in the vamp,' he said freely, seeing that
the eyes of the shepherd's wife fell upon his boots, 'and I am not
well fitted either.  I have had some rough times lately, and have
been forced to pick up what I can get in the way of wearing, but I
must find a suit better fit for working-days when I reach home.'

'One of hereabouts?' she inquired.

'Not quite that--further up the country.'

'I thought so.  And so be I; and by your tongue you come from my
neighbourhood.'

'But you would hardly have heard of me,' he said quickly.  'My time
would be long before yours, ma'am, you see.'

This testimony to the youthfulness of his hostess had the effect of
stopping her cross-examination.

'There is only one thing more wanted to make me happy,' continued
the new-comer.  'And that is a little baccy, which I am sorry to say
I am out of.'

'I'll fill your pipe,' said the shepherd.

'I must ask you to lend me a pipe likewise.'

'A smoker, and no pipe about 'ee?'

'I have dropped it somewhere on the road.'

The shepherd filled and handed him a new clay pipe, saying, as he
did so, 'Hand me your baccy-box--I'll fill that too, now I am about
it.'

The man went through the movement of searching his pockets.

'Lost that too?' said his entertainer, with some surprise.

'I am afraid so,' said the man with some confusion.  'Give it to me
in a screw of paper.'  Lighting his pipe at the candle with a
suction that drew the whole flame into the bowl, he resettled
himself in the corner and bent his looks upon the faint steam from
his damp legs, as if he wished to say no more.

Meanwhile the general body of guests had been taking little notice
of this visitor by reason of an absorbing discussion in which they
were engaged with the band about a tune for the next dance.  The
matter being settled, they were about to stand up when an
interruption came in the shape of another knock at the door.

At sound of the same the man in the chimney-corner took up the poker
and began stirring the brands as if doing it thoroughly were the one
aim of his existence; and a second time the shepherd said, 'Walk
in!'  In a moment another man stood upon the straw-woven door-mat.
He too was a stranger.

This individual was one of a type radically different from the
first.  There was more of the commonplace in his manner, and a

certain jovial cosmopolitanism sat upon his features.  He was
several years older than the first arrival, his hair being slightly
frosted, his eyebrows bristly, and his whiskers cut back from his
cheeks.  His face was rather full and flabby, and yet it was not
altogether a face without power.  A few grog-blossoms marked the
neighbourhood of his nose.  He flung back his long drab greatcoat,
revealing that beneath it he wore a suit of cinder-gray shade
throughout, large heavy seals, of some metal or other that would
take a polish, dangling from his fob as his only personal ornament.
Shaking the water-drops from his low-crowned glazed hat, he said, 'I
must ask for a few minutes' shelter, comrades, or I shall be wetted
to my skin before I get to Casterbridge.'

'Make yourself at home, master,' said the shepherd, perhaps a trifle
less heartily than on the first occasion.  Not that Fennel had the
least tinge of niggardliness in his composition; but the room was
far from large, spare chairs were not numerous, and damp companions
were not altogether desirable at close quarters for the women and
girls in their bright-coloured gowns.

However, the second comer, after taking off his greatcoat, and
hanging his hat on a nail in one of the ceiling-beams as if he had
been specially invited to put it there, advanced and sat down at the
table.  This had been pushed so closely into the chimney-corner, to
give all available room to the dancers, that its inner edge grazed
the elbow of the man who had ensconced himself by the fire; and thus
the two strangers were brought into close companionship.  They
nodded to each other by way of breaking the ice of unacquaintance,
and the first stranger handed his neighbour the family mug--a huge
vessel of brown ware, having its upper edge worn away like a
threshold by the rub of whole generations of thirsty lips that had
gone the way of all flesh, and bearing the following inscription
burnt upon its rotund side in yellow letters


THERE IS NO FUN
UNTiLL i CUM.


The other man, nothing loth, raised the mug to his lips, and drank
on, and on, and on--till a curious blueness overspread the
countenance of the shepherd's wife, who had regarded with no little
surprise the first stranger's free offer to the second of what did
not belong to him to dispense.

'I knew it!' said the toper to the shepherd with much satisfaction.
'When I walked up your garden before coming in, and saw the hives
all of a row, I said to myself; "Where there's bees there's honey,
and where there's honey there's mead."  But mead of such a truly
comfortable sort as this I really didn't expect to meet in my older
days.'  He took yet another pull at the mug, till it assumed an
ominous elevation.

'Glad you enjoy it!' said the shepherd warmly.

'It is goodish mead,' assented Mrs. Fennel, with an absence of
enthusiasm which seemed to say that it was possible to buy praise
for one's cellar at too heavy a price.  'It is trouble enough to
make--and really I hardly think we shall make any more.  For honey
sells well, and we ourselves can make shift with a drop o' small
mead and metheglin for common use from the comb-washings."

'O, but you'll never have the heart!' reproachfully cried the
stranger in cinder-gray, after taking up the mug a third time and
setting it down empty.  'I love mead, when 'tis old like this, as I
love to go to church o' Sundays, or to relieve the needy any day of
the week.'

'Ha, ha, ha!' said the man in the chimney-corner, who, in spite of
the taciturnity induced by the pipe of tobacco, could not or would
not refrain from this slight testimony to his comrade's humour.

Now the old mead of those days, brewed of the purest first-year or
maiden honey, four pounds to the gallon--with its due complement of
white of eggs, cinnamon, ginger, cloves, mace, rosemary, yeast, and
processes of working, bottling, and cellaring--tasted remarkably
strong; but it did not taste so strong as it actually was.  Hence,
presently, the stranger in cinder-gray at the table, moved by its
creeping influence, unbuttoned his waistcoat, threw himself back in
his chair, spread his legs, and made his presence felt in various
ways.

'Well, well, as I say,' he resumed, 'I am going to Casterbridge, and
to Casterbridge I must go.  I should have been almost there by this
time; but the rain drove me into your dwelling, and I'm not sorry
for it.'

'You don't live in Casterbridge?' said the shepherd.

'Not as yet; though I shortly mean to move there.'

'Going to set up in trade, perhaps?'

'No, no,' said the shepherd's wife.  'It is easy to see that the
gentleman is rich, and don't want to work at anything.'

The cinder-gray stranger paused, as if to consider whether he would
accept that definition of himself.  He presently rejected it by
answering, 'Rich is not quite the word for me, dame.  I do work, and
I must work.  And even if I only get to Casterbridge by midnight I
must begin work there at eight to-morrow morning.  Yes, het or wet,
blow or snow, famine or sword, my day's work to-morrow must be
done.'

'Poor man!  Then, in spite o' seeming, you be worse off than we?'
replied the shepherd's wife.

''Tis the nature of my trade, men and maidens.  'Tis the nature of
my trade more than my poverty . . . But really and truly I must up
and off, or I shan't get a lodging in the town.'  However, the
speaker did not move, and directly added, 'There's time for one more
draught of friendship before I go; and I'd perform it at once if the
mug were not dry.'

'Here's a mug o' small,' said Mrs. Fennel.  'Small, we call it,
though to be sure 'tis only the first wash o' the combs.'

'No,' said the stranger disdainfully.  'I won't spoil your first
kindness by partaking o' your second.'

'Certainly not,' broke in Fennel.  'We don't increase and multiply
every day, and I'll fill the mug again.'  He went away to the dark
place under the stairs where the barrel stood.  The shepherdess
followed him.

'Why should you do this?' she said reproachfully, as soon as they
were alone.  'He's emptied it once, though it held enough for ten
people; and now he's not contented wi' the small, but must needs
call for more o' the strong!  And a stranger unbeknown to any of us.
For my part, I don't like the look o' the man at all.'

'But he's in the house, my honey; and 'tis a wet night, and a
christening.  Daze it, what's a cup of mead more or less?  There'll
be plenty more next bee-burning.'

'Very well--this time, then,' she answered, looking wistfully at the
barrel.  'But what is the man's calling, and where is he one of;
that he should come in and join us like this?'

'I don't know.  I'll ask him again.'

The catastrophe of having the mug drained dry at one pull by the
stranger in cinder-gray was effectually guarded against this time by
Mrs. Fennel.  She poured out his allowance in a small cup, keeping
the large one at a discreet distance from him.  When he had tossed
off his portion the shepherd renewed his inquiry about the
stranger's occupation.

The latter did not immediately reply, and the man in the chimney-
corner, with sudden demonstrativeness, said, 'Anybody may know my
trade--I'm a wheelwright.'

'A very good trade for these parts,' said the shepherd.

'And anybody may know mine--if they've the sense to find it out,'
said the stranger in cinder-gray.

'You may generally tell what a man is by his claws,' observed the
hedge-carpenter, looking at his own hands.  'My fingers be as full
of thorns as an old pin-cushion is of pins.'

The hands of the man in the chimney-corner instinctively sought the
shade, and he gazed into the fire as he resumed his pipe.  The man
at the table took up the hedge-carpenter's remark, and added
smartly, 'True; but the oddity of my trade is that, instead of
setting a mark upon me, it sets a mark upon my customers.'

No observation being offered by anybody in elucidation of this
enigma, the shepherd's wife once more called for a song.  The same
obstacles presented themselves as at the former time--one had no
voice, another had forgotten the first verse.  The stranger at the
table, whose soul had now risen to a good working temperature,
relieved the difficulty by exclaiming that, to start the company, he
would sing himself.  Thrusting one thumb into the arm-hole of his
waistcoat, he waved the other hand in the air, and, with an
extemporizing gaze at the shining sheep-crooks above the
mantelpiece, began:-


'O my trade it is the rarest one,
Simple shepherds all -
My trade is a sight to see;
For my customers I tie, and take them up on high,
And waft 'em to a far countree!'


The room was silent when he had finished the verse--with one
exception, that of the man in the chimney-corner, who, at the
singer's word, 'Chorus! 'joined him in a deep bass voice of musical
relish -


'And waft 'em to a far countree!'


Oliver Giles, John Pitcher the dairyman, the parish-clerk, the
engaged man of fifty, the row of young women against the wall,
seemed lost in thought not of the gayest kind.  The shepherd looked
meditatively on the ground, the shepherdess gazed keenly at the
singer, and with some suspicion; she was doubting whether this
stranger were merely singing an old song from recollection, or was
composing one there and then for the occasion.  All were as
perplexed at the obscure revelation as the guests at Belshazzar's
Feast, except the man in the chimney-corner, who quietly said,
'Second verse, stranger,' and smoked on.

The singer thoroughly moistened himself from his lips inwards, and
went on with the next stanza as requested:-


'My tools are but common ones,
Simple shepherds all -
My tools are no sight to see:
A little hempen string, and a post whereon to swing,
Are implements enough for me!'


Shepherd Fennel glanced round.  There was no longer any doubt that
the stranger was answering his question rhythmically.  The guests
one and all started back with suppressed exclamations.  The young
woman engaged to the man of fifty fainted half-way, and would have
proceeded, but finding him wanting in alacrity for catching her she
sat down trembling.

'O, he's the--!' whispered the people in the background, mentioning
the name of an ominous public officer.  'He's come to do it!  'Tis
to be at Casterbridge jail to-morrow--the man for sheep-stealing--
the poor clock-maker we heard of; who used to live away at
Shottsford and had no work to do--Timothy Summers, whose family were
a-starving, and so he went out of Shottsford by the high-road, and
took a sheep in open daylight, defying the farmer and the farmer's
wife and the farmer's lad, and every man jack among 'em.  He' (and
they nodded towards the stranger of the deadly trade) 'is come from
up the country to do it because there's not enough to do in his own
county-town, and he's got the place here now our own county man's
dead; he's going to live in the same cottage under the prison wall.'

The stranger in cinder-gray took no notice of this whispered string
of observations, but again wetted his lips.  Seeing that his friend
in the chimney-corner was the only one who reciprocated his
joviality in any way, he held out his cup towards that appreciative
comrade, who also held out his own.  They clinked together, the eyes
of the rest of the room hanging upon the singer's actions.  He
parted his lips for the third verse; but at that moment another
knock was audible upon the door.  This time the knock was faint and
hesitating.

The company seemed scared; the shepherd looked with consternation
towards the entrance, and it was with some effort that he resisted
his alarmed wife's deprecatory glance, and uttered for the third
time the welcoming words, 'Walk in!'

The door was gently opened, and another man stood upon the mat.  He,
like those who had preceded him, was a stranger.  This time it was a
short, small personage, of fair complexion, and dressed in a decent
suit of dark clothes.

'Can you tell me the way to--?' he began:  when, gazing round the
room to observe the nature of the company amongst whom he had
fallen, his eyes lighted on the stranger in cinder-gray.  It was
just at the instant when the latter, who had thrown his mind into
his song with such a will that he scarcely heeded the interruption,
silenced all whispers and inquiries by bursting into his third
verse:-


'To-morrow is my working day,
Simple shepherds all -
To-morrow is a working day for me:
For the farmer's sheep is slain, and the lad who did it ta'en,
And on his soul may God ha' merc-y!'


The stranger in the chimney-corner, waving cups with the singer so
heartily that his mead splashed over on the hearth, repeated in his
bass voice as before:-


'And on his soul may God ha' merc-y!'


All this time the third stranger had been standing in the doorway.
Finding now that he did not come forward or go on speaking, the
guests particularly regarded him.  They noticed to their surprise
that he stood before them the picture of abject terror--his knees
trembling, his hand shaking so violently that the door-latch by
which he supported himself rattled audibly:  his white lips were
parted, and his eyes fixed on the merry officer of justice in the
middle of the room.  A moment more and he had turned, closed the
door, and fled.

'What a man can it be?' said the shepherd.

The rest, between the awfulness of their late discovery and the odd
conduct of this third visitor, looked as if they knew not what to
think, and said nothing.  Instinctively they withdrew further and
further from the grim gentleman in their midst, whom some of them
seemed to take for the Prince of Darkness himself; till they formed
a remote circle, an empty space of floor being left between them and
him -


' . . . circulus, cujus centrum diabolus.'


The room was so silent--though there were more than twenty people in
it--that nothing could be heard but the patter of the rain against
the window-shutters, accompanied by the occasional hiss of a stray
drop that fell down the chimney into the fire, and the steady
puffing of the man in the corner, who had now resumed his pipe of
long clay.

The stillness was unexpectedly broken.  The distant sound of a gun
reverberated through the air--apparently from the direction of the
county-town.

'Be jiggered!' cried the stranger who had sung the song, jumping up.

'What does that mean?' asked several.

'A prisoner escaped from the jail--that's what it means.'

All listened.  The sound was repeated, and none of them spoke but
the man in the chimney-corner, who said quietly, 'I've often been
told that in this county they fire a gun at such times; but I never
heard it till now.'

'I wonder if it is MY man?' murmured the personage in cinder-gray.

'Surely it is!' said the shepherd involuntarily.  'And surely we've
zeed him!  That little man who looked in at the door by now, and
quivered like a leaf when he zeed ye and heard your song!'

'His teeth chattered, and the breath went out of his body,' said the
dairyman.

'And his heart seemed to sink within him like a stone,' said Oliver
Giles.

'And he bolted as if he'd been shot at,' said the hedge-carpenter.

'True--his teeth chattered, and his heart seemed to sink; and he
bolted as if he'd been shot at,' slowly summed up the man in the
chimney-corner.

'I didn't notice it,' remarked the hangman.

'We were all a-wondering what made him run off in such a fright,'
faltered one of the women against the wall, 'and now 'tis
explained!'

The firing of the alarm-gun went on at intervals, low and sullenly,
and their suspicions became a certainty.  The sinister gentleman in
cinder-gray roused himself.  'Is there a constable here?' he asked,
in thick tones.  'If so, let him step forward.'

The engaged man of fifty stepped quavering out from the wall, his
betrothed beginning to sob on the back of the chair.

'You are a sworn constable?'

'I be, sir.'

'Then pursue the criminal at once, with assistance, and bring him
back here.  He can't have gone far.'

'I will, sir, I will--when I've got my staff.  I'll go home and get
it, and come sharp here, and start in a body.'

'Staff!--never mind your staff; the man'll be gone!'

'But I can't do nothing without my staff--can I, William, and John,
and Charles Jake?  No; for there's the king's royal crown a painted
on en in yaller and gold, and the lion and the unicorn, so as when I
raise en up and hit my prisoner, 'tis made a lawful blow thereby.  I
wouldn't 'tempt to take up a man without my staff--no, not I.  If I
hadn't the law to gie me courage, why, instead o' my taking up him
he might take up me!'

'Now, I'm a king's man myself; and can give you authority enough for
this,' said the formidable officer in gray.  'Now then, all of ye,
be ready.  Have ye any lanterns?'

'Yes--have ye any lanterns?--I demand it!' said the constable.

'And the rest of you able-bodied--'

'Able-bodied men--yes--the rest of ye!' said the constable.

'Have you some good stout staves and pitch-forks--'

'Staves and pitchforks--in the name o' the law!  And take 'em in yer
hands and go in quest, and do as we in authority tell ye!'

Thus aroused, the men prepared to give chase.  The evidence was,
indeed, though circumstantial, so convincing, that but little
argument was needed to show the shepherd's guests that after what
they had seen it would look very much like connivance if they did
not instantly pursue the unhappy third stranger, who could not as
yet have gone more than a few hundred yards over such uneven
country.

A shepherd is always well provided with lanterns; and, lighting
these hastily, and with hurdle-staves in their hands, they poured
out of the door, taking a direction along the crest of the hill,
away from the town, the rain having fortunately a little abated.

Disturbed by the noise, or possibly by unpleasant dreams of her
baptism, the child who had been christened began to cry heart-
brokenly in the room overhead.  These notes of grief came down
through the chinks of the floor to the ears of the women below, who
jumped up one by one, and seemed glad of the excuse to ascend and
comfort the baby, for the incidents of the last half-hour greatly
oppressed them.  Thus in the space of two or three minutes the room
on the ground-floor was deserted quite.

But it was not for long.  Hardly had the sound of footsteps died
away when a man returned round the corner of the house from the
direction the pursuers had taken.  Peeping in at the door, and
seeing nobody there, he entered leisurely.  It was the stranger of
the chimney-corner, who had gone out with the rest.  The motive of
his return was shown by his helping himself to a cut piece of
skimmer-cake that lay on a ledge beside where he had sat, and which
he had apparently forgotten to take with him.  He also poured out
half a cup more mead from the quantity that remained, ravenously
eating and drinking these as he stood.  He had not finished when
another figure came in just as quietly--his friend in cinder-gray.

'O--you here?' said the latter, smiling.  'I thought you had gone to
help in the capture.'  And this speaker also revealed the object of
his return by looking solicitously round for the fascinating mug of
old mead.

'And I thought you had gone,' said the other, continuing his
skimmer-cake with some effort.

'Well, on second thoughts, I felt there were enough without me,'
said the first confidentially, 'and such a night as it is, too.
Besides, 'tis the business o' the Government to take care of its
criminals--not mine.'

'True; so it is.  And I felt as you did, that there were enough
without me.'

'I don't want to break my limbs running over the humps and hollows
of this wild country.'

'Nor I neither, between you and me.'

'These shepherd-people are used to it--simple-minded souls, you
know, stirred up to anything in a moment.  They'll have him ready
for me before the morning, and no trouble to me at all.'

'They'll have him, and we shall have saved ourselves all labour in
the matter.'

'True, true.  Well, my way is to Casterbridge; and 'tis as much as
my legs will do to take me that far.  Going the same way?'

'No, I am sorry to say!  I have to get home over there' (he nodded
indefinitely to the right), 'and I feel as you do, that it is quite
enough for my legs to do before bedtime.'

The other had by this time finished the mead in the mug, after
which, shaking hands heartily at the door, and wishing each other
well, they went their several ways.

In the meantime the company of pursuers had reached the end of the
hog's-back elevation which dominated this part of the down.  They
had decided on no particular plan of action; and, finding that the
man of the baleful trade was no longer in their company, they seemed
quite unable to form any such plan now.  They descended in all
directions down the hill, and straightway several of the party fell
into the snare set by Nature for all misguided midnight ramblers
over this part of the cretaceous formation.  The 'lanchets,' or
flint slopes, which belted the escarpment at intervals of a dozen
yards, took the less cautious ones unawares, and losing their
footing on the rubbly steep they slid sharply downwards, the
lanterns rolling from their hands to the bottom, and there lying on
their sides till the horn was scorched through.

When they had again gathered themselves together, the shepherd, as
the man who knew the country best, took the lead, and guided them
round these treacherous inclines.  The lanterns, which seemed rather
to dazzle their eyes and warn the fugitive than to assist them in
the exploration, were extinguished, due silence was observed; and in
this more rational order they plunged into the vale.  It was a
grassy, briery, moist defile, affording some shelter to any person
who had sought it; but the party perambulated it in vain, and
ascended on the other side.  Here they wandered apart, and after an
interval closed together again to report progress.

At the second time of closing in they found themselves near a lonely
ash, the single tree on this part of the coomb, probably sown there
by a passing bird some fifty years before.  And here, standing a
little to one side of the trunk, as motionless as the trunk itself;
appeared the man they were in quest of; his outline being well
defined against the sky beyond.  The band noiselessly drew up and
faced him.

'Your money or your life!' said the constable sternly to the still
figure.

'No, no,' whispered John Pitcher.  ''Tisn't our side ought to say
that.  That's the doctrine of vagabonds like him, and we be on the
side of the law.'

'Well, well,' replied the constable impatiently; 'I must say
something, mustn't I? and if you had all the weight o' this
undertaking upon your mind, perhaps you'd say the wrong thing too!--
Prisoner at the bar, surrender, in the name of the Father--the
Crown, I mane!'

The man under the tree seemed now to notice them for the first time,
and, giving them no opportunity whatever for exhibiting their
courage, he strolled slowly towards them.  He was, indeed, the
little man, the third stranger; but his trepidation had in a great
measure gone.

'Well, travellers,' he said, 'did I hear ye speak to me?'

'You did:  you've got to come and be our prisoner at once!' said the
constable.  'We arrest 'ee on the charge of not biding in
Casterbridge jail in a decent proper manner to be hung to-morrow
morning.  Neighbours, do your duty, and seize the culpet!'

On hearing the charge, the man seemed enlightened, and, saying not
another word, resigned himself with preternatural civility to the
search-party, who, with their staves in their hands, surrounded him
on all sides, and marched him back towards the shepherd's cottage.

It was eleven o'clock by the time they arrived.  The light shining
from the open door, a sound of men's voices within, proclaimed to
them as they approached the house that some new events had arisen in
their absence.  On entering they discovered the shepherd's living
room to be invaded by two officers from Casterbridge jail, and a
well-known magistrate who lived at the nearest country-seat,
intelligence of the escape having become generally circulated.

'Gentlemen,' said the constable, 'I have brought back your man--not
without risk and danger; but every one must do his duty!  He is
inside this circle of able-bodied persons, who have lent me useful
aid, considering their ignorance of Crown work.  Men, bring forward
your prisoner!'  And the third stranger was led to the light.

'Who is this?' said one of the officials.

'The man,' said the constable.

'Certainly not,' said the turnkey; and the first corroborated his
statement.

'But how can it be otherwise?' asked the constable.  'Or why was he
so terrified at sight o' the singing instrument of the law who sat
there?'  Here he related the strange behaviour of the third stranger
on entering the house during the hangman's song.

'Can't understand it,' said the officer coolly.  'All I know is that
it is not the condemned man.  He's quite a different character from
this one; a gauntish fellow, with dark hair and eyes, rather good-
looking, and with a musical bass voice that if you heard it once
you'd never mistake as long as you lived.'

'Why, souls--'twas the man in the chimney-corner!'

'Hey--what?' said the magistrate, coming forward after inquiring
particulars from the shepherd in the background.  'Haven't you got
the man after all?'

'Well, sir,' said the constable, 'he's the man we were in search of,
that's true; and yet he's not the man we were in search of.  For the
man we were in search of was not the man we wanted, sir, if you
understand my every-day way; for 'twas the man in the chimney-
corner!'

'A pretty kettle of fish altogether!' said the magistrate.  'You had
better start for the other man at once.'

The prisoner now spoke for the first time.  The mention of the man
in the chimney-corner seemed to have moved him as nothing else could
do.  'Sir,' he said, stepping forward to the magistrate, 'take no
more trouble about me.  The time is come when I may as well speak.
I have done nothing; my crime is that the condemned man is my
brother.  Early this afternoon I left home at Shottsford to tramp it
all the way to Casterbridge jail to bid him farewell.  I was
benighted, and called here to rest and ask the way.  When I opened
the door I saw before me the very man, my brother, that I thought to
see in the condemned cell at Casterbridge.  He was in this chimney-
corner; and jammed close to him, so that he could not have got out
if he had tried, was the executioner who'd come to take his life,
singing a song about it and not knowing that it was his victim who
was close by, joining in to save appearances.  My brother looked a
glance of agony at me, and I knew he meant, "Don't reveal what you
see; my life depends on it."  I was so terror-struck that I could
hardly stand, and, not knowing what I did, I turned and hurried
away.'

The narrator's manner and tone had the stamp of truth, and his story
made a great impression on all around.  'And do you know where your
brother is at the present time?' asked the magistrate.

'I do not.  I have never seen him since I closed this door.'

'I can testify to that, for we've been between ye ever since,' said
the constable.

'Where does he think to fly to?--what is his occupation?'

'He's a watch-and-clock-maker, sir.'

''A said 'a was a wheelwright--a wicked rogue,' said the constable.

'The wheels of clocks and watches he meant, no doubt,' said Shepherd
Fennel.  'I thought his hands were palish for's trade.'

'Well, it appears to me that nothing can be gained by retaining this
poor man in custody,' said the magistrate; 'your business lies with
the other, unquestionably.'

And so the little man was released off-hand; but he looked nothing
the less sad on that account, it being beyond the power of
magistrate or constable to raze out the written troubles in his
brain, for they concerned another whom he regarded with more
solicitude than himself.  When this was done, and the man had gone
his way, the night was found to be so far advanced that it was
deemed useless to renew the search before the next morning.

Next day, accordingly, the quest for the clever sheep-stealer became
general and keen, to all appearance at least.  But the intended
punishment was cruelly disproportioned to the transgression, and the
sympathy of a great many country-folk in that district was strongly
on the side of the fugitive.  Moreover, his marvellous coolness and
daring in hob-and-nobbing with the hangman, under the unprecedented
circumstances of the shepherd's party, won their admiration.  So
that it may be questioned if all those who ostensibly made
themselves so busy in exploring woods and fields and lanes were
quite so thorough when it came to the private examination of their
own lofts and outhouses.  Stories were afloat of a mysterious figure
being occasionally seen in some old overgrown trackway or other,
remote from turnpike roads; but when a search was instituted in any
of these suspected quarters nobody was found.  Thus the days and
weeks passed without tidings.

In brief; the bass-voiced man of the chimney-corner was never
recaptured.  Some said that he went across the sea, others that he
did not, but buried himself in the depths of a populous city.  At
any rate, the gentleman in cinder-gray never did his morning's work
at Casterbridge, nor met anywhere at all, for business purposes, the
genial comrade with whom he had passed an hour of relaxation in the
lonely house on the coomb.

The grass has long been green on the graves of Shepherd Fennel and
his frugal wife; the guests who made up the christening party have
mainly followed their entertainers to the tomb; the baby in whose
honour they all had met is a matron in the sere and yellow leaf.
But the arrival of the three strangers at the shepherd's that night,
and the details connected therewith, is a story as well known as
ever in the country about Higher Crowstairs.

March 1883.




THE WITHERED ARM




CHAPTER I--A LORN MILKMAID



It was an eighty-cow dairy, and the troop of milkers, regular and
supernumerary, were all at work; for, though the time of year was as
yet but early April, the feed lay entirely in water-meadows, and the
cows were 'in full pail.'  The hour was about six in the evening,
and three-fourths of the large, red, rectangular animals having been
finished off, there was opportunity for a little conversation.

'He do bring home his bride to-morrow, I hear.  They've come as far
as Anglebury to-day.'

The voice seemed to proceed from the belly of the cow called Cherry,
but the speaker was a milking-woman, whose face was buried in the
flank of that motionless beast.

'Hav' anybody seen her?' said another.

There was a negative response from the first.  'Though they say
she's a rosy-cheeked, tisty-tosty little body enough,' she added;
and as the milkmaid spoke she turned her face so that she could
glance past her cow's tail to the other side of the barton, where a
thin, fading woman of thirty milked somewhat apart from the rest.

'Years younger than he, they say,' continued the second, with also a
glance of reflectiveness in the same direction.

'How old do you call him, then?'

'Thirty or so.'

'More like forty,' broke in an old milkman near, in a long white
pinafore or 'wropper,' and with the brim of his hat tied down, so
that he looked like a woman.  ''A was born before our Great Weir was
builded, and I hadn't man's wages when I laved water there.'

The discussion waxed so warm that the purr of the milk-streams
became jerky, till a voice from another cow's belly cried with
authority, 'Now then, what the Turk do it matter to us about Farmer
Lodge's age, or Farmer Lodge's new mis'ess?  I shall have to pay him
nine pound a year for the rent of every one of these milchers,
whatever his age or hers.  Get on with your work, or 'twill be dark
afore we have done.  The evening is pinking in a'ready.'  This
speaker was the dairyman himself; by whom the milkmaids and men were
employed.

Nothing more was said publicly about Farmer Lodge's wedding, but the
first woman murmured under her cow to her next neighbour, ''Tis hard
for SHE,' signifying the thin worn milkmaid aforesaid.

'O no,' said the second.  'He ha'n't spoke to Rhoda Brook for
years.'

When the milking was done they washed their pails and hung them on a
many-forked stand made of the peeled limb of an oak-tree, set
upright in the earth, and resembling a colossal antlered horn.  The
majority then dispersed in various directions homeward.  The thin
woman who had not spoken was joined by a boy of twelve or
thereabout, and the twain went away up the field also.

Their course lay apart from that of the others, to a lonely spot
high above the water-meads, and not far from the border of Egdon
Heath, whose dark countenance was visible in the distance as they
drew nigh to their home.

'They've just been saying down in barton that your father brings his
young wife home from Anglebury to-morrow,' the woman observed.  'I
shall want to send you for a few things to market, and you'll be
pretty sure to meet 'em.'

'Yes, mother,' said the boy.  'Is father married then?'

'Yes . . . You can give her a look, and tell me what's she's like,
if you do see her.'

'Yes, mother.'

'If she's dark or fair, and if she's tall--as tall as I.  And if she
seems like a woman who has ever worked for a living, or one that has
been always well off, and has never done anything, and shows marks
of the lady on her, as I expect she do.'

'Yes.'

They crept up the hill in the twilight, and entered the cottage.  It
was built of mud-walls, the surface of which had been washed by many
rains into channels and depressions that left none of the original
flat face visible; while here and there in the thatch above a rafter
showed like a bone protruding through the skin.

She was kneeling down in the chimney-corner, before two pieces of
turf laid together with the heather inwards, blowing at the red-hot
ashes with her breath till the turves flamed.  The radiance lit her
pale cheek, and made her dark eyes, that had once been handsome,
seem handsome anew.  'Yes,' she resumed, 'see if she is dark or
fair, and if you can, notice if her hands be white; if not, see if
they look as though she had ever done housework, or are milker's
hands like mine.'

The boy again promised, inattentively this time, his mother not
observing that he was cutting a notch with his pocket-knife in the
beech-backed chair.



CHAPTER II--THE YOUNG WIFE



The road from Anglebury to Holmstoke is in general level; but there
is one place where a sharp ascent breaks its monotony.  Farmers
homeward-bound from the former market-town, who trot all the rest of
the way, walk their horses up this short incline.

The next evening, while the sun was yet bright, a handsome new gig,
with a lemon-coloured body and red wheels, was spinning westward
along the level highway at the heels of a powerful mare.  The driver
was a yeoman in the prime of life, cleanly shaven like an actor, his
face being toned to that bluish-vermilion hue which so often graces
a thriving farmer's features when returning home after successful
dealings in the town.  Beside him sat a woman, many years his
junior--almost, indeed, a girl.  Her face too was fresh in colour,
but it was of a totally different quality--soft and evanescent, like
the light under a heap of rose-petals.

Few people travelled this way, for it was not a main road; and the
long white riband of gravel that stretched before them was empty,
save of one small scarce-moving speck, which presently resolved
itself into the figure of boy, who was creeping on at a snail's
pace, and continually looking behind him--the heavy bundle he
carried being some excuse for, if not the reason of, his
dilatoriness.  When the bouncing gig-party slowed at the bottom of
the incline above mentioned, the pedestrian was only a few yards in
front.  Supporting the large bundle by putting one hand on his hip,
he turned and looked straight at the farmer's wife as though he
would read her through and through, pacing along abreast of the
horse.

The low sun was full in her face, rendering every feature, shade,
and contour distinct, from the curve of her little nostril to the
colour of her eyes.  The farmer, though he seemed annoyed at the
boy's persistent presence, did not order him to get out of the way;
and thus the lad preceded them, his hard gaze never leaving her,
till they reached the top of the ascent, when the farmer trotted on
with relief in his lineaments--having taken no outward notice of the
boy whatever.

'How that poor lad stared at me!' said the young wife.

'Yes, dear; I saw that he did.'

'He is one of the village, I suppose?'

'One of the neighbourhood.  I think he lives with his mother a mile
or two off.'

'He knows who we are, no doubt?'

'O yes.  You must expect to be stared at just at first, my pretty
Gertrude.'

'I do,--though I think the poor boy may have looked at us in the
hope we might relieve him of his heavy load, rather than from
curiosity.'

'O no,' said her husband off-handedly.  'These country lads will
carry a hundredweight once they get it on their backs; besides his
pack had more size than weight in it.  Now, then, another mile and I
shall be able to show you our house in the distance--if it is not
too dark before we get there.'  The wheels spun round, and particles
flew from their periphery as before, till a white house of ample
dimensions revealed itself, with farm-buildings and ricks at the
back.

Meanwhile the boy had quickened his pace, and turning up a by-lane
some mile and half short of the white farmstead, ascended towards
the leaner pastures, and so on to the cottage of his mother.

She had reached home after her day's milking at the outlying dairy,
and was washing cabbage at the doorway in the declining light.
'Hold up the net a moment,' she said, without preface, as the boy
came up.

He flung down his bundle, held the edge of the cabbage-net, and as
she filled its meshes with the dripping leaves she went on, 'Well,
did you see her?'

'Yes; quite plain.'

'Is she ladylike?'

'Yes; and more.  A lady complete.'

'Is she young?'

'Well, she's growed up, and her ways be quite a woman's.'

'Of course.  What colour is her hair and face?'

'Her hair is lightish, and her face as comely as a live doll's.'

'Her eyes, then, are not dark like mine?'

'No--of a bluish turn, and her mouth is very nice and red; and when
she smiles, her teeth show white.'

'Is she tall?' said the woman sharply.

'I couldn't see.  She was sitting down.'

'Then do you go to Holmstoke church to-morrow morning:  she's sure
to be there.  Go early and notice her walking in, and come home and
tell me if she's taller than I.'

'Very well, mother.  But why don't you go and see for yourself?'

'_I_ go to see her!  I wouldn't look up at her if she were to pass
my window this instant.  She was with Mr. Lodge, of course.  What
did he say or do?'

'Just the same as usual.'

'Took no notice of you?'

'None.'

Next day the mother put a clean shirt on the boy, and started him
off for Holmstoke church.  He reached the ancient little pile when
the door was just being opened, and he was the first to enter.
Taking his seat by the font, he watched all the parishioners file
in.  The well-to-do Farmer Lodge came nearly last; and his young
wife, who accompanied him, walked up the aisle with the shyness
natural to a modest woman who had appeared thus for the first time.
As all other eyes were fixed upon her, the youth's stare was not
noticed now.

When he reached home his mother said, 'Well?' before he had entered
the room.

'She is not tall.  She is rather short,' he replied.

'Ah!' said his mother, with satisfaction.

'But she's very pretty--very.  In fact, she's lovely.'

The youthful freshness of the yeoman's wife had evidently made an
impression even on the somewhat hard nature of the boy.

'That's all I want to hear,' said his mother quickly.  'Now, spread
the table-cloth.  The hare you caught is very tender; but mind that
nobody catches you.--You've never told me what sort of hands she
had.'

'I have never seen 'em.  She never took off her gloves.'

'What did she wear this morning?'

'A white bonnet and a silver-coloured gownd.  It whewed and whistled
so loud when it rubbed against the pews that the lady coloured up
more than ever for very shame at the noise, and pulled it in to keep
it from touching; but when she pushed into her seat, it whewed more
than ever.  Mr. Lodge, he seemed pleased, and his waistcoat stuck
out, and his great golden seals hung like a lord's; but she seemed
to wish her noisy gownd anywhere but on her.'

'Not she!  However, that will do now.'

These descriptions of the newly-married couple were continued from
time to time by the boy at his mother's request, after any chance
encounter he had had with them.  But Rhoda Brook, though she might
easily have seen young Mrs. Lodge for herself by walking a couple of
miles, would never attempt an excursion towards the quarter where
the farmhouse lay.  Neither did she, at the daily milking in the
dairyman's yard on Lodge's outlying second farm, ever speak on the
subject of the recent marriage.  The dairyman, who rented the cows
of Lodge, and knew perfectly the tall milkmaid's history, with manly
kindliness always kept the gossip in the cow-barton from annoying
Rhoda.  But the atmosphere thereabout was full of the subject during
the first days of Mrs. Lodge's arrival; and from her boy's
description and the casual words of the other milkers, Rhoda Brook
could raise a mental image of the unconscious Mrs Lodge that was
realistic as a photograph.



CHAPTER III--A VISION



One night, two or three weeks after the bridal return, when the boy
was gone to bed, Rhoda sat a long time over the turf ashes that she
had raked out in front of her to extinguish them.  She contemplated
so intently the new wife, as presented to her in her mind's eye over
the embers, that she forgot the lapse of time.  At last, wearied
with her day's work, she too retired.

But the figure which had occupied her so much during this and the
previous days was not to be banished at night.  For the first time
Gertrude Lodge visited the supplanted woman in her dreams.  Rhoda
Brook dreamed--since her assertion that she really saw, before
falling asleep, was not to be believed--that the young wife, in the
pale silk dress and white bonnet, but with features shockingly
distorted, and wrinkled as by age, was sitting upon her chest as she
lay.  The pressure of Mrs. Lodge's person grew heavier; the blue
eyes peered cruelly into her face; and then the figure thrust
forward its left hand mockingly, so as to make the wedding-ring it
wore glitter in Rhoda's eyes.  Maddened mentally, and nearly
suffocated by pressure, the sleeper struggled; the incubus, still
regarding her, withdrew to the foot of the bed, only, however, to
come forward by degrees, resume her seat, and flash her left hand as
before.

Gasping for breath, Rhoda, in a last desperate effort, swung out her
right hand, seized the confronting spectre by its obtrusive left
arm, and whirled it backward to the floor, starting up herself as
she did so with a low cry.

'O, merciful heaven!' she cried, sitting on the edge of the bed in a
cold sweat; 'that was not a dream--she was here!'

She could feel her antagonist's arm within her grasp even now--the
very flesh and bone of it, as it seemed.  She looked on the floor
whither she had whirled the spectre, but there was nothing to be
seen.

Rhoda Brook slept no more that night, and when she went milking at
the next dawn they noticed how pale and haggard she looked.  The
milk that she drew quivered into the pail; her hand had not calmed
even yet, and still retained the feel of the arm.  She came home to
breakfast as wearily as if it had been suppertime.

'What was that noise in your chimmer, mother, last night?' said her
son.  'You fell off the bed, surely?'

'Did you hear anything fall?  At what time?'

'Just when the clock struck two.'

She could not explain, and when the meal was done went silently
about her household work, the boy assisting her, for he hated going
afield on the farms, and she indulged his reluctance.  Between
eleven and twelve the garden-gate clicked, and she lifted her eyes
to the window.  At the bottom of the garden, within the gate, stood
the woman of her vision.  Rhoda seemed transfixed.

'Ah, she said she would come!' exclaimed the boy, also observing
her.

'Said so--when?  How does she know us?'

'I have seen and spoken to her.  I talked to her yesterday.'

'I told you,' said the mother, flushing indignantly, 'never to speak
to anybody in that house, or go near the place.'

'I did not speak to her till she spoke to me.  And I did not go near
the place.  I met her in the road.'

'What did you tell her?'

'Nothing.  She said, "Are you the poor boy who had to bring the
heavy load from market?"  And she looked at my boots, and said they
would not keep my feet dry if it came on wet, because they were so
cracked.  I told her I lived with my mother, and we had enough to do
to keep ourselves, and that's how it was; and she said then, "I'll
come and bring you some better boots, and see your mother."  She
gives away things to other folks in the meads besides us.'

Mrs. Lodge was by this time close to the door--not in her silk, as
Rhoda had seen her in the bed-chamber, but in a morning hat, and
gown of common light material, which became her better than silk.
On her arm she carried a basket.

The impression remaining from the night's experience was still
strong.  Brook had almost expected to see the wrinkles, the scorn,
and the cruelty on her visitor's face.

She would have escaped an interview, had escape been possible.
There was, however, no backdoor to the cottage, and in an instant
the boy had lifted the latch to Mrs. Lodge's gentle knock.

'I see I have come to the right house,' said she, glancing at the
lad, and smiling.  'But I was not sure till you opened the door.'

The figure and action were those of the phantom; but her voice was
so indescribably sweet, her glance so winning, her smile so tender,
so unlike that of Rhoda's midnight visitant, that the latter could
hardly believe the evidence of her senses.  She was truly glad that
she had not hidden away in sheer aversion, as she had been inclined
to do.  In her basket Mrs. Lodge brought the pair of boots that she
had promised to the boy, and other useful articles.

At these proofs of a kindly feeling towards her and hers Rhoda's
heart reproached her bitterly.  This innocent young thing should
have her blessing and not her curse.  When she left them a light
seemed gone from the dwelling.  Two days later she came again to
know if the boots fitted; and less than a fortnight after that paid
Rhoda another call.  On this occasion the boy was absent.

'I walk a good deal,' said Mrs. Lodge, 'and your house is the
nearest outside our own parish.  I hope you are well.  You don't
look quite well.'

Rhoda said she was well enough; and, indeed, though the paler of the
two, there was more of the strength that endures in her well-defined
features and large frame, than in the soft-cheeked young woman
before her.  The conversation became quite confidential as regarded
their powers and weaknesses; and when Mrs. Lodge was leaving, Rhoda
said, 'I hope you will find this air agree with you, ma'am, and not
suffer from the damp of the water-meads.'

The younger one replied that there was not much doubt of it, her
general health being usually good.  'Though, now you remind me,' she
added, 'I have one little ailment which puzzles me.  It is nothing
serious, but I cannot make it out.'

She uncovered her left hand and arm; and their outline confronted
Rhoda's gaze as the exact original of the limb she had beheld and
seized in her dream.  Upon the pink round surface of the arm were
faint marks of an unhealthy colour, as if produced by a rough grasp.
Rhoda's eyes became riveted on the discolorations; she fancied that
she discerned in them the shape of her own four fingers.

'How did it happen?' she said mechanically.

'I cannot tell,' replied Mrs. Lodge, shaking her head.  'One night
when I was sound asleep, dreaming I was away in some strange place,
a pain suddenly shot into my arm there, and was so keen as to awaken
me.  I must have struck it in the daytime, I suppose, though I don't
remember doing so.'  She added, laughing, 'I tell my dear husband
that it looks just as if he had flown into a rage and struck me
there.  O, I daresay it will soon disappear.'

'Ha, ha!  Yes . . . On what night did it come?'

Mrs. Lodge considered, and said it would be a fortnight ago on the
morrow.  'When I awoke I could not remember where I was,' she added,
'till the clock striking two reminded me.'

She had named the night and the hour of Rhoda's spectral encounter,
and Brook felt like a guilty thing.  The artless disclosure startled
her; she did not reason on the freaks of coincidence; and all the
scenery of that ghastly night returned with double vividness to her
mind.

'O, can it be,' she said to herself, when her visitor had departed,
'that I exercise a malignant power over people against my own will?'
She knew that she had been slily called a witch since her fall; but
never having understood why that particular stigma had been attached
to her, it had passed disregarded.  Could this be the explanation,
and had such things as this ever happened before?



CHAPTER IV--A SUGGESTION



The summer drew on, and Rhoda Brook almost dreaded to meet Mrs.
Lodge again, notwithstanding that her feeling for the young wife
amounted well-nigh to affection.  Something in her own individuality
seemed to convict Rhoda of crime.  Yet a fatality sometimes would
direct the steps of the latter to the outskirts of Holmstoke
whenever she left her house for any other purpose than her daily
work; and hence it happened that their next encounter was out of
doors.  Rhoda could not avoid the subject which had so mystified
her, and after the first few words she stammered, 'I hope your--arm
is well again, ma'am?'  She had perceived with consternation that
Gertrude Lodge carried her left arm stiffly.

'No; it is not quite well.  Indeed it is no better at all; it is
rather worse.  It pains me dreadfully sometimes.'

'Perhaps you had better go to a doctor, ma'am.'

She replied that she had already seen a doctor.  Her husband had
insisted upon her going to one.  But the surgeon had not seemed to
understand the afflicted limb at all; he had told her to bathe it in
hot water, and she had bathed it, but the treatment had done no
good.

'Will you let me see it?' said the milkwoman.

Mrs. Lodge pushed up her sleeve and disclosed the place, which was a
few inches above the wrist.  As soon as Rhoda Brook saw it, she
could hardly preserve her composure.  There was nothing of the
nature of a wound, but the arm at that point had a shrivelled look,
and the outline of the four fingers appeared more distinct than at
the former time.  Moreover, she fancied that they were imprinted in
precisely the relative position of her clutch upon the arm in the
trance; the first finger towards Gertrude's wrist, and the fourth
towards her elbow.

What the impress resembled seemed to have struck Gertrude herself
since their last meeting.  'It looks almost like finger-marks,' she
said; adding with a faint laugh, 'my husband says it is as if some
witch, or the devil himself, had taken hold of me there, and blasted
the flesh.'

Rhoda shivered.  'That's fancy,' she said hurriedly.  'I wouldn't
mind it, if I were you.'

'I shouldn't so much mind it,' said the younger, with hesitation,
'if--if I hadn't a notion that it makes my husband--dislike me--no,
love me less.  Men think so much of personal appearance.'

'Some do--he for one.'

'Yes; and he was very proud of mine, at first.'

'Keep your arm covered from his sight.'

'Ah--he knows the disfigurement is there!'  She tried to hide the
tears that filled her eyes.

'Well, ma'am, I earnestly hope it will go away soon.'

And so the milkwoman's mind was chained anew to the subject by a
horrid sort of spell as she returned home.  The sense of having been
guilty of an act of malignity increased, affect as she might to
ridicule her superstition.  In her secret heart Rhoda did not
altogether object to a slight diminution of her successor's beauty,
by whatever means it had come about; but she did not wish to inflict
upon her physical pain.  For though this pretty young woman had
rendered impossible any reparation which Lodge might have made Rhoda
for his past conduct, everything like resentment at the unconscious
usurpation had quite passed away from the elder's mind.

If the sweet and kindly Gertrude Lodge only knew of the scene in the
bed-chamber, what would she think?  Not to inform her of it seemed
treachery in the presence of her friendliness; but tell she could
not of her own accord--neither could she devise a remedy.

She mused upon the matter the greater part of the night; and the
next day, after the morning milking, set out to obtain another
glimpse of Gertrude Lodge if she could, being held to her by a
gruesome fascination.  By watching the house from a distance the
milkmaid was presently able to discern the farmer's wife in a ride
she was taking alone--probably to join her husband in some distant
field.  Mrs. Lodge perceived her, and cantered in her direction.

'Good morning, Rhoda!' Gertrude said, when she had come up.  'I was
going to call.'

Rhoda noticed that Mrs. Lodge held the reins with some difficulty.

'I hope--the bad arm,' said Rhoda.

'They tell me there is possibly one way by which I might be able to
find out the cause, and so perhaps the cure, of it,' replied the
other anxiously.  'It is by going to some clever man over in Egdon
Heath.  They did not know if he was still alive--and I cannot
remember his name at this moment; but they said that you knew more
of his movements than anybody else hereabout, and could tell me if
he were still to be consulted.  Dear me--what was his name?  But you
know.'

'Not Conjuror Trendle?' said her thin companion, turning pale.

'Trendle--yes.  Is he alive?'

'I believe so,' said Rhoda, with reluctance.

'Why do you call him conjuror?'

'Well--they say--they used to say he was a--he had powers other
folks have not.'

'O, how could my people be so superstitious as to recommend a man of
that sort!  I thought they meant some medical man.  I shall think no
more of him.'

Rhoda looked relieved, and Mrs. Lodge rode on.  The milkwoman had
inwardly seen, from the moment she heard of her having been
mentioned as a reference for this man, that there must exist a
sarcastic feeling among the work-folk that a sorceress would know
the whereabouts of the exorcist.  They suspected her, then.  A short
time ago this would have given no concern to a woman of her common-
sense.  But she had a haunting reason to be superstitious now; and
she had been seized with sudden dread that this Conjuror Trendle
might name her as the malignant influence which was blasting the
fair person of Gertrude, and so lead her friend to hate her for
ever, and to treat her as some fiend in human shape.

But all was not over.  Two days after, a shadow intruded into the
window-pattern thrown on Rhoda Brook's floor by the afternoon sun.
The woman opened the door at once, almost breathlessly.

'Are you alone?' said Gertrude.  She seemed to be no less harassed
and anxious than Brook herself.

'Yes,' said Rhoda.

'The place on my arm seems worse, and troubles me!' the young
farmer's wife went on.  'It is so mysterious!  I do hope it will not
be an incurable wound.  I have again been thinking of what they said
about Conjuror Trendle.  I don't really believe in such men, but I
should not mind just visiting him, from curiosity--though on no
account must my husband know.  Is it far to where he lives?'

'Yes--five miles,' said Rhoda backwardly.  'In the heart of Egdon.'

'Well, I should have to walk.  Could not you go with me to show me
the way--say to-morrow afternoon?'

'O, not I--that is,' the milkwoman murmured, with a start of dismay.
Again the dread seized her that something to do with her fierce act
in the dream might be revealed, and her character in the eyes of the
most useful friend she had ever had be ruined irretrievably.

Mrs. Lodge urged, and Rhoda finally assented, though with much
misgiving.  Sad as the journey would be to her, she could not
conscientiously stand in the way of a possible remedy for her
patron's strange affliction.  It was agreed that, to escape
suspicion of their mystic intent, they should meet at the edge of
the heath at the corner of a plantation which was visible from the
spot where they now stood.



CHAPTER V--CONJUROR TRENDLE



By the next afternoon Rhoda would have done anything to escape this
inquiry.  But she had promised to go.  Moreover, there was a horrid
fascination at times in becoming instrumental in throwing such
possible light on her own character as would reveal her to be
something greater in the occult world than she had ever herself
suspected.

She started just before the time of day mentioned between them, and
half-an-hour's brisk walking brought her to the south-eastern
extension of the Egdon tract of country, where the fir plantation
was.  A slight figure, cloaked and veiled, was already there.  Rhoda
recognized, almost with a shudder, that Mrs. Lodge bore her left arm
in a sling.

They hardly spoke to each other, and immediately set out on their
climb into the interior of this solemn country, which stood high
above the rich alluvial soil they had left half-an-hour before.  It
was a long walk; thick clouds made the atmosphere dark, though it
was as yet only early afternoon; and the wind howled dismally over
the hills of the heath--not improbably the same heath which had
witnessed the agony of the Wessex King Ina, presented to after-ages
as Lear.  Gertrude Lodge talked most, Rhoda replying with
monosyllabic preoccupation.  She had a strange dislike to walking on
the side of her companion where hung the afflicted arm, moving round
to the other when inadvertently near it.  Much heather had been
brushed by their feet when they descended upon a cart-track, beside
which stood the house of the man they sought.

He did not profess his remedial practices openly, or care anything
about their continuance, his direct interests being those of a
dealer in furze, turf, 'sharp sand,' and other local products.
Indeed, he affected not to believe largely in his own powers, and
when warts that had been shown him for cure miraculously
disappeared--which it must be owned they infallibly did--he would
say lightly, 'O, I only drink a glass of grog upon 'em--perhaps it's
all chance,' and immediately turn the subject.

He was at home when they arrived, having in fact seen them
descending into his valley.  He was a gray-bearded man, with a
reddish face, and he looked singularly at Rhoda the first moment he
beheld her.  Mrs. Lodge told him her errand; and then with words of
self-disparagement he examined her arm.

'Medicine can't cure it,' he said promptly.  ''Tis the work of an
enemy.'

Rhoda shrank into herself, and drew back.

'An enemy?  What enemy?' asked Mrs. Lodge.

He shook his head.  'That's best known to yourself,' he said.  'If
you like, I can show the person to you, though I shall not myself
know who it is.  I can do no more; and don't wish to do that.'

She pressed him; on which he told Rhoda to wait outside where she
stood, and took Mrs. Lodge into the room.  It opened immediately
from the door; and, as the latter remained ajar, Rhoda Brook could
see the proceedings without taking part in them.  He brought a
tumbler from the dresser, nearly filled it with water, and fetching
an egg, prepared it in some private way; after which he broke it on
the edge of the glass, so that the white went in and the yolk
remained.  As it was getting gloomy, he took the glass and its
contents to the window, and told Gertrude to watch them closely.
They leant over the table together, and the milkwoman could see the
opaline hue of the egg-fluid changing form as it sank in the water,
but she was not near enough to define the shape that it assumed.

'Do you catch the likeness of any face or figure as you look?'
demanded the conjuror of the young woman.

She murmured a reply, in tones so low as to be inaudible to Rhoda,
and continued to gaze intently into the glass.  Rhoda turned, and
walked a few steps away.

When Mrs. Lodge came out, and her face was met by the light, it
appeared exceedingly pale--as pale as Rhoda's--against the sad dun
shades of the upland's garniture.  Trendle shut the door behind her,
and they at once started homeward together.  But Rhoda perceived
that her companion had quite changed.

'Did he charge much?' she asked tentatively.

'O no--nothing.  He would not take a farthing,' said Gertrude.

'And what did you see?' inquired Rhoda.

'Nothing I--care to speak of.'  The constraint in her manner was
remarkable; her face was so rigid as to wear an oldened aspect,
faintly suggestive of the face in Rhoda's bed-chamber.

'Was it you who first proposed coming here?' Mrs. Lodge suddenly
inquired, after a long pause.  'How very odd, if you did!'

'No.  But I am not sorry we have come, all things considered,' she
replied.  For the first time a sense of triumph possessed her, and
she did not altogether deplore that the young thing at her side
should learn that their lives had been antagonized by other
influences than their own.

The subject was no more alluded to during the long and dreary walk
home.  But in some way or other a story was whispered about the
many-dairied lowland that winter that Mrs. Lodge's gradual loss of
the use of her left arm was owing to her being 'overlooked' by Rhoda
Brook.  The latter kept her own counsel about the incubus, but her
face grew sadder and thinner; and in the spring she and her boy
disappeared from the neighbourhood of Holmstoke.



CHAPTER VI--A SECOND ATTEMPT



Half-a-dozen years passed away, and Mr. and Mrs. Lodge's married
experience sank into prosiness, and worse.  The farmer was usually
gloomy and silent:  the woman whom he had wooed for her grace and
beauty was contorted and disfigured in the left limb; moreover, she
had brought him no child, which rendered it likely that he would be
the last of a family who had occupied that valley for some two
hundred years.  He thought of Rhoda Brook and her son; and feared
this might be a judgment from heaven upon him.

The once blithe-hearted and enlightened Gertrude was changing into
an irritable, superstitious woman, whose whole time was given to
experimenting upon her ailment with every quack remedy she came
across.  She was honestly attached to her husband, and was ever
secretly hoping against hope to win back his heart again by
regaining some at least of her personal beauty.  Hence it arose that
her closet was lined with bottles, packets, and ointment-pots of
every description--nay, bunches of mystic herbs, charms, and books
of necromancy, which in her schoolgirl time she would have ridiculed
as folly.

'Damned if you won't poison yourself with these apothecary messes
and witch mixtures some time or other,' said her husband, when his
eye chanced to fall upon the multitudinous array.

She did not reply, but turned her sad, soft glance upon him in such
heart-swollen reproach that he looked sorry for his words, and
added, 'I only meant it for your good, you know, Gertrude.'

'I'll clear out the whole lot, and destroy them,' said she huskily,
'and try such remedies no more!'

'You want somebody to cheer you,' he observed.  'I once thought of
adopting a boy; but he is too old now.  And he is gone away I don't
know where.'

She guessed to whom he alluded; for Rhoda Brook's story had in the
course of years become known to her; though not a word had ever
passed between her husband and herself on the subject.  Neither had
she ever spoken to him of her visit to Conjuror Trendle, and of what
was revealed to her, or she thought was revealed to her, by that
solitary heath-man.

She was now five-and-twenty; but she seemed older.

'Six years of marriage, and only a few months of love,' she
sometimes whispered to herself.  And then she thought of the
apparent cause, and said, with a tragic glance at her withering
limb, 'If I could only again be as I was when he first saw me!'

She obediently destroyed her nostrums and charms; but there remained
a hankering wish to try something else--some other sort of cure
altogether.  She had never revisited Trendle since she had been
conducted to the house of the solitary by Rhoda against her will;
but it now suddenly occurred to Gertrude that she would, in a last
desperate effort at deliverance from this seeming curse, again seek
out the man, if he yet lived.  He was entitled to a certain
credence, for the indistinct form he had raised in the glass had
undoubtedly resembled the only woman in the world who--as she now
knew, though not then--could have a reason for bearing her ill-will.
The visit should be paid.

This time she went alone, though she nearly got lost on the heath,
and roamed a considerable distance out of her way.  Trendle's house
was reached at last, however:  he was not indoors, and instead of
waiting at the cottage, she went to where his bent figure was
pointed out to her at work a long way off.  Trendle remembered her,
and laying down the handful of furze-roots which he was gathering
and throwing into a heap, he offered to accompany her in her
homeward direction, as the distance was considerable and the days
were short.  So they walked together, his head bowed nearly to the
earth, and his form of a colour with it.

'You can send away warts and other excrescences I know,' she said;
'why can't you send away this?'  And the arm was uncovered.

'You think too much of my powers!' said Trendle; 'and I am old and
weak now, too.  No, no; it is too much for me to attempt in my own
person.  What have ye tried?'

She named to him some of the hundred medicaments and counterspells
which she had adopted from time to time.  He shook his head.

'Some were good enough,' he said approvingly; 'but not many of them
for such as this.  This is of the nature of a blight, not of the
nature of a wound; and if you ever do throw it off; it will be all
at once.'

'If I only could!'

'There is only one chance of doing it known to me.  It has never
failed in kindred afflictions,--that I can declare.  But it is hard
to carry out, and especially for a woman.'

'Tell me!' said she.

'You must touch with the limb the neck of a man who's been hanged.'

She started a little at the image he had raised.

'Before he's cold--just after he's cut down,' continued the conjuror
impassively.

'How can that do good?'

'It will turn the blood and change the constitution.  But, as I say,
to do it is hard.  You must get into jail, and wait for him when
he's brought off the gallows.  Lots have done it, though perhaps not
such pretty women as you.  I used to send dozens for skin
complaints.  But that was in former times.  The last I sent was in
'13--near twenty years ago.'

He had no more to tell her; and, when he had put her into a straight
track homeward, turned and left her, refusing all money as at first.



CHAPTER VII--A RIDE



The communication sank deep into Gertrude's mind.  Her nature was
rather a timid one; and probably of all remedies that the white
wizard could have suggested there was not one which would have
filled her with so much aversion as this, not to speak of the
immense obstacles in the way of its adoption.

Casterbridge, the county-town, was a dozen or fifteen miles off; and
though in those days, when men were executed for horse-stealing,
arson, and burglary, an assize seldom passed without a hanging, it
was not likely that she could get access to the body of the criminal
unaided.  And the fear of her husband's anger made her reluctant to
breathe a word of Trendle's suggestion to him or to anybody about
him.

She did nothing for months, and patiently bore her disfigurement as
before.  But her woman's nature, craving for renewed love, through
the medium of renewed beauty (she was but twenty-five), was ever
stimulating her to try what, at any rate, could hardly do her any
harm.  'What came by a spell will go by a spell surely,' she would
say.  Whenever her imagination pictured the act she shrank in terror
from the possibility of it:  then the words of the conjuror, 'It
will turn your blood,' were seen to be capable of a scientific no
less than a ghastly interpretation; the mastering desire returned,
and urged her on again.

There was at this time but one county paper, and that her husband
only occasionally borrowed.  But old-fashioned days had old-
fashioned means, and news was extensively conveyed by word of mouth
from market to market, or from fair to fair, so that, whenever such
an event as an execution was about to take place, few within a
radius of twenty miles were ignorant of the coming sight; and, so
far as Holmstoke was concerned, some enthusiasts had been known to
walk all the way to Casterbridge and back in one day, solely to
witness the spectacle.  The next assizes were in March; and when
Gertrude Lodge heard that they had been held, she inquired
stealthily at the inn as to the result, as soon as she could find
opportunity.

She was, however, too late.  The time at which the sentences were to
be carried out had arrived, and to make the journey and obtain
admission at such short notice required at least her husband's
assistance.  She dared not tell him, for she had found by delicate
experiment that these smouldering village beliefs made him furious
if mentioned, partly because he half entertained them himself.  It
was therefore necessary to wait for another opportunity.

Her determination received a fillip from learning that two epileptic
children had attended from this very village of Holmstoke many years
before with beneficial results, though the experiment had been
strongly condemned by the neighbouring clergy.  April, May, June,
passed; and it is no overstatement to say that by the end of the
last-named month Gertrude well-nigh longed for the death of a
fellow-creature.  Instead of her formal prayers each night, her
unconscious prayer was, 'O Lord, hang some guilty or innocent person
soon!'

This time she made earlier inquiries, and was altogether more
systematic in her proceedings.  Moreover, the season was summer,
between the haymaking and the harvest, and in the leisure thus
afforded him her husband had been holiday-taking away from home.

The assizes were in July, and she went to the inn as before.  There
was to be one execution--only one--for arson.

Her greatest problem was not how to get to Casterbridge, but what
means she should adopt for obtaining admission to the jail.  Though
access for such purposes had formerly never been denied, the custom
had fallen into desuetude; and in contemplating her possible
difficulties, she was again almost driven to fall back upon her
husband.  But, on sounding him about the assizes, he was so
uncommunicative, so more than usually cold, that she did not
proceed, and decided that whatever she did she would do alone.

Fortune, obdurate hitherto, showed her unexpected favour.  On the
Thursday before the Saturday fixed for the execution, Lodge remarked
to her that he was going away from home for another day or two on
business at a fair, and that he was sorry he could not take her with
him.

She exhibited on this occasion so much readiness to stay at home
that he looked at her in surprise.  Time had been when she would
have shown deep disappointment at the loss of such a jaunt.
However, he lapsed into his usual taciturnity, and on the day named
left Holmstoke.

It was now her turn.  She at first had thought of driving, but on
reflection held that driving would not do, since it would
necessitate her keeping to the turnpike-road, and so increase by
tenfold the risk of her ghastly errand being found out.  She decided
to ride, and avoid the beaten track, notwithstanding that in her
husband's stables there was no animal just at present which by any
stretch of imagination could be considered a lady's mount, in spite
of his promise before marriage to always keep a mare for her.  He
had, however, many cart-horses, fine ones of their kind; and among
the rest was a serviceable creature, an equine Amazon, with a back
as broad as a sofa, on which Gertrude had occasionally taken an
airing when unwell.  This horse she chose.

On Friday afternoon one of the men brought it round.  She was
dressed, and before going down looked at her shrivelled arm.  'Ah!'
she said to it, 'if it had not been for you this terrible ordeal
would have been saved me!'

When strapping up the bundle in which she carried a few articles of
clothing, she took occasion to say to the servant, 'I take these in
case I should not get back to-night from the person I am going to
visit.  Don't be alarmed if I am not in by ten, and close up the
house as usual.  I shall be at home to-morrow for certain.'  She
meant then to privately tell her husband:  the deed accomplished was
not like the deed projected.  He would almost certainly forgive her.

And then the pretty palpitating Gertrude Lodge went from her
husband's homestead; but though her goal was Casterbridge she did
not take the direct route thither through Stickleford.  Her cunning
course at first was in precisely the opposite direction.  As soon as
she was out of sight, however, she turned to the left, by a road
which led into Egdon, and on entering the heath wheeled round, and
set out in the true course, due westerly.  A more private way down
the county could not be imagined; and as to direction, she had
merely to keep her horse's head to a point a little to the right of
the sun.  She knew that she would light upon a furze-cutter or
cottager of some sort from time to time, from whom she might correct
her bearing.

Though the date was comparatively recent, Egdon was much less
fragmentary in character than now.  The attempts--successful and
otherwise--at cultivation on the lower slopes, which intrude and
break up the original heath into small detached heaths, had not been
carried far; Enclosure Acts had not taken effect, and the banks and
fences which now exclude the cattle of those villagers who formerly
enjoyed rights of commonage thereon, and the carts of those who had
turbary privileges which kept them in firing all the year round,
were not erected.  Gertrude, therefore, rode along with no other
obstacles than the prickly furze bushes, the mats of heather, the
white water-courses, and the natural steeps and declivities of the
ground.

Her horse was sure, if heavy-footed and slow, and though a draught
animal, was easy-paced; had it been otherwise, she was not a woman
who could have ventured to ride over such a bit of country with a
half-dead arm.  It was therefore nearly eight o'clock when she drew
rein to breathe the mare on the last outlying high point of heath-
land towards Casterbridge, previous to leaving Egdon for the
cultivated valleys.

She halted before a pool called Rushy-pond, flanked by the ends of
two hedges; a railing ran through the centre of the pond, dividing
it in half.  Over the railing she saw the low green country; over
the green trees the roofs of the town; over the roofs a white flat
facade, denoting the entrance to the county jail.  On the roof of
this front specks were moving about; they seemed to be workmen
erecting something.  Her flesh crept.  She descended slowly, and was
soon amid corn-fields and pastures.  In another half-hour, when it
was almost dusk, Gertrude reached the White Hart, the first inn of
the town on that side.

Little surprise was excited by her arrival; farmers' wives rode on
horseback then more than they do now; though, for that matter, Mrs.
Lodge was not imagined to be a wife at all; the innkeeper supposed

her some harum-skarum young woman who had come to attend 'hang-fair'
next day.  Neither her husband nor herself ever dealt in
Casterbridge market, so that she was unknown.  While dismounting she
beheld a crowd of boys standing at the door of a harness-maker's
shop just above the inn, looking inside it with deep interest.

'What is going on there?' she asked of the ostler.

'Making the rope for to-morrow.'

She throbbed responsively, and contracted her arm.

''Tis sold by the inch afterwards,' the man continued.  'I could get
you a bit, miss, for nothing, if you'd like?'

She hastily repudiated any such wish, all the more from a curious
creeping feeling that the condemned wretch's destiny was becoming
interwoven with her own; and having engaged a room for the night,
sat down to think.

Up to this time she had formed but the vaguest notions about her
means of obtaining access to the prison.  The words of the cunning-
man returned to her mind.  He had implied that she should use her
beauty, impaired though it was, as a pass-key.  In her inexperience
she knew little about jail functionaries; she had heard of a high-
sheriff and an under-sheriff; but dimly only.  She knew, however,
that there must be a hangman, and to the hangman she determined to
apply.



CHAPTER VIII--A WATER-SIDE HERMIT



At this date, and for several years after, there was a hangman to
almost every jail.  Gertrude found, on inquiry, that the
Casterbridge official dwelt in a lonely cottage by a deep slow river
flowing under the cliff on which the prison buildings were situate--
the stream being the self-same one, though she did not know it,
which watered the Stickleford and Holmstoke meads lower down in its
course.

Having changed her dress, and before she had eaten or drunk--for she
could not take her ease till she had ascertained some particulars--
Gertrude pursued her way by a path along the water-side to the
cottage indicated.  Passing thus the outskirts of the jail, she
discerned on the level roof over the gateway three rectangular lines
against the sky, where the specks had been moving in her distant
view; she recognized what the erection was, and passed quickly on.
Another hundred yards brought her to the executioner's house, which
a boy pointed out It stood close to the same stream, and was hard by
a weir, the waters of which emitted a steady roar.

While she stood hesitating the door opened, and an old man came
forth shading a candle with one hand.  Locking the door on the
outside, he turned to a flight of wooden steps fixed against the end
of the cottage, and began to ascend them, this being evidently the
staircase to his bedroom.  Gertrude hastened forward, but by the
time she reached the foot of the ladder he was at the top.  She
called to him loudly enough to be heard above the roar of the weir;
he looked down and said, 'What d'ye want here?'

'To speak to you a minute.'

The candle-light, such as it was, fell upon her imploring, pale,
upturned face, and Davies (as the hangman was called) backed down
the ladder.  'I was just going to bed,' he said; '"Early to bed and
early to rise," but I don't mind stopping a minute for such a one as
you.  Come into house.'  He reopened the door, and preceded her to
the room within.

The implements of his daily work, which was that of a jobbing
gardener, stood in a corner, and seeing probably that she looked
rural, he said, 'If you want me to undertake country work I can't
come, for I never leave Casterbridge for gentle nor simple--not I.
My real calling is officer of justice,' he added formally.

'Yes, yes!  That's it.  To-morrow!'

'Ah!  I thought so.  Well, what's the matter about that?  'Tis no
use to come here about the knot--folks do come continually, but I
tell 'em one knot is as merciful as another if ye keep it under the
ear.  Is the unfortunate man a relation; or, I should say, perhaps'
(looking at her dress) 'a person who's been in your employ?'

'No.  What time is the execution?'

'The same as usual--twelve o'clock, or as soon after as the London
mail-coach gets in.  We always wait for that, in case of a
reprieve.'

'O--a reprieve--I hope not!' she said involuntarily,

'Well,--hee, hee!--as a matter of business, so do I!  But still, if
ever a young fellow deserved to be let off, this one does; only just
turned eighteen, and only present by chance when the rick was fired.
Howsomever, there's not much risk of it, as they are obliged to make
an example of him, there having been so much destruction of property
that way lately.'

'I mean,' she explained, 'that I want to touch him for a charm, a
cure of an affliction, by the advice of a man who has proved the
virtue of the remedy.'

'O yes, miss!  Now I understand.  I've had such people come in past
years.  But it didn't strike me that you looked of a sort to require
blood-turning.  What's the complaint?  The wrong kind for this, I'll
be bound.'

'My arm.'  She reluctantly showed the withered skin.

'Ah--'tis all a-scram!' said the hangman, examining it.

'Yes,' said she.

'Well,' he continued, with interest, 'that IS the class o' subject,
I'm bound to admit!  I like the look of the place; it is truly as
suitable for the cure as any I ever saw.  'Twas a knowing-man that
sent 'ee, whoever he was.'

'You can contrive for me all that's necessary?' she said
breathlessly.

'You should really have gone to the governor of the jail, and your
doctor with 'ee, and given your name and address--that's how it used
to be done, if I recollect.  Still, perhaps, I can manage it for a
trifling fee.'

'O, thank you!  I would rather do it this way, as I should like it
kept private.'

'Lover not to know, eh?'

'No--husband.'

'Aha!  Very well.  I'll get ee' a touch of the corpse.'

'Where is it now?' she said, shuddering.

'It?--HE, you mean; he's living yet.  Just inside that little small
winder up there in the glum.'  He signified the jail on the cliff
above.

She thought of her husband and her friends.  'Yes, of course,' she
said; 'and how am I to proceed?'

He took her to the door.  'Now, do you be waiting at the little
wicket in the wall, that you'll find up there in the lane, not later
than one o'clock.  I will open it from the inside, as I shan't come
home to dinner till he's cut down.  Good-night.  Be punctual; and if
you don't want anybody to know 'ee, wear a veil.  Ah--once I had
such a daughter as you!'

She went away, and climbed the path above, to assure herself that
she would be able to find the wicket next day.  Its outline was soon
visible to her--a narrow opening in the outer wall of the prison
precincts.  The steep was so great that, having reached the wicket,
she stopped a moment to breathe; and, looking back upon the water-
side cot, saw the hangman again ascending his outdoor staircase.  He
entered the loft or chamber to which it led, and in a few minutes
extinguished his light.

The town clock struck ten, and she returned to the White Hart as she
had come.



CHAPTER IX--A RENCOUNTER



It was one o'clock on Saturday.  Gertrude Lodge, having been
admitted to the jail as above described, was sitting in a waiting-
room within the second gate, which stood under a classic archway of
ashlar, then comparatively modern, and bearing the inscription,
'COVNTY JAIL:  1793.'  This had been the facade she saw from the
heath the day before.  Near at hand was a passage to the roof on
which the gallows stood.

The town was thronged, and the market suspended; but Gertrude had
seen scarcely a soul.  Having kept her room till the hour of the
appointment, she had proceeded to the spot by a way which avoided
the open space below the cliff where the spectators had gathered;
but she could, even now, hear the multitudinous babble of their
voices, out of which rose at intervals the hoarse croak of a single
voice uttering the words, 'Last dying speech and confession!'  There
had been no reprieve, and the execution was over; but the crowd
still waited to see the body taken down.

Soon the persistent girl heard a trampling overhead, then a hand
beckoned to her, and, following directions, she went out and crossed
the inner paved court beyond the gatehouse, her knees trembling so
that she could scarcely walk.  One of her arms was out of its
sleeve, and only covered by her shawl.

On the spot at which she had now arrived were two trestles, and
before she could think of their purpose she heard heavy feet
descending stairs somewhere at her back.  Turn her head she would
not, or could not, and, rigid in this position, she was conscious of
a rough coffin passing her shoulder, borne by four men.  It was
open, and in it lay the body of a young man, wearing the smockfrock
of a rustic, and fustian breeches.  The corpse had been thrown into
the coffin so hastily that the skirt of the smockfrock was hanging
over.  The burden was temporarily deposited on the trestles.

By this time the young woman's state was such that a gray mist
seemed to float before her eyes, on account of which, and the veil
she wore, she could scarcely discern anything:  it was as though she
had nearly died, but was held up by a sort of galvanism.

'Now!' said a voice close at hand, and she was just conscious that
the word had been addressed to her.

By a last strenuous effort she advanced, at the same time hearing
persons approaching behind her.  She bared her poor curst arm; and
Davies, uncovering the face of the corpse, took Gertrude's hand, and
held it so that her arm lay across the dead man's neck, upon a line
the colour of an unripe blackberry, which surrounded it.

Gertrude shrieked:  'the turn o' the blood,' predicted by the
conjuror, had taken place.  But at that moment a second shriek rent
the air of the enclosure:  it was not Gertrude's, and its effect
upon her was to make her start round.

Immediately behind her stood Rhoda Brook, her face drawn, and her
eyes red with weeping.  Behind Rhoda stood Gertrude's own husband;
his countenance lined, his eyes dim, but without a tear.

'D-n you! what are you doing here?' he said hoarsely.

'Hussy--to come between us and our child now!' cried Rhoda.  'This
is the meaning of what Satan showed me in the vision!  You are like
her at last!'  And clutching the bare arm of the younger woman, she
pulled her unresistingly back against the wall.  Immediately Brook
had loosened her hold the fragile young Gertrude slid down against
the feet of her husband.  When he lifted her up she was unconscious.

The mere sight of the twain had been enough to suggest to her that
the dead young man was Rhoda's son.  At that time the relatives of
an executed convict had the privilege of claiming the body for
burial, if they chose to do so; and it was for this purpose that
Lodge was awaiting the inquest with Rhoda.  He had been summoned by
her as soon as the young man was taken in the crime, and at
different times since; and he had attended in court during the
trial.  This was the 'holiday' he had been indulging in of late.
The two wretched parents had wished to avoid exposure; and hence had
come themselves for the body, a waggon and sheet for its conveyance
and covering being in waiting outside.

Gertrude's case was so serious that it was deemed advisable to call
to her the surgeon who was at hand.  She was taken out of the jail
into the town; but she never reached home alive.  Her delicate
vitality, sapped perhaps by the paralyzed arm, collapsed under the
double shock that followed the severe strain, physical and mental,
to which she had subjected herself during the previous twenty-four
hours.  Her blood had been 'turned' indeed--too far.  Her death took
place in the town three days after.

Her husband was never seen in Casterbridge again; once only in the
old market-place at Anglebury, which he had so much frequented, and
very seldom in public anywhere.  Burdened at first with moodiness
and remorse, he eventually changed for the better, and appeared as a
chastened and thoughtful man.  Soon after attending the funeral of
his poor young wife he took steps towards giving up the farms in
Holmstoke and the adjoining parish, and, having sold every head of
his stock, he went away to Port-Bredy, at the other end of the
county, living there in solitary lodgings till his death two years
later of a painless decline.  It was then found that he had
bequeathed the whole of his not inconsiderable property to a
reformatory for boys, subject to the payment of a small annuity to
Rhoda Brook, if she could be found to claim it.

For some time she could not be found; but eventually she reappeared
in her old parish,--absolutely refusing, however, to have anything
to do with the provision made for her.  Her monotonous milking at
the dairy was resumed, and followed for many long years, till her
form became bent, and her once abundant dark hair white and worn
away at the forehead--perhaps by long pressure against the cows.
Here, sometimes, those who knew her experiences would stand and
observe her, and wonder what sombre thoughts were beating inside
that impassive, wrinkled brow, to the rhythm of the alternating
milk-streams.

('Blackwood's Magazine,' January 1888.)




FELLOW-TOWNSMEN




CHAPTER I



The shepherd on the east hill could shout out lambing intelligence
to the shepherd on the west hill, over the intervening town
chimneys, without great inconvenience to his voice, so nearly did
the steep pastures encroach upon the burghers' backyards.  And at
night it was possible to stand in the very midst of the town and
hear from their native paddocks on the lower levels of greensward
the mild lowing of the farmer's heifers, and the profound, warm
blowings of breath in which those creatures indulge.  But the
community which had jammed itself in the valley thus flanked formed
a veritable town, with a real mayor and corporation, and a staple
manufacture.

During a certain damp evening five-and-thirty years ago, before the
twilight was far advanced, a pedestrian of professional appearance,
carrying a small bag in his hand and an elevated umbrella, was
descending one of these hills by the turnpike road when he was
overtaken by a phaeton.

'Hullo, Downe--is that you?' said the driver of the vehicle, a young
man of pale and refined appearance.  'Jump up here with me, and ride
down to your door.'

The other turned a plump, cheery, rather self-indulgent face over
his shoulder towards the hailer.

'O, good evening, Mr. Barnet--thanks,' he said, and mounted beside
his acquaintance.

They were fellow-burgesses of the town which lay beneath them, but
though old and very good friends, they were differently
circumstanced.  Barnet was a richer man than the struggling young
lawyer Downe, a fact which was to some extent perceptible in Downe's
manner towards his companion, though nothing of it ever showed in
Barnet's manner towards the solicitor.  Barnet's position in the
town was none of his own making; his father had been a very
successful flax-merchant in the same place, where the trade was
still carried on as briskly as the small capacities of its quarters
would allow.  Having acquired a fair fortune, old Mr. Barnet had
retired from business, bringing up his son as a gentleman-burgher,
and, it must be added, as a well-educated, liberal-minded young man.

'How is Mrs. Barnet?' asked Downe.

'Mrs. Barnet was very well when I left home,' the other answered
constrainedly, exchanging his meditative regard of the horse for one
of self-consciousness.

Mr. Downe seemed to regret his inquiry, and immediately took up
another thread of conversation.  He congratulated his friend on his
election as a council-man; he thought he had not seen him since that
event took place; Mrs. Downe had meant to call and congratulate Mrs.
Barnet, but he feared that she had failed to do so as yet.

Barnet seemed hampered in his replies.  'WE should have been glad to
see you.  I--my wife would welcome Mrs. Downe at any time, as you
know . . . Yes, I am a member of the corporation--rather an
inexperienced member, some of them say.  It is quite true; and I
should have declined the honour as premature--having other things on
my hands just now, too--if it had not been pressed upon me so very
heartily.'

'There is one thing you have on your hands which I can never quite
see the necessity for,' said Downe, with good-humoured freedom.
'What the deuce do you want to build that new mansion for, when you
have already got such an excellent house as the one you live in?'

Barnet's face acquired a warmer shade of colour; but as the question
had been idly asked by the solicitor while regarding the surrounding
flocks and fields, he answered after a moment with no apparent
embarrassment -

'Well, we wanted to get out of the town, you know:  the house I am
living in is rather old and inconvenient.'  Mr. Downe declared that
he had chosen a pretty site for the new building.  They would be
able to see for miles and miles from the windows.  Was he going to
give it a name?  He supposed so.

Barnet thought not.  There was no other house near that was likely
to be mistaken for it.  And he did not care for a name.

'But I think it has a name!'  Downe observed:  'I went past--when
was it?--this morning; and I saw something,--"Chateau Ringdale," I
think it was, stuck up on a board!'

'It was an idea she--we had for a short time,' said Barnet hastily.
'But we have decided finally to do without a name--at any rate such
a name as that.  It must have been a week ago that you saw it.  It
was taken down last Saturday . . . Upon that matter I am firm!' he
added grimly.

Downe murmured in an unconvinced tone that he thought he had seen it
yesterday.

Talking thus they drove into the town.  The street was unusually
still for the hour of seven in the evening; an increasing drizzle
had prevailed since the afternoon, and now formed a gauze across the
yellow lamps, and trickled with a gentle rattle down the heavy roofs
of stone tile, that bent the house-ridges hollow-backed with its
weight, and in some instances caused the walls to bulge outwards in
the upper story.  Their route took them past the little town-hall,
the Black-Bull Hotel, and onward to the junction of a small street
on the right, consisting of a row of those two-and-two windowed
brick residences of no particular age, which are exactly alike
wherever found, except in the people they contain.

'Wait--I'll drive you up to your door,' said Barnet, when Downe
prepared to alight at the corner.  He thereupon turned into the
narrow street, when the faces of three little girls could be
discerned close to the panes of a lighted window a few yards ahead,
surmounted by that of a young matron, the gaze of all four being
directed eagerly up the empty street.  'You are a fortunate fellow,
Downe,' Barnet continued, as mother and children disappeared from
the window to run to the door.  'You must be happy if any man is.  I
would give a hundred such houses as my new one to have a home like
yours.'

'Well--yes, we get along pretty comfortably,' replied Downe
complacently.

'That house, Downe, is none of my ordering,' Barnet broke out,
revealing a bitterness hitherto suppressed, and checking the horse a
moment to finish his speech before delivering up his passenger.
'The house I have already is good enough for me, as you supposed.
It is my own freehold; it was built by my grandfather, and is stout
enough for a castle.  My father was born there, lived there, and
died there.  I was born there, and have always lived there; yet I
must needs build a new one.'

'Why do you?' said Downe.

'Why do I?  To preserve peace in the household.  I do anything for
that; but I don't succeed.  I was firm in resisting "Chateau
Ringdale," however; not that I would not have put up with the
absurdity of the name, but it was too much to have your house
christened after Lord Ringdale, because your wife once had a fancy
for him.  If you only knew everything, you would think all attempt
at reconciliation hopeless.  In your happy home you have had no such
experiences; and God forbid that you ever should.  See, here they
are all ready to receive you!'

'Of course!  And so will your wife be waiting to receive you,' said
Downe.  'Take my word for it she will!  And with a dinner prepared
for you far better than mine.'

'I hope so,' Barnet replied dubiously.

He moved on to Downe's door, which the solicitor's family had
already opened.  Downe descended, but being encumbered with his bag
and umbrella, his foot slipped, and he fell upon his knees in the
gutter.

'O, my dear Charles!' said his wife, running down the steps; and,
quite ignoring the presence of Barnet, she seized hold of her
husband, pulled him to his feet, and kissed him, exclaiming, 'I hope
you are not hurt, darling!'  The children crowded round, chiming in
piteously, 'Poor papa!'

'He's all right,' said Barnet, perceiving that Downe was only a
little muddy, and looking more at the wife than at the husband.
Almost at any other time--certainly during his fastidious bachelor
years--he would have thought her a too demonstrative woman; but
those recent circumstances of his own life to which he had just
alluded made Mrs. Downe's solicitude so affecting that his eye grew
damp as he witnessed it.  Bidding the lawyer and his family good-
night he left them, and drove slowly into the main street towards
his own house.

The heart of Barnet was sufficiently impressionable to be influenced
by Downe's parting prophecy that he might not be so unwelcome home
as he imagined:  the dreary night might, at least on this one
occasion, make Downe's forecast true.  Hence it was in a suspense
that he could hardly have believed possible that he halted at his
door.  On entering his wife was nowhere to be seen, and he inquired
for her.  The servant informed him that her mistress had the
dressmaker with her, and would be engaged for some time.

'Dressmaker at this time of day!'

'She dined early, sir, and hopes you will excuse her joining you
this evening.'

'But she knew I was coming to-night?'

'O yes, sir.'

'Go up and tell her I am come.'

The servant did so; but the mistress of the house merely transmitted
her former words.

Barnet said nothing more, and presently sat down to his lonely meal,
which was eaten abstractedly, the domestic scene he had lately
witnessed still impressing him by its contrast with the situation
here.  His mind fell back into past years upon a certain pleasing
and gentle being whose face would loom out of their shades at such
times as these.  Barnet turned in his chair, and looked with
unfocused eyes in a direction southward from where he sat, as if he
saw not the room but a long way beyond.  'I wonder if she lives
there still!' he said.



CHAPTER II



He rose with a sudden rebelliousness, put on his hat and coat, and
went out of the house, pursuing his way along the glistening
pavement while eight o'clock was striking from St. Mary's tower, and
the apprentices and shopmen were slamming up the shutters from end
to end of the town.  In two minutes only those shops which could
boast of no attendant save the master or the mistress remained with
open eyes.  These were ever somewhat less prompt to exclude
customers than the others:  for their owners' ears the closing hour
had scarcely the cheerfulness that it possessed for the hired
servants of the rest.  Yet the night being dreary the delay was not
for long, and their windows, too, blinked together one by one.

During this time Barnet had proceeded with decided step in a
direction at right angles to the broad main thoroughfare of the
town, by a long street leading due southward.  Here, though his
family had no more to do with the flax manufacture, his own name
occasionally greeted him on gates and warehouses, being used
allusively by small rising tradesmen as a recommendation, in such
words as 'Smith, from Barnet & Co.'--'Robinson, late manager at
Barnet's.'  The sight led him to reflect upon his father's busy
life, and he questioned if it had not been far happier than his own.

The houses along the road became fewer, and presently open ground
appeared between them on either side, the track on the right hand
rising to a higher level till it merged in a knoll.  On the summit a
row of builders' scaffold-poles probed the indistinct sky like
spears, and at their bases could be discerned the lower courses of a
building lately begun.  Barnet slackened his pace and stood for a
few moments without leaving the centre of the road, apparently not
much interested in the sight, till suddenly his eye was caught by a
post in the fore part of the ground bearing a white board at the
top.  He went to the rails, vaulted over, and walked in far enough
to discern painted upon the board 'Chateau Ringdale.'

A dismal irony seemed to lie in the words, and its effect was to
irritate him.  Downe, then, had spoken truly.  He stuck his umbrella
into the sod, and seized the post with both hands, as if intending
to loosen and throw it down.  Then, like one bewildered by an
opposition which would exist none the less though its manifestations
were removed, he allowed his arms to sink to his side.

'Let it be,' he said to himself.  'I have declared there shall be
peace--if possible.'

Taking up his umbrella he quietly left the enclosure, and went on
his way, still keeping his back to the town.  He had advanced with
more decision since passing the new building, and soon a hoarse
murmur rose upon the gloom; it was the sound of the sea.  The road
led to the harbour, at a distance of a mile from the town, from
which the trade of the district was fed.  After seeing the obnoxious
name-board Barnet had forgotten to open his umbrella, and the rain
tapped smartly on his hat, and occasionally stroked his face as he
went on.

Though the lamps were still continued at the roadside, they stood at
wider intervals than before, and the pavement had given place to
common road.  Every time he came to a lamp an increasing shine made
itself visible upon his shoulders, till at last they quite glistened
with wet.  The murmur from the shore grew stronger, but it was still
some distance off when he paused before one of the smallest of the
detached houses by the wayside, standing in its own garden, the
latter being divided from the road by a row of wooden palings.
Scrutinizing the spot to ensure that he was not mistaken, he opened
the gate and gently knocked at the cottage door.

When he had patiently waited minutes enough to lead any man in
ordinary cases to knock again, the door was heard to open, though it
was impossible to see by whose hand, there being no light in the
passage.  Barnet said at random, 'Does Miss Savile live here?'

A youthful voice assured him that she did live there, and by a
sudden afterthought asked him to come in.  It would soon get a
light, it said:  but the night being wet, mother had not thought it
worth while to trim the passage lamp.

'Don't trouble yourself to get a light for me,' said Barnet hastily;
'it is not necessary at all.  Which is Miss Savile's sitting-room?'

The young person, whose white pinafore could just be discerned,
signified a door in the side of the passage, and Barnet went forward
at the same moment, so that no light should fall upon his face.  On
entering the room he closed the door behind him, pausing till he
heard the retreating footsteps of the child.

He found himself in an apartment which was simply and neatly, though
not poorly furnished; everything, from the miniature chiffonnier to
the shining little daguerreotype which formed the central ornament
of the mantelpiece, being in scrupulous order.  The picture was
enclosed by a frame of embroidered card-board--evidently the work of
feminine hands--and it was the portrait of a thin faced, elderly
lieutenant in the navy.  From behind the lamp on the table a female
form now rose into view, that of a young girl, and a resemblance
between her and the portrait was early discoverable.  She had been
so absorbed in some occupation on the other side of the lamp as to
have barely found time to realize her visitor's presence.

They both remained standing for a few seconds without speaking.  The
face that confronted Barnet had a beautiful outline; the
Raffaelesque oval of its contour was remarkable for an English
countenance, and that countenance housed in a remote country-road to
an unheard-of harbour.  But her features did not do justice to this
splendid beginning:  Nature had recollected that she was not in
Italy; and the young lady's lineaments, though not so inconsistent
as to make her plain, would have been accepted rather as pleasing
than as correct.  The preoccupied expression which, like images on
the retina, remained with her for a moment after the state that
caused it had ceased, now changed into a reserved, half-proud, and
slightly indignant look, in which the blood diffused itself quickly
across her cheek, and additional brightness broke the shade of her
rather heavy eyes.

'I know I have no business here,' he said, answering the look.  'But
I had a great wish to see you, and inquire how you were.  You can
give your hand to me, seeing how often I have held it in past days?'

'I would rather forget than remember all that, Mr. Barnet,' she
answered, as she coldly complied with the request.  'When I think of
the circumstances of our last meeting, I can hardly consider it kind
of you to allude to such a thing as our past--or, indeed, to come
here at all.'

'There was no harm in it surely?  I don't trouble you often, Lucy.'

'I have not had the honour of a visit from you for a very long time,
certainly, and I did not expect it now,' she said, with the same
stiffness in her air.  'I hope Mrs. Barnet is very well?'

'Yes, yes!' he impatiently returned.  'At least I suppose so--though
I only speak from inference!'

'But she is your wife, sir,' said the young girl tremulously.

The unwonted tones of a man's voice in that feminine chamber had
startled a canary that was roosting in its cage by the window; the
bird awoke hastily, and fluttered against the bars.  She went and
stilled it by laying her face against the cage and murmuring a
coaxing sound.  It might partly have been done to still herself.

'I didn't come to talk of Mrs. Barnet,' he pursued; 'I came to talk
of you, of yourself alone; to inquire how you are getting on since
your great loss.'  And he turned towards the portrait of her father.

'I am getting on fairly well, thank you.'

The force of her utterance was scarcely borne out by her look; but
Barnet courteously reproached himself for not having guessed a thing
so natural; and to dissipate all embarrassment, added, as he bent
over the table, 'What were you doing when I came?--painting flowers,
and by candlelight?'

'O no,' she said, 'not painting them--only sketching the outlines.
I do that at night to save time--I have to get three dozen done by
the end of the month.'

Barnet looked as if he regretted it deeply.  'You will wear your
poor eyes out,' he said, with more sentiment than he had hitherto
shown.  'You ought not to do it.  There was a time when I should
have said you must not.  Well--I almost wish I had never seen light
with my own eyes when I think of that!'

'Is this a time or place for recalling such matters?' she asked,
with dignity.  'You used to have a gentlemanly respect for me, and
for yourself.  Don't speak any more as you have spoken, and don't
come again.  I cannot think that this visit is serious, or was
closely considered by you.'

'Considered:  well, I came to see you as an old and good friend--not
to mince matters, to visit a woman I loved.  Don't be angry!  I
could not help doing it, so many things brought you into my mind . .
. This evening I fell in with an acquaintance, and when I saw how
happy he was with his wife and family welcoming him home, though
with only one-tenth of my income and chances, and thought what might
have been in my case, it fairly broke down my discretion, and off I
came here.  Now I am here I feel that I am wrong to some extent.
But the feeling that I should like to see you, and talk of those we
used to know in common, was very strong.'

'Before that can be the case a little more time must pass,' said
Miss Savile quietly; 'a time long enough for me to regard with some
calmness what at present I remember far too impatiently--though it
may be you almost forget it.  Indeed you must have forgotten it long
before you acted as you did.'  Her voice grew stronger and more
vivacious as she added:  'But I am doing my best to forget it too,
and I know I shall succeed from the progress I have made already!'

She had remained standing till now, when she turned and sat down,
facing half away from him.

Barnet watched her moodily.  'Yes, it is only what I deserve,' he
said.  'Ambition pricked me on--no, it was not ambition, it was
wrongheadedness!  Had I but reflected . . . '  He broke out
vehemently:  'But always remember this, Lucy:  if you had written to
me only one little line after that misunderstanding, I declare I
should have come back to you.  That ruined me!' he slowly walked as
far as the little room would allow him to go, and remained with his
eyes on the skirting.

'But, Mr. Barnet, how could I write to you?  There was no opening
for my doing so.'

'Then there ought to have been,' said Barnet, turning.  'That was my
fault!'

'Well, I don't know anything about that; but as there had been
nothing said by me which required any explanation by letter, I did
not send one.  Everything was so indefinite, and feeling your
position to be so much wealthier than mine, I fancied I might have
mistaken your meaning.  And when I heard of the other lady--a woman
of whose family even you might be proud--I thought how foolish I had
been, and said nothing.'

'Then I suppose it was destiny--accident--I don't know what, that
separated us, dear Lucy.  Anyhow you were the woman I ought to have
made my wife--and I let you slip, like the foolish man that I was!'

'O, Mr. Barnet,' she said, almost in tears, 'don't revive the
subject to me; I am the wrong one to console you--think, sir,--you
should not be here--it would be so bad for me if it were known!'

'It would--it would, indeed,' he said hastily.  'I am not right in
doing this, and I won't do it again.'

'It is a very common folly of human nature, you know, to think the
course you did NOT adopt must have been the best,' she continued,
with gentle solicitude, as she followed him to the door of the room.
'And you don't know that I should have accepted you, even if you had
asked me to be your wife.'  At this his eye met hers, and she
dropped her gaze.  She knew that her voice belied her.  There was a
silence till she looked up to add, in a voice of soothing
playfulness, 'My family was so much poorer than yours, even before I
lost my dear father, that--perhaps your companions would have made
it unpleasant for us on account of my deficiencies.'

'Your disposition would soon have won them round,' said Barnet.

She archly expostulated:  'Now, never mind my disposition; try to
make it up with your wife!  Those are my commands to you.  And now
you are to leave me at once.'

'I will.  I must make the best of it all, I suppose,' he replied,
more cheerfully than he had as yet spoken.  'But I shall never again
meet with such a dear girl as you!'  And he suddenly opened the
door, and left her alone.  When his glance again fell on the lamps
that were sparsely ranged along the dreary level road, his eyes were
in a state which showed straw-like motes of light radiating from
each flame into the surrounding air.

On the other side of the way Barnet observed a man under an
umbrella, walking parallel with himself.  Presently this man left
the footway, and gradually converged on Barnet's course.  The latter
then saw that it was Charlson, a surgeon of the town, who owed him
money.  Charlson was a man not without ability; yet he did not
prosper.  Sundry circumstances stood in his way as a medical
practitioner:  he was needy; he was not a coddle; he gossiped with
men instead of with women; he had married a stranger instead of one
of the town young ladies; and he was given to conversational
buffoonery.  Moreover, his look was quite erroneous.  Those only
proper features in the family doctor, the quiet eye, and the thin
straight passionless lips which never curl in public either for
laughter or for scorn, were not his; he had a full-curved mouth, and
a bold black eye that made timid people nervous.  His companions
were what in old times would have been called boon companions--an
expression which, though of irreproachable root, suggests
fraternization carried to the point of unscrupulousness.  All this
was against him in the little town of his adoption.

Charlson had been in difficulties, and to oblige him Barnet had put
his name to a bill; and, as he had expected, was called upon to meet
it when it fell due.  It had been only a matter of fifty pounds,
which Barnet could well afford to lose, and he bore no ill-will to
the thriftless surgeon on account of it.  But Charlson had a little
too much brazen indifferentism in his composition to be altogether a
desirable acquaintance.

'I hope to be able to make that little bill-business right with you
in the course of three weeks, Mr. Barnet,' said Charlson with hail-
fellow friendliness.

Barnet replied good-naturedly that there was no hurry.

This particular three weeks had moved on in advance of Charlson's
present with the precision of a shadow for some considerable time.

'I've had a dream,' Charlson continued.  Barnet knew from his tone
that the surgeon was going to begin his characteristic nonsense, and
did not encourage him.  'I've had a dream,' repeated Charlson, who
required no encouragement.  'I dreamed that a gentleman, who has
been very kind to me, married a haughty lady in haste, before he had
quite forgotten a nice little girl he knew before, and that one wet
evening, like the present, as I was walking up the harbour-road, I
saw him come out of that dear little girl's present abode.'

Barnet glanced towards the speaker.  The rays from a neighbouring
lamp struck through the drizzle under Charlson's umbrella, so as
just to illumine his face against the shade behind, and show that
his eye was turned up under the outer corner of its lid, whence it
leered with impish jocoseness as he thrust his tongue into his
cheek.

'Come,' said Barnet gravely, 'we'll have no more of that.'

'No, no--of course not,' Charlson hastily answered, seeing that his
humour had carried him too far, as it had done many times before.
He was profuse in his apologies, but Barnet did not reply.  Of one
thing he was certain--that scandal was a plant of quick root, and
that he was bound to obey Lucy's injunction for Lucy's own sake.



CHAPTER III



He did so, to the letter; and though, as the crocus followed the
snowdrop and the daffodil the crocus in Lucy's garden, the harbour-
road was a not unpleasant place to walk in, Barnet's feet never trod
its stones, much less approached her door.  He avoided a saunter
that way as he would have avoided a dangerous dram, and took his
airings a long distance northward, among severely square and brown
ploughed fields, where no other townsman came.  Sometimes he went
round by the lower lanes of the borough, where the rope-walks
stretched in which his family formerly had share, and looked at the
rope-makers walking backwards, overhung by apple-trees and bushes,
and intruded on by cows and calves, as if trade had established
itself there at considerable inconvenience to Nature.

One morning, when the sun was so warm as to raise a steam from the
south-eastern slopes of those flanking hills that looked so lovely
above the old roofs, but made every low-chimneyed house in the town
as smoky as Tophet, Barnet glanced from the windows of the town-
council room for lack of interest in what was proceeding within.
Several members of the corporation were present, but there was not
much business doing, and in a few minutes Downe came leisurely
across to him, saying that he seldom saw Barnet now.

Barnet owned that he was not often present.

Downe looked at the crimson curtain which hung down beside the
panes, reflecting its hot hues into their faces, and then out of the
window.  At that moment there passed along the street a tall
commanding lady, in whom the solicitor recognized Barnet's wife.
Barnet had done the same thing, and turned away.

'It will be all right some day,' said Downe, with cheering sympathy.

'You have heard, then, of her last outbreak?'

Downe depressed his cheerfulness to its very reverse in a moment.
'No, I have not heard of anything serious,' he said, with as long a
face as one naturally round could be turned into at short notice.
'I only hear vague reports of such things.'

'You may think it will be all right,' said Barnet drily.  'But I
have a different opinion . . . No, Downe, we must look the thing in
the face.  Not poppy nor mandragora--however, how are your wife and
children?'

Downe said that they were all well, thanks; they were out that
morning somewhere; he was just looking to see if they were walking
that way.  Ah, there they were, just coming down the street; and
Downe pointed to the figures of two children with a nursemaid, and a
lady walking behind them.

'You will come out and speak to her?' he asked.

'Not this morning.  The fact is I don't care to speak to anybody
just now.'

'You are too sensitive, Mr. Barnet.  At school I remember you used
to get as red as a rose if anybody uttered a word that hurt your
feelings.'

Barnet mused.  'Yes,' he admitted, 'there is a grain of truth in
that.  It is because of that I often try to make peace at home.
Life would be tolerable then at any rate, even if not particularly
bright.'

'I have thought more than once of proposing a little plan to you,'
said Downe with some hesitation.  'I don't know whether it will meet
your views, but take it or leave it, as you choose.  In fact, it was
my wife who suggested it:  that she would be very glad to call on
Mrs. Barnet and get into her confidence.  She seems to think that
Mrs. Barnet is rather alone in the town, and without advisers.  Her
impression is that your wife will listen to reason.  Emily has a
wonderful way of winning the hearts of people of her own sex.'

'And of the other sex too, I think.  She is a charming woman, and
you were a lucky fellow to find her.'

'Well, perhaps I was,' simpered Downe, trying to wear an aspect of
being the last man in the world to feel pride.  'However, she will
be likely to find out what ruffles Mrs. Barnet.  Perhaps it is some
misunderstanding, you know--something that she is too proud to ask
you to explain, or some little thing in your conduct that irritates
her because she does not fully comprehend you.  The truth is, Emily
would have been more ready to make advances if she had been quite
sure of her fitness for Mrs. Barnet's society, who has of course
been accustomed to London people of good position, which made Emily
fearful of intruding.'

Barnet expressed his warmest thanks for the well-intentioned
proposition.  There was reason in Mrs. Downe's fear--that he owned.
'But do let her call,' he said.  'There is no woman in England I
would so soon trust on such an errand.  I am afraid there will not
be any brilliant result; still I shall take it as the kindest and
nicest thing if she will try it, and not be frightened at a
repulse.'

When Barnet and Downe had parted, the former went to the Town
Savings-Bank, of which he was a trustee, and endeavoured to forget
his troubles in the contemplation of low sums of money, and figures
in a network of red and blue lines.  He sat and watched the working-
people making their deposits, to which at intervals he signed his
name.  Before he left in the afternoon Downe put his head inside the
door.

'Emily has seen Mrs. Barnet,' he said, in a low voice.  'She has got
Mrs. Barnet's promise to take her for a drive down to the shore to-
morrow, if it is fine.  Good afternoon!'

Barnet shook Downe by the hand without speaking, and Downe went
away.



CHAPTER IV



The next day was as fine as the arrangement could possibly require.
As the sun passed the meridian and declined westward, the tall
shadows from the scaffold-poles of Barnet's rising residence
streaked the ground as far as to the middle of the highway.  Barnet
himself was there inspecting the progress of the works for the first
time during several weeks.  A building in an old-fashioned town
five-and-thirty years ago did not, as in the modern fashion, rise
from the sod like a booth at a fair.  The foundations and lower
courses were put in and allowed to settle for many weeks before the
superstructure was built up, and a whole summer of drying was hardly
sufficient to do justice to the important issues involved.  Barnet
stood within a window-niche which had as yet received no frame, and
thence looked down a slope into the road.  The wheels of a chaise
were heard, and then his handsome Xantippe, in the company of Mrs.
Downe, drove past on their way to the shore.  They were driving
slowly; there was a pleasing light in Mrs. Downe's face, which
seemed faintly to reflect itself upon the countenance of her
companion--that politesse du coeur which was so natural to her
having possibly begun already to work results.  But whatever the
situation, Barnet resolved not to interfere, or do anything to
hazard the promise of the day.  He might well afford to trust the
issue to another when he could never direct it but to ill himself.
His wife's clenched rein-hand in its lemon-coloured glove, her stiff
erect figure, clad in velvet and lace, and her boldly-outlined face,
passed on, exhibiting their owner as one fixed for ever above the
level of her companion--socially by her early breeding, and
materially by her higher cushion.

Barnet decided to allow them a proper time to themselves, and then
stroll down to the shore and drive them home.  After lingering on at
the house for another hour he started with this intention.  A few
hundred yards below 'Chateau Ringdale' stood the cottage in which
the late lieutenant's daughter had her lodging.  Barnet had not been
so far that way for a long time, and as he approached the forbidden
ground a curious warmth passed into him, which led him to perceive
that, unless he were careful, he might have to fight the battle with
himself about Lucy over again.  A tenth of his present excuse would,
however, have justified him in travelling by that road to-day.

He came opposite the dwelling, and turned his eyes for a momentary
glance into the little garden that stretched from the palings to the
door.  Lucy was in the enclosure; she was walking and stooping to
gather some flowers, possibly for the purpose of painting them, for
she moved about quickly, as if anxious to save time.  She did not
see him; he might have passed unnoticed; but a sensation which was
not in strict unison with his previous sentiments that day led him
to pause in his walk and watch her.  She went nimbly round and round
the beds of anemones, tulips, jonquils, polyanthuses, and other old-
fashioned flowers, looking a very charming figure in her half-
mourning bonnet, and with an incomplete nosegay in her left hand.
Raising herself to pull down a lilac blossom she observed him.

'Mr. Barnet!' she said, innocently smiling.  'Why, I have been
thinking of you many times since Mrs. Barnet went by in the pony-
carriage, and now here you are!'

'Yes, Lucy,' he said.

Then she seemed to recall particulars of their last meeting, and he
believed that she flushed, though it might have been only the fancy
of his own supersensitivenesss.

'I am going to the harbour,' he added.

'Are you?' Lucy remarked simply.  'A great many people begin to go
there now the summer is drawing on.'

Her face had come more into his view as she spoke, and he noticed
how much thinner and paler it was than when he had seen it last.
'Lucy, how weary you look! tell me, can I help you?' he was going to
cry out.--'If I do,' he thought, 'it will be the ruin of us both!'
He merely said that the afternoon was fine, and went on his way.

As he went a sudden blast of air came over the hill as if in
contradiction to his words, and spoilt the previous quiet of the
scene.  The wind had already shifted violently, and now smelt of the
sea.

The harbour-road soon began to justify its name.  A gap appeared in
the rampart of hills which shut out the sea, and on the left of the
opening rose a vertical cliff, coloured a burning orange by the
sunlight, the companion cliff on the right being livid in shade.
Between these cliffs, like the Libyan bay which sheltered the
shipwrecked Trojans, was a little haven, seemingly a beginning made
by Nature herself of a perfect harbour, which appealed to the
passer-by as only requiring a little human industry to finish it and
make it famous, the ground on each side as far back as the daisied
slopes that bounded the interior valley being a mere layer of blown
sand.  But the Port-Bredy burgesses a mile inland had, in the course
of ten centuries, responded many times to that mute appeal, with the
result that the tides had invariably choked up their works with sand
and shingle as soon as completed.  There were but few houses here:
a rough pier, a few boats, some stores, an inn, a residence or two,
a ketch unloading in the harbour, were the chief features of the
settlement.  On the open ground by the shore stood his wife's pony-
carriage, empty, the boy in attendance holding the horse.

When Barnet drew nearer, he saw an indigo-coloured spot moving
swiftly along beneath the radiant base of the eastern cliff, which
proved to be a man in a jersey, running with all his might.  He held
up his hand to Barnet, as it seemed, and they approached each other.
The man was local, but a stranger to him.

'What is it, my man?' said Barnet.

'A terrible calamity!' the boatman hastily explained.  Two ladies
had been capsized in a boat--they were Mrs. Downe and Mrs. Barnet of
the old town; they had driven down there that afternoon--they had
alighted, and it was so fine, that, after walking about a little

while, they had been tempted to go out for a short sail round the
cliff.  Just as they were putting in to the shore, the wind shifted
with a sudden gust, the boat listed over, and it was thought they
were both drowned.  How it could have happened was beyond his mind
to fathom, for John Green knew how to sail a boat as well as any man
there.

'Which is the way to the place?' said Barnet.

It was just round the cliff.

'Run to the carriage and tell the boy to bring it to the place as
soon as you can.  Then go to the Harbour Inn and tell them to ride
to town for a doctor.  Have they been got out of the water?'

'One lady has.'

'Which?'

'Mrs. Barnet.  Mrs. Downe, it is feared, has fleeted out to sea.'

Barnet ran on to that part of the shore which the cliff had hitherto
obscured from his view, and there discerned, a long way ahead, a
group of fishermen standing.  As soon as he came up one or two
recognized him, and, not liking to meet his eye, turned aside with
misgiving.  He went amidst them and saw a small sailing-boat lying
draggled at the water's edge; and, on the sloping shingle beside it,
a soaked and sandy woman's form in the velvet dress and yellow
gloves of his wife.



CHAPTER V



All had been done that could be done.  Mrs. Barnet was in her own
house under medical hands, but the result was still uncertain.
Barnet had acted as if devotion to his wife were the dominant
passion of his existence.  There had been much to decide--whether to
attempt restoration of the apparently lifeless body as it lay on the
shore--whether to carry her to the Harbour Inn--whether to drive
with her at once to his own house.  The first course, with no
skilled help or appliances near at hand, had seemed hopeless.  The
second course would have occupied nearly as much time as a drive to
the town, owing to the intervening ridges of shingle, and the
necessity of crossing the harbour by boat to get to the house, added
to which much time must have elapsed before a doctor could have
arrived down there.  By bringing her home in the carriage some
precious moments had slipped by; but she had been laid in her own
bed in seven minutes, a doctor called to her side, and every
possible restorative brought to bear upon her.

At what a tearing pace he had driven up that road, through the
yellow evening sunlight, the shadows flapping irksomely into his
eyes as each wayside object rushed past between him and the west!
Tired workmen with their baskets at their backs had turned on their
homeward journey to wonder at his speed.  Halfway between the shore
and Port-Bredy town he had met Charlson, who had been the first
surgeon to hear of the accident.  He was accompanied by his
assistant in a gig.  Barnet had sent on the latter to the coast in
case that Downe's poor wife should by that time have been reclaimed
from the waves, and had brought Charlson back with him to the house.

Barnet's presence was not needed here, and he felt it to be his next
duty to set off at once and find Downe, that no other than himself
might break the news to him.

He was quite sure that no chance had been lost for Mrs. Downe by his
leaving the shore.  By the time that Mrs. Barnet had been laid in
the carriage, a much larger group had assembled to lend assistance
in finding her friend, rendering his own help superfluous.  But the
duty of breaking the news was made doubly painful by the
circumstance that the catastrophe which had befallen Mrs. Downe was
solely the result of her own and her husband's loving-kindness
towards himself.

He found Downe in his office.  When the solicitor comprehended the
intelligence he turned pale, stood up, and remained for a moment
perfectly still, as if bereft of his faculties; then his shoulders
heaved, he pulled out his handkerchief and began to cry like a
child.  His sobs might have been heard in the next room.  He seemed
to have no idea of going to the shore, or of doing anything; but
when Barnet took him gently by the hand and proposed to start at
once, he quietly acquiesced, neither uttering any further word nor
making any effort to repress his tears.

Barnet accompanied him to the shore, where, finding that no trace
had as yet been seen of Mrs. Downe, and that his stay would be of no
avail, he left Downe with his friends and the young doctor, and once
more hastened back to his own house.

At the door he met Charlson.  'Well!'  Barnet said.

'I have just come down,' said the doctor; 'we have done everything,
but without result.  I sympathize with you in your bereavement.'

Barnet did not much appreciate Charlson's sympathy, which sounded to
his ears as something of a mockery from the lips of a man who knew
what Charlson knew about their domestic relations.  Indeed there
seemed an odd spark in Charlson's full black eye as he said the
words; but that might have been imaginary.

'And, Mr. Barnet,' Charlson resumed, 'that little matter between us-
-I hope to settle it finally in three weeks at least.'

'Never mind that now,' said Barnet abruptly.  He directed the
surgeon to go to the harbour in case his services might even now be
necessary there:  and himself entered the house.

The servants were coming from his wife's chamber, looking helplessly
at each other and at him.  He passed them by and entered the room,
where he stood mutely regarding the bed for a few minutes, after
which he walked into his own dressing-room adjoining, and there
paced up and down.  In a minute or two he noticed what a strange and
total silence had come over the upper part of the house; his own
movements, muffled as they were by the carpet, seemed noisy, and his
thoughts to disturb the air like articulate utterances.  His eye
glanced through the window.  Far down the road to the harbour a roof
detained his gaze:  out of it rose a red chimney, and out of the red
chimney a curl of smoke, as from a fire newly kindled.  He had often
seen such a sight before.  In that house lived Lucy Savile; and the
smoke was from the fire which was regularly lighted at this time to

make her tea.

After that he went back to the bedroom, and stood there some time
regarding his wife's silent form.  She was a woman some years older
than himself, but had not by any means overpassed the maturity of
good looks and vigour.  Her passionate features, well-defined, firm,
and statuesque in life, were doubly so now:  her mouth and brow,
beneath her purplish black hair, showed only too clearly that the
turbulency of character which had made a bear-garden of his house
had been no temporary phase of her existence.  While he reflected,
he suddenly said to himself, I wonder if all has been done?

The thought was led up to by his having fancied that his wife's
features lacked in its complete form the expression which he had
been accustomed to associate with the faces of those whose spirits
have fled for ever.  The effacement of life was not so marked but
that, entering uninformed, he might have supposed her sleeping.  Her
complexion was that seen in the numerous faded portraits by Sir
Joshua Reynolds; it was pallid in comparison with life, but there
was visible on a close inspection the remnant of what had once been
a flush; the keeping between the cheeks and the hollows of the face
being thus preserved, although positive colour was gone.  Long
orange rays of evening sun stole in through chinks in the blind,
striking on the large mirror, and being thence reflected upon the
crimson hangings and woodwork of the heavy bedstead, so that the
general tone of light was remarkably warm; and it was probable that
something might be due to this circumstance.  Still the fact
impressed him as strange.  Charlson had been gone more than a
quarter of an hour:  could it be possible that he had left too soon,
and that his attempts to restore her had operated so sluggishly as
only now to have made themselves felt?  Barnet laid his hand upon
her chest, and fancied that ever and anon a faint flutter of
palpitation, gentle as that of a butterfly's wing, disturbed the
stillness there--ceasing for a time, then struggling to go on, then
breaking down in weakness and ceasing again.

Barnet's mother had been an active practitioner of the healing art
among her poorer neighbours, and her inspirations had all been
derived from an octavo volume of Domestic Medicine, which at this
moment was lying, as it had lain for many years, on a shelf in
Barnet's dressing-room.  He hastily fetched it, and there read under
the head 'Drowning:'-


'Exertions for the recovery of any person who has not been immersed
for a longer period than half-an-hour should be continued for at
least four hours, as there have been many cases in which returning
life has made itself visible even after a longer interval.

'Should, however, a weak action of any of the organs show itself
when the case seems almost hopeless, our efforts must be redoubled;
the feeble spark in this case requires to be solicited; it will
certainly disappear under a relaxation of labour.'


Barnet looked at his watch; it was now barely two hours and a half
from the time when he had first heard of the accident.  He threw
aside the book and turned quickly to reach a stimulant which had
previously been used.  Pulling up the blind for more light, his eye
glanced out of the window.  There he saw that red chimney still
smoking cheerily, and that roof, and through the roof that somebody.
His mechanical movements stopped, his hand remained on the blind-
cord, and he seemed to become breathless, as if he had suddenly
found himself treading a high rope.

While he stood a sparrow lighted on the windowsill, saw him, and
flew away.  Next a man and a dog walked over one of the green hills
which bulged above the roofs of the town.  But Barnet took no
notice.

We may wonder what were the exact images that passed through his
mind during those minutes of gazing upon Lucy Savile's house, the
sparrow, the man and the dog, and Lucy Savile's house again.  There
are honest men who will not admit to their thoughts, even as idle
hypotheses, views of the future that assume as done a deed which
they would recoil from doing; and there are other honest men for
whom morality ends at the surface of their own heads, who will
deliberate what the first will not so much as suppose.  Barnet had a
wife whose pretence distracted his home; she now lay as in death; by
merely doing nothing--by letting the intelligence which had gone
forth to the world lie undisturbed--he would effect such a
deliverance for himself as he had never hoped for, and open up an
opportunity of which till now he had never dreamed.  Whether the
conjuncture had arisen through any unscrupulous, ill-considered
impulse of Charlson to help out of a strait the friend who was so
kind as never to press him for what was due could not be told; there
was nothing to prove it; and it was a question which could never be
asked.  The triangular situation--himself--his wife--Lucy Savile--
was the one clear thing.

From Barnet's actions we may infer that he SUPPOSED such and such a
result, for a moment, but did not deliberate.  He withdrew his hazel
eyes from the scene without, calmly turned, rang the bell for
assistance, and vigorously exerted himself to learn if life still
lingered in that motionless frame.  In a short time another surgeon
was in attendance; and then Barnet's surmise proved to be true.  The
slow life timidly heaved again; but much care and patience were
needed to catch and retain it, and a considerable period elapsed
before it could be said with certainty that Mrs. Barnet lived.  When
this was the case, and there was no further room for doubt, Barnet
left the chamber.  The blue evening smoke from Lucy's chimney had
died down to an imperceptible stream, and as he walked about
downstairs he murmured to himself, 'My wife was dead, and she is
alive again.'

It was not so with Downe.  After three hours' immersion his wife's
body had been recovered, life, of course, being quite extinct.
Barnet on descending, went straight to his friend's house, and there
learned the result.  Downe was helpless in his wild grief,
occasionally even hysterical.  Barnet said little, but finding that
some guiding hand was necessary in the sorrow-stricken household,
took upon him to supervise and manage till Downe should be in a
state of mind to do so for himself.



CHAPTER VI



One September evening, four months later, when Mrs. Barnet was in
perfect health, and Mrs. Downe but a weakening memory, an errand-boy
paused to rest himself in front of Mr. Barnet's old house,
depositing his basket on one of the window-sills.  The street was
not yet lighted, but there were lights in the house, and at
intervals a flitting shadow fell upon the blind at his elbow.  Words
also were audible from the same apartment, and they seemed to be
those of persons in violent altercation.  But the boy could not
gather their purport, and he went on his way.

Ten minutes afterwards the door of Barnet's house opened, and a tall
closely-veiled lady in a travelling-dress came out and descended the
freestone steps.  The servant stood in the doorway watching her as
she went with a measured tread down the street.  When she had been
out of sight for some minutes Barnet appeared at the door from
within.

'Did your mistress leave word where she was going?' he asked.

'No, sir.'

'Is the carriage ordered to meet her anywhere?'

'No, sir.'

'Did she take a latch-key?'

'No, sir.'

Barnet went in again, sat down in his chair, and leaned back.  Then
in solitude and silence he brooded over the bitter emotions that
filled his heart.  It was for this that he had gratuitously restored
her to life, and made his union with another impossible!  The
evening drew on, and nobody came to disturb him.  At bedtime he told
the servants to retire, that he would sit up for Mrs. Barnet
himself; and when they were gone he leaned his head upon his hand
and mused for hours.

The clock struck one, two; still his wife came not, and, with
impatience added to depression, he went from room to room till
another weary hour had passed.  This was not altogether a new
experience for Barnet; but she had never before so prolonged her
absence.  At last he sat down again and fell asleep.

He awoke at six o'clock to find that she had not returned.  In
searching about the rooms he discovered that she had taken a case of
jewels which had been hers before her marriage.  At eight a note was
brought him; it was from his wife, in which she stated that she had
gone by the coach to the house of a distant relative near London,
and expressed a wish that certain boxes, articles of clothing, and
so on, might be sent to her forthwith.  The note was brought to him
by a waiter at the Black-Bull Hotel, and had been written by Mrs.
Barnet immediately before she took her place in the stage.

By the evening this order was carried out, and Barnet, with a sense
of relief, walked out into the town.  A fair had been held during
the day, and the large clear moon which rose over the most prominent
hill flung its light upon the booths and standings that still
remained in the street, mixing its rays curiously with those from
the flaring naphtha lamps.  The town was full of country-people who
had come in to enjoy themselves, and on this account Barnet strolled
through the streets unobserved.  With a certain recklessness he made
for the harbour-road, and presently found himself by the shore,
where he walked on till he came to the spot near which his friend
the kindly Mrs. Downe had lost her life, and his own wife's life had
been preserved.  A tremulous pathway of bright moonshine now
stretched over the water which had engulfed them, and not a living
soul was near.

Here he ruminated on their characters, and next on the young girl in
whom he now took a more sensitive interest than at the time when he
had been free to marry her.  Nothing, so far as he was aware, had
ever appeared in his own conduct to show that such an interest
existed.  He had made it a point of the utmost strictness to hinder
that feeling from influencing in the faintest degree his attitude
towards his wife; and this was made all the more easy for him by the
small demand Mrs. Barnet made upon his attentions, for which she
ever evinced the greatest contempt; thus unwittingly giving him the
satisfaction of knowing that their severance owed nothing to
jealousy, or, indeed, to any personal behaviour of his at all.  Her
concern was not with him or his feelings, as she frequently told
him; but that she had, in a moment of weakness, thrown herself away
upon a common burgher when she might have aimed at, and possibly
brought down, a peer of the realm.  Her frequent depreciation of
Barnet in these terms had at times been so intense that he was
sorely tempted to retaliate on her egotism by owning that he loved
at the same low level on which he lived; but prudence had prevailed,
for which he was now thankful.

Something seemed to sound upon the shingle behind him over and above
the raking of the wave.  He looked round, and a slight girlish shape
appeared quite close to him, He could not see her face because it
was in the direction of the moon.

'Mr. Barnet?' the rambler said, in timid surprise.  The voice was
the voice of Lucy Savile.

'Yes,' said Barnet.  'How can I repay you for this pleasure?'

'I only came because the night was so clear.  I am now on my way
home.'

'I am glad we have met.  I want to know if you will let me do
something for you, to give me an occupation, as an idle man?  I am
sure I ought to help you, for I know you are almost without
friends.'

She hesitated.  'Why should you tell me that?' she said.

'In the hope that you will be frank with me.'

'I am not altogether without friends here.  But I am going to make a
little change in my life--to go out as a teacher of freehand drawing
and practical perspective, of course I mean on a comparatively
humble scale, because I have not been specially educated for that
profession.  But I am sure I shall like it much.'

'You have an opening?'

'I have not exactly got it, but I have advertised for one.'

'Lucy, you must let me help you!'

'Not at all.'

'You need not think it would compromise you, or that I am
indifferent to delicacy.  I bear in mind how we stand.  It is very
unlikely that you will succeed as teacher of the class you mention,
so let me do something of a different kind for you.  Say what you
would like, and it shall be done.'

'No; if I can't be a drawing-mistress or governess, or something of
that sort, I shall go to India and join my brother.'

'I wish I could go abroad, anywhere, everywhere with you, Lucy, and
leave this place and its associations for ever!'

She played with the end of her bonnet-string, and hastily turned
aside.  'Don't ever touch upon that kind of topic again,' she said,
with a quick severity not free from anger.  'It simply makes it
impossible for me to see you, much less receive any guidance from
you.  No, thank you, Mr. Barnet; you can do nothing for me at
present; and as I suppose my uncertainty will end in my leaving for
India, I fear you never will.  If ever I think you CAN do anything,
I will take the trouble to ask you.  Till then, good-bye.'

The tone of her latter words was equivocal, and while he remained in
doubt whether a gentle irony was or was not inwrought with their
sound, she swept lightly round and left him alone.  He saw her form
get smaller and smaller along the damp belt of sea-sand between ebb
and flood; and when she had vanished round the cliff into the
harbour-road, he himself followed in the same direction.

That her hopes from an advertisement should be the single thread
which held Lucy Savile in England was too much for Barnet.  On
reaching the town he went straight to the residence of Downe, now a
widower with four children.  The young motherless brood had been
sent to bed about a quarter of an hour earlier, and when Barnet
entered he found Downe sitting alone.  It was the same room as that
from which the family had been looking out for Downe at the
beginning of the year, when Downe had slipped into the gutter and
his wife had been so enviably tender towards him.  The old neatness
had gone from the house; articles lay in places which could show no
reason for their presence, as if momentarily deposited there some
months ago, and forgotten ever since; there were no flowers; things
were jumbled together on the furniture which should have been in
cupboards; and the place in general had that stagnant, unrenovated
air which usually pervades the maimed home of the widower.

Downe soon renewed his customary full-worded lament over his wife,
and even when he had worked himself up to tears, went on volubly, as
if a listener were a luxury to be enjoyed whenever he could be
caught.

'She was a treasure beyond compare, Mr. Barnet!  I shall never see
such another.  Nobody now to nurse me--nobody to console me in those
daily troubles, you know, Barnet, which make consolation so
necessary to a nature like mine.  It would be unbecoming to repine,
for her spirit's home was elsewhere--the tender light in her eyes
always showed it; but it is a long dreary time that I have before
me, and nobody else can ever fill the void left in my heart by her
loss--nobody--nobody!'  And Downe wiped his eyes again.

'She was a good woman in the highest sense,' gravely answered
Barnet, who, though Downe's words drew genuine compassion from his
heart, could not help feeling that a tender reticence would have
been a finer tribute to Mrs. Downe's really sterling virtues than
such a second-class lament as this.

'I have something to show you,' Downe resumed, producing from a
drawer a sheet of paper on which was an elaborate design for a
canopied tomb.  'This has been sent me by the architect, but it is
not exactly what I want.'

'You have got Jones to do it, I see, the man who is carrying out my
house,' said Barnet, as he glanced at the signature to the drawing.

'Yes, but it is not quite what I want.  I want something more
striking--more like a tomb I have seen in St. Paul's Cathedral.
Nothing less will do justice to my feelings, and how far short of
them that will fall!'

Barnet privately thought the design a sufficiently imposing one as
it stood, even extravagantly ornate; but, feeling that he had no
right to criticize, he said gently, 'Downe, should you not live more
in your children's lives at the present time, and soften the
sharpness of regret for your own past by thinking of their future?'

'Yes, yes; but what can I do more?' asked Downe, wrinkling his
forehead hopelessly.

It was with anxious slowness that Barnet produced his reply--the
secret object of his visit to-night.  'Did you not say one day that
you ought by rights to get a governess for the children?'

Downe admitted that he had said so, but that he could not see his
way to it.  'The kind of woman I should like to have,' he said,
'would be rather beyond my means.  No; I think I shall send them to
school in the town when they are old enough to go out alone.'

'Now, I know of something better than that.  The late Lieutenant
Savile's daughter, Lucy, wants to do something for herself in the
way of teaching.  She would be inexpensive, and would answer your
purpose as well as anybody for six or twelve months.  She would
probably come daily if you were to ask her, and so your housekeeping
arrangements would not be much affected.'

'I thought she had gone away,' said the solicitor, musing.  'Where
does she live?'

Barnet told him, and added that, if Downe should think of her as
suitable, he would do well to call as soon as possible, or she might
be on the wing.  'If you do see her,' he said, 'it would be
advisable not to mention my name.  She is rather stiff in her ideas
of me, and it might prejudice her against a course if she knew that
I recommended it.'

Downe promised to give the subject his consideration, and nothing
more was said about it just then.  But when Barnet rose to go, which
was not till nearly bedtime, he reminded Downe of the suggestion and
went up the street to his own solitary home with a sense of
satisfaction at his promising diplomacy in a charitable cause.



CHAPTER VII



The walls of his new house were carried up nearly to their full
height.  By a curious though not infrequent reaction, Barnet's
feelings about that unnecessary structure had undergone a change; he
took considerable interest in its progress as a long-neglected
thing, his wife before her departure having grown quite weary of it
as a hobby.  Moreover, it was an excellent distraction for a man in
the unhappy position of having to live in a provincial town with
nothing to do.  He was probably the first of his line who had ever
passed a day without toil, and perhaps something like an inherited
instinct disqualifies such men for a life of pleasant inaction, such
as lies in the power of those whose leisure is not a personal
accident, but a vast historical accretion which has become part of
their natures.

Thus Barnet got into a way of spending many of his leisure hours on
the site of the new building, and he might have been seen on most
days at this time trying the temper of the mortar by punching the
joints with his stick, looking at the grain of a floor-board, and
meditating where it grew, or picturing under what circumstances the
last fire would be kindled in the at present sootless chimneys.  One
day when thus occupied he saw three children pass by in the company
of a fair young woman, whose sudden appearance caused him to flush
perceptibly.

'Ah, she is there,' he thought.  'That's a blessed thing.'

Casting an interested glance over the rising building and the busy
workmen, Lucy Savile and the little Downes passed by; and after that
time it became a regular though almost unconscious custom of Barnet
to stand in the half-completed house and look from the ungarnished
windows at the governess as she tripped towards the sea-shore with
her young charges, which she was in the habit of doing on most fine
afternoons.  It was on one of these occasions, when he had been
loitering on the first-floor landing, near the hole left for the
staircase, not yet erected, that there appeared above the edge of
the floor a little hat, followed by a little head.

Barnet withdrew through a doorway, and the child came to the top of
the ladder, stepping on to the floor and crying to her sisters and
Miss Savile to follow.  Another head rose above the floor, and
another, and then Lucy herself came into view.  The troop ran hither
and thither through the empty, shaving-strewn rooms, and Barnet came
forward.

Lucy uttered a small exclamation:  she was very sorry that she had
intruded; she had not the least idea that Mr. Barnet was there:  the
children had come up, and she had followed.

Barnet replied that he was only too glad to see them there.  'And
now, let me show you the rooms,' he said.

She passively assented, and he took her round.  There was not much
to show in such a bare skeleton of a house, but he made the most of
it, and explained the different ornamental fittings that were soon

to be fixed here and there.  Lucy made but few remarks in reply,
though she seemed pleased with her visit, and stole away down the
ladder, followed by her companions.

After this the new residence became yet more of a hobby for Barnet.
Downe's children did not forget their first visit, and when the
windows were glazed, and the handsome staircase spread its broad low
steps into the hall, they came again, prancing in unwearied
succession through every room from ground-floor to attics, while
Lucy stood waiting for them at the door.  Barnet, who rarely missed
a day in coming to inspect progress, stepped out from the drawing-
room.

'I could not keep them out,' she said, with an apologetic blush.  'I
tried to do so very much:  but they are rather wilful, and we are
directed to walk this way for the sea air.'

'Do let them make the house their regular playground, and you
yours,' said Barnet.  'There is no better place for children to romp
and take their exercise in than an empty house, particularly in
muddy or damp weather such as we shall get a good deal of now; and
this place will not be furnished for a long long time--perhaps
never.  I am not at all decided about it.'

'O, but it must!' replied Lucy, looking round at the hall.  'The
rooms are excellent, twice as high as ours; and the views from the
windows are so lovely.'

'I daresay, I daresay,' he said absently.

'Will all the furniture be new?' she asked.

'All the furniture be new--that's a thing I have not thought of.  In
fact I only come here and look on.  My father's house would have
been large enough for me, but another person had a voice in the
matter, and it was settled that we should build.  However, the place
grows upon me; its recent associations are cheerful, and I am
getting to like it fast.'

A certain uneasiness in Lucy's manner showed that the conversation
was taking too personal a turn for her.  'Still, as modern tastes
develop, people require more room to gratify them in,' she said,
withdrawing to call the children; and serenely bidding him good
afternoon she went on her way.

Barnet's life at this period was singularly lonely, and yet he was
happier than he could have expected.  His wife's estrangement and
absence, which promised to be permanent, left him free as a boy in
his movements, and the solitary walks that he took gave him ample
opportunity for chastened reflection on what might have been his lot
if he had only shown wisdom enough to claim Lucy Savile when there
was no bar between their lives, and she was to be had for the
asking.  He would occasionally call at the house of his friend
Downe; but there was scarcely enough in common between their two
natures to make them more than friends of that excellent sort whose
personal knowledge of each other's history and character is always
in excess of intimacy, whereby they are not so likely to be severed
by a clash of sentiment as in cases where intimacy springs up in
excess of knowledge.  Lucy was never visible at these times, being
either engaged in the school-room, or in taking an airing out of
doors; but, knowing that she was now comfortable, and had given up
the, to him, depressing idea of going off to the other side of the
globe, he was quite content.

The new house had so far progressed that the gardeners were
beginning to grass down the front.  During an afternoon which he was
passing in marking the curve for the carriage-drive, he beheld her
coming in boldly towards him from the road.  Hitherto Barnet had
only caught her on the premises by stealth; and this advance seemed
to show that at last her reserve had broken down.

A smile gained strength upon her face as she approached, and it was
quite radiant when she came up, and said, without a trace of
embarrassment, 'I find I owe you a hundred thanks--and it comes to
me quite as a surprise!  It was through your kindness that I was
engaged by Mr. Downe.  Believe me, Mr. Barnet, I did not know it
until yesterday, or I should have thanked you long and long ago!'

'I had offended you--just a trifle--at the time, I think?' said
Barnet, smiling, 'and it was best that you should not know.'

'Yes, yes,' she returned hastily.  'Don't allude to that; it is past
and over, and we will let it be.  The house is finished almost, is
it not?  How beautiful it will look when the evergreens are grown!
Do you call the style Palladian, Mr. Barnet?'

'I--really don't quite know what it is.  Yes, it must be Palladian,
certainly.  But I'll ask Jones, the architect; for, to tell the
truth, I had not thought much about the style:  I had nothing to do
with choosing it, I am sorry to say.'

She would not let him harp on this gloomy refrain, and talked on
bright matters till she said, producing a small roll of paper which
he had noticed in her hand all the while, 'Mr. Downe wished me to
bring you this revised drawing of the late Mrs. Downe's tomb, which
the architect has just sent him.  He would like you to look it
over.'

The children came up with their hoops, and she went off with them
down the harbour-road as usual.  Barnet had been glad to get those
words of thanks; he had been thinking for many months that he would
like her to know of his share in finding her a home such as it was;
and what he could not do for himself, Downe had now kindly done for
him.  He returned to his desolate house with a lighter tread; though
in reason he hardly knew why his tread should be light.

On examining the drawing, Barnet found that, instead of the vast
altar-tomb and canopy Downe had determined on at their last meeting,
it was to be a more modest memorial even than had been suggested by
the architect; a coped tomb of good solid construction, with no
useless elaboration at all.  Barnet was truly glad to see that Downe
had come to reason of his own accord; and he returned the drawing
with a note of approval.

He followed up the house-work as before, and as he walked up and
down the rooms, occasionally gazing from the windows over the
bulging green hills and the quiet harbour that lay between them, he
murmured words and fragments of words, which, if listened to, would
have revealed all the secrets of his existence.  Whatever his reason
in going there, Lucy did not call again:  the walk to the shore
seemed to be abandoned:  he must have thought it as well for both
that it should be so, for he did not go anywhere out of his
accustomed ways to endeavour to discover her.



CHAPTER VIII



The winter and the spring had passed, and the house was complete.
It was a fine morning in the early part of June, and Barnet, though
not in the habit of rising early, had taken a long walk before
breakfast; returning by way of the new building.  A sufficiently
exciting cause of his restlessness to-day might have been the
intelligence which had reached him the night before, that Lucy
Savile was going to India after all, and notwithstanding the
representations of her friends that such a journey was unadvisable
in many ways for an unpractised girl, unless some more definite
advantage lay at the end of it than she could show to be the case.
Barnet's walk up the slope to the building betrayed that he was in a
dissatisfied mood.  He hardly saw that the dewy time of day lent an
unusual freshness to the bushes and trees which had so recently put
on their summer habit of heavy leafage, and made his newly-laid lawn
look as well established as an old manorial meadow.  The house had
been so adroitly placed between six tall elms which were growing on
the site beforehand, that they seemed like real ancestral trees; and
the rooks, young and old, cawed melodiously to their visitor.

The door was not locked, and he entered.  No workmen appeared to be
present, and he walked from sunny window to sunny window of the
empty rooms, with a sense of seclusion which might have been very
pleasant but for the antecedent knowledge that his almost paternal
care of Lucy Savile was to be thrown away by her wilfulness.
Footsteps echoed through an adjoining room; and bending his eyes in
that direction, he perceived Mr. Jones, the architect.  He had come
to look over the building before giving the contractor his final
certificate.  They walked over the house together.  Everything was
finished except the papering:  there were the latest improvements of
the period in bell-hanging, ventilating, smoke-jacks, fire-grates,
and French windows.  The business was soon ended, and Jones, having
directed Barnet's attention to a roll of wall-paper patterns which
lay on a bench for his choice, was leaving to keep another
engagement, when Barnet said, 'Is the tomb finished yet for Mrs.
Downe?'

'Well--yes:  it is at last,' said the architect, coming back and
speaking as if he were in a mood to make a confidence.  'I have had
no end of trouble in the matter, and, to tell the truth, I am
heartily glad it is over.'

Barnet expressed his surprise.  'I thought poor Downe had given up
those extravagant notions of his? then he has gone back to the altar
and canopy after all?  Well, he is to be excused, poor fellow!'

'O no--he has not at all gone back to them--quite the reverse,'
Jones hastened to say.  'He has so reduced design after design, that
the whole thing has been nothing but waste labour for me; till in
the end it has become a common headstone, which a mason put up in
half a day.'

'A common headstone?' said Barnet.

'Yes.  I held out for some time for the addition of a footstone at
least.  But he said, "O no--he couldn't afford it."'

'Ah, well--his family is growing up, poor fellow, and his expenses
are getting serious.'

'Yes, exactly,' said Jones, as if the subject were none of his.  And
again directing Barnet's attention to the wall-papers, the bustling
architect left him to keep some other engagement.

'A common headstone,' murmured Barnet, left again to himself.  He
mused a minute or two, and next began looking over and selecting
from the patterns; but had not long been engaged in the work when he
heard another footstep on the gravel without, and somebody enter the
open porch.

Barnet went to the door--it was his manservant in search of him.

'I have been trying for some time to find you, sir,' he said.  'This
letter has come by the post, and it is marked immediate.  And
there's this one from Mr. Downe, who called just now wanting to see
you.'  He searched his pocket for the second.

Barnet took the first letter--it had a black border, and bore the
London postmark.  It was not in his wife's handwriting, or in that
of any person he knew; but conjecture soon ceased as he read the
page, wherein he was briefly informed that Mrs. Barnet had died
suddenly on the previous day, at the furnished villa she had
occupied near London.

Barnet looked vaguely round the empty hall, at the blank walls, out
of the doorway.  Drawing a long palpitating breath, and with eyes
downcast, he turned and climbed the stairs slowly, like a man who
doubted their stability.  The fact of his wife having, as it were,
died once already, and lived on again, had entirely dislodged the
possibility of her actual death from his conjecture.  He went to the
landing, leant over the balusters, and after a reverie, of whose
duration he had but the faintest notion, turned to the window and
stretched his gaze to the cottage further down the road, which was
visible from his landing, and from which Lucy still walked to the
solicitor's house by a cross path.  The faint words that came from
his moving lips were simply, 'At last!'

Then, almost involuntarily, Barnet fell down on his knees and
murmured some incoherent words of thanksgiving.  Surely his virtue
in restoring his wife to life had been rewarded!  But, as if the
impulse struck uneasily on his conscience, he quickly rose, brushed
the dust from his trousers and set himself to think of his next
movements.  He could not start for London for some hours; and as he
had no preparations to make that could not be made in half-an-hour,
he mechanically descended and resumed his occupation of turning over
the wall-papers.  They had all got brighter for him, those papers.
It was all changed--who would sit in the rooms that they were to
line?  He went on to muse upon Lucy's conduct in so frequently
coming to the house with the children; her occasional blush in
speaking to him; her evident interest in him.  What woman can in the
long run avoid being interested in a man whom she knows to be
devoted to her?  If human solicitation could ever effect anything,
there should be no going to India for Lucy now.  All the papers
previously chosen seemed wrong in their shades, and he began from
the beginning to choose again.

While entering on the task he heard a forced 'Ahem!' from without
the porch, evidently uttered to attract his attention, and footsteps
again advancing to the door.  His man, whom he had quite forgotten
in his mental turmoil, was still waiting there.

'I beg your pardon, sir,' the man said from round the doorway; 'but
here's the note from Mr. Downe that you didn't take.  He called just
after you went out, and as he couldn't wait, he wrote this on your
study-table.'

He handed in the letter--no black-bordered one now, but a practical-
looking note in the well-known writing of the solicitor.


'DEAR BARNET'--it ran--'Perhaps you will be prepared for the
information I am about to give--that Lucy Savile and myself are
going to be married this morning.  I have hitherto said nothing as
to my intention to any of my friends, for reasons which I am sure
you will fully appreciate.  The crisis has been brought about by her
expressing her intention to join her brother in India.  I then
discovered that I could not do without her.

'It is to be quite a private wedding; but it is my particular wish
that you come down here quietly at ten, and go to church with us; it
will add greatly to the pleasure I shall experience in the ceremony,
and, I believe, to Lucy's also.  I have called on you very early to
make the request, in the belief that I should find you at home; but
you are beforehand with me in your early rising.--Yours sincerely,
C. Downe.'


'Need I wait, sir?' said the servant after a dead silence.

'That will do, William.  No answer,' said Barnet calmly.

When the man had gone Barnet re-read the letter.  Turning eventually
to the wall-papers, which he had been at such pains to select, he
deliberately tore them into halves and quarters, and threw them into
the empty fireplace.  Then he went out of the house; locked the
door, and stood in the front awhile.  Instead of returning into the
town, he went down the harbour-road and thoughtfully lingered about
by the sea, near the spot where the body of Downe's late wife had
been found and brought ashore.

Barnet was a man with a rich capacity for misery, and there is no
doubt that he exercised it to its fullest extent now.  The events
that had, as it were, dashed themselves together into one half-hour
of this day showed that curious refinement of cruelty in their
arrangement which often proceeds from the bosom of the whimsical god
at other times known as blind Circumstance.  That his few minutes of
hope, between the reading of the first and second letters, had
carried him to extraordinary heights of rapture was proved by the
immensity of his suffering now.  The sun blazing into his face would
have shown a close watcher that a horizontal line, which he had
never noticed before, but which was never to be gone thereafter, was
somehow gradually forming itself in the smooth of his forehead.  His
eyes, of a light hazel, had a curious look which can only be
described by the word bruised; the sorrow that looked from them
being largely mixed with the surprise of a man taken unawares.

The secondary particulars of his present position, too, were odd
enough, though for some time they appeared to engage little of his
attention.  Not a soul in the town knew, as yet, of his wife's
death; and he almost owed Downe the kindness of not publishing it
till the day was over:  the conjuncture, taken with that which had
accompanied the death of Mrs. Downe, being so singular as to be
quite sufficient to darken the pleasure of the impressionable
solicitor to a cruel extent, if made known to him.  But as Barnet
could not set out on his journey to London, where his wife lay, for
some hours (there being at this date no railway within a distance of
many miles), no great reason existed why he should leave the town.

Impulse in all its forms characterized Barnet, and when he heard the
distant clock strike the hour of ten his feet began to carry him up
the harbour-road with the manner of a man who must do something to
bring himself to life.  He passed Lucy Savile's old house, his own
new one, and came in view of the church.  Now he gave a perceptible
start, and his mechanical condition went away.  Before the church-
gate were a couple of carriages, and Barnet then could perceive that
the marriage between Downe and Lucy was at that moment being
solemnized within.  A feeling of sudden, proud self-confidence, an
indocile wish to walk unmoved in spite of grim environments, plainly
possessed him, and when he reached the wicket-gate he turned in
without apparent effort.  Pacing up the paved footway he entered the
church and stood for a while in the nave passage.  A group of people
was standing round the vestry door; Barnet advanced through these
and stepped into the vestry.

There they were, busily signing their names.  Seeing Downe about to
look round, Barnet averted his somewhat disturbed face for a second
or two; when he turned again front to front he was calm and quite
smiling; it was a creditable triumph over himself, and deserved to
be remembered in his native town.  He greeted Downe heartily,
offering his congratulations.

It seemed as if Barnet expected a half-guilty look upon Lucy's face;
but no, save the natural flush and flurry engendered by the service
just performed, there was nothing whatever in her bearing which
showed a disturbed mind:  her gray-brown eyes carried in them now as
at other times the well-known expression of common-sensed rectitude
which never went so far as to touch on hardness.  She shook hands
with him, and Downe said warmly, 'I wish you could have come sooner:
I called on purpose to ask you.  You'll drive back with us now?'

'No, no,' said Barnet; 'I am not at all prepared; but I thought I
would look in upon you for a moment, even though I had not time to
go home and dress.  I'll stand back and see you pass out, and
observe the effect of the spectacle upon myself as one of the
public.'

Then Lucy and her husband laughed, and Barnet laughed and retired;
and the quiet little party went gliding down the nave and towards
the porch, Lucy's new silk dress sweeping with a smart rustle round
the base-mouldings of the ancient font, and Downe's little daughters
following in a state of round-eyed interest in their position, and
that of Lucy, their teacher and friend.

So Downe was comforted after his Emily's death, which had taken
place twelve months, two weeks, and three days before that time.

When the two flys had driven off and the spectators had vanished,
Barnet followed to the door, and went out into the sun.  He took no
more trouble to preserve a spruce exterior; his step was unequal,
hesitating, almost convulsive; and the slight changes of colour
which went on in his face seemed refracted from some inward flame.
In the churchyard he became pale as a summer cloud, and finding it
not easy to proceed he sat down on one of the tombstones and
supported his head with his hand.

Hard by was a sexton filling up a grave which he had not found time
to finish on the previous evening.  Observing Barnet, he went up to
him, and recognizing him, said, 'Shall I help you home, sir?'

'O no, thank you,' said Barnet, rousing himself and standing up.
The sexton returned to his grave, followed by Barnet, who, after
watching him awhile, stepped into the grave, now nearly filled, and
helped to tread in the earth.

The sexton apparently thought his conduct a little singular, but he
made no observation, and when the grave was full, Barnet suddenly
stopped, looked far away, and with a decided step proceeded to the
gate and vanished.  The sexton rested on his shovel and looked after
him for a few moments, and then began banking up the mound.

In those short minutes of treading in the dead man Barnet had formed
a design, but what it was the inhabitants of that town did not for
some long time imagine.  He went home, wrote several letters of
business, called on his lawyer, an old man of the same place who had
been the legal adviser of Barnet's father before him, and during the
evening overhauled a large quantity of letters and other documents
in his possession.  By eleven o'clock the heap of papers in and
before Barnet's grate had reached formidable dimensions, and he
began to burn them.  This, owing to their quantity, it was not so
easy to do as he had expected, and he sat long into the night to
complete the task.

The next morning Barnet departed for London, leaving a note for
Downe to inform him of Mrs. Barnet's sudden death, and that he was
gone to bury her; but when a thrice-sufficient time for that purpose
had elapsed, he was not seen again in his accustomed walks, or in
his new house, or in his old one.  He was gone for good, nobody knew
whither.  It was soon discovered that he had empowered his lawyer to
dispose of all his property, real and personal, in the borough, and
pay in the proceeds to the account of an unknown person at one of
the large London banks.  The person was by some supposed to be
himself under an assumed name; but few, if any, had certain
knowledge of that fact.

The elegant new residence was sold with the rest of his possessions;
and its purchaser was no other than Downe, now a thriving man in the
borough, and one whose growing family and new wife required more
roomy accommodation than was afforded by the little house up the
narrow side street.  Barnet's old habitation was bought by the
trustees of the Congregational Baptist body in that town, who pulled
down the time-honoured dwelling and built a new chapel on its site.
By the time the last hour of that, to Barnet, eventful year had
chimed, every vestige of him had disappeared from the precincts of
his native place, and the name became extinct in the borough of
Port-Bredy, after having been a living force therein for more than
two hundred years.



CHAPTER IX



Twenty-one years and six months do not pass without setting a mark
even upon durable stone and triple brass; upon humanity such a
period works nothing less than transformation.  In Barnet's old
birthplace vivacious young children with bones like india-rubber had
grown up to be stable men and women, men and women had dried in the
skin, stiffened, withered, and sunk into decrepitude; while
selections from every class had been consigned to the outlying
cemetery.  Of inorganic differences the greatest was that a railway
had invaded the town, tying it on to a main line at a junction a
dozen miles off.  Barnet's house on the harbour-road, once so
insistently new, had acquired a respectable mellowness, with ivy,
Virginia creepers, lichens, damp patches, and even constitutional
infirmities of its own like its elder fellows.  Its architecture,
once so very improved and modern, had already become stale in style,
without having reached the dignity of being old-fashioned.  Trees
about the harbour-road had increased in circumference or disappeared
under the saw; while the church had had such a tremendous practical
joke played upon it by some facetious restorer or other as to be
scarce recognizable by its dearest old friends.

During this long interval George Barnet had never once been seen or
heard of in the town of his fathers.

It was the evening of a market-day, and some half-dozen middle-aged
farmers and dairymen were lounging round the bar of the Black-Bull
Hotel, occasionally dropping a remark to each other, and less
frequently to the two barmaids who stood within the pewter-topped
counter in a perfunctory attitude of attention, these latter sighing
and making a private observation to one another at odd intervals, on
more interesting experiences than the present.

'Days get shorter,' said one of the dairymen, as he looked towards
the street, and noticed that the lamp-lighter was passing by.

The farmers merely acknowledged by their countenances the propriety
of this remark, and finding that nobody else spoke, one of the
barmaids said 'yes,' in a tone of painful duty.

'Come fair-day we shall have to light up before we start for home-
along.'

'That's true,' his neighbour conceded, with a gaze of blankness.

'And after that we shan't see much further difference all's winter.'

The rest were not unwilling to go even so far as this.

The barmaid sighed again, and raised one of her hands from the
counter on which they rested to scratch the smallest surface of her
face with the smallest of her fingers.  She looked towards the door,
and presently remarked, 'I think I hear the 'bus coming in from
station.'

The eyes of the dairymen and farmers turned to the glass door
dividing the hall from the porch, and in a minute or two the omnibus
drew up outside.  Then there was a lumbering down of luggage, and
then a man came into the hall, followed by a porter with a
portmanteau on his poll, which he deposited on a bench.

The stranger was an elderly person, with curly ashen white hair, a
deeply-creviced outer corner to each eyelid, and a countenance baked
by innumerable suns to the colour of terra-cotta, its hue and that
of his hair contrasting like heat and cold respectively.  He walked
meditatively and gently, like one who was fearful of disturbing his
own mental equilibrium.  But whatever lay at the bottom of his
breast had evidently made him so accustomed to its situation there
that it caused him little practical inconvenience.

He paused in silence while, with his dubious eyes fixed on the
barmaids, he seemed to consider himself.  In a moment or two he
addressed them, and asked to be accommodated for the night.  As he
waited he looked curiously round the hall, but said nothing.  As
soon as invited he disappeared up the staircase, preceded by a
chambermaid and candle, and followed by a lad with his trunk.  Not a
soul had recognized him.

A quarter of an hour later, when the farmers and dairymen had driven
off to their homesteads in the country, he came downstairs, took a
biscuit and one glass of wine, and walked out into the town, where
the radiance from the shop-windows had grown so in volume of late
years as to flood with cheerfulness every standing cart, barrow,
stall, and idler that occupied the wayside, whether shabby or
genteel.  His chief interest at present seemed to lie in the names
painted over the shop-fronts and on door-ways, as far as they were
visible; these now differed to an ominous extent from what they had
been one-and-twenty years before.

The traveller passed on till he came to the bookseller's, where he
looked in through the glass door.  A fresh-faced young man was
standing behind the counter, otherwise the shop was empty.  The
gray-haired observer entered, asked for some periodical by way of
paying for admission, and with his elbow on the counter began to
turn over the pages he had bought, though that he read nothing was
obvious.

At length he said, 'Is old Mr. Watkins still alive?' in a voice
which had a curious youthful cadence in it even now.

'My father is dead, sir,' said the young man.

'Ah, I am sorry to hear it,' said the stranger.  'But it is so many
years since I last visited this town that I could hardly expect it
should be otherwise.'  After a short silence he continued--'And is
the firm of Barnet, Browse, and Company still in existence?--they
used to be large flax-merchants and twine-spinners here?'

'The firm is still going on, sir, but they have dropped the name of
Barnet.  I believe that was a sort of fancy name--at least, I never
knew of any living Barnet.  'Tis now Browse and Co.'

'And does Andrew Jones still keep on as architect?'

'He's dead, sir.'

'And the Vicar of St. Mary's--Mr. Melrose?'

'He's been dead a great many years.'

'Dear me!'  He paused yet longer, and cleared his voice.  'Is Mr.
Downe, the solicitor, still in practice?'

'No, sir, he's dead.  He died about seven years ago.'

Here it was a longer silence still; and an attentive observer would
have noticed that the paper in the stranger's hand increased its
imperceptible tremor to a visible shake.  That gray-haired gentleman
noticed it himself, and rested the paper on the counter.  'Is MRS.
Downe still alive?' he asked, closing his lips firmly as soon as the
words were out of his mouth, and dropping his eyes.

'Yes, sir, she's alive and well.  She's living at the old place.'

'In East Street?'

'O no; at Chateau Ringdale.  I believe it has been in the family for
some generations.'

'She lives with her children, perhaps?'

'No; she has no children of her own.  There were some Miss Downes; I
think they were Mr. Downe's daughters by a former wife; but they are
married and living in other parts of the town.  Mrs. Downe lives
alone.'

'Quite alone?'

'Yes, sir; quite alone.'

The newly-arrived gentleman went back to the hotel and dined; after
which he made some change in his dress, shaved back his beard to the
fashion that had prevailed twenty years earlier, when he was young
and interesting, and once more emerging, bent his steps in the
direction of the harbour-road.  Just before getting to the point
where the pavement ceased and the houses isolated themselves, he
overtook a shambling, stooping, unshaven man, who at first sight
appeared like a professional tramp, his shoulders having a
perceptible greasiness as they passed under the gaslight.  Each
pedestrian momentarily turned and regarded the other, and the tramp-
like gentleman started back.

'Good--why--is that Mr. Barnet?  'Tis Mr. Barnet, surely!'

'Yes; and you are Charlson?'

'Yes--ah--you notice my appearance.  The Fates have rather ill-used
me.  By-the-bye, that fifty pounds.  I never paid it, did I? . . .
But I was not ungrateful!'  Here the stooping man laid one hand
emphatically on the palm of the other.  'I gave you a chance, Mr.
George Barnet, which many men would have thought full value
received--the chance to marry your Lucy.  As far as the world was
concerned, your wife was a DROWNED WOMAN, hey?'

'Heaven forbid all that, Charlson!'

'Well, well, 'twas a wrong way of showing gratitude, I suppose.  And
now a drop of something to drink for old acquaintance' sake!  And
Mr. Barnet, she's again free--there's a chance now if you care for
it--ha, ha!'  And the speaker pushed his tongue into his hollow
cheek and slanted his eye in the old fashion.

'I know all,' said Barnet quickly; and slipping a small present into
the hands of the needy, saddening man, he stepped ahead and was soon
in the outskirts of the town.

He reached the harbour-road, and paused before the entrance to a
well-known house.  It was so highly bosomed in trees and shrubs
planted since the erection of the building that one would scarcely
have recognized the spot as that which had been a mere neglected
slope till chosen as a site for a dwelling.  He opened the swing-
gate, closed it noiselessly, and gently moved into the semicircular
drive, which remained exactly as it had been marked out by Barnet on
the morning when Lucy Savile ran in to thank him for procuring her
the post of governess to Downe's children.  But the growth of trees
and bushes which revealed itself at every step was beyond all
expectation; sun-proof and moon-proof bowers vaulted the walks, and
the walls of the house were uniformly bearded with creeping plants
as high as the first-floor windows.

After lingering for a few minutes in the dusk of the bending boughs,
the visitor rang the door-bell, and on the servant appearing, he
announced himself as 'an old friend of Mrs. Downe's.'

The hall was lighted, but not brightly, the gas being turned low, as
if visitors were rare.  There was a stagnation in the dwelling; it
seemed to be waiting.  Could it really be waiting for him?  The
partitions which had been probed by Barnet's walking-stick when the
mortar was green, were now quite brown with the antiquity of their
varnish, and the ornamental woodwork of the staircase, which had
glistened with a pale yellow newness when first erected, was now of
a rich wine-colour.  During the servant's absence the following
colloquy could be dimly heard through the nearly closed door of the
drawing-room.

'He didn't give his name?'

'He only said "an old friend," ma'am.'

'What kind of gentleman is he?'

'A staidish gentleman, with gray hair.'

The voice of the second speaker seemed to affect the listener
greatly.  After a pause, the lady said, 'Very well, I will see him.'

And the stranger was shown in face to face with the Lucy who had
once been Lucy Savile.  The round cheek of that formerly young lady
had, of course, alarmingly flattened its curve in her modern
representative; a pervasive grayness overspread her once dark brown
hair, like morning rime on heather.  The parting down the middle was
wide and jagged; once it had been a thin white line, a narrow
crevice between two high banks of shade.  But there was still enough
left to form a handsome knob behind, and some curls beneath
inwrought with a few hairs like silver wires were very becoming.  In
her eyes the only modification was that their originally mild
rectitude of expression had become a little more stringent than
heretofore.  Yet she was still girlish--a girl who had been
gratuitously weighted by destiny with a burden of five-and-forty
years instead of her proper twenty.

'Lucy, don't you know me?' he said, when the servant had closed the
door.

'I knew you the instant I saw you!' she returned cheerfully.  'I
don't know why, but I always thought you would come back to your old
town again.'

She gave him her hand, and then they sat down.  'They said you were
dead,' continued Lucy, 'but I never thought so.  We should have
heard of it for certain if you had been.'

'It is a very long time since we met.'

'Yes; what you must have seen, Mr. Barnet, in all these roving
years, in comparison with what I have seen in this quiet place!'
Her face grew more serious.  'You know my husband has been dead a
long time?  I am a lonely old woman now, considering what I have
been; though Mr. Downe's daughters--all married--manage to keep me
pretty cheerful.'

'And I am a lonely old man, and have been any time these twenty
years.'

'But where have you kept yourself?  And why did you go off so
mysteriously?'

'Well, Lucy, I have kept myself a little in America, and a little in
Australia, a little in India, a little at the Cape, and so on; I
have not stayed in any place for a long time, as it seems to me, and
yet more than twenty years have flown.  But when people get to my
age two years go like one!--Your second question, why did I go away
so mysteriously, is surely not necessary.  You guessed why, didn't
you?'

'No, I never once guessed,' she said simply; 'nor did Charles, nor
did anybody as far as I know.'

'Well, indeed!  Now think it over again, and then look at me, and
say if you can't guess?'

She looked him in the face with an inquiring smile.  'Surely not
because of me?' she said, pausing at the commencement of surprise.

Barnet nodded, and smiled again; but his smile was sadder than hers.

'Because I married Charles?' she asked.

'Yes; solely because you married him on the day I was free to ask
you to marry me.  My wife died four-and-twenty hours before you went
to church with Downe.  The fixing of my journey at that particular
moment was because of her funeral; but once away I knew I should
have no inducement to come back, and took my steps accordingly.'

Her face assumed an aspect of gentle reflection, and she looked up
and down his form with great interest in her eyes.  'I never thought
of it!' she said.  'I knew, of course, that you had once implied
some warmth of feeling towards me, but I concluded that it passed
off.  And I have always been under the impression that your wife was
alive at the time of my marriage.  Was it not stupid of me!--But you
will have some tea or something?  I have never dined late, you know,
since my husband's death.  I have got into the way of making a
regular meal of tea.  You will have some tea with me, will you not?'

The travelled man assented quite readily, and tea was brought in.
They sat and chatted over the meal, regardless of the flying hour.
'Well, well!' said Barnet presently, as for the first time he
leisurely surveyed the room; 'how like it all is, and yet how
different!  Just where your piano stands was a board on a couple of
trestles, bearing the patterns of wall-papers, when I was last here.
I was choosing them--standing in this way, as it might be.  Then my
servant came in at the door, and handed me a note, so.  It was from
Downe, and announced that you were just going to be married to him.
I chose no more wall-papers--tore up all those I had selected, and
left the house.  I never entered it again till now.'

'Ah, at last I understand it all,' she murmured.

They had both risen and gone to the fireplace.  The mantel came
almost on a level with her shoulder, which gently rested against it,
and Barnet laid his hand upon the shelf close beside her shoulder.
'Lucy,' he said, 'better late than never.  Will you marry me now?'

She started back, and the surprise which was so obvious in her
wrought even greater surprise in him that it should be so.  It was
difficult to believe that she had been quite blind to the situation,
and yet all reason and common sense went to prove that she was not
acting.

'You take me quite unawares by such a question!' she said, with a
forced laugh of uneasiness.  It was the first time she had shown any
embarrassment at all.  'Why,' she added, 'I couldn't marry you for
the world.'

'Not after all this!  Why not?'

'It is--I would--I really think I may say it--I would upon the whole
rather marry you, Mr. Barnet, than any other man I have ever met, if
I ever dreamed of marriage again.  But I don't dream of it--it is
quite out of my thoughts; I have not the least intention of marrying
again.'

'But--on my account--couldn't you alter your plans a little?  Come!'

'Dear Mr. Barnet,' she said with a little flutter, 'I would on your
account if on anybody's in existence.  But you don't know in the
least what it is you are asking--such an impracticable thing--I
won't say ridiculous, of course, because I see that you are really
in earnest, and earnestness is never ridiculous to my mind.'

'Well, yes,' said Barnet more slowly, dropping her hand, which he
had taken at the moment of pleading, 'I am in earnest.  The resolve,
two months ago, at the Cape, to come back once more was, it is true,
rather sudden, and as I see now, not well considered.  But I am in
earnest in asking.'

'And I in declining.  With all good feeling and all kindness, let me
say that I am quite opposed to the idea of marrying a second time.'


'Well, no harm has been done,' he answered, with the same subdued
and tender humorousness that he had shown on such occasions in early
life.  'If you really won't accept me, I must put up with it, I
suppose.'  His eye fell on the clock as he spoke.  'Had you any
notion that it was so late?' he asked.  'How absorbed I have been!'

She accompanied him to the hall, helped him to put on his overcoat,
and let him out of the house herself.

'Good-night,' said Barnet, on the doorstep, as the lamp shone in his
face.  'You are not offended with me?'

'Certainly not.  Nor you with me?'

'I'll consider whether I am or not,' he pleasantly replied.  'Good-
night.'

She watched him safely through the gate; and when his footsteps had
died away upon the road, closed the door softly and returned to the
room.  Here the modest widow long pondered his speeches, with eyes
dropped to an unusually low level.  Barnet's urbanity under the blow
of her refusal greatly impressed her.  After having his long period
of probation rendered useless by her decision, he had shown no
anger, and had philosophically taken her words as if he deserved no
better ones.  It was very gentlemanly of him, certainly; it was more
than gentlemanly; it was heroic and grand.  The more she meditated,
the more she questioned the virtue of her conduct in checking him so
peremptorily; and went to her bedroom in a mood of dissatisfaction.
On looking in the glass she was reminded that there was not so much
remaining of her former beauty as to make his frank declaration an
impulsive natural homage to her cheeks and eyes; it must undoubtedly
have arisen from an old staunch feeling of his, deserving tenderest
consideration.  She recalled to her mind with much pleasure that he
had told her he was staying at the Black-Bull Hotel; so that if,
after waiting a day or two, he should not, in his modesty, call
again, she might then send him a nice little note.  To alter her
views for the present was far from her intention; but she would
allow herself to be induced to reconsider the case, as any generous
woman ought to do.

The morrow came and passed, and Mr. Barnet did not drop in.  At
every knock, light youthful hues flew across her cheek; and she was
abstracted in the presence of her other visitors.  In the evening
she walked about the house, not knowing what to do with herself; the
conditions of existence seemed totally different from those which
ruled only four-and-twenty short hours ago.  What had been at first
a tantalizing elusive sentiment was getting acclimatized within her
as a definite hope, and her person was so informed by that emotion
that she might almost have stood as its emblematical representative
by the time the clock struck ten.  In short, an interest in Barnet
precisely resembling that of her early youth led her present heart
to belie her yesterday's words to him, and she longed to see him
again.

The next day she walked out early, thinking she might meet him in
the street.  The growing beauty of her romance absorbed her, and she
went from the street to the fields, and from the fields to the
shore, without any consciousness of distance, till reminded by her
weariness that she could go no further.  He had nowhere appeared.
In the evening she took a step which under the circumstances seemed
justifiable; she wrote a note to him at the hotel, inviting him to
tea with her at six precisely, and signing her note 'Lucy.'

In a quarter of an hour the messenger came back.  Mr. Barnet had
left the hotel early in the morning of the day before, but he had
stated that he would probably return in the course of the week.

The note was sent back, to be given to him immediately on his
arrival.

There was no sign from the inn that this desired event had occurred,
either on the next day or the day following.  On both nights she had
been restless, and had scarcely slept half-an-hour.

On the Saturday, putting off all diffidence, Lucy went herself to
the Black-Bull, and questioned the staff closely.

Mr. Barnet had cursorily remarked when leaving that he might return
on the Thursday or Friday, but they were directed not to reserve a
room for him unless he should write.

He had left no address.

Lucy sorrowfully took back her note went home, and resolved to wait.

She did wait--years and years--but Barnet never reappeared.

April 1880.
Atlanta Nightlife

Christmas With
St. Nick

Electronics
Recycling

FSBO Leads For
Real Estate Agents

Real Estate
Agent Coaching

Atlanta Nightlife

Christmas WithSt. Nick

Electronics Recycling

FSBO Leads For Real Estate Agents

Real Estate Agent Coaching

Christmas With
St. Nick

Electronics
Recycling

FSBO Leads For
Real Estate Agents

Real Estate
Agent Coaching
