Wessex Tales by Thomas Hardy (page 4)

me out there, and went from bad to worse.’

‘Then why didn’t you let us know?–you’ve not writ a line for the last two or three years.’

The son admitted sadly that he had not. He said that he had hoped and thought he might fetch up again, and be able to send good news. Then he had been obliged to abandon that hope, and had finally come home from sheer necessity–previously to making a new start. ‘Yes, things are very bad with me,’ he repeated, perceiving their commiserating glances at his clothes.

They brought him nearer the fire, took his hat from his thin hand, which was so small and smooth as to show that his attempts to fetch up again had not been in a manual direction. His mother resumed her inquiries, and dubiously asked if he had chosen to come that particular night for any special reason.

For no reason, he told her. His arrival had been quite at random. Then Philip Hall looked round the room, and saw for the first time that the table was laid somewhat luxuriously, and for a larger number than themselves; and that an air of festivity pervaded their dress. He asked quickly what was going on.

‘Sally is going to be married in a day or two,’ replied the mother; and she explained how Mr. Darton, Sally’s intended husband, was coming there that night with the groomsman, Mr. Johns, and other details. ‘We thought it must be their step when we heard you,’ said Mrs. Hall.

The needy wanderer looked again on the floor. ‘I see–I see,’ he murmured. ‘Why, indeed, should I have come to-night? Such folk as I are not wanted here at these times, naturally. And I have no business here–spoiling other people’s happiness.’

‘Phil,’ said his mother, with a tear in her eye, but with a thinness of lip and severity of manner which were presumably not more than past events justified; ‘since you speak like that to me, I’ll speak honestly to you. For these three years you have taken no thought for us. You left home with a good supply of money, and strength and education, and you ought to have made good use of it all. But you come back like a beggar; and that you come in a very awkward time for us cannot be denied. Your return to-night may do us much harm. But mind–you are welcome to this home as long as it is mine. I don’t wish to turn you adrift. We will make the best of a bad job; and I hope you are not seriously ill?’

‘O no. I have only this infernal cough.’

She looked at him anxiously. ‘I think you had better go to bed at once,’ she said.

‘Well–I shall be out of the way there,’ said the son wearily. ‘Having ruined myself, don’t let me ruin you by being seen in these togs, for Heaven’s sake. Who do you say Sally is going to be married to–a Farmer Darton?’

‘Yes–a gentleman-farmer–quite a wealthy man. Far better in station than she could have expected. It is a good thing, altogether.’

‘Well done, little Sal!’ said her brother, brightening and looking up at her with a smile. ‘I ought to have written; but perhaps I have thought of you all the more. But let me get out of sight. I would rather go and jump into the river than be seen here. But have you anything I can drink? I am confoundedly thirsty with my long tramp.’

‘Yes, yes, we will bring something upstairs to you,’ said Sally, with grief in her face.

‘Ay, that will do nicely. But, Sally and mother–‘ He stopped, and they waited. ‘Mother, I have not told you all,’ he resumed slowly, still looking on the floor between his knees. ‘Sad as what you see of me is, there’s worse behind.’

His mother gazed upon him in grieved suspense, and Sally went and leant upon the bureau, listening for every sound, and sighing. Suddenly she turned round, saying, ‘Let them come, I don’t care! Philip, tell the worst, and take your time.’

‘Well, then,’ said the unhappy Phil, ‘I am not the only one in this mess. Would to Heaven I were! But–‘

‘O, Phil!’

‘I have a wife as destitute as I.’

‘A wife?’ said his mother.

‘Unhappily!’

‘A wife! Yes, that is the way with sons!’

‘And besides–‘ said he.

‘Besides! O, Philip, surely–‘

‘I have two little children.’

‘Wife and children!’ whispered Mrs. Hall, sinking down confounded.

‘Poor little things!’ said Sally involuntarily.

His mother turned again to him. ‘I suppose these helpless beings are left in Australia?’

‘No. They are in England.’

‘Well, I can only hope you’ve left them in a respectable place.’

‘I have not left them at all. They are here–within a few yards of us. In short, they are in the stable.’

‘Where?’

‘In the stable. I did not like to bring them indoors till I had seen you, mother, and broken the bad news a bit to you. They were very tired, and are resting out there on some straw.’

Mrs. Hall’s fortitude visibly broke down. She had been brought up not without refinement, and was even more moved by such a collapse of genteel aims as this than a substantial dairyman’s widow would in ordinary have been moved. ‘Well, it must be borne,’ she said, in a low voice, with her hands tightly joined. ‘A starving son, a starving wife, starving children! Let it be. But why is this come to us now, to-day, to-night? Could no other misfortune happen to helpless women than this, which will quite upset my poor girl’s chance of a happy life? Why have you done us this wrong, Philip? What respectable man will come here, and marry open-eyed into a family of vagabonds?’

‘Nonsense, mother!’ said Sally vehemently, while her face flushed. ‘Charley isn’t the man to desert me. But if he should be, and won’t marry me because Phil’s come, let him go and marry elsewhere. I won’t be ashamed of my own flesh and blood for any man in England– not I!’ And then Sally turned away and burst into tears.

‘Wait till you are twenty years older and you will tell a different tale,’ replied her mother.

The son stood up. ‘Mother,’ he said bitterly, ‘as I have come, so I will go. All I ask of you is that you will allow me and mine to lie in your stable to-night. I give you my word that we’ll be gone by break of day, and trouble you no further!’

Mrs. Hall, the mother, changed at that. ‘O no,’ she answered hastily; ‘never shall it be said that I sent any of my own family from my door. Bring ’em in, Philip, or take me out to them.’

‘We will put ’em all into the large bedroom,’ said Sally, brightening, ‘and make up a large fire. Let’s go and help them in, and call Rebekah.’ (Rebekah was the woman who assisted at the dairy and housework; she lived in a cottage hard by with her husband, who attended to the cows.)

Sally went to fetch a lantern from the back-kitchen, but her brother said, ‘You won’t want a light. I lit the lantern that was hanging there.’

‘What must we call your wife?’ asked Mrs. Hall.

‘Helena,’ said Philip.

With shawls over their heads they proceeded towards the back door.

‘One minute before you go,’ interrupted Philip. ‘I–I haven’t confessed all.’

‘Then Heaven help us!’ said Mrs. Hall, pushing to the door and clasping her hands in calm despair.

‘We passed through Evershead as we came,’ he continued, ‘and I just looked in at the “Sow-and-Acorn” to see if old Mike still kept on there as usual. The carrier had come in from Sherton Abbas at that moment, and guessing that I was bound for this place–for I think he knew me–he asked me to bring on a dressmaker’s parcel for Sally that was marked “immediate.” My wife had walked on with the children. ‘Twas a flimsy parcel, and the paper was torn, and I found on looking at it that it was a thick warm gown. I didn’t wish you to see poor Helena in a shabby state. I was ashamed that you should–’twas not what she was born to. I untied the parcel in the road, took it on to her where she was waiting in the Lower Barn, and told her I had managed to get it for her, and that she was to ask no question. She, poor thing, must have supposed I obtained it on trust, through having reached a place where I was known, for she put it on gladly enough. She has it on now. Sally has other gowns, I daresay.’

Sally looked at her mother, speechless.

‘You have others, I daresay!’ repeated Phil, with a sick man’s impatience. ‘I thought to myself, “Better Sally cry than Helena freeze.” Well, is the dress of great consequence? ‘Twas nothing very ornamental, as far as I could see.’

‘No–no; not of consequence,’ returned Sally sadly, adding in a gentle voice, ‘You will not mind if I lend her another instead of that one, will you?’

Philip’s agitation at the confession had brought on another attack of the cough, which seemed to shake him to pieces. He was so obviously unfit to sit in a chair that they helped him upstairs at once; and having hastily given him a cordial and kindled the bedroom fire, they descended to fetch their unhappy new relations.

CHAPTER III

It was with strange feelings that the girl and her mother, lately so cheerful, passed out of the back door into the open air of the barton, laden with hay scents and the herby breath of cows. A fine sleet had begun to fall, and they trotted across the yard quickly. The stable-door was open; a light shone from it–from the lantern which always hung there, and which Philip had lighted, as he said. Softly nearing the door, Mrs. Hall pronounced the name ‘Helena!’

There was no answer for the moment. Looking in she was taken by surprise. Two people appeared before her. For one, instead of the drabbish woman she had expected, Mrs. Hall saw a pale, dark-eyed, ladylike creature, whose personality ruled her attire rather than was ruled by it. She was in a new and handsome gown, of course, and an old bonnet. She was standing up, agitated; her hand was held by her companion–none else than Sally’s affianced, Farmer Charles Darton, upon whose fine figure the pale stranger’s eyes were fixed, as his were fixed upon her. His other hand held the rein of his horse, which was standing saddled as if just led in.

At sight of Mrs. Hall they both turned, looking at her in a way neither quite conscious nor unconscious, and without seeming to recollect that words were necessary as a solution to the scene. In another moment Sally entered also, when Mr. Darton dropped his companion’s hand, led the horse aside, and came to greet his betrothed and Mrs. Hall.

‘Ah!’ he said, smiling–with something like forced composure–‘this is a roundabout way of arriving, you will say, my dear Mrs. Hall. But we lost our way, which made us late. I saw a light here, and led in my horse at once–my friend Johns and my man have gone back to the little inn with theirs, not to crowd you too much. No sooner had I entered than I saw that this lady had taken temporary shelter here–and found I was intruding.’

‘She is my daughter-in-law,’ said Mrs. Hall calmly. ‘My son, too, is in the house, but he has gone to bed unwell.’

Sally had stood staring wonderingly at the scene until this moment, hardly recognizing Darton’s shake of the hand. The spell that bound her was broken by her perceiving the two little children seated on a heap of hay. She suddenly went forward, spoke to them, and took one on her arm and the other in her hand.

‘And two children?’ said Mr. Darton, showing thus that he had not been there long enough as yet to understand the situation.

‘My grandchildren,’ said Mrs. Hall, with as much affected ease as before.

Philip Hall’s wife, in spite of this interruption to her first rencounter, seemed scarcely so much affected by it as to feel any one’s presence in addition to Mr. Darton’s. However, arousing herself by a quick reflection, she threw a sudden critical glance of her sad eyes upon Mrs. Hall; and, apparently finding her satisfactory, advanced to her in a meek initiative. Then Sally and the stranger spoke some friendly words to each other, and Sally went on with the children into the house. Mrs. Hall and Helena followed, and Mr. Darton followed these, looking at Helena’s dress and outline, and listening to her voice like a man in a dream.

By the time the others reached the house Sally had already gone upstairs with the tired children. She rapped against the wall for Rebekah to come in and help to attend to them, Rebekah’s house being a little ‘spit-and-dab’ cabin leaning against the substantial stone- work of Mrs. Hall’s taller erection. When she came a bed was made up for the little ones, and some supper given to them. On descending the stairs after seeing this done Sally went to the sitting-room. Young Mrs. Hall entered it just in advance of her, having in the interim retired with her mother-in-law to take off her bonnet, and otherwise make herself presentable. Hence it was evident that no further communication could have passed between her and Mr. Darton since their brief interview in the stable.

Mr. Japheth Johns now opportunely arrived, and broke up the restraint of the company, after a few orthodox meteorological commentaries had passed between him and Mrs. Hall by way of introduction. They at once sat down to supper, the present of wine and turkey not being produced for consumption to-night, lest the premature display of those gifts should seem to throw doubt on Mrs. Hall’s capacities as a provider.

‘Drink hearty, Mr. Johns–drink hearty,’ said that matron magnanimously. ‘Such as it is there’s plenty of. But perhaps cider-wine is not to your taste?–though there’s body in it.’

‘Quite the contrairy, ma’am–quite the contrairy,’ said the dairyman. ‘For though I inherit the malt-liquor principle from my father, I am a cider-drinker on my mother’s side. She came from these parts, you know. And there’s this to be said for’t–’tis a more peaceful liquor, and don’t lie about a man like your hotter drinks. With care, one may live on it a twelvemonth without knocking down a neighbour, or getting a black eye from an old acquaintance.’

The general conversation thus begun was continued briskly, though it was in the main restricted to Mrs. Hall and Japheth, who in truth required but little help from anybody. There being slight call upon Sally’s tongue, she had ample leisure to do what her heart most desired, namely, watch her intended husband and her sister-in-law with a view of elucidating the strange momentary scene in which her mother and herself had surprised them in the stable. If that scene meant anything, it meant, at least, that they had met before. That there had been no time for explanations Sally could see, for their manner was still one of suppressed amazement at each other’s presence there. Darton’s eyes, too, fell continually on the gown worn by Helena as if this were an added riddle to his perplexity; though to Sally it was the one feature in the case which was no mystery. He seemed to feel that fate had impishly changed his vis- a-vis in the lover’s jig he was about to foot; that while the gown had been expected to enclose a Sally, a Helena’s face looked out from the bodice; that some long-lost hand met his own from the sleeves.

Sally could see that whatever Helena might know of Darton, she knew nothing of how the dress entered into his embarrassment. And at moments the young girl would have persuaded herself that Darton’s looks at her sister-in-law were entirely the fruit of the clothes query. But surely at other times a more extensive range of speculation and sentiment was expressed by her lover’s eye than that which the changed dress would account for.

Sally’s independence made her one of the least jealous of women. But there was something in the relations of these two visitors which ought to be explained.

Japheth Johns continued to converse in his well-known style, interspersing his talk with some private reflections on the position of Darton and Sally, which, though the sparkle in his eye showed them to be highly entertaining to himself, were apparently not quite communicable to the company. At last he withdrew for the night, going off to the roadside inn half-a-mile back, whither Darton promised to follow him in a few minutes.

Half-an-hour passed, and then Mr. Darton also rose to leave, Sally and her sister-in-law simultaneously wishing him good-night as they retired upstairs to their rooms. But on his arriving at the front door with Mrs. Hall a sharp shower of rain began to come down, when the widow suggested that he should return to the fire-side till the storm ceased.

Darton accepted her proposal, but insisted that, as it was getting late, and she was obviously tired, she should not sit up on his account, since he could let himself out of the house, and would quite enjoy smoking a pipe by the hearth alone. Mrs. Hall assented; and Darton was left by himself. He spread his knees to the brands, lit up his tobacco as he had said, and sat gazing into the fire, and at the notches of the chimney-crook which hung above.

An occasional drop of rain rolled down the chimney with a hiss, and still he smoked on; but not like a man whose mind was at rest. In the long run, however, despite his meditations, early hours afield and a long ride in the open air produced their natural result. He began to doze.

How long he remained in this half-unconscious state he did not know. He suddenly opened his eyes. The back-brand had burnt itself in two, and ceased to flame; the light which he had placed on the mantelpiece had nearly gone out. But in spite of these deficiencies there was a light in the apartment, and it came from elsewhere. Turning his head he saw Philip Hall’s wife standing at the entrance of the room with a bed-candle in one hand, a small brass tea-kettle in the other, and HIS gown, as it certainly seemed, still upon her.

‘Helena!’ said Darton, starting up.

Her countenance expressed dismay, and her first words were an apology. ‘I–did not know you were here, Mr. Darton,’ she said, while a blush flashed to her cheek. ‘I thought every one had retired–I was coming to make a little water boil; my husband seems to be worse. But perhaps the kitchen fire can be lighted up again.’

‘Don’t go on my account. By all means put it on here as you intended,’ said Darton. ‘Allow me to help you.’ He went forward to take the kettle from her hand, but she did not allow him, and placed it on the fire herself.

They stood some way apart, one on each side of the fireplace, waiting till the water should boil, the candle on the mantel between them, and Helena with her eyes on the kettle. Darton was the first to break the silence. ‘Shall I call Sally?’ he said.

‘O no,’ she quickly returned. ‘We have given trouble enough already. We have no right here. But we are the sport of fate, and were obliged to come.’

‘No right here!’ said he in surprise.

‘None. I can’t explain it now,’ answered Helena. ‘This kettle is very slow.’

There was another pause; the proverbial dilatoriness of watched pots was never more clearly exemplified.

Helena’s face was of that sort which seems to ask for assistance without the owner’s knowledge–the very antipodes of Sally’s, which was self-reliance expressed. Darton’s eyes travelled from the kettle to Helena’s face, then back to the kettle, then to the face for rather a longer time. ‘So I am not to know anything of the mystery that has distracted me all the evening?’ he said. ‘How is it that a woman, who refused me because (as I supposed) my position was not good enough for her taste, is found to be the wife of a man who certainly seems to be worse off than I?’

‘He had the prior claim,’ said she.

‘What! you knew him at that time?’

‘Yes, yes! Please say no more,’ she implored.

‘Whatever my errors, I have paid for them during the last five years!’

The heart of Darton was subject to sudden overflowings. He was kind to a fault. ‘I am sorry from my soul,’ he said, involuntarily approaching her. Helena withdrew a step or two, at which he became conscious of his movement, and quickly took his former place. Here he stood without speaking, and the little kettle began to sing.

‘Well, you might have been my wife if you had chosen,’ he said at last. ‘But that’s all past and gone. However, if you are in any trouble or poverty I shall be glad to be of service, and as your relation by marriage I shall have a right to be. Does your uncle know of your distress?’

‘My uncle is dead. He left me without a farthing. And now we have two children to maintain.’

‘What, left you nothing? How could he be so cruel as that?’

‘I disgraced myself in his eyes.’

‘Now,’ said Darton earnestly, ‘let me take care of the children, at least while you are so unsettled. YOU belong to another, so I cannot take care of you.’

‘Yes you can,’ said a voice; and suddenly a third figure stood beside them. It was Sally. ‘You can, since you seem to wish to?’ she repeated. ‘She no longer belongs to another . . . My poor brother is dead!’

Her face was red, her eyes sparkled, and all the woman came to the front. ‘I have heard it!’ she went on to him passionately. ‘You can protect her now as well as the children!’ She turned then to her agitated sister-in-law. ‘I heard something,’ said Sally (in a gentle murmur, differing much from her previous passionate words), ‘and I went into his room. It must have been the moment you left. He went off so quickly, and weakly, and it was so unexpected, that I couldn’t leave even to call you.’

Darton was just able to gather from the confused discourse which followed that, during his sleep by the fire, this brother whom he had never seen had become worse; and that during Helena’s absence for water the end had unexpectedly come. The two young women hastened upstairs, and he was again left alone.

After standing there a short time he went to the front door and looked out; till, softly closing it behind him, he advanced and stood under the large sycamore-tree. The stars were flickering coldly, and the dampness which had just descended upon the earth in rain now sent up a chill from it. Darton was in a strange position, and he felt it. The unexpected appearance, in deep poverty, of Helena–a young lady, daughter of a deceased naval officer, who had been brought up by her uncle, a solicitor, and had refused Darton in marriage years ago–the passionate, almost angry demeanour of Sally at discovering them, the abrupt announcement that Helena was a widow; all this coming together was a conjuncture difficult to cope with in a moment, and made him question whether he ought to leave the house or offer assistance. But for Sally’s manner he would unhesitatingly have done the latter.

He was still standing under the tree when the door in front of him opened, and Mrs. Hall came out. She went round to the garden-gate at the side without seeing him. Darton followed her, intending to speak.

Pausing outside, as if in thought, she proceeded to a spot where the sun came earliest in spring-time, and where the north wind never blew; it was where the row of beehives stood under the wall. Discerning her object, he waited till she had accomplished it.

It was the universal custom thereabout to wake the bees by tapping at their hives whenever a death occurred in the household, under the belief that if this were not done the bees themselves would pine away and perish during the ensuing year. As soon as an interior buzzing responded to her tap at the first hive Mrs. Hall went on to the second, and thus passed down the row. As soon as she came back he met her.

‘What can I do in this trouble, Mrs. Hall?’ he said.

‘O–nothing, thank you, nothing,’ she said in a tearful voice, now just perceiving him. ‘We have called Rebekah and her husband, and they will do everything necessary.’ She told him in a few words the particulars of her son’s arrival, broken in health–indeed, at death’s very door, though they did not suspect it–and suggested, as the result of a conversation between her and her daughter, that the wedding should be postponed.

‘Yes, of course,’ said Darton. ‘I think now to go straight to the inn and tell Johns what has happened.’ It was not till after he had shaken hands with her that he turned hesitatingly and added, ‘Will you tell the mother of his children that, as they are now left fatherless, I shall be glad to take the eldest of them, if it would be any convenience to her and to you?’

Mrs. Hall promised that her son’s widow should he told of the offer, and they parted. He retired down the rooty slope and disappeared in the direction of the inn, where he informed Johns of the circumstances. Meanwhile Mrs. Hall had entered the house, Sally was downstairs in the sitting-room alone, and her mother explained to her that Darton had readily assented to the postponement.

‘No doubt he has,’ said Sally, with sad emphasis. ‘It is not put off for a week, or a month, or a year. I shall never marry him, and she will!’

CHAPTER IV

Time passed, and the household on the Knap became again serene under the composing influences of daily routine. A desultory, very desultory correspondence, dragged on between Sally Hall and Darton, who, not quite knowing how to take her petulant words on the night of her brother’s death, had continued passive thus long. Helena and her children remained at the dairy-house, almost of necessity, and Darton therefore deemed it advisable to stay away.

One day, seven months later on, when Mr. Darton was as usual at his farm, twenty miles from Hintock, a note reached him from Helena. She thanked him for his kind offer about her children, which her mother-in-law had duly communicated, and stated that she would be glad to accept it as regarded the eldest, the boy. Helena had, in truth, good need to do so, for her uncle had left her penniless, and all application to some relatives in the north had failed. There was, besides, as she said, no good school near Hintock to which she could send the child.

On a fine summer day the boy came. He was accompanied half-way by Sally and his mother–to the ‘White Horse,’ at Chalk Newton–where he was handed over to Darton’s bailiff in a shining spring-cart, who met them there.

He was entered as a day-scholar at a popular school at Casterbridge, three or four miles from Darton’s, having first been taught by Darton to ride a forest-pony, on which he cantered to and from the aforesaid fount of knowledge, and (as Darton hoped) brought away a promising headful of the same at each diurnal expedition. The thoughtful taciturnity into which Darton had latterly fallen was quite dissipated by the presence of this boy.

When the Christmas holidays came it was arranged that he should spend them with his mother. The journey was, for some reason or other, performed in two stages, as at his coming, except that Darton in person took the place of the bailiff, and that the boy and himself rode on horseback.

Reaching the renowned ‘White Horse,’ Darton inquired if Miss and young Mrs. Hall were there to meet little Philip (as they had agreed to be). He was answered by the appearance of Helena alone at the door.

‘At the last moment Sally would not come,’ she faltered.

That meeting practically settled the point towards which these long- severed persons were converging. But nothing was broached about it for some time yet. Sally Hall had, in fact, imparted the first decisive motion to events by refusing to accompany Helena. She soon gave them a second move by writing the following note

‘[Private.]

‘DEAR CHARLES,–Living here so long and intimately with Helena, I have naturally learnt her history, especially that of it which refers to you. I am sure she would accept you as a husband at the proper time, and I think you ought to give her the opportunity. You inquire in an old note if I am sorry that I showed temper (which it WASN’T) that night when I heard you talking to her. No, Charles, I am not sorry at all for what I said then.–Yours sincerely, SALLY HALL.’

Thus set in train, the transfer of Darton’s heart back to its original quarters proceeded by mere lapse of time. In the following July, Darton went to his friend Japheth to ask him at last to fulfil the bridal office which had been in abeyance since the previous January twelvemonths.

‘With all my heart, man o’ constancy!’ said Dairyman Johns warmly. ‘I’ve lost most of my genteel fair complexion haymaking this hot weather, ’tis true, but I’ll do your business as well as them that look better. There be scents and good hair-oil in the world yet, thank God, and they’ll take off the roughest o’ my edge. I’ll compliment her. “Better late than never, Sally Hall,” I’ll say.’

‘It is not Sally,’ said Darton hurriedly. ‘It is young Mrs. Hall.’

Japheth’s face, as soon as he really comprehended, became a picture of reproachful dismay. ‘Not Sally?’ he said. ‘Why not Sally? I can’t believe it! Young Mrs. Hall! Well, well–where’s your wisdom?’

Darton shortly explained particulars; but Johns would not be reconciled. ‘She was a woman worth having if ever woman was,’ he cried. ‘And now to let her go!’

‘But I suppose I can marry where I like,’ said Darton.

‘H’m,’ replied the dairyman, lifting his eyebrows expressively. ‘This don’t become you, Charles–it really do not. If I had done such a thing you would have sworn I was a curst no’thern fool to be drawn off the scent by such a red-herring doll-oll-oll.’

Farmer Darton responded in such sharp terms to this laconic opinion that the two friends finally parted in a way they had never parted before. Johns was to be no groomsman to Darton after all. He had flatly declined. Darton went off sorry, and even unhappy, particularly as Japheth was about to leave that side of the county, so that the words which had divided them were not likely to be explained away or softened down.

A short time after the interview Darton was united to Helena at a simple matter-of fact wedding; and she and her little girl joined the boy who had already grown to look on Darton’s house as home.

For some months the farmer experienced an unprecedented happiness and satisfaction. There had been a flaw in his life, and it was as neatly mended as was humanly possible. But after a season the stream of events followed less clearly, and there were shades in his reveries. Helena was a fragile woman, of little staying power, physically or morally, and since the time that he had originally known her–eight or ten years before–she had been severely tried. She had loved herself out, in short, and was now occasionally given to moping. Sometimes she spoke regretfully of the gentilities of her early life, and instead of comparing her present state with her condition as the wife of the unlucky Hall, she mused rather on what it had been before she took the first fatal step of clandestinely marrying him. She did not care to please such people as those with whom she was thrown as a thriving farmer’s wife. She allowed the pretty trifles of agricultural domesticity to glide by her as sorry details, and had it not been for the children Darton’s house would have seemed but little brighter than it had been before.

This led to occasional unpleasantness, until Darton sometimes declared to himself that such endeavours as his to rectify early deviations of the heart by harking back to the old point mostly failed of success. ‘Perhaps Johns was right,’ he would say. ‘I should have gone on with Sally. Better go with the tide and make the best of its course than stem it at the risk of a capsize.’ But he kept these unmelodious thoughts to himself, and was outwardly considerate and kind.

This somewhat barren tract of his life had extended to less than a year and a half when his ponderings were cut short by the loss of the woman they concerned. When she was in her grave he thought better of her than when she had been alive; the farm was a worse place without her than with her, after all. No woman short of divine could have gone through such an experience as hers with her first husband without becoming a little soured. Her stagnant sympathies, her sometimes unreasonable manner, had covered a heart frank and well meaning, and originally hopeful and warm. She left him a tiny red infant in white wrappings. To make life as easy as possible to this touching object became at once his care.

As this child learnt to walk and talk Darton learnt to see feasibility in a scheme which pleased him. Revolving the experiment which he had hitherto made upon life, he fancied he had gained wisdom from his mistakes and caution from his miscarriages.

What the scheme was needs no penetration to discover. Once more he had opportunity to recast and rectify his ill-wrought situations by returning to Sally Hall, who still lived quietly on under her mother’s roof at Hintock. Helena had been a woman to lend pathos and refinement to a home; Sally was the woman to brighten it. She would not, as Helena did, despise the rural simplicities of a farmer’s fireside. Moreover, she had a pre-eminent qualification for Darton’s household; no other woman could make so desirable a mother to her brother’s two children and Darton’s one as Sally– while Darton, now that Helena had gone, was a more promising husband for Sally than he had ever been when liable to reminders from an uncured sentimental wound.

Darton was not a man to act rapidly, and the working out of his reparative designs might have been delayed for some time. But there came a winter evening precisely like the one which had darkened over that former ride to Hintock, and he asked himself why he should postpone longer, when the very landscape called for a repetition of that attempt.

He told his man to saddle the mare, booted and spurred himself with a younger horseman’s nicety, kissed the two youngest children, and rode off. To make the journey a complete parallel to the first, he would fain have had his old acquaintance Japheth Johns with him. But Johns, alas! was missing. His removal to the other side of the county had left unrepaired the breach which had arisen between him and Darton; and though Darton had forgiven him a hundred times, as Johns had probably forgiven Darton, the effort of reunion in present circumstances was one not likely to be made.

He screwed himself up to as cheerful a pitch as he could without his former crony, and became content with his own thoughts as he rode, instead of the words of a companion. The sun went down; the boughs appeared scratched in like an etching against the sky; old crooked men with faggots at their backs said ‘Good-night, sir,’ and Darton replied ‘Good-night’ right heartily.

By the time he reached the forking roads it was getting as dark as it had been on the occasion when Johns climbed the directing-post. Darton made no mistake this time. ‘Nor shall I be able to mistake, thank Heaven, when I arrive,’ he murmured. It gave him peculiar satisfaction to think that the proposed marriage, like his first, was of the nature of setting in order things long awry, and not a momentary freak of fancy.

Nothing hindered the smoothness of his journey, which seemed not half its former length. Though dark, it was only between five and six o’clock when the bulky chimneys of Mrs. Hall’s residence appeared in view behind the sycamore-tree. On second thoughts he retreated and put up at the ale-house as in former time; and when he had plumed himself before the inn mirror, called for something to drink, and smoothed out the incipient wrinkles of care, he walked on to the Knap with a quick step.

CHAPTER V

That evening Sally was making ‘pinners’ for the milkers, who were now increased by two, for her mother and herself no longer joined in milking the cows themselves. But upon the whole there was little change in the household economy, and not much in its appearance, beyond such minor particulars as that the crack over the window, which had been a hundred years coming, was a trifle wider; that the beams were a shade blacker; that the influence of modernism had supplanted the open chimney corner by a grate; that Rebekah, who had worn a cap when she had plenty of hair, had left it off now she had scarce any, because it was reported that caps were not fashionable; and that Sally’s face had naturally assumed a more womanly and experienced cast.

Mrs. Hall was actually lifting coals with the tongs, as she had used to do.

‘Five years ago this very night, if I am not mistaken–‘ she said, laying on an ember.

‘Not this very night–though ’twas one night this week,’ said the correct Sally.

‘Well, ’tis near enough. Five years ago Mr. Darton came to marry you, and my poor boy Phil came home to die.’ She sighed. ‘Ah, Sally,’ she presently said, ‘if you had managed well Mr. Darton would have had you, Helena or none.’

‘Don’t be sentimental about that, mother,’ begged Sally. ‘I didn’t care to manage well in such a case. Though I liked him, I wasn’t so anxious. I would never have married the man in the midst of such a hitch as that was,’ she added with decision; ‘and I don’t think I would if he were to ask me now.’

‘I am not sure about that, unless you have another in your eye.’

‘I wouldn’t; and I’ll tell you why. I could hardly marry him for love at this time o’ day. And as we’ve quite enough to live on if we give up the dairy to-morrow, I should have no need to marry for any meaner reason . . . I am quite happy enough as I am, and there’s an end of it.’

Now it was not long after this dialogue that there came a mild rap at the door, and in a moment there entered Rebekah, looking as though a ghost had arrived. The fact was that that accomplished skimmer and churner (now a resident in the house) had overheard the desultory observations between mother and daughter, and on opening the door to Mr. Darton thought the coincidence must have a grisly meaning in it. Mrs. Hall welcomed the farmer with warm surprise, as did Sally, and for a moment they rather wanted words.

‘Can you push up the chimney-crook for me, Mr Darton? the notches hitch,’ said the matron. He did it, and the homely little act bridged over the awkward consciousness that he had been a stranger for four years.

Mrs. Hall soon saw what he had come for, and left the principals together while she went to prepare him a late tea, smiling at Sally’s recent hasty assertions of indifference, when she saw how civil Sally was. When tea was ready she joined them. She fancied that Darton did not look so confident as when he had arrived; but Sally was quite light-hearted, and the meal passed pleasantly.

About seven he took his leave of them. Mrs. Hall went as far as the door to light him down the slope. On the doorstep he said frankly– ‘I came to ask your daughter to marry me; chose the night and everything, with an eye to a favourable answer. But she won’t.’

‘Then she’s a very ungrateful girl!’ emphatically said Mrs. Hall.

Darton paused to shape his sentence, and asked, ‘I–I suppose there’s nobody else more favoured?’

‘I can’t say that there is, or that there isn’t,’ answered Mrs. Hall. ‘She’s private in some things. I’m on your side, however, Mr. Darton, and I’ll talk to her.’

‘Thank ‘ee, thank ‘ee!’ said the farmer in a gayer accent; and with this assurance the not very satisfactory visit came to an end. Darton descended the roots of the sycamore, the light was withdrawn, and the door closed. At the bottom of the slope he nearly ran against a man about to ascend.

‘Can a jack-o’-lent believe his few senses on such a dark night, or can’t he?’ exclaimed one whose utterance Darton recognized in a moment, despite its unexpectedness. ‘I dare not swear he can, though I fain would!’ The speaker was Johns.

Darton said he was glad of this opportunity, bad as it was, of putting an end to the silence of years, and asked the dairyman what he was travelling that way for.

Japheth showed the old jovial confidence in a moment. ‘I’m going to see your–relations–as they always seem to me,’ he said–‘Mrs. Hall and Sally. Well, Charles, the fact is I find the natural barbarousness of man is much increased by a bachelor life, and, as your leavings were always good enough for me, I’m trying civilization here.’ He nodded towards the house.

‘Not with Sally–to marry her?’ said Darton, feeling something like a rill of ice water between his shoulders.

‘Yes, by the help of Providence and my personal charms. And I think I shall get her. I am this road every week–my present dairy is only four miles off, you know, and I see her through the window. ‘Tis rather odd that I was going to speak practical to-night to her for the first time. You’ve just called?’

‘Yes, for a short while. But she didn’t say a word about you.’

‘A good sign, a good sign. Now that decides me. I’ll swing the mallet and get her answer this very night as I planned.’

A few more remarks, and Darton, wishing his friend joy of Sally in a slightly hollow tone of jocularity, bade him good-bye. Johns promised to write particulars, and ascended, and was lost in the shade of the house and tree. A rectangle of light appeared when Johns was admitted, and all was dark again.

‘Happy Japheth!’ said Darton. ‘This then is the explanation!’

He determined to return home that night. In a quarter of an hour he passed out of the village, and the next day went about his swede- lifting and storing as if nothing had occurred.

He waited and waited to hear from Johns whether the wedding-day was fixed: but no letter came. He learnt not a single particular till, meeting Johns one day at a horse-auction, Darton exclaimed genially- -rather more genially than he felt–‘When is the joyful day to be?’

To his great surprise a reciprocity of gladness was not conspicuous in Johns. ‘Not at all,’ he said, in a very subdued tone. ”Tis a bad job; she won’t have me.’

Darton held his breath till he said with treacherous solicitude, ‘Try again–’tis coyness.’

‘O no,’ said Johns decisively. ‘There’s been none of that. We talked it over dozens of times in the most fair and square way. She tells me plainly, I don’t suit her. ‘Twould be simply annoying her to ask her again. Ah, Charles, you threw a prize away when you let her slip five years ago.’

‘I did–I did,’ said Darton.

He returned from that auction with a new set of feelings in play. He had certainly made a surprising mistake in thinking Johns his successful rival. It really seemed as if he might hope for Sally after all.

This time, being rather pressed by business, Darton had recourse to pen-and-ink, and wrote her as manly and straightforward a proposal as any woman could wish to receive. The reply came promptly:-

‘DEAR MR. DARTON,–I am as sensible as any woman can be of the goodness that leads you to make me this offer a second time. Better women than I would be proud of the honour, for when I read your nice long speeches on mangold-wurzel, and such like topics, at the Casterbridge Farmers’ Club, I do feel it an honour, I assure you. But my answer is just the same as before. I will not try to explain what, in truth, I cannot explain–my reasons; I will simply say that I must decline to be married to you. With good wishes as in former times, I am, your faithful friend,

‘SALLY HALL.’

Darton dropped the letter hopelessly. Beyond the negative, there was just a possibility of sarcasm in it–‘nice long speeches on mangold-wurzel’ had a suspicious sound. However, sarcasm or none, there was the answer, and he had to be content.

He proceeded to seek relief in a business which at this time engrossed much of his attention–that of clearing up a curious mistake just current in the county, that he had been nearly ruined by the recent failure of a local bank. A farmer named Darton had lost heavily, and the similarity of name had probably led to the error. Belief in it was so persistent that it demanded several days of letter-writing to set matters straight, and persuade the world that he was as solvent as ever he had been in his life. He had hardly concluded this worrying task when, to his delight, another letter arrived in the handwriting of Sally.

Darton tore it open; it was very short.

‘DEAR MR. DARTON,–We have been so alarmed these last few days by the report that you were ruined by the stoppage of –‘s Bank, that, now it is contradicted I hasten, by my mother’s wish, to say how truly glad we are to find there is no foundation for the report. After your kindness to my poor brother’s children, I can do no less than write at such a moment. We had a letter from each of them a few days ago.–Your faithful friend,

‘SALLY HALL.’

‘Mercenary little woman!’ said Darton to himself with a smile. ‘Then that was the secret of her refusal this time–she thought I was ruined.’

Now, such was Darton, that as hours went on he could not help feeling too generously towards Sally to condemn her in this. What did he want in a wife? he asked himself. Love and integrity. What next? Worldly wisdom. And was there really more than worldly wisdom in her refusal to go aboard a sinking ship? She now knew it was otherwise. ‘Begad,’ he said, ‘I’ll try her again.’

The fact was he had so set his heart upon Sally, and Sally alone, that nothing was to be allowed to baulk him; and his reasoning was purely formal.

Anniversaries having been unpropitious, he waited on till a bright day late in May–a day when all animate nature was fancying, in its trusting, foolish way, that it was going to bask out of doors for evermore. As he rode through Long-Ash Lane it was scarce recognizable as the track of his two winter journeys. No mistake could be made now, even with his eyes shut. The cuckoo’s note was at its best, between April tentativeness and midsummer decrepitude, and the reptiles in the sun behaved as winningly as kittens on a hearth. Though afternoon, and about the same time as on the last occasion, it was broad day and sunshine when he entered Hintock, and the details of the Knap dairy-house were visible far up the road. He saw Sally in the garden, and was set vibrating. He had first intended to go on to the inn; but ‘No,’ he said; ‘I’ll tie my horse to the garden-gate. If all goes well it can soon be taken round: if not, I mount and ride away’

The tall shade of the horseman darkened the room in which Mrs. Hall sat, and made her start, for he had ridden by a side path to the top of the slope, where riders seldom came. In a few seconds he was in the garden with Sally.

Five–ay, three minutes–did the business at the back of that row of bees. Though spring had come, and heavenly blue consecrated the scene, Darton succeeded not. ‘NO,’ said Sally firmly. ‘I will never, never marry you, Mr. Darton. I would have done it once; but now I never can.’

‘But!’–implored Mr. Darton. And with a burst of real eloquence he went on to declare all sorts of things that he would do for her. He would drive her to see her mother every week–take her to London– settle so much money upon her–Heaven knows what he did not promise, suggest, and tempt her with. But it availed nothing. She interposed with a stout negative, which closed the course of his argument like an iron gate across a highway. Darton paused.

‘Then,’ said he simply, ‘you hadn’t heard of my supposed failure when you declined last time?’

‘I had not,’ she said. ‘But if I had ‘twould have been all the same.’

‘And ’tis not because of any soreness from my slighting you years ago?’

‘No. That soreness is long past.’

‘Ah–then you despise me, Sally?’

‘No,’ she slowly answered. ‘I don’t altogether despise you. I don’t think you quite such a hero as I once did–that’s all. The truth is, I am happy enough as I am; and I don’t mean to marry at all. Now, may _I_ ask a favour, sir?’ She spoke with an ineffable charm, which, whenever he thought of it, made him curse his loss of her as long as he lived.

‘To any extent.’

‘Please do not put this question to me any more. Friends as long as you like, but lovers and married never.’

‘I never will,’ said Darton. ‘Not if I live a hundred years.’

And he never did. That he had worn out his welcome in her heart was only too plain.

When his step-children had grown up, and were placed out in life, all communication between Darton and the Hall family ceased. It was only by chance that, years after, he learnt that Sally, notwithstanding the solicitations her attractions drew down upon her, had refused several offers of marriage, and steadily adhered to her purpose of leading a single life

May 1884.

THE DISTRACTED PREACHER

CHAPTER I–HOW HIS COLD WAS CURED

Something delayed the arrival of the Wesleyan minister, and a young man came temporarily in his stead. It was on the thirteenth of January 183- that Mr. Stockdale, the young man in question, made his humble entry into the village, unknown, and almost unseen. But when those of the inhabitants who styled themselves of his connection became acquainted with him, they were rather pleased with the substitute than otherwise, though he had scarcely as yet acquired ballast of character sufficient to steady the consciences of the hundred-and-forty Methodists of pure blood who, at this time, lived in Nether-Moynton, and to give in addition supplementary support to the mixed race which went to church in the morning and chapel in the evening, or when there was a tea–as many as a hundred-and-ten people more, all told, and including the parish-clerk in the winter- time, when it was too dark for the vicar to observe who passed up the street at seven o’clock–which, to be just to him, he was never anxious to do.

It was owing to this overlapping of creeds that the celebrated population-puzzle arose among the denser gentry of the district around Nether-Moynton: how could it be that a parish containing fifteen score of strong full-grown Episcopalians, and nearly thirteen score of well-matured Dissenters, numbered barely two-and- twenty score adults in all?

The young man being personally interesting, those with whom he came in contact were content to waive for a while the graver question of his sufficiency. It is said that at this time of his life his eyes were affectionate, though without a ray of levity; that his hair was curly, and his figure tall; that he was, in short, a very lovable youth, who won upon his female hearers as soon as they saw and heard him, and caused them to say, ‘Why didn’t we know of this before he came, that we might have gied him a warmer welcome!’

The fact was that, knowing him to be only provisionally selected, and expecting nothing remarkable in his person or doctrine, they and the rest of his flock in Nether-Moynton had felt almost as indifferent about his advent as if they had been the soundest church-going parishioners in the country, and he their true and appointed parson. Thus when Stockdale set foot in the place nobody had secured a lodging for him, and though his journey had given him a bad cold in the head, he was forced to attend to that business himself. On inquiry he learnt that the only possible accommodation in the village would be found at the house of one Mrs. Lizzy Newberry, at the upper end of the street.

It was a youth who gave this information, and Stockdale asked him who Mrs. Newberry might be.

The boy said that she was a widow-woman, who had got no husband, because he was dead. Mr. Newberry, he added, had been a well-to-do man enough, as the saying was, and a farmer; but he had gone off in a decline. As regarded Mrs. Newberry’s serious side, Stockdale gathered that she was one of the trimmers who went to church and chapel both.

‘I’ll go there,’ said Stockdale, feeling that, in the absence of purely sectarian lodgings, he could do no better.

‘She’s a little particular, and won’t hae gover’ment folks, or curates, or the pa’son’s friends, or such like,’ said the lad dubiously.

‘Ah, that may be a promising sign: I’ll call. Or no; just you go up and ask first if she can find room for me. I have to see one or two persons on another matter. You will find me down at the carrier’s.’

In a quarter of an hour the lad came back, and said that Mrs. Newberry would have no objection to accommodate him, whereupon Stockdale called at the house.

It stood within a garden-hedge, and seemed to be roomy and comfortable. He saw an elderly woman, with whom he made arrangements to come the same night, since there was no inn in the place, and he wished to house himself as soon as possible; the village being a local centre from which he was to radiate at once to the different small chapels in the neighbourhood. He forthwith sent his luggage to Mrs. Newberry’s from the carrier’s, where he had taken shelter, and in the evening walked up to his temporary home.

As he now lived there, Stockdale felt it unnecessary to knock at the door; and entering quietly he had the pleasure of hearing footsteps scudding away like mice into the back quarters. He advanced to the parlour, as the front room was called, though its stone floor was scarcely disguised by the carpet, which only over-laid the trodden areas, leaving sandy deserts under the bulging mouldings of the table-legs, playing with brass furniture. But the room looked snug and cheerful. The firelight shone out brightly, trembling on the knobs and handles, and lurking in great strength on the under surface of the chimney-piece. A deep arm-chair, covered with horsehair, and studded with a countless throng of brass nails, was pulled up on one side of the fireplace. The tea-things were on the table, the teapot cover was open, and a little hand-bell had been laid at that precise point towards which a person seated in the great chair might be expected instinctively to stretch his hand.

Stockdale sat down, not objecting to his experience of the room thus far, and began his residence by tinkling the bell. A little girl crept in at the summons, and made tea for him. Her name, she said, was Marther Sarer, and she lived out there, nodding towards the road and village generally. Before Stockdale had got far with his meal, a tap sounded on the door behind him, and on his telling the inquirer to come in, a rustle of garments caused him to turn his head. He saw before him a fine and extremely well-made young woman, with dark hair, a wide, sensible, beautiful forehead, eyes that warmed him before he knew it, and a mouth that was in itself a picture to all appreciative souls.

‘Can I get you anything else for tea?’ she said, coming forward a step or two, an expression of liveliness on her features, and her hand waving the door by its edge.

‘Nothing, thank you,’ said Stockdale, thinking less of what he replied than of what might be her relation to the household.

‘You are quite sure?’ said the young woman, apparently aware that he had not considered his answer.

He conscientiously examined the tea-things, and found them all there. ‘Quite sure, Miss Newberry,’ he said.

‘It is Mrs. Newberry,’ she said. ‘Lizzy Newberry, I used to be Lizzy Simpkins.’

‘O, I beg your pardon, Mrs. Newberry.’ And before he had occasion to say more she left the room.

Stockdale remained in some doubt till Martha Sarah came to clear the table. ‘Whose house is this, my little woman,’ said he.

‘Mrs. Lizzy Newberry’s, sir.’

‘Then Mrs. Newberry is not the old lady I saw this afternoon?’

‘No. That’s Mrs. Newberry’s mother. It was Mrs. Newberry who comed in to you just by now, because she wanted to see if you was good- looking.’

Later in the evening, when Stockdale was about to begin supper, she came again. ‘I have come myself, Mr. Stockdale,’ she said. The minister stood up in acknowledgment of the honour. ‘I am afraid little Marther might not make you understand. What will you have for supper?–there’s cold rabbit, and there’s a ham uncut.’

Stockdale said he could get on nicely with those viands, and supper was laid. He had no more than cut a slice when tap-tap came to the door again. The minister had already learnt that this particular rhythm in taps denoted the fingers of his enkindling landlady, and the doomed young fellow buried his first mouthful under a look of receptive blandness.

‘We have a chicken in the house, Mr. Stockdale–I quite forgot to mention it just now. Perhaps you would like Marther Sarer to bring it up?’

Stockdale had advanced far enough in the art of being a young man to say that he did not want the chicken, unless she brought it up herself; but when it was uttered he blushed at the daring gallantry of the speech, perhaps a shade too strong for a serious man and a minister. In three minutes the chicken appeared, but, to his great surprise, only in the hands of Martha Sarah. Stockdale was disappointed, which perhaps it was intended that he should be.

He had finished supper, and was not in the least anticipating Mrs. Newberry again that night, when she tapped and entered as before. Stockdale’s gratified look told that she had lost nothing by not appearing when expected. It happened that the cold in the head from which the young man suffered had increased with the approach of night, and before she had spoken he was seized with a violent fit of sneezing which he could not anyhow repress.

Mrs. Newberry looked full of pity. ‘Your cold is very bad to-night, Mr. Stockdale.’

Stockdale replied that it was rather troublesome.

‘And I’ve a good mind’–she added archly, looking at the cheerless glass of water on the table, which the abstemious minister was going to drink.

‘Yes, Mrs. Newberry?’

‘I’ve a good mind that you should have something more likely to cure it than that cold stuff.’

‘Well,’ said Stockdale, looking down at the glass, ‘as there is no inn here, and nothing better to be got in the village, of course it will do.’

To this she replied, ‘There is something better, not far off, though not in the house. I really think you must try it, or you may be ill. Yes, Mr. Stockdale, you shall.’ She held up her finger, seeing that he was about to speak. ‘Don’t ask what it is; wait, and you shall see.’

Lizzy went away, and Stockdale waited in a pleasant mood. Presently she returned with her bonnet and cloak on, saying, ‘I am so sorry, but you must help me to get it. Mother has gone to bed. Will you wrap yourself up, and come this way, and please bring that cup with you?’

Stockdale, a lonely young fellow, who had for weeks felt a great craving for somebody on whom to throw away superfluous interest, and even tenderness, was not sorry to join her; and followed his guide through the back door, across the garden, to the bottom, where the boundary was a wall. This wall was low, and beyond it Stockdale discerned in the night shades several grey headstones, and the outlines of the church roof and tower.

‘It is easy to get up this way,’ she said, stepping upon a bank which abutted on the wall; then putting her foot on the top of the stonework, and descending a spring inside, where the ground was much higher, as is the manner of graveyards to be. Stockdale did the same, and followed her in the dusk across the irregular ground till they came to the tower door, which, when they had entered, she softly closed behind them.

‘You can keep a secret?’ she said, in a musical voice.

‘Like an iron chest!’ said he fervently.

Then from under her cloak she produced a small lighted lantern, which the minister had not noticed that she carried at all. The light showed them to be close to the singing-gallery stairs, under which lay a heap of lumber of all sorts, but consisting mostly of decayed framework, pews, panels, and pieces of flooring, that from time to time had been removed from their original fixings in the body of the edifice and replaced by new.

‘Perhaps you will drag some of those boards aside?’ she said, holding the lantern over her head to light him better. ‘Or will you take the lantern while I move them?’

‘I can manage it,’ said the young man, and acting as she ordered, he uncovered, to his surprise, a row of little barrels bound with wood hoops, each barrel being about as large as the nave of a heavy waggon-wheel.

When they were laid open Lizzy fixed her eyes on him, as if she wondered what he would say.

‘You know what they are?’ she asked, finding that he did not speak.

‘Yes, barrels,’ said Stockdale simply. He was an inland man, the son of highly respectable parents, and brought up with a single eye to the ministry; and the sight suggested nothing beyond the fact that such articles were there.

‘You are quite right, they are barrels,’ she said, in an emphatic tone of candour that was not without a touch of irony.

Stockdale looked at her with an eye of sudden misgiving. ‘Not smugglers’ liquor?’ he said.

‘Yes,’ said she. ‘They are tubs of spirit that have accidentally come over in the dark from France.’

In Nether-Moynton and its vicinity at this date people always smiled at the sort of sin called in the outside world illicit trading; and these little kegs of gin and brandy were as well known to the inhabitants as turnips. So that Stockdale’s innocent ignorance, and his look of alarm when he guessed the sinister mystery, seemed to strike Lizzy first as ludicrous, and then as very awkward for the good impression that she wished to produce upon him.

‘Smuggling is carried on here by some of the people,’ she said in a gentle, apologetic voice. ‘It has been their practice for generations, and they think it no harm. Now, will you roll out one of the tubs?’

‘What to do with it?’ said the minister.

‘To draw a little from it to cure your cold,’ she answered. ‘It is so ‘nation strong that it drives away that sort of thing in a jiffy. O, it is all right about our taking it. I may have what I like; the owner of the tubs says so. I ought to have had some in the house, and then I shouldn’t ha’ been put to this trouble; but I drink none myself, and so I often forget to keep it indoors.’

‘You are allowed to help yourself, I suppose, that you may not inform where their hiding-place is?’

‘Well, no; not that particularly; but I may take any if I want it. So help yourself.’

‘I will, to oblige you, since you have a right to it,’ murmured the minister; and though he was not quite satisfied with his part in the performance, he rolled one of the ‘tubs’ out from the corner into the middle of the tower floor. ‘How do you wish me to get it out– with a gimlet, I suppose?’

‘No, I’ll show you,’ said his interesting companion; and she held up with her other hand a shoemaker’s awl and a hammer. ‘You must never do these things with a gimlet, because the wood-dust gets in; and when the buyers pour out the brandy that would tell them that the tub had been broached. An awl makes no dust, and the hole nearly closes up again. Now tap one of the hoops forward.’

Stockdale took the hammer and did so.

‘Now make the hole in the part that was covered by the hoop.’

He made the hole as directed. ‘It won’t run out,’ he said.

‘O yes it will,’ said she. ‘Take the tub between your knees, and squeeze the heads; and I’ll hold the cup.’

Stockdale obeyed; and the pressure taking effect upon the tub, which seemed, to be thin, the spirit spirted out in a stream. When the cup was full he ceased pressing, and the flow immediately stopped. ‘Now we must fill up the keg with water,’ said Lizzy, ‘or it will cluck like forty hens when it is handled, and show that ’tis not full.’

‘But they tell you you may take it?’

‘Yes, the SMUGGLERS: but the BUYERS must not know that the smugglers have been kind to me at their expense.’

‘I see,’ said Stockdale doubtfully. ‘I much question the honesty of this proceeding.’

By her direction he held the tub with the hole upwards, and while he went through the process of alternately pressing and ceasing to press, she produced a bottle of water, from which she took mouthfuls, conveying each to the keg by putting her pretty lips to the hole, where it was sucked in at each recovery of the cask from pressure. When it was again full he plugged the hole, knocked the hoop down to its place, and buried the tub in the lumber as before.

‘Aren’t the smugglers afraid that you will tell?’ he asked, as they recrossed the churchyard.

‘O no; they are not afraid of that. I couldn’t do such a thing.’

‘They have put you into a very awkward corner,’ said Stockdale emphatically. ‘You must, of course, as an honest person, sometimes feel that it is your duty to inform–really you must.’

‘Well, I have never particularly felt it as a duty; and, besides, my first husband–‘ She stopped, and there was some confusion in her voice. Stockdale was so honest and unsophisticated that he did not at once discern why she paused: but at last he did perceive that the words were a slip, and that no woman would have uttered ‘first husband’ by accident unless she had thought pretty frequently of a second. He felt for her confusion, and allowed her time to recover and proceed. ‘My husband,’ she said, in a self-corrected tone, ‘used to know of their doings, and so did my father, and kept the secret. I cannot inform, in fact, against anybody.’

‘I see the hardness of it,’ he continued, like a man who looked far into the moral of things. ‘And it is very cruel that you should be tossed and tantalized between your memories and your conscience. I do hope, Mrs. Newberry, that you will soon see your way out of this unpleasant position.’

‘Well, I don’t just now,’ she murmured.

By this time they had passed over the wall and entered the house, where she brought him a glass and hot water, and left him to his own reflections. He looked after her vanishing form, asking himself whether he, as a respectable man, and a minister, and a shining light, even though as yet only of the halfpenny-candle sort, were quite justified in doing this thing. A sneeze settled the question; and he found that when the fiery liquor was lowered by the addition of twice or thrice the quantity of water, it was one of the prettiest cures for a cold in the head that he had ever known, particularly at this chilly time of the year.

Stockdale sat in the deep chair about twenty minutes sipping and meditating, till he at length took warmer views of things, and longed for the morrow, when he would see Mrs. Newberry again. He then felt that, though chronologically at a short distance, it would in an emotional sense be very long before to-morrow came, and walked restlessly round the room. His eye was attracted by a framed and glazed sampler in which a running ornament of fir-trees and peacocks surrounded the following pretty bit of sentiment:-

‘Rose-leaves smell when roses thrive, Here’s my work while I’m alive;
Rose-leaves smell when shrunk and shed, Here’s my work when I am dead.

‘Lizzy Simpkins. Fear God. Honour the King. ‘Aged 11 years.

”Tis hers,’ he said to himself. ‘Heavens, how I like that name!’

Before he had done thinking that no other name from Abigail to Zenobia would have suited his young landlady so well, tap-tap came again upon the door; and the minister started as her face appeared yet another time, looking so disinterested that the most ingenious would have refrained from asserting that she had come to affect his feelings by her seductive eyes.

‘Would you like a fire in your room, Mr. Stockdale, on account of your cold?’

The minister, being still a little pricked in the conscience for countenancing her in watering the spirits, saw here a way to self- chastisement. ‘No, I thank you,’ he said firmly; ‘it is not necessary. I have never been used to one in my life, and it would be giving way to luxury too far.’

‘Then I won’t insist,’ she said, and disconcerted him by vanishing instantly.

Wondering if she was vexed by his refusal, he wished that he had chosen to have a fire, even though it should have scorched him out of bed and endangered his self-discipline for a dozen days. However, he consoled himself with what was in truth a rare consolation for a budding lover, that he was under the same roof with Lizzy; her guest, in fact, to take a poetical view of the term lodger; and that he would certainly see her on the morrow.

The morrow came, and Stockdale rose early, his cold quite gone. He had never in his life so longed for the breakfast hour as he did that day, and punctually at eight o’clock, after a short walk, to reconnoitre the premises, he re-entered the door of his dwelling. Breakfast passed, and Martha Sarah attended, but nobody came voluntarily as on the night before to inquire if there were other wants which he had not mentioned, and which she would attempt to gratify. He was disappointed, and went out, hoping to see her at dinner. Dinner time came; he sat down to the meal, finished it, lingered on for a whole hour, although two new teachers were at that moment waiting at the chapel-door to speak to him by appointment. It was useless to wait longer, and he slowly went his way down the lane, cheered by the thought that, after all, he would see her in the evening, and perhaps engage again in the delightful tub- broaching in the neighbouring church tower, which proceeding he resolved to render more moral by steadfastly insisting that no water should be introduced to fill up, though the tub should cluck like all the hens in Christendom. But nothing could disguise the fact that it was a queer business; and his countenance fell when he thought how much more his mind was interested in that matter than in his serious duties.

However, compunction vanished with the decline of day. Night came, and his tea and supper; but no Lizzy Newberry, and no sweet temptations. At last the minister could bear it no longer, and said to his quaint little attendant, ‘Where is Mrs. Newberry to-day?’ judiciously handing a penny as he spoke.

‘She’s busy,’ said Martha.

‘Anything serious happened?’ he asked, handing another penny, and revealing yet additional pennies in the background.

‘O no–nothing at all!’ said she, with breathless confidence. ‘Nothing ever happens to her. She’s only biding upstairs in bed because ’tis her way sometimes.’

Being a young man of some honour, he would not question further, and assuming that Lizzy must have a bad headache, or other slight ailment, in spite of what the girl had said, he went to bed dissatisfied, not even setting eyes on old Mrs. Simpkins. ‘I said last night that I should see her to-morrow,’ he reflected; ‘but that was not to be!’

Next day he had better fortune, or worse, meeting her at the foot of the stairs in the morning, and being favoured by a visit or two from her during the day–once for the purpose of making kindly inquiries about his comfort, as on the first evening, and at another time to place a bunch of winter-violets on his table, with a promise to renew them when they drooped. On these occasions there was something in her smile which showed how conscious she was of the effect she produced, though it must be said that it was rather a humorous than a designing consciousness, and savoured more of pride than of vanity.

As for Stockdale, he clearly perceived that he possessed unlimited capacity for backsliding, and wished that tutelary saints were not denied to Dissenters. He set a watch upon his tongue and eyes for the space of one hour and a half, after which he found it was useless to struggle further, and gave himself up to the situation. ‘The other minister will be here in a month,’ he said to himself when sitting over the fire. ‘Then I shall be off, and she will distract my mind no more! . . . And then, shall I go on living by myself for ever? No; when my two years of probation are finished, I shall have a furnished house to live in, with a varnished door and a brass knocker; and I’ll march straight back to her, and ask her flat, as soon as the last plate is on the dresser!

Thus a titillating fortnight was passed by young Stockdale, during which time things proceeded much as such matters have done ever since the beginning of history. He saw the object of attachment several times one day, did not see her at all the next, met her when he least expected to do so, missed her when hints and signs as to where she should be at a given hour almost amounted to an appointment. This mild coquetry was perhaps fair enough under the circumstances of their being so closely lodged, and Stockdale put up with it as philosophically as he was able. Being in her own house, she could, after vexing him or disappointing him of her presence, easily win him back by suddenly surrounding him with those little attentions which her position as his landlady put it in her power to bestow. When he had waited indoors half the day to see her, and on finding that she would not be seen, had gone off in a huff to the dreariest and dampest walk he could discover, she would restore equilibrium in the evening with ‘Mr. Stockdale, I have fancied you must feel draught o’ nights from your bedroom window, and so I have been putting up thicker curtains this afternoon while you were out;’ or, ‘I noticed that you sneezed twice again this morning, Mr. Stockdale. Depend upon it that cold is hanging about you yet; I am sure it is–I have thought of it continually; and you must let me make a posset for you.’

Sometimes in coming home he found his sitting-room rearranged, chairs placed where the table had stood, and the table ornamented with the few fresh flowers and leaves that could be obtained at this season, so as to add a novelty to the room. At times she would be standing on a chair outside the house, trying to nail up a branch of the monthly rose which the winter wind had blown down; and of course he stepped forward to assist her, when their hands got mixed in passing the shreds and nails. Thus they became friends again after a disagreement. She would utter on these occasions some pretty and deprecatory remark on the necessity of her troubling him anew; and he would straightway say that he would do a hundred times as much for her if she should so require.

CHAPTER II–HOW HE SAW TWO OTHER MEN

Matters being in this advancing state, Stockdale was rather surprised one cloudy evening, while sitting in his room, at hearing her speak in low tones of expostulation to some one at the door. It was nearly dark, but the shutters were not yet closed, nor the candles lighted; and Stockdale was tempted to stretch his head towards the window. He saw outside the door a young man in clothes of a whitish colour, and upon reflection judged their wearer to be the well-built and rather handsome miller who lived below. The miller’s voice was alternately low and firm, and sometimes it reached the level of positive entreaty; but what the words were Stockdale could in no way hear.

Before the colloquy had ended, the minister’s attention was attracted by a second incident. Opposite Lizzy’s home grew a clump of laurels, forming a thick and permanent shade. One of the laurel boughs now quivered against the light background of sky, and in a moment the head of a man peered out, and remained still. He seemed to be also much interested in the conversation at the door, and was plainly lingering there to watch and listen. Had Stockdale stood in any other relation to Lizzy than that of a lover, he might have gone out and investigated the meaning of this: but being as yet but an unprivileged ally, he did nothing more than stand up and show himself against the firelight, whereupon the listener disappeared, and Lizzy and the miller spoke in lower tones.

Stockdale was made so uneasy by the circumstance, that as soon as the miller was gone, he said, ‘Mrs. Newberry, are you aware that you were watched just now, and your conversation heard?’

‘When?’ she said.

‘When you were talking to that miller. A man was looking from the laurel-tree as jealously as if he could have eaten you.’

She showed more concern than the trifling event seemed to demand, and he added, ‘Perhaps you were talking of things you did not wish to be overheard?’

‘I was talking only on business,’ she said.

‘Lizzy, be frank!’ said the young man. ‘If it was only on business, why should anybody wish to listen to you?’

She looked curiously at him. ‘What else do you think it could be, then?’

‘Well–the only talk between a young woman and man that is likely to amuse an eavesdropper.’

‘Ah yes,’ she said, smiling in spite of her preoccupation. ‘Well, my cousin Owlett has spoken to me about matrimony, every now and then, that’s true; but he was not speaking of it then. I wish he had been speaking of it, with all my heart. It would have been much less serious for me.’

‘O Mrs. Newberry!’

‘It would. Not that I should ha’ chimed in with him, of course. I wish it for other reasons. I am glad, Mr. Stockdale, that you have told me of that listener. It is a timely warning, and I must see my cousin again.’

‘But don’t go away till I have spoken,’ said the minister. ‘I’ll out with it at once, and make no more ado. Let it be Yes or No between us, Lizzy; please do!’ And he held out his hand, in which she freely allowed her own to rest, but without speaking.

‘You mean Yes by that?’ he asked, after waiting a while.

‘You may be my sweetheart, if you will.’

‘Why not say at once you will wait for me until I have a house and can come back to marry you.’

‘Because I am thinking–thinking of something else,’ she said with embarrassment. ‘It all comes upon me at once, and I must settle one thing at a time.’

‘At any rate, dear Lizzy, you can assure me that the miller shall not be allowed to speak to you except on business? You have never directly encouraged him?’

She parried the question by saying, ‘You see, he and his party have been in the habit of leaving things on my premises sometimes, and as I have not denied him, it makes him rather forward.’

‘Things–what things?’

‘Tubs–they are called Things here.’

‘But why don’t you deny him, my dear Lizzy?’

‘I cannot well.’

‘You are too timid. It is unfair of him to impose so upon you, and get your good name into danger by his smuggling tricks. Promise me that the next time he wants to leave his tubs here you will let me roll them into the street?’

She shook her head. ‘I would not venture to offend the neighbours so much as that,’ said she, ‘or do anything that would be so likely to put poor Owlett into the hands of the excisemen.’

Stockdale sighed, and said that he thought hers a mistaken generosity when it extended to assisting those who cheated the king of his dues. ‘At any rate, you will let me make him keep his distance as your lover, and tell him flatly that you are not for him?’

‘Please not, at present,’ she said. ‘I don’t wish to offend my old neighbours. It is not only Owlett who is concerned.’

‘This is too bad,’ said Stockdale impatiently.

‘On my honour, I won’t encourage him as my lover,’ Lizzy answered earnestly. ‘A reasonable man will be satisfied with that.’

‘Well, so I am,’ said Stockdale, his countenance clearing.

CHAPTER III–THE MYSTERIOUS GREATCOAT

Stockdale now began to notice more particularly a feature in the life of his fair landlady, which he had casually observed but scarcely ever thought of before. It was that she was markedly irregular in her hours of rising. For a week or two she would be tolerably punctual, reaching the ground-floor within a few minutes of half-past seven. Then suddenly she would not be visible till twelve at noon, perhaps for three or four days in succession; and twice he had certain proof that she did not leave her room till half-past three in the afternoon. The second time that this extreme lateness came under his notice was on a day when he had particularly wished to consult with her about his future movements; and he concluded, as he always had done, that she had a cold, headache, or other ailment, unless she had kept herself invisible to avoid meeting and talking to him, which he could hardly believe. The former supposition was disproved, however, by her innocently saying, some days later, when they were speaking on a question of health, that she had never had a moment’s heaviness, headache, or illness of any kind since the previous January twelvemonth.

‘I am glad to hear it,’ said he. ‘I thought quite otherwise.’

‘What, do I look sickly?’ she asked, turning up her face to show the impossibility of his gazing on it and holding such a belief for a moment.

‘Not at all; I merely thought so from your being sometimes obliged to keep your room through the best part of the day.’

‘O, as for that–it means nothing,’ she murmured, with a look which some might have called cold, and which was the worst look that he liked to see upon her. ‘It is pure sleepiness, Mr. Stockdale.’

‘Never!’

‘It is, I tell you. When I stay in my room till half-past three in the afternoon, you may always be sure that I slept soundly till three, or I shouldn’t have stayed there.’

‘It is dreadful,’ said Stockdale, thinking of the disastrous effects of such indulgence upon the household of a minister, should it become a habit of everyday occurrence.

‘But then,’ she said, divining his good and prescient thoughts, ‘it only happens when I stay awake all night. I don’t go to sleep till five or six in the morning sometimes.’

‘Ah, that’s another matter,’ said Stockdale. ‘Sleeplessness to such an alarming extent is real illness. Have you spoken to a doctor?’

‘O no–there is no need for doing that–it is all natural to me.’ And she went away without further remark.

Stockdale might have waited a long time to know the real cause of her sleeplessness, had it not happened that one dark night he was sitting in his bedroom jotting down notes for a sermon, which occupied him perfunctorily for a considerable time after the other members of the household had retired. He did not get to bed till one o’clock. Before he had fallen asleep he heard a knocking at the front door, first rather timidly performed, and then louder. Nobody answered it, and the person knocked again. As the house still remained undisturbed, Stockdale got out of bed, went to his window, which overlooked the door, and opening it, asked who was there.

A young woman’s voice replied that Susan Wallis was there, and that she had come to ask if Mrs. Newberry could give her some mustard to make a plaster with, as her father was taken very ill on the chest.

The minister, having neither bell nor servant, was compelled to act in person. ‘I will call Mrs. Newberry,’ he said. Partly dressing himself; he went along the passage and tapped at Lizzy’s door. She did not answer, and, thinking of her erratic habits in the matter of sleep, he thumped the door persistently, when he discovered, by its moving ajar under his knocking, that it had only been gently pushed to. As there was now a sufficient entry for the voice, he knocked no longer, but said in firm tones, ‘Mrs. Newberry, you are wanted.’

The room was quite silent; not a breathing, not a rustle, came from any part of it. Stockdale now sent a positive shout through the open space of the door: ‘Mrs. Newberry!’–still no answer, or movement of any kind within. Then he heard sounds from the opposite room, that of Lizzy’s mother, as if she had been aroused by his uproar though Lizzy had not, and was dressing herself hastily. Stockdale softly closed the younger woman’s door and went on to the other, which was opened by Mrs. Simpkins before he could reach it. She was in her ordinary clothes, and had a light in her hand.

‘What’s the person calling about?’ she said in alarm.

Stockdale told the girl’s errand, adding seriously, ‘I cannot wake Mrs. Newberry.’

‘It is no matter,’ said her mother. ‘I can let the girl have what she wants as well as my daughter.’ And she came out of the room and went downstairs.

Stockdale retired towards his own apartment, saying, however, to Mrs. Simpkins from the landing, as if on second thoughts, ‘I suppose there is nothing the matter with Mrs. Newberry, that I could not wake her?’

‘O no,’ said the old lady hastily. ‘Nothing at all.’

Still the minister was not satisfied. ‘Will you go in and see?’ he said. ‘I should be much more at ease.’

Mrs. Simpkins returned up the staircase, went to her daughter’s room, and came out again almost instantly. ‘There is nothing at all the matter with Lizzy,’ she said; and descended again to attend to the applicant, who, having seen the light, had remained quiet during this interval.

Stockdale went into his room and lay down as before. He heard Lizzy’s mother open the front door, admit the girl, and then the murmured discourse of both as they went to the store-cupboard for the medicament required. The girl departed, the door was fastened, Mrs. Simpkins came upstairs, and the house was again in silence. Still the minister did not fall asleep. He could not get rid of a singular suspicion, which was all the more harassing in being, if true, the most unaccountable thing within his experience. That Lizzy Newberry was in her bedroom when he made such a clamour at the door he could not possibly convince himself; notwithstanding that he had heard her come upstairs at the usual time, go into her chamber, and shut herself up in the usual way. Yet all reason was so much against her being elsewhere, that he was constrained to go back again to the unlikely theory of a heavy sleep, though he had heard neither breath nor movement during a shouting and knocking loud enough to rouse the Seven Sleepers.

Before coming to any positive conclusion he fell asleep himself, and did not awake till day. He saw nothing of Mrs. Newberry in the morning, before he went out to meet the rising sun, as he liked to do when the weather was fine; but as this was by no means unusual, he took no notice of it. At breakfast-time he knew that she was not far off by hearing her in the kitchen, and though he saw nothing of her person, that back apartment being rigorously closed against his eyes, she seemed to be talking, ordering, and bustling about among the pots and skimmers in so ordinary a manner, that there was no reason for his wasting more time in fruitless surmise.

The minister suffered from these distractions, and his extemporized sermons were not improved thereby. Already he often said Romans for Corinthians in the pulpit, and gave out hymns in strange cramped metres, that hitherto had always been skipped, because the congregation could not raise a tune to fit them. He fully resolved that as soon as his few weeks of stay approached their end he would cut the matter short, and commit himself by proposing a definite engagement, repenting at leisure if necessary.

With this end in view, he suggested to her on the evening after her mysterious sleep that they should take a walk together just before dark, the latter part of the proposition being introduced that they might return home unseen. She consented to go; and away they went over a stile, to a shrouded footpath suited for the occasion. But, in spite of attempts on both sides, they were unable to infuse much spirit into the ramble. She looked rather paler than usual, and sometimes turned her head away.

‘Lizzy,’ said Stockdale reproachfully, when they had walked in silence a long distance.

‘Yes,’ said she.

‘You yawned–much my company is to you!’ He put it in that way, but he was really wondering whether her yawn could possibly have more to do with physical weariness from the night before than mental weariness of that present moment. Lizzy apologized, and owned that she was rather tired, which gave him an opening for a direct question on the point; but his modesty would not allow him to put it to her; and he uncomfortably resolved to wait.

The month of February passed with alternations of mud and frost, rain and sleet, east winds and north-westerly gales. The hollow places in the ploughed fields showed themselves as pools of water, which had settled there from the higher levels, and had not yet found time to soak away. The birds began to get lively, and a single thrush came just before sunset each evening, and sang hopefully on the large elm-tree which stood nearest to Mrs. Newberry’s house. Cold blasts and brittle earth had given place to an oozing dampness more unpleasant in itself than frost; but it suggested coming spring, and its unpleasantness was of a bearable kind.

Stockdale had been going to bring about a practical understanding with Lizzy at least half-a-dozen times; but, what with the mystery of her apparent absence on the night of the neighbour’s call, and her curious way of lying in bed at unaccountable times, he felt a check within him whenever he wanted to speak out. Thus they still lived on as indefinitely affianced lovers, each of whom hardly acknowledged the other’s claim to the name of chosen one. Stockdale persuaded himself that his hesitation was owing to the postponement of the ordained minister’s arrival, and the consequent delay in his own departure, which did away with all necessity for haste in his courtship; but perhaps it was only that his discretion was reasserting itself, and telling him that he had better get clearer ideas of Lizzy before arranging for the grand contract of his life with her. She, on her part, always seemed ready to be urged further on that question than he had hitherto attempted to go; but she was none the less independent, and to a degree which would have kept from flagging the passion of a far more mutable man.

On the evening of the first of March he went casually into his bedroom about dusk, and noticed lying on a chair a greatcoat, hat, and breeches. Having no recollection of leaving any clothes of his own in that spot, he went and examined them as well as he could in the twilight, and found that they did not belong to him. He paused for a moment to consider how they might have got there. He was the only man living in the house; and yet these were not his garments, unless he had made a mistake. No, they were not his. He called up Martha Sarah.

‘How did these things come in my room?’ he said, flinging the objectionable articles to the floor.

Martha said that Mrs. Newberry had given them to her to brush, and that she had brought them up there thinking they must be Mr. Stockdale’s, as there was no other gentleman a-lodging there.

‘Of course you did,’ said Stockdale. ‘Now take them down to your mis’ess, and say they are some clothes I have found here and know nothing about.’

As the door was left open he heard the conversation downstairs. ‘How stupid!’ said Mrs. Newberry, in a tone of confusion. ‘Why, Marther Sarer, I did not tell you to take ’em to Mr. Stockdale’s room?’

‘I thought they must be his as they was so muddy,’ said Martha humbly.

‘You should have left ’em on the clothes-horse,’ said the young mistress severely; and she came upstairs with the garments on her arm, quickly passed Stockdale’s room, and threw them forcibly into a closet at the end of a passage. With this the incident ended, and the house was silent again.

There would have been nothing remarkable in finding such clothes in a widow’s house had they been clean; or moth-eaten, or creased, or mouldy from long lying by; but that they should be splashed with recent mud bothered Stockdale a good deal. When a young pastor is in the aspen stage of attachment, and open to agitation at the merest trifles, a really substantial incongruity of this complexion is a disturbing thing. However, nothing further occurred at that time; but he became watchful, and given to conjecture, and was unable to forget the circumstance.

One morning, on looking from his window, he saw Mrs. Newberry herself brushing the tails of a long drab greatcoat, which, if he mistook not, was the very same garment as the one that had adorned the chair of his room. It was densely splashed up to the hollow of the back with neighbouring Nether-Moynton mud, to judge by its colour, the spots being distinctly visible to him in the sunlight. The previous day or two having been wet, the inference was irresistible that the wearer had quite recently been walking some considerable distance about the lanes and fields. Stockdale opened the window and looked out, and Mrs. Newberry turned her head. Her face became slowly red; she never had looked prettier, or more incomprehensible, he waved his hand affectionately, and said good- morning; she answered with embarrassment, having ceased her occupation on the instant that she saw him, and rolled up the coat half-cleaned.

Stockdale shut the window. Some simple explanation of her proceeding was doubtless within the bounds of possibility; but he himself could not think of one; and he wished that she had placed the matter beyond conjecture by voluntarily saying something about it there and then.

But, though Lizzy had not offered an explanation at the moment, the subject was brought forward by her at the next time of their meeting. She was chatting to him concerning some other event, and remarked that it happened about the time when she was dusting some old clothes that had belonged to her poor husband.

‘You keep them clean out of respect to his memory?’ said Stockdale tentatively.

‘I air and dust them sometimes,’ she said, with the most charming innocence in the world.

‘Do dead men come out of their graves and walk in mud?’ murmured the minister, in a cold sweat at the deception that she was practising.

‘What did you say?’ asked Lizzy.

‘Nothing, nothing,’ said he mournfully. ‘Mere words–a phrase that will do for my sermon next Sunday.’ It was too plain that Lizzy was unaware that he had seen actual pedestrian splashes upon the skirts of the tell-tale overcoat, and that she imagined him to believe it had come direct from some chest or drawer.

The aspect of the case was now considerably darker. Stockdale was so much depressed by it that he did not challenge her explanation, or threaten to go off as a missionary to benighted islanders, or reproach her in any way whatever. He simply parted from her when she had done talking, and lived on in perplexity, till by degrees his natural manner became sad and constrained.

CHAPTER IV–AT THE TIME OF THE NEW MOON

The following Thursday was changeable, damp, and gloomy; and the night threatened to be windy and unpleasant. Stockdale had gone