Complete Works of Thomas Hardy (Illustrated) (318 page)

‘We heard you had got a letter, Maister Loveday,’ they said.

‘Yes; “Southampton, the twelfth of August, dear father,”‘ said Loveday; and they were as silent as relations at the reading of a will.  Anne, for whom the letter had a singular fascination, came in with her mother and sat down.

Bob stated in his own way that having, since landing, taken into consideration his father’s wish that he should renounce a seafaring life and become a partner in the mill, he had decided to agree to the proposal; and with that object in view he would return to Overcombe in three days from the time of writing.

He then said incidentally that since his voyage he had been in lodgings at Southampton, and during that time had become acquainted with a lovely and virtuous young maiden, in whom he found the exact qualities necessary to his happiness.  Having known this lady for the full space of a fortnight he had had ample opportunities of studying her character, and, being struck with the recollection that, if there was one thing more than another necessary in a mill which had no mistress, it was somebody who could play that part with grace and dignity, he had asked Miss Matilda Johnson to be his wife.  In her kindness she, though sacrificing far better prospects, had agreed; and he could not but regard it as a happy chance that he should have found at the nick of time such a woman to adorn his home, whose innocence was as stunning as her beauty.  Without much ado, therefore, he and she had arranged to be married at once, and at Overcombe, that his father might not be deprived of the pleasures of the wedding feast.  She had kindly consented to follow him by land in the course of a few days, and to live in the house as their guest for the week or so previous to the ceremony.

‘‘Tis a proper good letter,’ said Mrs. Comfort from the background.  ‘I never heerd true love better put out of hand in my life; and they seem ‘nation fond of one another.’

‘He haven’t knowed her such a very long time,’ said Job Mitchell dubiously.

‘That’s nothing,’ said Esther Beach.  ‘Nater will find her way, very rapid when the time’s come for’t.  Well, ‘tis good news for ye, miller.’

‘Yes, sure, I hope ‘tis,’ said Loveday, without, however, showing any great hurry to burst into the frantic form of fatherly joy which the event should naturally have produced, seeming more disposed to let off his feelings by examining thoroughly into the fibres of the letter-paper.

‘I was five years a-courting my wife,’ he presently remarked.  ‘But folks were slower about everything in them days.  Well, since she’s coming we must make her welcome.  Did any of ye catch by my reading which day it is he means?  What with making out the penmanship, my mind was drawn off from the sense here and there.’

‘He says in three days,’ said Mrs. Garland.  ‘The date of the letter will fix it.’

On examination it was found that the day appointed was the one nearly expired; at which the miller jumped up and said, ‘Then he’ll be here before bedtime.  I didn’t gather till now that he was coming afore Saturday.  Why, he may drop in this very minute!’

He had scarcely spoken when footsteps were heard coming along the front, and they presently halted at the door.  Loveday pushed through the neighbours and rushed out; and, seeing in the passage a form which obscured the declining light, the miller seized hold of him, saying, ‘O my dear Bob; then you are come!’

‘Scrounch it all, miller, don’t quite pull my poor shoulder out of joint!  Whatever is the matter?’ said the new-comer, trying to release himself from Loveday’s grasp of affection.  It was Uncle Benjy.

‘Thought ‘twas my son!’ faltered the miller, sinking back upon the toes of the neighbours who had closely followed him into the entry.  ‘Well, come in, Mr. Derriman, and make yerself at home.  Why, you haven’t been here for years!  Whatever has made you come now, sir, of all times in the world?’

‘Is he in there with ye?’ whispered the farmer with misgiving.

‘Who?’

‘My nephew, after that maid that he’s so mighty smit with?’

‘O no; he never calls here.’

Farmer Derriman breathed a breath of relief.  ‘Well, I’ve called to tell ye,’ he said, ‘that there’s more news of the French.  We shall have ‘em here this month as sure as a gun.  The gunboats be all ready — near two thousand of ‘em — and the whole army is at Boulogne.  And, miller, I know ye to be an honest man.’

Loveday did not say nay.

‘Neighbour Loveday, I know ye to be an honest man,’ repeated the old squireen.  ‘Can I speak to ye alone?’

As the house was full, Loveday took him into the garden, all the while upon tenter-hooks, not lest Buonaparte should appear in their midst, but lest Bob should come whilst he was not there to receive him.  When they had got into a corner Uncle Benjy said, ‘Miller, what with the French, and what with my nephew Festus, I assure ye my life is nothing but wherrit from morning to night.  Miller Loveday, you are an honest man.’

Loveday nodded.

‘Well, I’ve come to ask a favour — to ask if you will take charge of my few poor title-deeds and documents and suchlike, while I am away from home next week, lest anything should befall me, and they should be stole away by Boney or Festus, and I should have nothing left in the wide world?  I can trust neither banks nor lawyers in these terrible times; and I am come to you.’

Loveday after some hesitation agreed to take care of anything that Derriman should bring, whereupon the farmer said he would call with the parchments and papers alluded to in the course of a week.  Derriman then went away by the garden gate, mounted his pony, which had been tethered outside, and rode on till his form was lost in the shades.

The miller rejoined his friends, and found that in the meantime John had arrived.  John informed the company that after parting from his father and Anne he had rambled to the harbour, and discovered the Pewit by the quay.  On inquiry he had learnt that she came in at eleven o’clock, and that Bob had gone ashore.

‘We’ll go and meet him,’ said the miller.  ‘‘Tis still light out of doors.’

So, as the dew rose from the meads and formed fleeces in the hollows, Loveday and his friends and neighbours strolled out, and loitered by the stiles which hampered the footpath from Overcombe to the high road at intervals of a hundred yards.  John Loveday, being obliged to return to camp, was unable to accompany them, but Widow Garland thought proper to fall in with the procession.  When she had put on her bonnet she called to her daughter.  Anne said from upstairs that she was coming in a minute; and her mother walked on without her.

What was Anne doing?  Having hastily unlocked a receptacle for emotional objects of small size, she took thence the little folded paper with which we have already become acquainted, and, striking a light from her private tinder-box, she held the paper, and curl of hair it contained, in the candle till they were burnt.  Then she put on her hat and followed her mother and the rest of them across the moist grey fields, cheerfully singing in an undertone as she went, to assure herself of her indifference to circumstances.

CHAPTER XV. 

‘CAPTAIN’ BOB LOVEDAY OF THE MERCHANT SERVICE

While Loveday and his neighbours were thus rambling forth, full of expectancy, some of them, including Anne in the rear, heard the crackling of light wheels along the curved lane to which the path was the chord.  At once Anne thought, ‘Perhaps that’s he, and we are missing him.’  But recent events were not of a kind to induce her to say anything; and the others of the company did not reflect on the sound.

Had they gone across to the hedge which hid the lane, and looked through it, they would have seen a light cart driven by a boy, beside whom was seated a seafaring man, apparently of good standing in the merchant service, with his feet outside on the shaft.  The vehicle went over the main bridge, turned in upon the other bridge at the tail of the mill, and halted by the door.  The sailor alighted, showing himself to be a well-shaped, active, and fine young man, with a bright eye, an anonymous nose, and of such a rich complexion by exposure to ripening suns that he might have been some connection of the foreigner who calls his likeness the Portrait of a Gentleman in galleries of the Old Masters.  Yet in spite of this, and though Bob Loveday had been all over the world from Cape Horn to Pekin, and from India’s coral strand to the White Sea, the most conspicuous of all the marks that he had brought back with him was an increased resemblance to his mother, who had lain all the time beneath Overcombe church wall.

Captain Loveday tried the house door; finding this locked he went to the mill door: this was locked also, the mill being stopped for the night.

‘They are not at home,’ he said to the boy.  ‘But never mind that.  Just help to unload the things and then I’ll pay you, and you can drive off home.’

The cart was unloaded, and the boy was dismissed, thanking the sailor profusely for the payment rendered.  Then Bob Loveday, finding that he had still some leisure on his hands, looked musingly east, west, north, south, and nadir; after which he bestirred himself by carrying his goods, article by article, round to the back door, out of the way of casual passers.  This done, he walked round the mill in a more regardful attitude, and surveyed its familiar features one by one — the panes of the grinding-room, now as heretofore clouded with flour as with stale hoar-frost; the meal lodged in the corners of the window-sills, forming a soil in which lichens grew without ever getting any bigger, as they had done since his smallest infancy; the mosses on the plinth towards the river, reaching as high as the capillary power of the walls would fetch up moisture for their nourishment, and the penned mill-pond, now as ever on the point of overflowing into the garden.  Everything was the same.

When he had had enough of this it occurred to Loveday that he might get into the house in spite of the locked doors; and by entering the garden, placing a pole from the fork of an apple-tree to the window-sill of a bedroom on that side, and climbing across like a Barbary ape, he entered the window and stepped down inside.  There was something anomalous in being close to the familiar furniture without having first seen his father, and its silent, impassive shine was not cheering; it was as if his relations were all dead, and only their tables and chests of drawers left to greet him.  He went downstairs and seated himself in the dark parlour.  Finding this place, too, rather solitary, and the tick of the invisible clock preternaturally loud, he unearthed the tinder-box, obtained a light, and set about making the house comfortable for his father’s return, divining that the miller had gone out to meet him by the wrong road.

Robert’s interest in this work increased as he proceeded, and he bustled round and round the kitchen as lightly as a girl.  David, the indoor factotum, having lost himself among the quart pots of Budmouth, there had been nobody left here to prepare supper, and Bob had it all to himself.  In a short time a fire blazed up the chimney, a tablecloth was found, the plates were clapped down, and a search made for what provisions the house afforded, which, in addition to various meats, included some fresh eggs of the elongated shape that produces cockerels when hatched, and had been set aside on that account for putting under the next broody hen.

A more reckless cracking of eggs than that which now went on had never been known in Overcombe since the last large christening; and as Loveday gashed one on the side, another at the end, another longways, and another diagonally, he acquired adroitness by practice, and at last made every son of a hen of them fall into two hemispheres as neatly as if it opened by a hinge.  From eggs he proceeded to ham, and from ham to kidneys, the result being a brilliant fry.

Not to be tempted to fall to before his father came back, the returned navigator emptied the whole into a dish, laid a plate over the top, his coat over the plate, and his hat over his coat.  Thus completely stopping in the appetizing smell, he sat down to await events.  He was relieved from the tediousness of doing this by hearing voices outside; and in a minute his father entered.

‘Glad to welcome ye home, father,’ said Bob.  ‘And supper is just ready.’

‘Lard, lard — why, Captain Bob’s here!’ said Mrs. Garland.

‘And we’ve been out waiting to meet thee!’ said the miller, as he entered the room, followed by representatives of the houses of Cripplestraw, Comfort, Mitchell, Beach, and Snooks, together with some small beginnings of Fencible Tremlett’s posterity.  In the rear came David, and quite in the vanishing-point of the composition, Anne the fair.

‘I drove over; and so was forced to come by the road,’ said Bob.

‘And we went across the fields, thinking you’d walk,’ said his father.

‘I should have been here this morning; but not so much as a wheelbarrow could I get for my traps; everything was gone to the review.  So I went too, thinking I might meet you there.  I was then obliged to return to the harbour for the luggage.’

Then there was a welcoming of Captain Bob by pulling out his arms like drawers and shutting them again, smacking him on the back as if he were choking, holding him at arm’s length as if he were of too large type to read close.  All which persecution Bob bore with a wide, genial smile that was shaken into fragments and scattered promiscuously among the spectators.

‘Get a chair for ‘n!’ said the miller to David, whom they had met in the fields and found to have got nothing worse by his absence than a slight slant in his walk.

‘Never mind — I am not tired — I have been here ever so long,’ said Bob.  ‘And I — ’  But the chair having been placed behind him, and a smart touch in the hollow of a person’s knee by the edge of that piece of furniture having a tendency to make the person sit without further argument, Bob sank down dumb, and the others drew up other chairs at a convenient nearness for easy analytic vision and the subtler forms of good fellowship.  The miller went about saying, ‘David, the nine best glasses from the corner cupboard!’ — ’David, the corkscrew!’ — ’David, whisk the tail of thy smock-frock round the inside of these quart pots afore you draw drink in ‘em — they be an inch thick in dust!’ — ’David, lower that chimney-crook a couple of notches that the flame may touch the bottom of the kettle, and light three more of the largest candles!’ — ’If you can’t get the cork out of the jar, David, bore a hole in the tub of Hollands that’s buried under the scroff in the fuel-house; d’ye hear? — Dan Brown left en there yesterday as a return for the little porker I gied en.’