Complete Works of Thomas Hardy (Illustrated) (925 page)

“I had no idea until a day or two ago that there were any letters there,” she said. “The bureau was in a room where Roger kept old books that he never used, but evidently did not wish to destroy or give away; his school trunks, sets of games and other boyish treasures.  Indeed I did not know that he used the bureau at all for he always kept the room locked up.”

They went together to a spare room and she showed him the letters and papers, all neatly ranged in various drawers and pigeon-holes.

“I would have gone through these myself,” she said in a low tone; “but just now it seems beyond me.”

He threw an enquiring glance towards her and noticed her air of depression, and the weary look in her eyes. She left him when he had assured her that he could run through the letters more expeditiously with out her aid. Taking a packet from the top drawer and slipping off an elastic band he began to read.

He had been through quite half a dozen letters before the meaning of their so careful concealment in the bureau struck home to his puzzled senses. Here, he felt, his hand was on a clue which, followed up, would explain much of the hidden side of Wingate’s character that he had suspected but never clearly viewed. Reading on and on he drew deep breaths of bewilderment as packet after packet revealed a hitherto unknown Wingate, one to whom base trickery and unholy alliances had not been too mean weapons for gaining desired ends. No laudatory biography could have been written had these  circumstances been revealed before. He remembered bitterly one chapter that he had filled with an exposition of Wingate’s loyalty to a party, which, as these letters showed, he had basely sold.  There was no proof of any great, overwhelming temptation and sudden, pitiable fall, such as the heart of any understanding man might have forgiven.  He had lied and cheated in a calm deliberate manner, using, as in all other circumstances of his life, that unconquerable will, which it seemed had awed his accomplices into lasting silence.

Fadelle, in reading, wondered why Wingate should have piled together and preserved this mass of evidence now before him, for had these letters and papers, all damning records, been burnt, the high integrity of his character would have remained undoubted.  An ordinary man, with little of state craft and nothing of Wingate’s ability, would have taken this ordinary precaution.  Nevertheless, people did such things as keep compromising papers, and, it was not out of accord with Wingate’s character that he should have hurled his own image from its pedestal thus violently.  No gradual descent would have served that supreme wilfulness.

The last packet of letters gave the final blow, and Fadelle put his hand to his head mechanically, as if amazed at the dull numbing pain it had sustained.  Up to this moment he had held that his friend had carried, as a well of sweetening waters in the inviolable recesses of his heart, deep and unstained reverence for a domestic ideal, but these letters spoke of the deepest treachery, not to his party this time but to his wife.

He put them down and rested his aching head on his hands.  Gradually the dubious haze and confusion cleared away and a tiny ray of light, no more than a pin-point at first-pierced the darkness and grew and grew until his mind was illuminated by one vast idea.  He, Philip Fadelle, had triumphed at last: his adversary, after long years of victory, had met with one finally decisive stroke, for Fate had taken up arms against her erstwhile favourite on Fadelle’s behalf.

One thing seemed plain enough to him: the biography could hardly be published now, at any rate not as he had written it.  Gertrude would share the disillusionment, and not, so he dared to think, too regretfully. There was no reason now for her keeping faith with the memory of one who had been so unfaithful to her as she must be made to know. Things grew clearer and clearer to him, and at length he was serenely contented. He seemed to beholding out a cynically good-natured hand to Wingate across the dividing stream.

“I’ve won at last, old friend. You made a good fight of it always; but now, like the sportsman you always were, you must confess yourself beaten.”

Strange that even now, with that confuting pile of letters before him, he should still cherish the idea of Wingate’s straightness.        

A slight noise made him start, and he turned to see that Gertrude had entered the room. In her hand she held some unfolded pages. She had been looking in a writing case that had belonged to her husband, one that had been used only when he was travelling, and in it she had found a letter, unfinished. “Addressed to me,” she said with a slight   tremor in her voice.”  From the date I imagine that it was written while he was out of Town, during that last short holiday he took before his death. I remember that he was called back suddenly, and that is, probably, why this letter was never finished.”

He asked, somewhat bewildered, if she wished him to read it.

“I thought you would like to, as he speaks very beautifully of you. I was greatly touched. It is like a message from the dead.”

Fadelle’s eyes lingered for a moment upon the letters spread before him on the bureau: there, too, was a message, but of a different cast. “Have you found anything there of importance?” asked Gertrude, her glance following his.

Moved by a sudden impulse, strange even to himself, he answered hurriedly that there was nothing; he supposed that the letters had been put there so that they might, after an interval, be destroyed. Of their nature he said nothing, and Gertrude then left him.  

When he was alone he wondered why he had failed to reveal that which must be made known at some time: the opportunity had presented itself so aptly, and yet he had omitted to make use of it.  Wingate, he was sure, had never hesitated to grasp the slightest chance; and here was he, in the moment of victory, acknowledging his weakness. 

With a sigh he gathered together the letters of the last packet and slipped around them their elastic band, having done which he took up the written sheets which Gertrude had left.    

“I have been wondering who would be the best man for this purpose, and I have come to the conclusion that there is only one of all my host of acquaintances in whom I am able to place implicit trust, and that one is Philip Fadelle.  I am sorry that we have seen so little of him lately, but that has not been my fault. Indeed, as years pass, I realise more fully the loyalty of his friendship; he has been the same from boyhood, your friend and my friend, and I am certain that if I call upon him now to do me this service he will not fail me.  I am going to ask him — ”

The letter ended abruptly, leaving Fadelle in ignorance concerning the request that his dead friend would have made.  With a steady hand he laid it on the top of the bureau.  It was, indeed, a message from the dead, a supplication rather, an appeal, to which he could not but respond.

“He will not fail me.” He repeated the words: they were uncanny now. Yes, Wingate had judged him well, he could not fail him; could not reveal. Once more his glance fell upon the packets of betraying letters, ranged in drawer and pigeon-hole, and then he walked back to one of the windows. Below, in the sunlight, he saw the figure of Gertrude moving among the flaming torch-lilies and flaunting golden-rod in the long garden at the side of the house.  Some distance behind her, at the end of the kitchen garden, arose a thin blue column of smoke from a pile of burning weeds; the sight suggested to him a course of action and he went down.

As he drew near to her he saw in her eyes that she wished to know how the letter had affected him, but of that he had determined he would not speak.

“I have looked through the letters in the bureau,” he said steadily. “They relate mostly to private political matters, and were evidently meant to be destroyed.  Perhaps it would be better for me to take them away with me to look through them again more leisurely than I have time to do now. If I find nothing in them that needs preserving I suppose I have your permission to destroy them. I suppose that you do not wish to read them?”

He waited in strained suspense for her answer, which came as he had thought.

“No thank you. I would much rather not, if you do not think it necessary. I think there can be nothing more depressing than reading such letters, and I hope that I have seen the last of them.”

As they sauntered in the garden she again approached, almost shyly, the question of his departure, and it was evident that she wished him to remain longer. These tentative advances were disregarded by Fadelle. All that he wished now was to free himself as quickly as possible from the burden of obligation to his dead friend, which pressed upon his shoulders with ever increasing weight.

When the time arrived for him to go to the station and Gertrude appeared, ready to drive him in her dogcart, it was clear, even to his dulled bachelor perceptions, that her costume of thick cream serge and hat to match had no suggestion of widowhood; and the light tendrils of hair that blew across her brow were almost virginal in their significance.

As they drove along he remarked dully that the bracken was taking to itself deeper tints of brown and gold. A strange silence fell between them, a silence that seemed ever at breaking point. He felt that at a word from Gertrude the whole face of his mental world might have changed for ever, but the word was not spoken, though he seemed to see its shadow on her lips and in her eyes. At the same quiet wayside station where she had met him upon his arrival the pony drew up, and he found that there was the briefest possible space in which to wait for the train; he wondered, even then, what the interval might bring forth, but its sliding moments proved barren. Gertrude spoke of the bright flowers of early autumn that were beginning to bloom in the neat little station-garden, and she stooped and petted a serious station-cat which strolled leisurely among the luggage. Then the train rushed in.

Fadelle had made his farewell and taken his seat when she moved suddenly forward, her lips eagerly parted.

“Goodbye, Goodbye!” He leaned from the window as the train started, and his voice drowned what she might have said.

She took a few quick steps, not half a dozen in all, by the side of the moving carriage, and he knew that she had something to say then that might never again be said.

“Goodbye!” He dropped back in his seat and saw her left behind, the light dying out of her face as she stood still.

It was not until the train had pulsed and rattled onward for some miles, and he felt himself being carried to pastures unstained by memory, that he uttered to himself a comment which was to him the final token of the affair — that from the other side of the grave Wingate had played his last card and won.

The Poetry Collections

Thomas Hardy’s birthplace, Higher Bockhampton, Dorset

Thomas Hardy’s parents— his father Thomas was a successful stonemason and his mother Jemima was well-educated.

Hardy in 1856, aged 16

WESSEX POEMS AND OTHER VERSES