Complete Works of Thomas Hardy (Illustrated) (699 page)

The children came up with their hoops, and she went off with them down the harbour-road as usual.  Barnet had been glad to get those words of thanks; he had been thinking for many months that he would like her to know of his share in finding her a home such as it was; and what he could not do for himself, Downe had now kindly done for him.  He returned to his desolate house with a lighter tread; though in reason he hardly knew why his tread should be light.

On examining the drawing, Barnet found that, instead of the vast altar-tomb and canopy Downe had determined on at their last meeting, it was to be a more modest memorial even than had been suggested by the architect; a coped tomb of good solid construction, with no useless elabouration at all.  Barnet was truly glad to see that Downe had come to reason of his own accord; and he returned the drawing with a note of approval.

He followed up the house-work as before, and as he walked up and down the rooms, occasionally gazing from the windows over the bulging green hills and the quiet harbour that lay between them, he murmured words and fragments of words, which, if listened to, would have revealed all the secrets of his existence.  Whatever his reason in going there, Lucy did not call again: the walk to the shore seemed to be abandoned: he must have thought it as well for both that it should be so, for he did not go anywhere out of his accustomed ways to endeavour to discover her.

CHAPTER VIII

The winter and the spring had passed, and the house was complete.  It was a fine morning in the early part of June, and Barnet, though not in the habit of rising early, had taken a long walk before breakfast; returning by way of the new building.  A sufficiently exciting cause of his restlessness to-day might have been the intelligence which had reached him the night before, that Lucy Savile was going to India after all, and notwithstanding the representations of her friends that such a journey was unadvisable in many ways for an unpractised girl, unless some more definite advantage lay at the end of it than she could show to be the case.  Barnet’s walk up the slope to the building betrayed that he was in a dissatisfied mood.  He hardly saw that the dewy time of day lent an unusual freshness to the bushes and trees which had so recently put on their summer habit of heavy leafage, and made his newly-laid lawn look as well established as an old manorial meadow.  The house had been so adroitly placed between six tall elms which were growing on the site beforehand, that they seemed like real ancestral trees; and the rooks, young and old, cawed melodiously to their visitor.

The door was not locked, and he entered.  No workmen appeared to be present, and he walked from sunny window to sunny window of the empty rooms, with a sense of seclusion which might have been very pleasant but for the antecedent knowledge that his almost paternal care of Lucy Savile was to be thrown away by her wilfulness.  Footsteps echoed through an adjoining room; and bending his eyes in that direction, he perceived Mr. Jones, the architect.  He had come to look over the building before giving the contractor his final certificate.  They walked over the house together.  Everything was finished except the papering: there were the latest improvements of the period in bell-hanging, ventilating, smoke-jacks, fire-grates, and French windows.  The business was soon ended, and Jones, having directed Barnet’s attention to a roll of wall-paper patterns which lay on a bench for his choice, was leaving to keep another engagement, when Barnet said, ‘Is the tomb finished yet for Mrs. Downe?’

‘Well — yes: it is at last,’ said the architect, coming back and speaking as if he were in a mood to make a confidence.  ‘I have had no end of trouble in the matter, and, to tell the truth, I am heartily glad it is over.’

Barnet expressed his surprise.  ‘I thought poor Downe had given up those extravagant notions of his? then he has gone back to the altar and canopy after all?  Well, he is to be excused, poor fellow!’

‘O no — he has not at all gone back to them — quite the reverse,’ Jones hastened to say.  ‘He has so reduced design after design, that the whole thing has been nothing but waste labour for me; till in the end it has become a common headstone, which a mason put up in half a day.’

‘A common headstone?’ said Barnet.

‘Yes.  I held out for some time for the addition of a footstone at least.  But he said, “O no — he couldn’t afford it.”‘

‘Ah, well — his family is growing up, poor fellow, and his expenses are getting serious.’

‘Yes, exactly,’ said Jones, as if the subject were none of his.  And again directing Barnet’s attention to the wall-papers, the bustling architect left him to keep some other engagement.

‘A common headstone,’ murmured Barnet, left again to himself.  He mused a minute or two, and next began looking over and selecting from the patterns; but had not long been engaged in the work when he heard another footstep on the gravel without, and somebody enter the open porch.

Barnet went to the door — it was his manservant in search of him.

‘I have been trying for some time to find you, sir,’ he said.  ‘This letter has come by the post, and it is marked immediate.  And there’s this one from Mr. Downe, who called just now wanting to see you.’  He searched his pocket for the second.

Barnet took the first letter — it had a black border, and bore the London postmark.  It was not in his wife’s handwriting, or in that of any person he knew; but conjecture soon ceased as he read the page, wherein he was briefly informed that Mrs. Barnet had died suddenly on the previous day, at the furnished villa she had occupied near London.

Barnet looked vaguely round the empty hall, at the blank walls, out of the doorway.  Drawing a long palpitating breath, and with eyes downcast, he turned and climbed the stairs slowly, like a man who doubted their stability.  The fact of his wife having, as it were, died once already, and lived on again, had entirely dislodged the possibility of her actual death from his conjecture.  He went to the landing, leant over the balusters, and after a reverie, of whose duration he had but the faintest notion, turned to the window and stretched his gaze to the cottage further down the road, which was visible from his landing, and from which Lucy still walked to the solicitor’s house by a cross path.  The faint words that came from his moving lips were simply, ‘At last!’

Then, almost involuntarily, Barnet fell down on his knees and murmured some incoherent words of thanksgiving.  Surely his virtue in restoring his wife to life had been rewarded!  But, as if the impulse struck uneasily on his conscience, he quickly rose, brushed the dust from his trousers and set himself to think of his next movements.  He could not start for London for some hours; and as he had no preparations to make that could not be made in half-an-hour, he mechanically descended and resumed his occupation of turning over the wall-papers.  They had all got brighter for him, those papers.  It was all changed — who would sit in the rooms that they were to line?  He went on to muse upon Lucy’s conduct in so frequently coming to the house with the children; her occasional blush in speaking to him; her evident interest in him.  What woman can in the long run avoid being interested in a man whom she knows to be devoted to her?  If human solicitation could ever effect anything, there should be no going to India for Lucy now.  All the papers previously chosen seemed wrong in their shades, and he began from the beginning to choose again.

While entering on the task he heard a forced ‘Ahem!’ from without the porch, evidently uttered to attract his attention, and footsteps again advancing to the door.  His man, whom he had quite forgotten in his mental turmoil, was still waiting there.

‘I beg your pardon, sir,’ the man said from round the doorway; ‘but here’s the note from Mr. Downe that you didn’t take.  He called just after you went out, and as he couldn’t wait, he wrote this on your study-table.’

He handed in the letter — no black-bordered one now, but a practical-looking note in the well-known writing of the solicitor.

‘DEAR BARNET’ — it ran — ’Perhaps you will be prepared for the information I am about to give — that Lucy Savile and myself are going to be married this morning.  I have hitherto said nothing as to my intention to any of my friends, for reasons which I am sure you will fully appreciate.  The crisis has been brought about by her expressing her intention to join her brother in India.  I then discovered that I could not do without her.

‘It is to be quite a private wedding; but it is my particular wish that you come down here quietly at ten, and go to church with us; it will add greatly to the pleasure I shall experience in the ceremony, and, I believe, to Lucy’s also.  I have called on you very early to make the request, in the belief that I should find you at home; but you are beforehand with me in your early rising. — Yours sincerely, C. Downe.’

‘Need I wait, sir?’ said the servant after a dead silence.

‘That will do, William.  No answer,’ said Barnet calmly.

When the man had gone Barnet re-read the letter.  Turning eventually to the wall-papers, which he had been at such pains to select, he deliberately tore them into halves and quarters, and threw them into the empty fireplace.  Then he went out of the house; locked the door, and stood in the front awhile.  Instead of returning into the town, he went down the harbour-road and thoughtfully lingered about by the sea, near the spot where the body of Downe’s late wife had been found and brought ashore.

Barnet was a man with a rich capacity for misery, and there is no doubt that he exercised it to its fullest extent now.  The events that had, as it were, dashed themselves together into one half-hour of this day showed that curious refinement of cruelty in their arrangement which often proceeds from the bosom of the whimsical god at other times known as blind Circumstance.  That his few minutes of hope, between the reading of the first and second letters, had carried him to extraordinary heights of rapture was proved by the immensity of his suffering now.  The sun blazing into his face would have shown a close watcher that a horizontal line, which he had never noticed before, but which was never to be gone thereafter, was somehow gradually forming itself in the smooth of his forehead.  His eyes, of a light hazel, had a curious look which can only be described by the word bruised; the sorrow that looked from them being largely mixed with the surprise of a man taken unawares.

The secondary particulars of his present position, too, were odd enough, though for some time they appeared to engage little of his attention.  Not a soul in the town knew, as yet, of his wife’s death; and he almost owed Downe the kindness of not publishing it till the day was over: the conjuncture, taken with that which had accompanied the death of Mrs. Downe, being so singular as to be quite sufficient to darken the pleasure of the impressionable solicitor to a cruel extent, if made known to him.  But as Barnet could not set out on his journey to London, where his wife lay, for some hours (there being at this date no railway within a distance of many miles), no great reason existed why he should leave the town.

Impulse in all its forms characterized Barnet, and when he heard the distant clock strike the hour of ten his feet began to carry him up the harbour-road with the manner of a man who must do something to bring himself to life.  He passed Lucy Savile’s old house, his own new one, and came in view of the church.  Now he gave a perceptible start, and his mechanical condition went away.  Before the church-gate were a couple of carriages, and Barnet then could perceive that the marriage between Downe and Lucy was at that moment being solemnized within.  A feeling of sudden, proud self-confidence, an indocile wish to walk unmoved in spite of grim environments, plainly possessed him, and when he reached the wicket-gate he turned in without apparent effort.  Pacing up the paved footway he entered the church and stood for a while in the nave passage.  A group of people was standing round the vestry door; Barnet advanced through these and stepped into the vestry.

There they were, busily signing their names.  Seeing Downe about to look round, Barnet averted his somewhat disturbed face for a second or two; when he turned again front to front he was calm and quite smiling; it was a creditable triumph over himself, and deserved to be remembered in his native town.  He greeted Downe heartily, offering his congratulations.

It seemed as if Barnet expected a half-guilty look upon Lucy’s face; but no, save the natural flush and flurry engendered by the service just performed, there was nothing whatever in her bearing which showed a disturbed mind: her gray-brown eyes carried in them now as at other times the well-known expression of common-sensed rectitude which never went so far as to touch on hardness.  She shook hands with him, and Downe said warmly, ‘I wish you could have come sooner: I called on purpose to ask you.  You’ll drive back with us now?’

‘No, no,’ said Barnet; ‘I am not at all prepared; but I thought I would look in upon you for a moment, even though I had not time to go home and dress.  I’ll stand back and see you pass out, and observe the effect of the spectacle upon myself as one of the public.’

Then Lucy and her husband laughed, and Barnet laughed and retired; and the quiet little party went gliding down the nave and towards the porch, Lucy’s new silk dress sweeping with a smart rustle round the base-mouldings of the ancient font, and Downe’s little daughters following in a state of round-eyed interest in their position, and that of Lucy, their teacher and friend.

So Downe was comforted after his Emily’s death, which had taken place twelve months, two weeks, and three days before that time.

When the two flys had driven off and the spectators had vanished, Barnet followed to the door, and went out into the sun.  He took no more trouble to preserve a spruce exterior; his step was unequal, hesitating, almost convulsive; and the slight changes of colour which went on in his face seemed refracted from some inward flame.  In the churchyard he became pale as a summer cloud, and finding it not easy to proceed he sat down on one of the tombstones and supported his head with his hand.

Hard by was a sexton filling up a grave which he had not found time to finish on the previous evening.  Observing Barnet, he went up to him, and recognizing him, said, ‘Shall I help you home, sir?’