Complete Works of Thomas Hardy (Illustrated) (756 page)

In the course of her parish-visiting she lighted on the young girl without much difficulty, and found her looking pale and sad, and wearing a simple black gown, which she had put on out of respect for the young man’s memory, whom she had tenderly loved, though he had not loved her.

‘Ah, you have lost your lover, Milly,’ said Lady Caroline.

The young woman could not repress her tears.  ‘My lady, he was not quite my lover,’ she said.  ‘But I was his — and now he is dead I don’t care to live any more!’

‘Can you keep a secret about him?’ asks the lady; ‘one in which his honour is involved — which is known to me alone, but should be known to you?’

The girl readily promised, and, indeed, could be safely trusted on such a subject, so deep was her affection for the youth she mourned.

‘Then meet me at his grave to-night, half-an-hour after sunset, and I will tell it to you,’ says the other.

In the dusk of that spring evening the two shadowy figures of the young women converged upon the assistant-steward’s newly-turfed mound; and at that solemn place and hour, the one of birth and beauty unfolded her tale: how she had loved him and married him secretly; how he had died in her chamber; and how, to keep her secret, she had dragged him to his own door.

‘Married him, my lady!’ said the rustic maiden, starting back.

‘I have said so,’ replied Lady Caroline.  ‘But it was a mad thing, and a mistaken course.  He ought to have married you.  You, Milly, were peculiarly his.  But you lost him.’

‘Yes,’ said the poor girl; ‘and for that they laughed at me.  “Ha — ha, you mid love him, Milly,” they said; “but he will not love you!”‘

‘Victory over such unkind jeerers would be sweet,’ said Lady Caroline.  ‘You lost him in life; but you may have him in death
as if
you had had him in life; and so turn the tables upon them.’

‘How?’ said the breathless girl.

The young lady then unfolded her plan, which was that Milly should go forward and declare that the young man had contracted a secret marriage (as he truly had done); that it was with her, Milly, his sweetheart; that he had been visiting her in her cottage on the evening of his death; when, on finding he was a corpse, she had carried him to his house to prevent discovery by her parents, and that she had meant to keep the whole matter a secret till the rumours afloat had forced it from her.

‘And how shall I prove this?’ said the woodman’s daughter, amazed at the boldness of the proposal.

‘Quite sufficiently.  You can say, if necessary, that you were married to him at the church of St. Michael, in Bath City, in my name, as the first that occurred to you, to escape detection.  That was where he married me.  I will support you in this.’

‘Oh — I don’t quite like — ’

‘If you will do so,’ said the lady peremptorily, ‘I will always be your father’s friend and yours; if not, it will be otherwise.  And I will give you my wedding-ring, which you shall wear as yours.’

‘Have you worn it, my lady?’

‘Only at night.’

There was not much choice in the matter, and Milly consented.  Then this noble lady took from her bosom the ring she had never been able openly to exhibit, and, grasping the young girl’s hand, slipped it upon her finger as she stood upon her lover’s grave.

Milly shivered, and bowed her head, saying, ‘I feel as if I had become a corpse’s bride!’

But from that moment the maiden was heart and soul in the substitution.  A blissful repose came over her spirit.  It seemed to her that she had secured in death him whom in life she had vainly idolized; and she was almost content.  After that the lady handed over to the young man’s new wife all the little mementoes and trinkets he had given herself; even to a locket containing his hair.

The next day the girl made her so-called confession, which the simple mourning she had already worn, without stating for whom, seemed to bear out; and soon the story of the little romance spread through the village and country-side, almost as far as Melchester.  It was a curious psychological fact that, having once made the avowal, Milly seemed possessed with a spirit of ecstasy at her position.  With the liberal sum of money supplied to her by Lady Caroline she now purchased the garb of a widow, and duly appeared at church in her weeds, her simple face looking so sweet against its margin of crape that she was almost envied her state by the other village-girls of her age.  And when a woman’s sorrow for her beloved can maim her young life so obviously as it had done Milly’s there was, in truth, little subterfuge in the case.  Her explanation tallied so well with the details of her lover’s latter movements — those strange absences and sudden returnings, which had occasionally puzzled his friends — that nobody supposed for a moment that the second actor in these secret nuptials was other than she.  The actual and whole truth would indeed have seemed a preposterous assertion beside this plausible one, by reason of the lofty demeanour of the Lady Caroline and the unassuming habits of the late villager.  There being no inheritance in question, not a soul took the trouble to go to the city church, forty miles off, and search the registers for marriage signatures bearing out so humble a romance.

In a short time Milly caused a decent tombstone to be erected over her nominal husband’s grave, whereon appeared the statement that it was placed there by his heartbroken widow, which, considering that the payment for it came from Lady Caroline and the grief from Milly, was as truthful as such inscriptions usually are, and only required pluralising to render it yet more nearly so.

The impressionable and complaisant Milly, in her character of widow, took delight in going to his grave every day, and indulging in sorrow which was a positive luxury to her.  She placed fresh flowers on his grave, and so keen was her emotional imaginativeness that she almost believed herself to have been his wife indeed as she walked to and fro in her garb of woe.  One afternoon, Milly being busily engaged in this labour of love at the grave, Lady Caroline passed outside the churchyard wall with some of her visiting friends, who, seeing Milly there, watched her actions with interest, remarked upon the pathos of the scene, and upon the intense affection the young man must have felt for such a tender creature as Milly.  A strange light, as of pain, shot from the Lady Caroline’s eye, as if for the first time she begrudged to the young girl the position she had been at such pains to transfer to her; it showed that a slumbering affection for her husband still had life in Lady Caroline, obscured and stifled as it was by social considerations.

An end was put to this smooth arrangement by the sudden appearance in the churchyard one day of the Lady Caroline, when Milly had come there on her usual errand of laying flowers.  Lady Caroline had been anxiously awaiting her behind the chancel, and her countenance was pale and agitated.

‘Milly!’ she said, ‘come here!  I don’t know how to say to you what I am going to say.  I am half dead!’

‘I am sorry for your ladyship,’ says Milly, wondering.

‘Give me that ring!’ says the lady, snatching at the girl’s left hand.

Milly drew it quickly away.

‘I tell you give it to me!’ repeated Caroline, almost fiercely.  ‘Oh — but you don’t know why?  I am in a grief and a trouble I did not expect!’  And Lady Caroline whispered a few words to the girl.

‘O my lady!’ said the thunderstruck Milly.  ‘What
will
you do?’

‘You must say that your statement was a wicked lie, an invention, a scandal, a deadly sin — that I told you to make it to screen me!  That it was I whom he married at Bath.  In short, we must tell the truth, or I am ruined — body, mind, and reputation — for ever!’

But there is a limit to the flexibility of gentle-souled women.  Milly by this time had so grown to the idea of being one flesh with this young man, of having the right to bear his name as she bore it; had so thoroughly come to regard him as her husband, to dream of him as her husband, to speak of him as her husband, that she could not relinquish him at a moment’s peremptory notice.

‘No, no,’ she said desperately, ‘I cannot, I will not give him up!  Your ladyship took him away from me alive, and gave him back to me only when he was dead.  Now I will keep him!  I am truly his widow.  More truly than you, my lady! for I love him and mourn for him, and call myself by his dear name, and your ladyship does neither!’

‘I
do
love him!’ cries Lady Caroline with flashing eyes, ‘and I cling to him, and won’t let him go to such as you!  How can I, when he is the father of this poor babe that’s coming to me?  I must have him back again!  Milly, Milly, can’t you pity and understand me, perverse girl that you are, and the miserable plight that I am in?  Oh, this precipitancy — it is the ruin of women!  Why did I not consider, and wait!  Come, give me back all that I have given you, and assure me you will support me in confessing the truth!’

‘Never, never!’ persisted Milly, with woe-begone passionateness.  ‘Look at this headstone!  Look at my gown and bonnet of crape — this ring: listen to the name they call me by!  My character is worth as much to me as yours is to you!  After declaring my Love mine, myself his, taking his name, making his death my own particular sorrow, how can I say it was not so?  No such dishonour for me!  I will outswear you, my lady; and I shall be believed.  My story is so much the more likely that yours will be thought false.  But, O please, my lady, do not drive me to this!  In pity let me keep him!’

The poor nominal widow exhibited such anguish at a proposal which would have been truly a bitter humiliation to her, that Lady Caroline was warmed to pity in spite of her own condition.

‘Yes, I see your position,’ she answered.  ‘But think of mine!  What can I do?  Without your support it would seem an invention to save me from disgrace; even if I produced the register, the love of scandal in the world is such that the multitude would slur over the fact, say it was a fabrication, and believe your story.  I do not know who were the witnesses, or anything!’

In a few minutes these two poor young women felt, as so many in a strait have felt before, that union was their greatest strength, even now; and they consulted calmly together.  The result of their deliberations was that Milly went home as usual, and Lady Caroline also, the latter confessing that very night to the Countess her mother of the marriage, and to nobody else in the world.  And, some time after, Lady Caroline and her mother went away to London, where a little while later still they were joined by Milly, who was supposed to have left the village to proceed to a watering-place in the North for the benefit of her health, at the expense of the ladies of the Manor, who had been much interested in her state of lonely and defenceless widowhood.

Early the next year the widow Milly came home with an infant in her arms, the family at the Manor House having meanwhile gone abroad.  They did not return from their tour till the autumn ensuing, by which time Milly and the child had again departed from the cottage of her father the woodman, Milly having attained to the dignity of dwelling in a cottage of her own, many miles to the eastward of her native village; a comfortable little allowance had moreover been settled on her and the child for life, through the instrumentality of Lady Caroline and her mother.

Two or three years passed away, and the Lady Caroline married a nobleman — the Marquis of Stonehenge — considerably her senior, who had wooed her long and phlegmatically.  He was not rich, but she led a placid life with him for many years, though there was no child of the marriage.  Meanwhile Milly’s boy, as the youngster was called, and as Milly herself considered him, grew up, and throve wonderfully, and loved her as she deserved to be loved for her devotion to him, in whom she every day traced more distinctly the lineaments of the man who had won her girlish heart, and kept it even in the tomb.

She educated him as well as she could with the limited means at her disposal, for the allowance had never been increased, Lady Caroline, or the Marchioness of Stonehenge as she now was, seeming by degrees to care little what had become of them.  Milly became extremely ambitious on the boy’s account; she pinched herself almost of necessaries to send him to the Grammar School in the town to which they retired, and at twenty he enlisted in a cavalry regiment, joining it with a deliberate intent of making the Army his profession, and not in a freak of idleness.  His exceptional attainments, his manly bearing, his steady conduct, speedily won him promotion, which was furthered by the serious war in which this country was at that time engaged.  On his return to England after the peace he had risen to the rank of riding-master, and was soon after advanced another stage, and made quartermaster, though still a young man.

His mother — his corporeal mother, that is, the Marchioness of Stonehenge — heard tidings of this unaided progress; it reawakened her maternal instincts, and filled her with pride.  She became keenly interested in her successful soldier-son; and as she grew older much wished to see him again, particularly when, the Marquis dying, she was left a solitary and childless widow.  Whether or not she would have gone to him of her own impulse I cannot say; but one day, when she was driving in an open carriage in the outskirts of a neighbouring town, the troops lying at the barracks hard by passed her in marching order.  She eyed them narrowly, and in the finest of the horsemen recognized her son from his likeness to her first husband.

This sight of him doubly intensified the motherly emotions which had lain dormant in her for so many years, and she wildly asked herself how she could so have neglected him?  Had she possessed the true courage of affection she would have owned to her first marriage, and have reared him as her son!  What would it have mattered if she had never obtained this precious coronet of pearls and gold leaves, by comparison with the gain of having the love and protection of such a noble and worthy son?  These and other sad reflections cut the gloomy and solitary lady to the heart; and she repented of her pride in disclaiming her first husband more bitterly than she had ever repented of her infatuation in marrying him.