Complete Works of Thomas Hardy (Illustrated) (798 page)

‘Yes — I own them both,’ she answered faintly.  ‘But owning such as that tells against me; and I swear the inference is not true.’

‘Don’t say that; for you have come — let me think the reason of your coming what I like to think it.  It can do you no harm.  Come once more!’

He still held her hand and waist.  ‘Very well, then,’ she said.  ‘Thus far you shall persuade me.  I will meet you to-morrow night or the night after.  Now, O let me go.’

He released her, and they parted.  The Duchess ran rapidly down the hill towards the outlying mansion of Shakeforest Towers, and when he had watched her out of sight, he turned and strode off in the opposite direction.  All then was silent and empty as before.

Yet it was only for a moment.  When they had quite departed, another shape appeared upon the scene.  He came from behind the trilithon.  He was a man of stouter build than the first, and wore the boots and spurs of a horseman.  Two things were at once obvious from this phenomenon: that he had watched the interview between the Captain and the Duchess; and that, though he probably had seen every movement of the couple, including the embrace, he had been too remote to hear the reluctant words of the lady’s conversation — or, indeed, any words at all — so that the meeting must have exhibited itself to his eye as the assignation of a pair of well-agreed lovers.  But it was necessary that several years should elapse before the shepherd-boy was old enough to reason out this.

The third individual stood still for a moment, as if deep in meditation.  He crossed over to where the lady and gentleman had stood, and looked at the ground; then he too turned and went away in a third direction, as widely divergent as possible from those taken by the two interlocutors.  His course was towards the highway; and a few minutes afterwards the trot of a horse might have been heard upon its frosty surface, lessening till it died away upon the ear.

The boy remained in the hut, confronting the trilithon as if he expected yet more actors on the scene, but nobody else appeared.  How long he stood with his little face against the loophole he hardly knew; but he was rudely awakened from his reverie by a punch in his back, and in the feel of it he familiarly recognized the stem of the old shepherd’s crook.

‘Blame thy young eyes and limbs, Bill Mills — now you have let the fire out, and you know I want it kept in! I thought something would go wrong with ‘ee up here, and I couldn’t bide in bed no more than thistledown on the wind, that I could not!  Well, what’s happened, fie upon ‘ee?’

‘Nothing.’

‘Ewes all as I left ‘em?’

‘Yes.’

‘Any lambs want bringing in?’

‘No.’

The shepherd relit the fire, and went out among the sheep with a lantern, for the moon was getting low.  Soon he came in again.

‘Blame it all — thou’st say that nothing have happened; when one ewe have twinned and is like to go off, and another is dying for want of half an eye of looking to! I told ‘ee, Bill Mills, if anything went wrong to come down and call me; and this is how you have done it.’

‘You said I could go to sleep for a hollerday, and I did.’

‘Don’t you speak to your betters like that, young man, or you’ll come to the gallows-tree!  You didn’t sleep all the time, or you wouldn’t have been peeping out of that there hole!  Now you can go home, and be up here again by breakfast-time.  I be an old man, and there’s old men that deserve well of the world; but no — I must rest how I can!’

The elder shepherd then lay down inside the hut, and the boy went down the hill to the hamlet where he dwelt.

SECOND NIGHT

When the next night drew on the actions of the boy were almost enough to show that he was thinking of the meeting he had witnessed, and of the promise wrung from the lady that she would come there again.  As far as the sheep-tending arrangements were concerned, to-night was but a repetition of the foregoing one.  Between ten and eleven o’clock the old shepherd withdrew as usual for what sleep at home he might chance to get without interruption, making up the other necessary hours of rest at sometime during the day: the boy was left alone.

The frost was the same as on the night before, except perhaps that it was a little more severe.  The moon shone as usual, except that it was three-quarters of an hour later in its course; and the boy’s condition was much the same, except that he felt no sleepiness whatever.  He felt, too, rather afraid; but upon the whole he preferred witnessing an assignation of strangers to running the risk of being discovered absent by the old shepherd.

It was before the distant clock of Shakeforest Towers had struck eleven that he observed the opening of the second act of this midnight drama.  It consisted in the appearance of neither lover nor Duchess, but of the third figure — the stout man, booted and spurred who came up from the easterly direction in which he had retreated the night before.  He walked once round the trilithon, and next advanced towards the clump concealing the hut, the moonlight shining full upon his face and revealing him to be the Duke.  Fear seized upon the shepherd-boy: the Duke was Jove himself to the rural population, whom to offend was starvation, homelessness, and death, and whom to look at was to be mentally scathed and dumbfounded.  He closed the stove, so that not a spark of light appeared, and hastily buried himself in the straw that lay in a corner.

The Duke came close to the clump of furze and stood by the spot where his wife and the Captain had held their dialogue; he examined the furze as if searching for a hiding-place, and in doing so discovered the hut.  The latter he walked round and then looked inside; finding it to all seeming empty, he entered, closing the door behind him and taking his place at the little circular window against which the boy’s face had been pressed just before.

The Duke had not adopted his measures too rapidly, if his object were concealment.  Almost as soon as he had stationed himself there eleven o’clock struck, and the slender young man who had previously graced the scene promptly reappeared from the north quarter of the down.  The spot of assignation having, by the accident of his running forward on the foregoing night, removed itself from the Devil’s Door to the clump of furze, he instinctively came thither, and waited for the Duchess where he had met her before.

But a fearful surprise was in store for him to-night, as well as for the trembling juvenile.  At his appearance the Duke breathed more and more quickly, his breathings being distinctly audible to the crouching boy.  The young man had hardly paused when the alert nobleman softly opened the door of the hut, and, stepping round the furze, came full upon Captain Fred.

‘You have dishonoured her, and you shall die the death you deserve!’ came to the shepherd’s ears, in a harsh, hollow whisper through the boarding of the hut.

The apathetic and taciturn boy was excited enough to run the risk of rising and looking from the window, but he could see nothing for the intervening furze boughs, both the men having gone round to the side.  What took place in the few following moments he never exactly knew.  He discerned portion of a shadow in quick muscular movement; then there was the fall of something on the grass; then there was stillness.

Two or three minutes later the Duke became visible round the corner of the hut, dragging by the collar the now inert body of the second man.  The Duke dragged him across the open space towards the trilithon.  Behind this ruin was a hollow, irregular spot, overgrown with furze and stunted thorns, and riddled by the old holes of badgers, its former inhabitants, who had now died out or departed.  The Duke vanished into this depression with his burden, reappearing after the lapse of a few seconds.  When he came forth he dragged nothing behind him.

He returned to the side of the hut, cleansed something on the grass, and again put himself on the watch, though not as before, inside the hut, but without, on the shady side.  ‘Now for the second!’ he said.

It was plain, even to the unsophisticated boy, that he now awaited the other person of the appointment his wife, the Duchess — for what purpose it was terrible to think. “He seemed to be a man of such determined temper that he would scarcely hesitate in carrying out a course of revenge to the bitter end.  Moreover — though it was what the shepherd did not perceive — this was all the more probable, in that the moody Duke was labouring under the exaggerated impression which the sight of the meeting in dumb show had conveyed.

The jealous watcher waited long, but he waited in vain.  From within the hut the boy could hear his occasional exclamations of surprise, as if he were almost disappointed at the failure of his assumption that his guilty Duchess would surely keep the tryst.  Sometimes he stepped from the shade of the furze into the moonlight, and held up his watch to learn the time.

About half-past eleven he seemed to give up expecting her.  He then went a second time to the hollow behind the trilithon, remaining there nearly a quarter of an hour.  From this place he proceeded quickly over a shoulder of the declivity, a little to the left, presently returning on horseback, which proved that his horse had been tethered in some secret place down there.  Crossing anew the down between the hut and the trilithon, and scanning the precincts as if finally to assure himself that she had not come, he rode slowly downwards in the direction of Shakeforest Towers.

The juvenile shepherd thought of what lay in the hollow yonder; and no fear of the crook-stem of his superior officer was potent enough to detain him longer on that hill alone.  Any live company, even the most terrible, was better than the company of the dead so, running with the speed of a hare in the direction pursued by the horseman, he overtook the revengeful Duke at the second descent (where the great western road crossed before you came to the old park entrance on that side — now closed up and the lodge cleared away, though at the time it was wondered why, being considered the most convenient gate of all).

Once within the sound of the horse’s footsteps, Bill Mills felt comparatively comfortable; for, though in awe of the Duke because of his position, he had no moral repugnance to his companionship on account of the grisly deed he had committed, considering that powerful nobleman to have a right to do what he chose on his own lands.  The Duke rode steadily on beneath his ancestral trees, the hoofs of his horse sending up a smart sound now that he had reached the hard road of the drive, and soon drew near the front door of his house, surmounted by parapets with square-cut battlements that cast a notched shade upon the gravelled terrace.  These outlines were quite familiar to little Bill Mills, though nothing within their boundary had ever been seen by him.

When the rider approached the mansion a small turret door was quickly opened and a woman came out.  As soon as she saw the horseman’s outlines she ran forward into the moonlight to meet him.

‘Ah dear — and are you come?’ she said.  ‘I heard Hero’s tread just when you rode over the hill, and I knew it in a moment.  I would have come further if I had been aware — ’

‘Glad to see me, eh?’

‘How can you ask that?’

‘Well; it is a lovely night for meetings.’

‘Yes, it is a lovely night.’

The Duke dismounted and stood by her side.  ‘Why should you have been listening at this time of night, and yet not expecting me?’ he asked.

‘Why, indeed!  There is a strange story attached to that, which I must tell you at once.  But why did you come a night sooner than you said you would come?  I am rather sorry — I really am!’ (shaking her head playfully) ‘for as a surprise to you I had ordered a bonfire to be built, which was to be lighted on your arrival to-morrow; and now it is wasted.  You can see the outline of it just out there.’

The Duke looked across to a spot of rising glade, and saw the faggots in a heap. He then bent his eyes with a bland and puzzled air on the ground, ‘What is this strange story you have to tell me that kept you awake?’ he murmured.

‘It is this — and it is really rather serious.  My cousin Fred Ogbourne — Captain Ogbourne as he is now — was in his boyhood a great admirer of mine, as I think I have told you, though I was six years his senior.  In strict truth, he was absurdly fond of me.’

‘You have never told me of that before.’

‘Then it was your sister I told — yes, it was.  Well, you know I have not seen him for many years, and naturally I had quite forgotten his admiration of me in old times.  But guess my surprise when the day before yesterday, I received a mysterious note bearing no address, and found on opening it that it came from him.  The contents frightened me out of my wits.  He had returned from Canada to his father’s house, and conjured me by all he could think of to meet him at once.  But I think I can repeat the exact words, though I will show it to you when we get indoors.

‘MY DEAR COUSIN HARRIET,’ the note said, ‘After this long absence you will be surprised at my sudden reappearance, and more by what I am going to ask.  But if my life and future are of any concern to you at all, I beg that you will grant my request. What I require of you, is, dear Harriet, that you meet me about eleven to-night by the Druid stones on Marlbury Downs, about a mile or more from your house.  I cannot say more, except to entreat you to come.  I will explain all when you are there.  The one thing is, I want to see you.  Come alone.  Believe me, I would not ask this if my happiness did not hang upon it — God knows how entirely !  I am too agitated to say more — Yours. FRED.’

‘That was all of it.  Now, of course, I ought not to have gone, as it turned out, but that I did not think of then.  I remembered his impetuous temper, and feared that something grievous was impending over his head, while he had not a friend in the world to help him, or anyone except myself to whom he would care to make his trouble known. So I wrapped myself up and went to Marlbury Downs at the time he had named.  Don’t you think I was courageous?’

‘Very.’

‘When I got there — but shall we not walk on; it is getting cold?’ The Duke, however, did not move.  ‘When I got there he came, of course, as a full grown man and officer, and not as the lad that I had known him.  When I saw him I was sorry I had come.  ‘I can hardly tell you how he behaved.  What he wanted I don’t know even now; it seemed to be no more than the mere meeting with me.  He held me by the hand and waist — O so tight — and would not let me go till I had promised to meet him again.  His manner was so strange and passionate that I was afraid of him in such a lonely place, and I promised to come.  Then I escaped — then I ran home — and that’s all.  When the time drew on this evening for the appointment — which, of course, I never intended to keep — I felt uneasy, lest when he found I meant to disappoint him he would come on to the house; and that’s why I could not sleep.  But you are so silent!’