Complete Works of Thomas Hardy (Illustrated) (840 page)

‘He has not come?’ said Nicholas under his breath.

‘He has not.’

Then Nicholas sat beside her, and they talked on general topics merely like saddened old friends.  But they could not keep away the subject of Bellston, their voices dropping as it forced its way in.  Christine, no less than Nicholas, knowing her husband’s character, inferred that, having stopped her game, as he would have phrased it, he was taking things leisurely, and, finding nothing very attractive in her limited mode of living, was meaning to return to her only when he had nothing better to do.

The bolt which laid low their hopes had struck so recently that they could hardly look each other in the face when speaking that day.  But when a week or two had passed, and all the horizon still remained as vacant of Bellston as before, Nicholas and she could talk of the event with calm wonderment.  Why had he come, to go again like this?

And then there set in a period of resigned surmise, during which

So like, so very like, was day to day,

that to tell of one of them is to tell of all.  Nicholas would arrive between three and four in the afternoon, a faint trepidation influencing his walk as he neared her door.  He would knock; she would always reply in person, having watched for him from the window. Then he would whisper —

‘He has not come?’

‘He has not,’ she would say.

Nicholas would enter then, and she being ready bonneted, they would walk into the Sallows together as far as to the spot which they had frequently made their place of appointment in their youthful days.  A plank bridge, which Bellston had caused to be thrown over the stream during his residence with her in the manor house, was now again removed, and all was just the same as in Nicholas’s time, when he had been accustomed to wade across on the edge of the cascade and come up to her like a merman from the deep.  Here on the felled trunk, which still lay rotting in its old place, they would now sit, gazing at the descending sheet of water, with its never-ending sarcastic hiss at their baffled attempts to make themselves one flesh.  Returning to the house they would sit down together to tea, after which, and the confidential chat that accompanied it, he walked home by the declining light.  This proceeding became as periodic as an astronomical recurrence.  Twice a week he came — all through that winter, all through the spring following, through the summer, through the autumn, the next winter, the next year, and the next, till an appreciable span of human life had passed by.  Bellston still tarried.

Years and years Nic walked that way, at this interval of three days, from his house in the neighbouring town; and in every instance the aforesaid order of things was customary; and still on his arrival the form of words went on —

‘He has not come?’

‘He has not.’

So they grew older.  The dim shape of that third one stood continually between them; they could not displace it; neither, on the other hand, could it effectually part them. They were in close communion, yet not indissolubly united; lovers, yet never growing cured of love.  By the time that the fifth year of Nic’s visiting had arrived, on about the five-hundredth occasion of his presence at her tea-table, he noticed that the bleaching process which had begun upon his own locks was also spreading to hers.  He told her so, and they laughed.  Yet she was in good health — a condition of suspense, which would have half-killed a man, had been endured by her without complaint, and even with composure.

One day, when these years of abeyance had numbered seven, they had strolled as usual as far as the waterfall, whose faint roar formed a sort of calling voice sufficient in the circumstances to direct their listlessness.  Pausing there, he looked up at her face and said, ‘Why should we not try again, Christine?  We are legally at liberty to do so now.  Nothing venture, nothing have.’

But she would not.  Perhaps a little primness of idea was by this time ousting the native daring of Christine.  ‘What he has done once he can do twice,’ she said.  ‘He is not dead, and if we were to marry he would say we had “forced his hand,” as he said before, and duly reappear.’

Some years after, when Christine was about fifty, and Nicholas fifty-three, a new trouble of a minor kind arrived.  He found an inconvenience in traversing the distance between their two houses, particularly in damp weather, the years he had spent in trying climates abroad having sown the seeds of rheumatism, which made a journey undesirable on inclement days, even in a carriage.  He told her of this new difficulty, as he did of everything.

‘If you could live nearer,’ suggested she.

Unluckily there was no house near.  But Nicholas, though not a millionaire, was a man of means; he obtained a small piece of ground on lease at the nearest spot to, her home that it could be so obtained, which was on the opposite brink of the Froom, this river forming the boundary of the Froom-Everard manor; and here he built a cottage large enough for his wants.  This took time, and when he got into it he found its situation a great comfort to him.  He was not more than five hundred yards from her now, and gained a new pleasure in feeling that all sounds which greeted his ears, in the day or in the night, also fell upon hers — the caw of a particular rook, the voice of a neighbouring nightingale, the whistle of a local breeze, or the purl of the fall in the meadows, whose rush was a material rendering of time’s ceaseless scour over themselves, wearing them away without uniting them.

Christine’s missing husband was taking shape as a myth among the surrounding residents; but he was still believed in as corporeally imminent by Christine herself, and also, in a milder degree, by Nicholas.  For a curious unconsciousness of the long lapse of time since his revelation of himself seemed to affect the pair.  There had been no passing events to serve as chronological milestones, and the evening on which she had kept supper waiting for him still loomed out with startling nearness in their retrospects.

In the seventeenth pensive year of this their parallel march towards the common bourne, a labourer came in a hurry one day to Nicholas’s house and brought strange tidings.  The present owner of Froom-Everard — a non-resident — had been improving his property in sundry ways, and one of these was by dredging the stream which, in the course of years, had become choked with mud and weeds in its passage through the Sallows.  The process necessitated a reconstruction of the waterfall.  When the river had been pumped dry for this purpose, the skeleton of a man had been found jammed among the piles supporting the edge of the fall.  Every particle of his flesh and clothing had been eaten by fishes or abraded to nothing by the water, but the relics of a gold watch remained, and on the inside of the case was engraved the name of the maker of her husband’s watch, which she well remembered.

Nicholas, deeply agitated, hastened down to the place and examined the remains attentively, afterwards going across to Christine, and breaking the discovery to her.  She would not come to view the skeleton, which lay extended on the grass, not a finger or toe-bone missing, so neatly had the aquatic operators done their work.  Conjecture was directed to the question how Bellston had got there; and conjecture alone could give an explanation.

It was supposed that, on his way to call upon her, he had taken a short cut through the grounds, with which he was naturally very familiar, and coming to the fall under the trees had expected to find there the plank which, during his occupancy of the premises with Christine and her father, he had placed there for crossing into the meads on the other side instead of wading across as Nicholas had done.  Before discovering its removal he had probably overbalanced himself, and was thus precipitated into the cascade, the piles beneath the descending current wedging him between them like the prongs of a pitchfork, and effectually preventing the rising of his body, over which the weeds grew.  Such was the reasonable supposition concerning the discovery; but proof was never forthcoming.

‘To think,’ said Nicholas, when the remains had been decently interred, and he was again sitting with Christine — though not beside the waterfall — ’to-think how we visited him!  How we sat over him, hours and hours, gazing at him, bewailing our fate, when all the time he was ironically hissing at us from the spot, in an unknown tongue, that we could marry if we chose!’

She echoed the sentiment with a sigh.

‘I have strange fancies,’ she said.  ‘I suppose it must have been my husband who came back, and not some other man.’

Nicholas felt that there was little doubt.  ‘Besides — the skeleton’ he said.

‘Yes. . . . If it could not have been another person’s — but no, of course it was he.’

‘You might have married me on the day we had fixed, and there would have been no impediment.  You would now have been seventeen years my wife, and we might have had tall sons and daughters.’

‘It might have been so,’ she murmured.

‘Well — is it still better late than never?’

The question was one which had become complicated by the increasing years of each.  Their wills were somewhat enfeebled now, their hearts sickened of tender enterprise by hope too long deferred. Having postponed the consideration of their course till a year after the interment of Bellston, each seemed less disposed than formerly to take it up again.

‘Is it worth while, after so many years?’ she said to him.  ‘We are fairly happy as we are — perhaps happier than we should be in any other relation, seeing what old people we have grown.  The weight is gone from our lives; the shadow no longer divides us: then let us be joyful together as we are, dearest Nic, in the days of our vanity; and

With mirth and laughter let old wrinkles come.’

He fell in with these views of hers to some extent.  But occasionally he ventured to urge her to reconsider the case, though he spoke not with the fervour of his earlier years.

Autumn 1887.

The Withered Arm

I

A LORN MILKMAID

It was an eighty-cow dairy, and the troop of milkers, regular and supernumerary, were all at work; for, though the time of the year was as yet but early April, the feed lay entirely in water-meadows, and the cows were ‘in full pail.’ The hour was about six in the evening, and three fourths of the large, red, rectangular animals having been finished off, there was opportunity for a little conversation.

“He brings home his bride to-morrow, I hear. They’ve come as far as Anglebury to-day.”

The voice seemed to proceed from the belly of the cow called Cherry, but the speaker was a milking-woman, whose face was buried in the flank of that motionless beast.

“Has anybody seen her?” said another.

There was a negative response from the first. “Though they say she’s a rosy-cheeked, tisty-tosty little body enough,” she added; and as the milkmaid spoke she turned her face so that she could glance past her cow’s tail to the other side of the barton, where a thin, faded woman of thirty milked somewhat apart from the rest.

“Years younger than he, they say,” continued the second, with also a glance of reflectiveness in the same direction.

“How old do you call him, then?”

“Thirty or so.”

“More like forty,” broke in an old milkman, near, in a long white pinafore or ‘wropper,’ and with the brim of his hat tied down so that he looked like a woman. “ ‘A was born before our Great Weir was builded, and I hadn’t man’s wages when I laved water there.”

The discussion waxed so warm that the purr of the milk-streams became jerky, till a voice from another cow’s belly cried with authority, “Now then, what the Turk do it matter to us about Farmer Lodge’s age, or Farmer Lodge’s new mis’ess! I shall have to pay him nine pound a year for the rent of every one of these milchers, whatever his age or hers. Get on with your work, or ‘twill be dark before we have done. The evening is pinking in a’ready.” This speaker was the dairyman himself, by whom the milkmaids and men were employed.

Nothing more was said publicly about Farmer Lodge’s wedding, but the first woman murmured under her cow to her next neighbour, “ ‘Tis hard for she,” signifying the thin, worn milkmaid aforesaid

“Oh no,” said the second. “He hasn’t spoke to Rhoda Brook for years.”

When the milking was done they washed their pails and hung them on a many-forked stand made of the peeled limb of an oak-tree, set upright in the earth, and resembling a colossal antlered horn. The majority then dispersed in various directions homeward. The thin woman who had not spoken was joined by a boy of twelve or thereabout, and the twain went away up the field also.

Their course lay apart from that of the others, to a lonely spot high above the water-meads, and not far from the border of Egdon Heath, whose dark countenance was visible in the distance as they drew nigh to their home.

“They’ve just been saying down in barton that your father brings his young wife home from Anglebury tomorrow,” the woman observed. “I shall want to send you for a few things to market, and you’ll be pretty sure to meet ‘em.”

“Yes, mother,” said the boy. “Is father married, then?”

“Yes.... You can give her a look, and tell me what she’s like, if you do see her.”

“Yes, mother.”

“If she’s dark or fair, and if she’s tall — as tall as I. And if she seems like a woman who has ever worked for a living, or one that has been always well off, and has never done anything, and shows marks of the lady on her, as I expect she do.”

“Yes.”

They crept up the hill in the twilight, and entered the cottage. It was thatched, and built of mud-walls, the surface of which had been washed by many rains into channels and depressions that left none of the original flat face visible; while here and there a rafter showed like a bone protruding through the skin.

She was kneeling down in the chimney-corner, before two pieces of turf laid together with the heather inward, blowing at the red-hot ashes with her breath till the turfs flamed. The radiance lit her pale cheek, and made her dark eyes, that had once been handsome, seem handsome anew. “Yes,” she resumed, “see if she is dark or fair; and if you can, notice if her hands are white; if not, see if they look as though she had ever done housework, or are milker’s hands like mine.”