Complete Works of Thomas Hardy (Illustrated) (787 page)

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 outward 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 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 anyman 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.

“Oh, 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 toward 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 tonight?”

“Oh yes, sir.”

“Go up and tell I her I am come.”

The servant did so; but the mistress of the house merely repeated 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.

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 tract 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 leading 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, had then 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 inclosure, 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 harbor, 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 road-side, 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 way-side, standing in its own garden, the latter being divided from the road by a row of wooden palings. Scrutinizing the spot to insure 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 after-thought 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 chiffonier to the shining little daguerreotype which formed the central ornament of the mantel-piece, being in scrupulous order. The picture was inclosed by a frame of embroidered cardboard — evidently the work of feminine hands — and it represented a thin-faced, elderly lieutenant in the navy. From behind the lamp on the table a female form now rose into view: it was that of a young girls 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 realise her visitor’s presence.

They both remained standing for a few seconds without speaking. The face that confronted Barnet had a beautiful outline; the Raphaelesque oval of its contour was remarkable for an English countenance, and that countenance housed in a remote country-road to an unheard-of harbor. 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 toward 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 candle-light?”

“Oh 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! “