Complete Works of Thomas Hardy (Illustrated) (745 page)

Squire Dornell wondered if, in going or returning, it had been her plan to call at the Reynards’ place near Melchester, through which city their journey lay.  It was possible that she might do this in furtherance of her project, and the sense that his own might become the losing game was harassing.

He did not know how to dispose of himself, till it occurred to him that, to get rid of his intolerable heaviness, he would invite some friends to dinner and drown his cares in grog and wine.  No sooner was the carouse decided upon than he put it in hand; those invited being mostly neighbouring landholders, all smaller men than himself, members of the hunt; also the doctor from Evershead, and the like — some of them rollicking blades whose presence his wife would not have countenanced had she been at home.  ‘When the cat’s away — !’ said the Squire.

They arrived, and there were indications in their manner that they meant to make a night of it.  Baxby of Sherton Castle was late, and they waited a quarter of an hour for him, he being one of the liveliest of Dornell’s friends; without whose presence no such dinner as this would be considered complete, and, it may be added, with whose presence no dinner which included both sexes could be conducted with strict propriety.  He had just returned from London, and the Squire was anxious to talk to him — for no definite reason; but he had lately breathed the atmosphere in which Betty was.

At length they heard Baxby driving up to the door, whereupon the host and the rest of his guests crossed over to the dining-room.  In a moment Baxby came hastily in at their heels, apologizing for his lateness.

‘I only came back last night, you know,’ he said; ‘and the truth o’t is, I had as much as I could carry.’  He turned to the Squire.  ‘Well, Dornell — so cunning Reynard has stolen your little ewe lamb?  Ha, ha!’

‘What?’ said Squire Dornell vacantly, across the dining-table, round which they were all standing, the cold March sunlight streaming in upon his full-clean shaven face.

‘Surely th’st know what all the town knows? — you’ve had a letter by this time? — that Stephen Reynard has married your Betty?  Yes, as I’m a living man.  It was a carefully-arranged thing: they parted at once, and are not to meet for five or six years.  But, Lord, you must know!’

A thud on the floor was the only reply of the Squire.  They quickly turned.  He had fallen down like a log behind the table, and lay motionless on the oak boards.

Those at hand hastily bent over him, and the whole group were in confusion.  They found him to be quite unconscious, though puffing and panting like a blacksmith’s bellows.  His face was livid, his veins swollen, and beads of perspiration stood upon his brow.

‘What’s happened to him?’ said several.

‘An apoplectic fit,’ said the doctor from Evershead, gravely.

He was only called in at the Court for small ailments, as a rule, and felt the importance of the situation.  He lifted the Squire’s head, loosened his cravat and clothing, and rang for the servants, who took the Squire upstairs.

There he lay as if in a drugged sleep.  The surgeon drew a basin-full of blood from him, but it was nearly six o’clock before he came to himself.  The dinner was completely disorganized, and some had gone home long ago; but two or three remained.

‘Bless my soul,’ Baxby kept repeating, ‘I didn’t know things had come to this pass between Dornell and his lady!  I thought the feast he was spreading to-day was in honour of the event, though privately kept for the present!  His little maid married without his knowledge!’

As soon as the Squire recovered consciousness he gasped: ‘‘Tis abduction!  ‘Tis a capital felony!  He can be hung!  Where is Baxby?  I am very well now.  What items have ye heard, Baxby?’

The bearer of the untoward news was extremely unwilling to agitate Dornell further, and would say little more at first.  But an hour after, when the Squire had partially recovered and was sitting up, Baxby told as much as he knew, the most important particular being that Betty’s mother was present at the marriage, and showed every mark of approval.  ‘Everything appeared to have been done so regularly that I, of course, thought you knew all about it,’ he said.

‘I knew no more than the underground dead that such a step was in the wind!  A child not yet thirteen!  How Sue hath outwitted me!  Did Reynard go up to Lon’on with ‘em, d’ye know?’

‘I can’t say.  All I know is that your lady and daughter were walking along the street, with the footman behind ‘em; that they entered a jeweller’s shop, where Reynard was standing; and that there, in the presence o’ the shopkeeper and your man, who was called in on purpose, your Betty said to Reynard — so the story goes: ‘pon my soul I don’t vouch for the truth of it — she said, “Will you marry me?” or, “I want to marry you: will you have me — now or never?” she said.’

‘What she said means nothing,’ murmured the Squire, with wet eyes.  ‘Her mother put the words into her mouth to avoid the serious consequences that would attach to any suspicion of force.  The words be not the child’s: she didn’t dream of marriage — how should she, poor little maid!  Go on.’

‘Well, be that as it will, they were all agreed apparently.  They bought the ring on the spot, and the marriage took place at the nearest church within half-an-hour.’

* * * * *

A day or two later there came a letter from Mrs. Dornell to her husband, written before she knew of his stroke.  She related the circumstances of the marriage in the gentlest manner, and gave cogent reasons and excuses for consenting to the premature union, which was now an accomplished fact indeed.  She had no idea, till sudden pressure was put upon her, that the contract was expected to be carried out so soon, but being taken half unawares, she had consented, having learned that Stephen Reynard, now their son-in-law, was becoming a great favourite at Court, and that he would in all likelihood have a title granted him before long.  No harm could come to their dear daughter by this early marriage-contract, seeing that her life would be continued under their own eyes, exactly as before, for some years.  In fine, she had felt that no other such fair opportunity for a good marriage with a shrewd courtier and wise man of the world, who was at the same time noted for his excellent personal qualities, was within the range of probability, owing to the rusticated lives they led at King’s-Hintock.  Hence she had yielded to Stephen’s solicitation, and hoped her husband would forgive her.  She wrote, in short, like a woman who, having had her way as to the deed, is prepared to make any concession as to words and subsequent behaviour.

All this Dornell took at its true value, or rather, perhaps, at less than its true value.  As his life depended upon his not getting into a passion, he controlled his perturbed emotions as well as he was able, going about the house sadly and utterly unlike his former self.  He took every precaution to prevent his wife knowing of the incidents of his sudden illness, from a sense of shame at having a heart so tender; a ridiculous quality, no doubt, in her eyes, now that she had become so imbued with town ideas.  But rumours of his seizure somehow reached her, and she let him know that she was about to return to nurse him.  He thereupon packed up and went off to his own place at Falls-Park.

Here he lived the life of a recluse for some time.  He was still too unwell to entertain company, or to ride to hounds or elsewhither; but more than this, his aversion to the faces of strangers and acquaintances, who knew by that time of the trick his wife had played him, operated to hold him aloof.

Nothing could influence him to censure Betty for her share in the exploit.  He never once believed that she had acted voluntarily.  Anxious to know how she was getting on, he despatched the trusty servant Tupcombe to Evershead village, close to King’s-Hintock, timing his journey so that he should reach the place under cover of dark.  The emissary arrived without notice, being out of livery, and took a seat in the chimney-corner of the Sow-and-Acorn.

The conversation of the droppers-in was always of the nine days’ wonder — the recent marriage.  The smoking listener learnt that Mrs. Dornell and the girl had returned to King’s-Hintock for a day or two, that Reynard had set out for the Continent, and that Betty had since been packed off to school.  She did not realise her position as Reynard’s child-wife — so the story went — and though somewhat awe-stricken at first by the ceremony, she had soon recovered her spirits on finding that her freedom was in no way to be interfered with.

After that, formal messages began to pass between Dornell and his wife, the latter being now as persistently conciliating as she was formerly masterful.  But her rustic, simple, blustering husband still held personally aloof.  Her wish to be reconciled — to win his forgiveness for her stratagem — moreover, a genuine tenderness and desire to soothe his sorrow, which welled up in her at times, brought her at last to his door at Falls-Park one day.

They had not met since that night of altercation, before her departure for London and his subsequent illness.  She was shocked at the change in him.  His face had become expressionless, as blank as that of a puppet, and what troubled her still more was that she found him living in one room, and indulging freely in stimulants, in absolute disobedience to the physician’s order.  The fact was obvious that he could no longer be allowed to live thus uncouthly.

So she sympathized, and begged his pardon, and coaxed.  But though after this date there was no longer such a complete estrangement as before, they only occasionally saw each other, Dornell for the most part making Falls his headquarters still.

Three or four years passed thus.  Then she came one day, with more animation in her manner, and at once moved him by the simple statement that Betty’s schooling had ended; she had returned, and was grieved because he was away.  She had sent a message to him in these words: ‘Ask father to come home to his dear Betty.’

‘Ah!  Then she is very unhappy!’ said Squire Dornell.

His wife was silent.

‘‘Tis that accursed marriage!’ continued the Squire.

Still his wife would not dispute with him.  ‘She is outside in the carriage,’ said Mrs. Dornell gently.

‘What — Betty?’

‘Yes.’

‘Why didn’t you tell me?’  Dornell rushed out, and there was the girl awaiting his forgiveness, for she supposed herself, no less than her mother, to be under his displeasure.

Yes, Betty had left school, and had returned to King’s-Hintock.  She was nearly seventeen, and had developed to quite a young woman.  She looked not less a member of the household for her early marriage-contract, which she seemed, indeed, to have almost forgotten.  It was like a dream to her; that clear cold March day, the London church, with its gorgeous pews, and green-baize linings, and the great organ in the west gallery — so different from their own little church in the shrubbery of King’s-Hintock Court — the man of thirty, to whose face she had looked up with so much awe, and with a sense that he was rather ugly and formidable; the man whom, though they corresponded politely, she had never seen since; one to whose existence she was now so indifferent that if informed of his death, and that she would never see him more, she would merely have replied, ‘Indeed!’  Betty’s passions as yet still slept.

‘Hast heard from thy husband lately?’ said Squire Dornell, when they were indoors, with an ironical laugh of fondness which demanded no answer.

The girl winced, and he noticed that his wife looked appealingly at him.  As the conversation went on, and there were signs that Dornell would express sentiments that might do harm to a position which they could not alter, Mrs. Dornell suggested that Betty should leave the room till her father and herself had finished their private conversation; and this Betty obediently did.

Dornell renewed his animadversions freely.  ‘Did you see how the sound of his name frightened her?’ he presently added.  ‘If you didn’t, I did.  Zounds! what a future is in store for that poor little unfortunate wench o’ mine!  I tell ‘ee, Sue, ‘twas not a marriage at all, in morality, and if I were a woman in such a position, I shouldn’t feel it as one.  She might, without a sign of sin, love a man of her choice as well now as if she were chained up to no other at all.  There, that’s my mind, and I can’t help it.  Ah, Sue, my man was best!  He’d ha’ suited her.’

‘I don’t believe it,’ she replied incredulously.

‘You should see him; then you would.  He’s growing up a fine fellow, I can tell ‘ee.’

‘Hush! not so loud!’ she answered, rising from her seat and going to the door of the next room, whither her daughter had betaken herself.  To Mrs. Dornell’s alarm, there sat Betty in a reverie, her round eyes fixed on vacancy, musing so deeply that she did not perceive her mother’s entrance.  She had heard every word, and was digesting the new knowledge.

Her mother felt that Falls-Park was dangerous ground for a young girl of the susceptible age, and in Betty’s peculiar position, while Dornell talked and reasoned thus.  She called Betty to her, and they took leave.  The Squire would not clearly promise to return and make King’s-Hintock Court his permanent abode; but Betty’s presence there, as at former times, was sufficient to make him agree to pay them a visit soon.

All the way home Betty remained preoccupied and silent.  It was too plain to her anxious mother that Squire Dornell’s free views had been a sort of awakening to the girl.

The interval before Dornell redeemed his pledge to come and see them was unexpectedly short.  He arrived one morning about twelve o’clock, driving his own pair of black-bays in the curricle-phaeton with yellow panels and red wheels, just as he had used to do, and his faithful old Tupcombe on horseback behind.  A young man sat beside the Squire in the carriage, and Mrs. Dornell’s consternation could scarcely be concealed when, abruptly entering with his companion, the Squire announced him as his friend Phelipson of Elm-Cranlynch.

Dornell passed on to Betty in the background and tenderly kissed her.  ‘Sting your mother’s conscience, my maid!’ he whispered.  ‘Sting her conscience by pretending you are struck with Phelipson, and would ha’ loved him, as your old father’s choice, much more than him she has forced upon ‘ee.’