Complete Works of Thomas Hardy (Illustrated) (716 page)

They talked as they had talked in old days, Sam pulling himself up now and then, when he thought himself too familiar.  More than once she said with misgiving that she wondered if she ought to have indulged in the freak.  ‘But I am so lonely in my house,’ she added, ‘and this makes me so happy!’

‘You must come again, dear Mrs. Twycott.  There is no time o’ day for taking the air like this.’

It grew lighter and lighter.  The sparrows became busy in the streets, and the city waxed denser around them.  When they approached the river it was day, and on the bridge they beheld the full blaze of morning sunlight in the direction of St. Paul’s, the river glistening towards it, and not a craft stirring.

Near Covent Garden he put her into a cab, and they parted, looking into each other’s faces like the very old friends they were.  She reached home without adventure, limped to the door, and let herself in with her latch-key unseen.

The air and Sam’s presence had revived her: her cheeks were quite pink — almost beautiful.  She had something to live for in addition to her son.  A woman of pure instincts, she knew there had been nothing really wrong in the journey, but supposed it conventionally to be very wrong indeed.

Soon, however, she gave way to the temptation of going with him again, and on this occasion their conversation was distinctly tender, and Sam said he never should forget her, notwithstanding that she had served him rather badly at one time.  After much hesitation he told her of a plan it was in his power to carry out, and one he should like to take in hand, since he did not care for London work: it was to set up as a master greengrocer down at Aldbrickham, the county-town of their native place.  He knew of an opening — a shop kept by aged people who wished to retire.

‘And why don’t you do it, then, Sam?’ she asked with a slight heartsinking.

‘Because I’m not sure if — you’d join me.  I know you wouldn’t — couldn’t!  Such a lady as ye’ve been so long, you couldn’t be a wife to a man like me.’

‘I hardly suppose I could!’ she assented, also frightened at the idea.

‘If you could,’ he said eagerly, ‘you’d on’y have to sit in the back parlour and look through the glass partition when I was away sometimes — just to keep an eye on things.  The lameness wouldn’t hinder that . . . I’d keep you as genteel as ever I could, dear Sophy — if I might think of it!’ he pleaded.

‘Sam, I’ll be frank,’ she said, putting her hand on his.  ‘If it were only myself I would do it, and gladly, though everything I possess would be lost to me by marrying again.’

‘I don’t mind that!  It’s more independent.’

‘That’s good of you, dear, dear Sam.  But there’s something else.  I have a son . . . I almost fancy when I am miserable sometimes that he is not really mine, but one I hold in trust for my late husband.  He seems to belong so little to me personally, so entirely to his dead father.  He is so much educated and I so little that I do not feel dignified enough to be his mother . . . Well, he would have to be told.’

‘Yes.  Unquestionably.’  Sam saw her thought and her fear.  ‘Still, you can do as you like, Sophy — Mrs. Twycott,’ he added.  ‘It is not you who are the child, but he.’

‘Ah, you don’t know!  Sam, if I could, I would marry you, some day.  But you must wait a while, and let me think.’

It was enough for him, and he was blithe at their parting.  Not so she.  To tell Randolph seemed impossible.  She could wait till he had gone up to Oxford, when what she did would affect his life but little.  But would he ever tolerate the idea?  And if not, could she defy him?

She had not told him a word when the yearly cricket-match came on at Lord’s between the public schools, though Sam had already gone back to Aldbrickham.  Mrs. Twycott felt stronger than usual: she went to the match with Randolph, and was able to leave her chair and walk about occasionally.  The bright idea occurred to her that she could casually broach the subject while moving round among the spectators, when the boy’s spirits were high with interest in the game, and he would weigh domestic matters as feathers in the scale beside the day’s victory.  They promenaded under the lurid July sun, this pair, so wide apart, yet so near, and Sophy saw the large proportion of boys like her own, in their broad white collars and dwarf hats, and all around the rows of great coaches under which was jumbled the
débris
of luxurious luncheons; bones, pie-crusts, champagne-bottles, glasses, plates, napkins, and the family silver; while on the coaches sat the proud fathers and mothers; but never a poor mother like her.  If Randolph had not appertained to these, had not centred all his interests in them, had not cared exclusively for the class they belonged to, how happy would things have been!  A great huzza at some small performance with the bat burst from the multitude of relatives, and Randolph jumped wildly into the air to see what had happened.  Sophy fetched up the sentence that had been already shaped; but she could not get it out.  The occasion was, perhaps, an inopportune one.  The contrast between her story and the display of fashion to which Randolph had grown to regard himself as akin would be fatal.  She awaited a better time.

It was on an evening when they were alone in their plain suburban residence, where life was not blue but brown, that she ultimately broke silence, qualifying her announcement of a probable second marriage by assuring him that it would not take place for a long time to come, when he would be living quite independently of her.

The boy thought the idea a very reasonable one, and asked if she had chosen anybody?  She hesitated; and he seemed to have a misgiving.  He hoped his stepfather would be a gentleman? he said.

‘Not what you call a gentleman,’ she answered timidly.  ‘He’ll be much as I was before I knew your father;’ and by degrees she acquainted him with the whole.  The youth’s face remained fixed for a moment; then he flushed, leant on the table, and burst into passionate tears.

His mother went up to him, kissed all of his face that she could get at, and patted his back as if he were still the baby he once had been, crying herself the while.  When he had somewhat recovered from his paroxysm he went hastily to his own room and fastened the door.

Parleyings were attempted through the keyhole, outside which she waited and listened.  It was long before he would reply, and when he did it was to say sternly at her from within: ‘I am ashamed of you!  It will ruin me!  A miserable boor! a churl! a clown!  It will degrade me in the eyes of all the gentlemen of England!’

‘Say no more — perhaps I am wrong!  I will struggle against it!’ she cried miserably.

Before Randolph left her that summer a letter arrived from Sam to inform her that he had been unexpectedly fortunate in obtaining the shop.  He was in possession; it was the largest in the town, combining fruit with vegetables, and he thought it would form a home worthy even of her some day.  Might he not run up to town to see her?

She met him by stealth, and said he must still wait for her final answer.  The autumn dragged on, and when Randolph was home at Christmas for the holidays she broached the matter again.  But the young gentleman was inexorable.

It was dropped for months; renewed again; abandoned under his repugnance; again attempted; and thus the gentle creature reasoned and pleaded till four or five long years had passed.  Then the faithful Sam revived his suit with some peremptoriness.  Sophy’s son, now an undergraduate, was down from Oxford one Easter, when she again opened the subject.  As soon as he was ordained, she argued, he would have a home of his own, wherein she, with her bad grammar and her ignorance, would be an encumbrance to him.  Better obliterate her as much as possible.

He showed a more manly anger now, but would not agree.  She on her side was more persistent, and he had doubts whether she could be trusted in his absence.  But by indignation and contempt for her taste he completely maintained his ascendency; and finally taking her before a little cross and altar that he had erected in his bedroom for his private devotions, there bade her kneel, and swear that she would not wed Samuel Hobson without his consent.  ‘I owe this to my father!’ he said.

The poor woman swore, thinking he would soften as soon as he was ordained and in full swing of clerical work.  But he did not.  His education had by this time sufficiently ousted his humanity to keep him quite firm; though his mother might have led an idyllic life with her faithful fruiterer and greengrocer, and nobody have been anything the worse in the world.

Her lameness became more confirmed as time went on, and she seldom or never left the house in the long southern thoroughfare, where she seemed to be pining her heart away.  ‘Why mayn’t I say to Sam that I’ll marry him?  Why mayn’t I?’ she would murmur plaintively to herself when nobody was near.

Some four years after this date a middle-aged man was standing at the door of the largest fruiterer’s shop in Aldbrickham.  He was the proprietor, but to-day, instead of his usual business attire, he wore a neat suit of black; and his window was partly shuttered.  From the railway-station a funeral procession was seen approaching: it passed his door and went out of the town towards the village of Gaymead.  The man, whose eyes were wet, held his hat in his hand as the vehicles moved by; while from the mourning coach a young smooth-shaven priest in a high waistcoat looked black as a cloud at the shop keeper standing there.

December
1891.

FOR CONSCIENCE’ SAKE

CHAPTER I

Whether the utilitarian or the intuitive theory of the moral sense be upheld, it is beyond question that there are a few subtle-souled persons with whom the absolute gratuitousness of an act of reparation is an inducement to perform it; while exhortation as to its necessity would breed excuses for leaving it undone.  The case of Mr. Millborne and Mrs. Frankland particularly illustrated this, and perhaps something more.

There were few figures better known to the local crossing-sweeper than Mr. Millborne’s, in his daily comings and goings along a familiar and quiet London street, where he lived inside the door marked eleven, though not as householder.  In age he was fifty at least, and his habits were as regular as those of a person can be who has no occupation but the study of how to keep himself employed.  He turned almost always to the right on getting to the end of his street, then he went onward down Bond Street to his club, whence he returned by precisely the same course about six o’clock, on foot; or, if he went to dine, later on in a cab.  He was known to be a man of some means, though apparently not wealthy.  Being a bachelor he seemed to prefer his present mode of living as a lodger in Mrs. Towney’s best rooms, with the use of furniture which he had bought ten times over in rent during his tenancy, to having a house of his own.

None among his acquaintance tried to know him well, for his manner and moods did not excite curiosity or deep friendship.  He was not a man who seemed to have anything on his mind, anything to conceal, anything to impart.  From his casual remarks it was generally understood that he was country-born, a native of some place in Wessex; that he had come to London as a young man in a banking-house, and had risen to a post of responsibility; when, by the death of his father, who had been fortunate in his investments, the son succeeded to an income which led him to retire from a business life somewhat early.

One evening, when he had been unwell for several days, Doctor Bindon came in, after dinner, from the adjoining medical quarter, and smoked with him over the fire.  The patient’s ailment was not such as to require much thought, and they talked together on indifferent subjects.

‘I am a lonely man, Bindon — a lonely man,’ Millborne took occasion to say, shaking his head gloomily.  ‘You don’t know such loneliness as mine . . . And the older I get the more I am dissatisfied with myself.  And to-day I have been, through an accident, more than usually haunted by what, above all other events of my life, causes that dissatisfaction — the recollection of an unfulfilled promise made twenty years ago.  In ordinary affairs I have always been considered a man of my word and perhaps it is on that account that a particular vow I once made, and did not keep, comes back to me with a magnitude out of all proportion (I daresay) to its real gravity, especially at this time of day.  You know the discomfort caused at night by the half-sleeping sense that a door or window has been left unfastened, or in the day by the remembrance of unanswered letters.  So does that promise haunt me from time to time, and has done to-day particularly.’

There was a pause, and they smoked on.  Millborne’s eyes, though fixed on the fire, were really regarding attentively a town in the West of England.

‘Yes,’ he continued, ‘I have never quite forgotten it, though during the busy years of my life it was shelved and buried under the pressure of my pursuits.  And, as I say, to-day in particular, an incident in the law-report of a somewhat similar kind has brought it back again vividly.  However, what it was I can tell you in a few words, though no doubt you, as a man of the world, will smile at the thinness of my skin when you hear it . . . I came up to town at one-and-twenty, from Toneborough, in Outer Wessex, where I was born, and where, before I left, I had won the heart of a young woman of my own age.  I promised her marriage, took advantage of my promise, and — am a bachelor.’

‘The old story.’

The other nodded.

‘I left the place, and thought at the time I had done a very clever thing in getting so easily out of an entanglement.  But I have lived long enough for that promise to return to bother me — to be honest, not altogether as a pricking of the conscience, but as a dissatisfaction with myself as a specimen of the heap of flesh called humanity.  If I were to ask you to lend me fifty pounds, which I would repay you next midsummer, and I did not repay you, I should consider myself a shabby sort of fellow, especially if you wanted the money badly.  Yet I promised that girl just as distinctly; and then coolly broke my word, as if doing so were rather smart conduct than a mean action, for which the poor victim herself, encumbered with a child, and not I, had really to pay the penalty, in spite of certain pecuniary aid that was given.  There, that’s the retrospective trouble that I am always unearthing; and you may hardly believe that though so many years have elapsed, and it is all gone by and done with, and she must be getting on for an old woman now, as I am for an old man, it really often destroys my sense of self-respect still.’