Complete Works of Thomas Hardy (Illustrated) (765 page)

He stated that, at the request of a relative of Sir John’s, who wished to be assured on the matter by reason of its suddenness, he had, with the assistance of a surgeon, made a private examination of Sir John’s body immediately after his decease, and found that it had resulted from purely natural causes.  Nobody at this time had breathed a suspicion of foul play, and therefore nothing was said which might afterwards have established her innocence.

It being thus placed beyond doubt that this beautiful and noble lady had been done to death by a vile scandal that was wholly unfounded, her husband was stung with a dreadful remorse at the share he had taken in her misfortunes, and left the country anew, this time never to return alive.  He survived her but a few years, and his body was brought home and buried beside his wife’s under the tomb which is still visible in the parish church.  Until lately there was a good portrait of her, in weeds for her first husband, with a cross in her hand, at the ancestral seat of her family, where she was much pitied, as she deserved to be.  Yet there were some severe enough to say — and these not unjust persons in other respects — that though unquestionably innocent of the crime imputed to her, she had shown an unseemly wantonness in contracting three marriages in such rapid succession; that the untrue suspicion might have been ordered by Providence (who often works indirectly) as a punishment for her self-indulgence.  Upon that point I have no opinion to offer.

* * * * *

The reverend the Vice-President, however, the tale being ended, offered as his opinion that her fate ought to be quite clearly recognized as a punishment.  So thought the Churchwarden, and also the quiet gentleman sitting near.  The latter knew many other instances in point, one of which could be narrated in a few words.

DAME THE NINTH — THE DUCHESS OF HAMPTONSHIRE

By the Quiet Gentleman

Some fifty years ago, the then Duke of Hamptonshire, fifth of that title, was incontestibly the head man in his county, and particularly in the neighbourhood of Batton.  He came of the ancient and loyal family of Saxelbye, which, before its ennoblement, had numbered many knightly and ecclesiastical celebrities in its male line.  It would have occupied a painstaking county historian a whole afternoon to take rubbings of the numerous effigies and heraldic devices graven to their memory on the brasses, tablets, and altar-tombs in the aisle of the parish-church.  The Duke himself, however, was a man little attracted by ancient chronicles in stone and metal, even when they concerned his own beginnings.  He allowed his mind to linger by preference on the many graceless and unedifying pleasures which his position placed at his command.  He could on occasion close the mouths of his dependents by a good bomb-like oath, and he argued doggedly with the parson on the virtues of cock-fighting and baiting the bull.

This nobleman’s personal appearance was somewhat impressive.  His complexion was that of the copper-beech tree.  His frame was stalwart, though slightly stooping.  His mouth was large, and he carried an unpolished sapling as his walking-stick, except when he carried a spud for cutting up any thistle he encountered on his walks.  His castle stood in the midst of a park, surrounded by dusky elms, except to the southward; and when the moon shone out, the gleaming stone facade, backed by heavy boughs, was visible from the distant high road as a white spot on the surface of darkness.  Though called a castle, the building was little fortified, and had been erected with greater eye to internal convenience than those crannied places of defence to which the name strictly appertains.  It was a castellated mansion as regular as a chessboard on its ground-plan, ornamented with make-believe bastions and machicolations, behind which were stacks of battlemented chimneys.  On still mornings, at the fire-lighting hour, when ghostly house-maids stalk the corridors, and thin streaks of light through the shutter-chinks lend startling winks and smiles to ancestors on canvas, twelve or fifteen thin stems of blue smoke sprouted upwards from these chimney-tops, and spread into a flat canopy on high.  Around the site stretched ten thousand acres of good, fat, unimpeachable soil, plentiful in glades and lawns wherever visible from the castle-windows, and merging in homely arable where screened from the too curious eye by ingeniously-contrived plantations.

Some way behind the owner of all this came the second man in the parish, the rector, the Honourable and Reverend Mr. Oldbourne, a widower, over stiff and stern for a clergyman, whose severe white neckcloth, well-kept gray hair, and right-lined face betokened none of those sympathetic traits whereon depends so much of a parson’s power to do good among his fellow-creatures.  The last, far-removed man of the series — altogether the Neptune of these local primaries — was the curate, Mr. Alwyn Hill.  He was a handsome young deacon with curly hair, dreamy eyes — so dreamy that to look long into them was like ascending and floating among summer clouds — a complexion as fresh as a flower, and a chin absolutely beardless.  Though his age was about twenty-five, he looked not much over nineteen.

The rector had a daughter called Emmeline, of so sweet and simple a nature that her beauty was discovered, measured, and inventoried by almost everybody in that part of the country before it was suspected by herself to exist.  She had been bred in comparative solitude; a rencounter with men troubled and confused her.  Whenever a strange visitor came to her father’s house she slipped into the orchard and remained till he was gone, ridiculing her weakness in apostrophes, but unable to overcome it.  Her virtues lay in no resistant force of character, but in a natural inappetency for evil things, which to her were as unmeaning as joints of flesh to a herbivorous creature.  Her charms of person, manner, and mind, had been clear for some time to the Antinous in orders, and no less so to the Duke, who, though scandalously ignorant of dainty phrases, ever showing a clumsy manner towards the gentler sex, and, in short, not at all a lady’s man, took fire to a degree that was wellnigh terrible at sudden sight of Emmeline, a short time after she was turned seventeen.

It occurred one afternoon at the corner of a shrubbery between the castle and the rectory, where the Duke was standing to watch the heaving of a mole, when the fair girl brushed past at a distance of a few yards, in the full light of the sun, and without hat or bonnet.  The Duke went home like a man who had seen a spirit.  He ascended to the picture-gallery of his castle, and there passed some time in staring at the bygone beauties of his line as if he had never before considered what an important part those specimens of womankind had played in the evolution of the Saxelbye race.  He dined alone, drank rather freely, and declared to himself that Emmeline Oldbourne must be his.

Meanwhile there had unfortunately arisen between the curate and this girl some sweet and secret understanding.  Particulars of the attachment remained unknown then and always, but it was plainly not approved of by her father.  His procedure was cold, hard, and inexorable.  Soon the curate disappeared from the parish, almost suddenly, after bitter and hard words had been heard to pass between him and the rector one evening in the garden, intermingled with which, like the cries of the dying in the din of battle, were the beseeching sobs of a woman.  Not long after this it was announced that a marriage between the Duke and Miss Oldbourne was to be solemnized at a surprisingly early date.

The wedding-day came and passed; and she was a Duchess.  Nobody seemed to think of the ousted man during the day, or else those who thought of him concealed their meditations.  Some of the less subservient ones were disposed to speak in a jocular manner of the august husband and wife, others to make correct and pretty speeches about them, according as their sex and nature dictated.  But in the evening, the ringers in the belfry, with whom Alwyn had been a favourite, eased their minds a little concerning the gentle young man, and the possible regrets of the woman he had loved.

‘Don’t you see something wrong in it all?’ said the third bell as he wiped his face.  ‘I know well enough where she would have liked to stable her horses to-night, when they have done their journey.’

‘That is, you would know if you could tell where young Mr. Hill is living, which is known to none in the parish.’

‘Except to the lady that this ring o’ grandsire triples is in honour of.’

Yet these friendly cottagers were at this time far from suspecting the real dimensions of Emmeline’s misery, nor was it clear even to those who came into much closer communion with her than they, so well had she concealed her heart-sickness.  But bride and bridegroom had not long been home at the castle when the young wife’s unhappiness became plainly enough perceptible.  Her maids and men said that she was in the habit of turning to the wainscot and shedding stupid scalding tears at a time when a right-minded lady would have been overhauling her wardrobe.  She prayed earnestly in the great church-pew, where she sat lonely and insignificant as a mouse in a cell, instead of counting her rings, falling asleep, or amusing herself in silent laughter at the queer old people in the congregation, as previous beauties of the family had done in their time.  She seemed to care no more for eating and drinking out of crystal and silver than from a service of earthen vessels.  Her head was, in truth, full of something else; and that such was the case was only too obvious to the Duke, her husband.  At first he would only taunt her for her folly in thinking of that milk-and-water parson; but as time went on his charges took a more positive shape.  He would not believe her assurance that she had in no way communicated with her former lover, nor he with her, since their parting in the presence of her father.  This led to some strange scenes between them which need not be detailed; their result was soon to take a catastrophic shape.

One dark quiet evening, about two months after the marriage, a man entered the gate admitting from the highway to the park and avenue which ran up to the house.  He arrived within two hundred yards of the walls, when he left the gravelled drive and drew near to the castle by a roundabout path leading into a shrubbery.  Here he stood still.  In a few minutes the strokes of the castle-clock resounded, and then a female figure entered the same secluded nook from an opposite direction.  There the two indistinct persons leapt together like a pair of dewdrops on a leaf; and then they stood apart, facing each other, the woman looking down.

‘Emmeline, you begged me to come, and here I am, Heaven forgive me!’ said the man hoarsely.

‘You are going to emigrate, Alwyn,’ she said in broken accents.  ‘I have heard of it; you sail from Plymouth in three days in the
Western Glory
?’

‘Yes.  I can live in England no longer.  Life is as death to me here,’ says he.

‘My life is even worse — worse than death.  Death would not have driven me to this extremity.  Listen, Alwyn — I have sent for you to beg to go with you, or at least to be near you — to do anything so that it be not to stay here.’

‘To go away with me?’ he said in a startled tone.

‘Yes, yes — or under your direction, or by your help in some way!  Don’t be horrified at me — you must bear with me whilst I implore it.  Nothing short of cruelty would have driven me to this.  I could have borne my doom in silence had I been left unmolested; but he tortures me, and I shall soon be in the grave if I cannot escape.’

To his shocked inquiry how her husband tortured her, the Duchess said that it was by jealousy.  ‘He tries to wring admissions from me concerning you,’ she said, ‘and will not believe that I have not communicated with you since my engagement to him was settled by my father, and I was forced to agree to it.’

The poor curate said that this was the heaviest news of all.  ‘He has not personally ill-used you?’ he asked.

‘Yes,’ she whispered.

‘What has he done?’

She looked fearfully around, and said, sobbing: ‘In trying to make me confess to what I have never done, he adopts plans I dare not describe for terrifying me into a weak state, so that I may own to anything!  I resolved to write to you, as I had no other friend.’  She added, with dreary irony, ‘I thought I would give him some ground for his suspicion, so as not to disgrace his judgment.’

‘Do you really mean, Emmeline,’ he tremblingly inquired, ‘that you — that you want to fly with me?’

‘Can you think that I would act otherwise than in earnest at such a time as this?’

He was silent for a minute or more.  ‘You must not go with me,’ he said.

‘Why?’

‘It would be sin.’

‘It
cannot
be sin, for I have never wanted to commit sin in my life; and it isn’t likely I would begin now, when I pray every day to die and be sent to Heaven out of my misery!’

‘But it is wrong, Emmeline, all the same.’

‘Is it wrong to run away from the fire that scorches you?’

‘It would look wrong, at any rate, in this case.’

‘Alwyn, Alwyn, take me, I beseech you!’ she burst out.  ‘It is not right in general, I know, but it is such an exceptional instance, this.  Why has such a severe strain been put upon me?  I was doing no harm, injuring no one, helping many people, and expecting happiness; yet trouble came.  Can it be that God holds me in derision?  I had no supporter — I gave way; and now my life is a burden and a shame to me . . . Oh, if you only knew how much to me this request to you is — how my life is wrapped up in it, you could not deny me!’

‘This is almost beyond endurance — Heaven support us,’ he groaned.  ‘Emmy, you are the Duchess of Hamptonshire, the Duke of Hamptonshire’s wife; you must not go with me!’

‘And am I then refused? — Oh, am I refused?’ she cried frantically.  ‘Alwyn, Alwyn, do you say it indeed to me?’

‘Yes, I do, dear, tender heart!  I do most sadly say it.  You must not go.  Forgive me, for there is no alternative but refusal.  Though I die, though you die, we must not fly together.  It is forbidden in God’s law.  Good-bye, for always and ever!’

He tore himself away, hastened from the shrubbery, and vanished among the trees.