Complete Works of Thomas Hardy (Illustrated) (219 page)

‘Never mind them — don’t interrupt them,’ said Ladywell.  ‘The plain truth is that I have been very greatly disturbed in mind; and I could not appear earlier by reason of it.  I had some doubt about coming at all.’

‘I am sorry to hear that.’

‘Neigh — I may as well tell you and have done with it.  I have found that a lady of my acquaintance has two strings to her bow, or I am very much in error.’

‘What — Mrs. Petherwin?’ said Neigh uneasily.  ‘But I thought that — that fancy was over with you long ago.  Even your acquaintance with her was at an end, I thought.’

‘In a measure it is at an end.  But let me tell you that what you call a fancy has been anything but a fancy with me, to be over like a spring shower.  To speak plainly, Neigh, I consider myself badly used by that woman; damn badly used.’

‘Badly used?’ said Neigh mechanically, and wondering all the time if Ladywell had been informed that Ethelberta was to be one of the party to-day.

‘Well, I ought not to talk like that,’ said Ladywell, adopting a lighter tone.  ‘All is fair in courtship, I suppose, now as ever.  Indeed, I mean to put a good face upon it: if I am beaten, I am.  But it is very provoking, after supposing matters to be going on smoothly, to find out that you are quite mistaken.’

‘I told you you were quite mistaken in supposing she cared for you.’

‘That is just the point I was not mistaken in,’ said Ladywell warmly.  ‘She did care for me, and I stood as well with her as any man could stand until this fellow came, whoever he is.  I sometimes feel so disturbed about it that I have a good mind to call upon her and ask his name.  Wouldn’t you, Neigh?  Will you accompany me?’

‘I would in a moment, but, but — I strongly advise you not to go,’ said Neigh earnestly.  ‘It would be rash, you know, and rather unmannerly; and would only hurt your feelings.’

‘Well, I am always ready to yield to a friend’s arguments. . . .  A sneaking scamp, that’s what he is.  Why does he not show himself?’

‘Don’t you really know who he is?’ said Neigh, in a pronounced and exceptional tone, on purpose to give Ladywell a chance of suspecting, for the position was getting awkward.  But Ladywell was blind as Bartimeus in that direction, so well had indifference to Ethelberta’s charms been feigned by Neigh until he thought seriously of marrying her.  Yet, unfortunately for the interests of calmness, Ladywell was less blind with his outward eye.  In his reflections his glance had lingered again upon the pocket-book which Neigh still held in his hand, and upon the two or three rose-leaves on the floor, until he said idly, superimposing humorousness upon misery, as men in love can:

‘Rose-leaves, Neigh?  I thought you did not care for flowers.  What makes you amuse yourself with such sentimental objects as those, only fit for women, or painters like me?  If I had not observed you with my own eyes I should have said that you were about the last man in the world to care for things of that sort.  Whatever makes you keep rose-leaves in your pocket-book?’

‘The best reason on earth,’ said Neigh.  ‘A woman gave them to me.’

‘That proves nothing unless she is a great deal to you,’ said Ladywell, with the experienced air of a man who, whatever his inferiority in years to Neigh, was far beyond him in knowledge of that sort, by virtue of his recent trials.

‘She is a great deal to me.’

‘If I did not know you to be such a confirmed misogynist I should say that this is a serious matter.’

‘It is serious,’ said Neigh quietly.  ‘The probability is that I shall marry the woman who gave me these.  Anyhow I have asked her the question, and she has not altogether said no.’

‘I am glad to hear it, Neigh,’ said Ladywell heartily.  ‘I am glad to hear that your star is higher than mine.’

Before Neigh could make further reply Ladywell was attracted by the glow of green sunlight reflected through the south door by the grass of the churchyard, now in all its spring freshness and luxuriance.  He bent his steps thither, followed anxiously by Neigh.

‘I had no idea there was such a lovely green spot in the city,’ Ladywell continued, passing out.  ‘Trees too, planted in the manner of an orchard.  What a charming place!’

The place was truly charming just at that date.  The untainted leaves of the lime and plane trees and the newly-sprung grass had in the sun a brilliancy of beauty that was brought into extraordinary prominence by the sable soil showing here and there, and the charcoaled stems and trunks out of which the leaves budded: they seemed an importation, not a produce, and their delicacy such as would perish in a day.

‘What is this round tower?’ Ladywell said again, walking towards the iron-grey bastion, partly covered with ivy and Virginia creeper, which stood obtruding into the enclosure.

‘O, didn’t you know that was here?  That’s a piece of the old city wall,’ said Neigh, looking furtively around at the same time.  Behind the bastion the churchyard ran into a long narrow strip, grassed like the other part, but completely hidden from it by the cylinder of ragged masonry.  On rounding this projection, Ladywell beheld within a few feet of him a lady whom he knew too well.

‘Mrs. Petherwin here!’ exclaimed he, proving how ignorant he had been of the composition of the party he was to meet, and accounting at the same time for his laxity in attending it.

‘I forgot to tell you,’ said Neigh awkwardly, behind him, ‘that Mrs. Petherwin was to come with us.’

Ethelberta’s look was somewhat blushful and agitated, as if from some late transaction: she appeared to have been secluding herself there till she should have recovered her equanimity.  However, she came up to him and said, ‘I did not see you before this moment: we had been thinking you would not come.’

While these words were being prettily spoken, Ladywell’s face became pale as death.  On Ethelberta’s bosom were the stem and green calyx of a rose, almost all its flower having disappeared.  It had been a Harlequin rose, for two or three of its striped leaves remained to tell the tale.

She could not help noticing his fixed gaze, and she said quickly, ‘Yes, I have lost my pretty rose: this may as well go now,’ and she plucked the stem from its fastening in her dress and flung it away.

Poor Ladywell turned round to meet Mr. and Mrs. Belmaine, whose voices were beginning to be heard just within the church door, leaving Neigh and Ethelberta together.  It was a graceful act of young Ladywell’s that, in the midst of his own pain at the strange tale the rose-leaves suggested — Neigh’s rivalry, Ethelberta’s mutability, his own defeat — he was not regardless of the intense embarrassment which might have been caused had he remained.

The two were silent at first, and it was evident that Ethelberta’s mood was one of anger at something that had gone before.  She turned aside from him to follow the others, when Neigh spoke in a tone somewhat bitter and somewhat stern.

‘What — going like that!  After being compromised together, why don’t you close with me?  Ladywell knows all: I had already told him that the rose-leaves were given me by my intended wife.  We seem to him to be practising deceptions all of a piece, and what folly it is to play off so!  As to what I did, that I ask your forgiveness for.’

Ethelberta looked upon the ground and maintained a compressed lip.  Neigh resumed: ‘If I showed more feeling than you care for, I insist that it was not more than was natural under the circumstances, if not quite proper.  Opinions may differ, but my experience goes to prove that conventional squeamishness at such times as these is more talked and written about than practised.  Plain behaviour must be expected when marriage is the question.  Nevertheless, I do say — and I cannot say more — that I am sincerely sorry to have offended you by exceeding my privileges.  I will never do so again.’

‘Don’t say privileges.  You have none.’

‘I am sorry that I thought otherwise, and that others will think so too.  Ladywell is, at any rate, bent on thinking so. . . .  It might have been made known to him in a gentle way — but God disposes.’

‘There is nothing to make known — I don’t understand,’ said Ethelberta, going from him.

By this time Ladywell had walked round the gravel walks with the two other ladies and Mr. Belmaine, and they were all turning to come back again.  The young painter had deputed his voice to reply to their remarks, but his understanding continued poring upon other things.  When he came up to Ethelberta, his agitation had left him: she too was free from constraint; while Neigh was some distance off, carefully examining nothing in particular in an old fragment of wall.

The little party was now united again as to its persons; though in spirit far otherwise.  They went through the church in general talk, Ladywell sad but serene, and Ethelberta keeping far-removed both from him and from Neigh.  She had at this juncture entered upon that Sphinx-like stage of existence in which, contrary to her earlier manner, she signified to no one of her ways, plans, or sensations, and spoke little on any subject at all.  There were occasional smiles now which came only from the face, and speeches from the lips merely.

The journey home was performed as they had come, Ladywell not accepting the seat in Neigh’s cab which was phlegmatically offered him.  Mrs. Doncastle’s acquaintance with Ethelberta had been slight until this day; but the afternoon’s proceeding had much impressed the matron with her younger friend.  Before they parted she said, with the sort of affability which is meant to signify the beginning of permanent friendship: ‘A friend of my husband’s, Lord Mountclere, has been anxious for some time to meet you.  He is a great admirer of the poems, and more still of the story-telling invention, and your power in it.  He has been present many times at the Mayfair Hall to hear you.  When will you dine with us to meet him?  I know you will like him.  Will Thursday be convenient?’

Ethelberta stood for a moment reflecting, and reflecting hoped that Mrs. Doncastle had not noticed her momentary perplexity.  Crises were becoming as common with her as blackberries; and she had foreseen this one a long time.  It was not that she was to meet Lord Mountclere, for he was only a name and a distant profile to her: it was that her father would necessarily be present at the meeting, in the most anomalous position that human nature could endure.

However, having often proved in her disjointed experience that the shortest way out of a difficulty lies straight through it, Ethelberta decided to dine at the Doncastles’, and, as she murmured that she should have great pleasure in meeting any friend of theirs, set about contriving how the encounter with her dearest relative might be made safe and unsuspected.  She bade them adieu blithely; but the thoughts engendered by the invitation stood before her as sorrowful and rayless ghosts which could not be laid.  Often at such conjunctures as these, when the futility of her great undertaking was more than usually manifest, did Ethelberta long like a tired child for the conclusion of the whole matter; when her work should be over, and the evening come; when she might draw her boat upon the shore, and in some thymy nook await eternal night with a placid mind.

CHAPTER 28.

ETHELBERTA’S — MR. CHICKEREL’S ROOM

The question of Neigh or no Neigh had reached a pitch of insistence which no longer permitted of dallying, even by a popular beauty.  His character was becoming defined to Ethelberta as something very differently composed from that of her first imagining.  She had set him down to be a man whose external in excitability owed nothing to self-repression, but stood as the natural surface of the mass within.  Neigh’s urban torpor, she said, might have been in the first instance produced by art, but, were it thus, it had gone so far as to permeate him.  This had been disproved, first surprisingly, by his reported statement; wondrously, in the second place, by his call upon her and sudden proposal; thirdly, to a degree simply astounding, by what had occurred in the city that day.  For Neigh, before the fervour had subsided which was produced in him by her look and general power while reading ‘Paradise Lost,’ found himself alone with her in a nook outside the church, and there had almost demanded her promise to be his wife.  She had replied by asking for time, and idly offering him the petals of her rose, that had shed themselves in her hand.  Neigh, in taking them, pressed her fingers more warmly than she thought she had given him warrant for, which offended her.  It was certainly a very momentary affair, and when it was over seemed to surprise himself almost as much as it had vexed her; but it had reminded her of one truth which she was in danger of forgetting.  The town gentleman was not half so far removed from Sol and Dan, and the hard-handed order in general, in his passions as in his philosophy.  He still continued to be the male of his species, and when the heart was hot with a dream Pall Mall had much the same aspect as Wessex.

Well, she had not accepted him yet; indeed, for the moment they were in a pet with one another.  Yet that might soon be cleared off, and then recurred the perpetual question, would the advantage that might accrue to her people by her marriage be worth the sacrifice?  One palliative feature must be remembered when we survey the matrimonial ponderings of the poetess and romancer.  What she contemplated was not meanly to ensnare a husband just to provide incomes for her and her family, but to find some man she might respect, who would maintain her in such a stage of comfort as should, by setting her mind free from temporal anxiety, enable her to further organize her talent, and provide incomes for them herself.  Plenty of saleable originality was left in her as yet, but it was getting crushed under the rubbish of her necessities.

She was not sure that Neigh would stand the test of her revelations.  It would be possible to lead him to marry her without revealing anything — the events of the last few days had shown her that — yet Ethelberta’s honesty shrank from the safe course of holding her tongue.  It might be pleasant to many a modern gentleman to find himself allied with a lady, none of whose ancestors had ever pandered to a court, lost an army, taken a bribe, oppressed a community, or broken a bank; but the added disclosure that, in avoiding these stains, her kindred had worked and continued to work with their hands for bread, might lead such an one to consider that the novelty was dearly purchased.