Complete Works of Thomas Hardy (Illustrated) (876 page)

‘About half an hour after the young farmer awoke, and looking across the room saw that his friend Georgy had gone away in clothes which didn’t belong to him, and had kindly left for himself the seedy ones worn by Georgy. At this he sat up in a deep thought for some time, instead of hastening to give an alarm. “The money, the money is gone,” he said to himself, “and that’s bad. But so are the clothes.”

‘He then looked upon the table and saw that the money, or most of it, had been left behind.

‘ “Ha, ha, ha!” he cried, and began to dance about the room. “Ha, ha, ha!” he said again, and made beautiful smiles to himself in the shaving glass and in the brass candlestick; and then swung about his arms for all the world as if he were going through the sword exercise.

‘When he had dressed himself in Georgy’s clothes and gone downstairs, he did not seem to mind at all that they took him for the other; and even when he saw that he had been left a bad horse for a good one, he was not inclined to cry out. They told him his friend had paid the bill, at which he seemed much pleased, and without waiting for breakfast he mounted Georgy’s horse and rode away likewise, choosing the nearest by-lane in preference to the high-road, without knowing that Georgy had chosen that by-lane also.

‘He had not trotted more than two miles in the personal character of Georgy Crookhill when, suddenly rounding a bend that the lane made thereabout, he came upon a man struggling in the hands of two village constables. It was his friend Georgy, the borrower of his clothes and horse. But so far was the young farmer from showing any alacrity in rushing forward to claim his property that he would have turned the poor beast he rode into the wood adjoining, if he had not been already perceived.

‘ “Help, help, help!” cried the constables. “Assistance in the name of the Crown!”

‘The young farmer could do nothing but ride forward. “What’s the matter?” he inquired, as coolly as he could.

‘ “A deserter – a deserter!” said they. “One who’s to be tried by court martial and shot without parley. He deserted from the Dragoons at Cheltenham some days ago, and was tracked; but the search-party can’t find him anywhere, and we told ‘em if we met him we’d hand him on to ‘em forthwith. The day after he left the barracks the rascal met a respectable farmer and made him drunk at an inn, and told him what a fine soldier he would make, and coaxed him to change clothes, to see how well a military uniform would become him. This the simple farmer did; when our deserter said that for a joke he would leave the room and go to the landlady, to see if she would know him in that dress. He never came back, and Farmer Jollice found himself in soldier’s clothes, the money in his pockets gone, and, when he got to the stable, his horse gone too.”

‘ “A scoundrel!” says the young man in Georgy’s clothes. “And is this the wretched caitiff?” (pointing to Georgy).

‘ “No, no!” cries Georgy, as innocent as a babe of this matter of the soldier’s desertion. “He’s the man! He was wearing Farmer Jollice’s suit o’clothes, and he slept in the same room wi’ me, and brought up the subject of changing clothes, which put it into my head to dress myself in his suit before he was awake. He’s got on mine!”

‘ “D’ye hear the villain?” groans the tall young man to the constables. “Trying to get out of his crime by charging the first innocent man with it that he sees! No, master soldier – that won’t do!”

‘ “No, no! That won’t do!” the constables chimed in. “To have the impudence to say such as that, when we caught him in the act almost! But, thank God, we’ve got the handcuffs on him at last.”

‘ “We have, thank God,” said the tall young man. “Well, I must move on. Good luck to ye with your prisoner!” And off he went, as fast as his poor jade would carry him.

‘The constables then, with Georgy handcuffed between ‘em, and leading the horse, marched off in the other direction, toward the village where they had been accosted by the escort of soldiers sent to bring the deserter back, Georgy groaning: “I shall be shot, I shall be shot!” They had not gone more than a mile before they met them.

‘ “Hoi, there!” says the head constable.

‘ “Hoi, yerself!” says the corporal in charge.

‘ “We’ve got your man,” says the constable.

‘ “Where?” says the corporal.

‘ “Here, between us,” said the constable. “Only you don’t recognize him out o’ uniform.”

‘The corporal looked at Georgy hard enough; then shook his head and said he was not the absconder.

‘ “But the absconder changed clothes with Farmer Jollice, and took his horse; and this man has em, d’ye see!”

‘ “ ‘Tis not our man,” said the soldiers. “He’s a tall young fellow with a mole on his right cheek, and a military bearing, which this man decidedly has not.”

‘ “I told the two officers of justice that ‘twas the other!” pleaded Georgy. “But they wouldn’t believe me.”

‘And so it became clear that the missing dragoon was the tall young farmer, and not Georgy Crookhill – a fact which Farmer Jollice himself corroborated when he arrived on the scene. As Georgy had only robbed the robber, his sentence was comparatively light. The deserter from the Dragoons was never traced: his double shift of clothing having been of the greatest advantage to him in getting off; though he left Georgy’s horse behind him a few miles ahead, having found the poor creature more hindrance than aid.’

The man from abroad seemed to be less interested in the questionable characters of Longpuddle and their strange adventures than in the ordinary inhabitants and the ordinary events, though his local fellow-travellers preferred the former as subjects of discussion. He now for the first time asked concerning young persons of the opposite sex – or rather those who had been young when he left his native land. His informants, adhering to their own opinion that the remarkable was better worth telling than the ordinary, would not allow him to dwell upon the simple chronicles of those who had merely come and gone. They asked him if he remembered Netty Sargent.

‘Netty Sargent – I do, just remember her. She was a young woman living with her uncle when I left, if my childish recollection may be trusted.’

‘That was the maid. She was a oneyer, if you like, sir. Not any harm in her, you know, but up to everything. You ought to hear how she got the copyhold of her house extended. Oughtn’t he, Mr. Day?’

‘He ought, replied the world-ignored old painter.

‘Tell him, Mr. Day. Nobody can do it better than you, and you know the legal part better than some of us.’

Day apologized, and began: –

The Doctor’s Legend

I

“Not more than half-a-dozen miles from the Wessex coast” (said the doctor) “is a mansion which appeared newer in the last century than it appears at the present day after years of neglect and occupation by inferior tenants. It was owned by a man of five-and-twenty, than whom a more ambitious personage never surveyed his face in a glass. His name I will not mention out of respect to those of his blood and connections who may remain on earth, if any such there be. In the words of a writer of that time who knew him well, he was ‘one whom anything would petrify but nothing would soften’.

“This worthy gentleman was of so elevated and refined a nature that he never gave a penny to women who uttered bad words in their trouble and rage, or who wore dirty aprons in view of his front door. On those misguided ones who did not pull the fore-lock to him in passing, and call him ‘your Honour’ and ‘Squire’, he turned shoulder of scorn, especially when he wore his finer ruffles and gold seals.

“Neither his personal nor real estate at this time was large; but the latter he made the most of by jealously guarding it, as of the former by his economics. Yet though his fields and woods were well-watched by his gamekeepers and other dependents, such was his dislike to intrusion that he never ceased to watch the watchers. He stopped footpaths and enclosed lands. He made no exception to these sentiments in the case of his own villagers, whose faces were never to be seen in his private grounds except on pressing errands.

“Outside his garden-wall, near the entrance to the park, there lived a poor woman with an only child. This child had been so unfortunate as to trespass upon the Squire’s lawn on more than one occasion, in search of flowers; and on this incident, trivial as it was, hung much that was afterwards of concern to the house and lineage of the Squire. It seems that the Squire had sent a message to the little girl’s mother concerning the nuisance; nevertheless, only a few days afterwards, he saw the child there again. This unwarrantable impertinence, as the owner and landlord deemed it to be, irritated him exceedingly; and, with his walking cane elevated, he began to pursue the child to teach her by chastisement what she would not learn by exhortation.

“Naturally enough, as soon as the girl saw the Squire in pursuit of her she gave a loud scream, and started off like a hare; but the only entrance to the grounds being on the side which the Squire’s position commanded, she could not escape, and endeavoured to elude him by winding, and doubling in her terrified course. Finding her, by reason of her fleetness, not so easy to chastise as he had imagined, her assailant lost his temper — never a very difficult matter — and the more loudly she screamed the more angrily did he pursue. A more untoward interruption to the peace of a beautiful and secluded spot was never seen.

“The race continued, and the Squire, now panting with rage and exertion, drew closer to his victim. To the horrified eyes of the child, when she gazed over her shoulder, his face appeared like a crimson mask set with eyes of fire. The glance sealed her fate in the race. By a sudden start forward he caught hold of her by the skirt of her short frock flying behind. The clutch so terrified the child that, with a louder shriek than ever, she leapt from his grasp, leaving the skirt in his hand. But she did not go far; in a few more moments she fell on the ground in an epileptic fit.

“This strange, and, but for its painfulness, even ludicrous scene, was witnessed by one of the gardeners who had been working near, and the squire haughtily directed him to take the prostrate and quivering child home; after which he walked off, by no means pleased with himself at the unmanly and undignified part which a violent temper had led him to play.

“The mother of the girl was in great distress when she saw her only child brought home in such a condition: she was still more distressed, when in the course of a day or two, it became doubtful if fright had not deprived the girl entirely of her reason, as well as of her health. In the singular, nervous malady which supervened the child’s hair came off, and her teeth fell from her gums; till no one could have recognised in the mere scare-crow that she appeared, the happy and laughing youngster of a few weeks before.

“The mother was a woman of very different mettle from her poor child. Impassioned and determined in character, she was not one to provoke with impunity. And her moods were as enduring as they were deep. Seeing what a wreck her darling had become she went on foot to the manor-house, and, contrary to the custom of the villagers, rang at the front door, where she asked to see that ruffian the master of the mansion who had ruined her only child. The Squire sent out a reply that he was very sorry for the girl, but that he could not see her mother, accompanying his message by a solatium of five shillings.

“In the bitterness of her hate, the woman threw the five-shilling-piece through the panes of the dining-room window, and went home to brood again over her idiotized child.

“One day a little later, when the girl was well enough to play in the lane, she came in with a bigger girl who took care of her.

“‘Death’s Head — I be Death’s Head — hee, hee!’ said the child.

“‘What?’ said her mother, turning pale.

“The girl in charge explained that the other children had nicknamed her daughter ‘Death’s Head’ since she had lost her hair, from her resemblance to a skull.

“When the elder girl was gone the mother carefully regarded the child from a distance. In a moment she saw how cruelly apt the sobriquet was. The bald scalp, the hollow cheeks — by reason of the absence of teeth — and the saucer eyes, the cadaverous hue, had, indeed, a startling likeness to that bony relic of mortality.

“At this time the Squire was successfully soliciting in marriage a certain Lady Cicely, the daughter of an ancient and noble house in that county. During the ensuing summer their nuptials were celebrated, and the young wife brought home amid great rejoicing, and ringing of bells, and dancing on the green, followed by a bonfire after dark on the hill. The woman whose disfigured child was as the apple of her eye to her, saw all this, and the greater the good fortune that fell to the Squire, the more envenomed did she become.

“The newly-wedded lady was much liked by the villagers in general, to whom she was very charitable, intelligently entering into their lives and histories, and endeavouring to relieve their cares. On a particular evening of the ensuing Autumn when she had been a wife but a few months, after some parish-visiting, she was returning homeward to dinner on foot, her way to the mansion lying by the churchyard-wall. It was barely dusk, but a full harvest moon was shining from the east. At this moment of the Lady Cicely’s return, it chanced that the widow with her afflicted girl was crossing the churchyard by the footpath from gate to gate. The churchyard was in obscurity, being shaded by the yews. Seeing the lady in the adjoining highway, the woman hastily left the footpath with the child, crossed the graves to the shadow of the wall outside which the lady was passing, and pulled off the child’s hood so that the baldness was revealed. Whispering to the child, ‘Grin at her my deary!’ she held up the little girl as high as she could, which was just sufficient to disclose her face over the coping of the wall to a person on the other side.

“The moonlight fell upon the sepulchral face and head, intensifying the child’s daytime aspect till it was only too much like that which had suggested the nickname. The unsuspecting and timid lady — a perfect necrophobist by reason of the care with which everything unpleasant had been kept out of her dainty life — saw the death — like shape, and, shrieking with sudden terror, fell to the ground. The lurking woman with her child disappeared in another direction, and passed through the churchyard gate homeward.