Complete Works of Thomas Hardy (Illustrated) (711 page)

‘It is worth a good deal, I suppose?’ said Stockdale.

‘O no — about two guineas and half to us now,’ said Lizzy excitedly.  ‘It isn’t that — it is the smell!  It is so blazing strong before it has been lowered by water, that it smells dreadfully when spilt in the road like that!  I do hope Latimer won’t pass by till it is gone off.’

Owlett and one or two others picked up the burst tub and began to scrape and trample over the spot, to disperse the liquor as much as possible; and then they all entered the gate of Owlett’s orchard, which adjoined Lizzy’s garden on the right.  Stockdale did not care to follow them, for several on recognizing him had looked wonderingly at his presence, though they said nothing.  Lizzy left his side and went to the bottom of the garden, looking over the hedge into the orchard, where the men could be dimly seen bustling about, and apparently hiding the tubs.  All was done noiselessly, and without a light; and when it was over they dispersed in different directions, those who had taken their cargoes to the church having already gone off to their homes.

Lizzy returned to the garden-gate, over which Stockdale was still abstractedly leaning.  ‘It is all finished: I am going indoors now,’ she said gently.  ‘I will leave the door ajar for you.’

‘O no — you needn’t,’ said Stockdale; ‘I am coming too.’

But before either of them had moved, the faint clatter of horses’ hoofs broke upon the ear, and it seemed to come from the point where the track across the down joined the hard road.

‘They are just too late!’ cried Lizzy exultingly.

‘Who?’ said Stockdale.

‘Latimer, the riding-officer, and some assistant of his.  We had better go indoors.’

They entered the house, and Lizzy bolted the door.  ‘Please don’t get a light, Mr. Stockdale,’ she said.

‘Of course I will not,’ said he.

‘I thought you might be on the side of the king,’ said Lizzy, with faintest sarcasm.

‘I am,’ said Stockdale.  ‘But, Lizzy Newberry, I love you, and you know it perfectly well; and you ought to know, if you do not, what I have suffered in my conscience on your account these last few days!’

‘I guess very well,’ she said hurriedly.  ‘Yet I don’t see why.  Ah, you are better than I!’

The trotting of the horses seemed to have again died away, and the pair of listeners touched each other’s fingers in the cold ‘Good-night’ of those whom something seriously divided.  They were on the landing, but before they had taken three steps apart, the tramp of the horsemen suddenly revived, almost close to the house.  Lizzy turned to the staircase window, opened the casement about an inch, and put her face close to the aperture.  ‘Yes, one of ‘em is Latimer,’ she whispered.  ‘He always rides a white horse.  One would think it was the last colour for a man in that line.’

Stockdale looked, and saw the white shape of the animal as it passed by; but before the riders had gone another ten yards, Latimer reined in his horse, and said something to his companion which neither Stockdale nor Lizzy could hear.  Its drift was, however, soon made evident, for the other man stopped also; and sharply turning the horses’ heads they cautiously retraced their steps.  When they were again opposite Mrs. Newberry’s garden, Latimer dismounted, and the man on the dark horse did the same.

Lizzy and Stockdale, intently listening and observing the proceedings, naturally put their heads as close as possible to the slit formed by the slightly opened casement; and thus it occurred that at last their cheeks came positively into contact.  They went on listening, as if they did not know of the singular incident which had happened to their faces, and the pressure of each to each rather increased than lessened with the lapse of time.

They could hear the excisemen sniffing the air like hounds as they paced slowly along.  When they reached the spot where the tub had burst, both stopped on the instant.

‘Ay, ay, ‘tis quite strong here,’ said the second officer.  ‘Shall we knock at the door?’

‘Well, no,’ said Latimer.  ‘Maybe this is only a trick to put us off the scent.  They wouldn’t kick up this stink anywhere near their hiding-place.  I have known such things before.’

‘Anyhow, the things, or some of ‘em, must have been brought this way,’ said the other.

‘Yes,’ said Latimer musingly.  ‘Unless ‘tis all done to tole us the wrong way.  I have a mind that we go home for to-night without saying a word, and come the first thing in the morning with more hands.  I know they have storages about here, but we can do nothing by this owl’s light.  We will look round the parish and see if everybody is in bed, John; and if all is quiet, we will do as I say.’

They went on, and the two inside the window could hear them passing leisurely through the whole village, the street of which curved round at the bottom and entered the turnpike road at another junction.  This way the excisemen followed, and the amble of their horses died quite away.

‘What will you do?’ said Stockdale, withdrawing from his position.

She knew that he alluded to the coming search by the officers, to divert her attention from their own tender incident by the casement, which he wished to be passed over as a thing rather dreamt of than done.  ‘O, nothing,’ she replied, with as much coolness as she could command under her disappointment at his manner.  ‘We often have such storms as this.  You would not be frightened if you knew what fools they are.  Fancy riding o’ horseback through the place: of course they will hear and see nobody while they make that noise; but they are always afraid to get off, in case some of our fellows should burst out upon ‘em, and tie them up to the gate-post, as they have done before now.  Good-night, Mr. Stockdale.’

She closed the window and went to her room, where a tear fell from her eyes; and that not because of the alertness of the riding-officers.

CHAPTER VI — THE GREAT SEARCH AT NETHER-MOYNTON

Stockdale was so excited by the events of the evening, and the dilemma that he was placed in between conscience and love, that he did not sleep, or even doze, but remained as broadly awake as at noonday.  As soon as the grey light began to touch ever so faintly the whiter objects in his bedroom he arose, dressed himself, and went downstairs into the road.

The village was already astir.  Several of the carriers had heard the well-known tramp of Latimer’s horse while they were undressing in the dark that night, and had already communicated with each other and Owlett on the subject.  The only doubt seemed to be about the safety of those tubs which had been left under the church gallery-stairs, and after a short discussion at the corner of the mill, it was agreed that these should be removed before it got lighter, and hidden in the middle of a double hedge bordering the adjoining field.  However, before anything could be carried into effect, the footsteps of many men were heard coming down the lane from the highway.

‘Damn it, here they be,’ said Owlett, who, having already drawn the hatch and started his mill for the day, stood stolidly at the mill-door covered with flour, as if the interest of his whole soul was bound up in the shaking walls around him.

The two or three with whom he had been talking dispersed to their usual work, and when the excise officers, and the formidable body of men they had hired, reached the village cross, between the mill and Mrs. Newberry’s house, the village wore the natural aspect of a place beginning its morning labours.

‘Now,’ said Latimer to his associates, who numbered thirteen men in all, ‘what I know is that the things are somewhere in this here place.  We have got the day before us, and ‘tis hard if we can’t light upon ‘em and get ‘em to Budmouth Custom-house before night.  First we will try the fuel-houses, and then we’ll work our way into the chimmers, and then to the ricks and stables, and so creep round.  You have nothing but your noses to guide ye, mind, so use ‘em to-day if you never did in your lives before.’

Then the search began.  Owlett, during the early part, watched from his mill-window, Lizzy from the door of her house, with the greatest self-possession.  A farmer down below, who also had a share in the run, rode about with one eye on his fields and the other on Latimer and his myrmidons, prepared to put them off the scent if he should be asked a question.  Stockdale, who was no smuggler at all, felt more anxiety than the worst of them, and went about his studies with a heavy heart, coming frequently to the door to ask Lizzy some question or other on the consequences to her of the tubs being found.

‘The consequences,’ she said quietly, ‘are simply that I shall lose ‘em.  As I have none in the house or garden, they can’t touch me personally.’

‘But you have some in the orchard?’

‘Owlett rents that of me, and he lends it to others.  So it will be hard to say who put any tubs there if they should be found.’

There was never such a tremendous sniffing known as that which took place in Nether-Moynton parish and its vicinity this day.  All was done methodically, and mostly on hands and knees.  At different hours of the day they had different plans.  From daybreak to breakfast-time the officers used their sense of smell in a direct and straightforward manner only, pausing nowhere but at such places as the tubs might be supposed to be secreted in at that very moment, pending their removal on the following night.  Among the places tested and examined were

Hollow trees        Cupboards         Culverts

Potato-graves       Clock-cases       Hedgerows

Fuel-houses         Chimney-flues     Faggot-ricks

Bedrooms            Rainwater-butts   Haystacks

Apple-lofts         Pigsties          Coppers and ovens.

After breakfast they recommenced with renewed vigour, taking a new line; that is to say, directing their attention to clothes that might be supposed to have come in contact with the tubs in their removal from the shore, such garments being usually tainted with the spirit, owing to its oozing between the staves.  They now sniffed at -

Smock-frocks                 Smiths’ and shoemakers’ aprons

Old shirts and waistcoats    Knee-naps and hedging-gloves

Coats and hats               Tarpaulins

Breeches and leggings        Market-cloaks

Women’s shawls and gowns     Scarecrows

And as soon as the mid-day meal was over, they pushed their search into places where the spirits might have been thrown away in alarm:-

Horse-ponds       Mixens         Sinks in yards

Stable-drains     Wet ditches    Road-scrapings, and

Cinder-heaps      Cesspools      Back-door gutters.

But still these indefatigable excisemen discovered nothing more than the original tell-tale smell in the road opposite Lizzy’s house, which even yet had not passed off.

‘I’ll tell ye what it is, men,’ said Latimer, about three o’clock in the afternoon, ‘we must begin over again.  Find them tubs I will.’

The men, who had been hired for the day, looked at their hands and knees, muddy with creeping on all fours so frequently, and rubbed their noses, as if they had almost had enough of it; for the quantity of bad air which had passed into each one’s nostril had rendered it nearly as insensible as a flue.  However, after a moment’s hesitation, they prepared to start anew, except three, whose power of smell had quite succumbed under the excessive wear and tear of the day.

By this time not a male villager was to be seen in the parish.  Owlett was not at his mill, the farmers were not in their fields, the parson was not in his garden, the smith had left his forge, and the wheelwright’s shop was silent.

‘Where the divil are the folk gone?’ said Latimer, waking up to the fact of their absence, and looking round.  ‘I’ll have ‘em up for this!  Why don’t they come and help us?  There’s not a man about the place but the Methodist parson, and he’s an old woman.  I demand assistance in the king’s name!’

‘We must find the jineral public afore we can demand that,’ said his lieutenant.

‘Well, well, we shall do better without ‘em,’ said Latimer, who changed his moods at a moment’s notice.  ‘But there’s great cause of suspicion in this silence and this keeping out of sight, and I’ll bear it in mind.  Now we will go across to Owlett’s orchard, and see what we can find there.’

Stockdale, who heard this discussion from the garden-gate, over which he had been leaning, was rather alarmed, and thought it a mistake of the villagers to keep so completely out of the way.  He himself, like the excisemen, had been wondering for the last half-hour what could have become of them.  Some labourers were of necessity engaged in distant fields, but the master-workmen should have been at home; though one and all, after just showing themselves at their shops, had apparently gone off for the day.  He went in to Lizzy, who sat at a back window sewing, and said, ‘Lizzy, where are the men?’

Lizzy laughed.  ‘Where they mostly are when they’re run so hard as this.’  She cast her eyes to heaven.  ‘Up there,’ she said.

Stockdale looked up.  ‘What — on the top of the church tower?’ he asked, seeing the direction of her glance.

‘Yes.’

‘Well, I expect they will soon have to come down,’ said he gravely.  ‘I have been listening to the officers, and they are going to search the orchard over again, and then every nook in the church.’

Lizzy looked alarmed for the first time.  ‘Will you go and tell our folk?’ she said.  ‘They ought to be let know.’  Seeing his conscience struggling within him like a boiling pot, she added, ‘No, never mind, I’ll go myself.’

She went out, descended the garden, and climbed over the churchyard wall at the same time that the preventive-men were ascending the road to the orchard.  Stockdale could do no less than follow her.  By the time that she reached the tower entrance he was at her side, and they entered together.

Nether-Moynton church-tower was, as in many villages, without a turret, and the only way to the top was by going up to the singers’ gallery, and thence ascending by a ladder to a square trap-door in the floor of the bell-loft, above which a permanent ladder was fixed, passing through the bells to a hole in the roof.  When Lizzy and Stockdale reached the gallery and looked up, nothing but the trap-door and the five holes for the bell-ropes appeared.  The ladder was gone.