Complete Works of Thomas Hardy (Illustrated) (305 page)

The dragoons passed in front of the lookers-on as the others had done, and their gay plumes, which had hung lazily during the ascent, swung to northward as they reached the top, showing that on the summit a fresh breeze blew.  ‘But look across there,’ said Anne.  There had entered upon the down from another direction several battalions of foot, in white kerseymere breeches and cloth gaiters.  They seemed to be weary from a long march, the original black of their gaiters and boots being whity-brown with dust.  Presently came regimental waggons, and the private canteen carts which followed at the end of a convoy.

The space in front of the mill-pond was now occupied by nearly all the inhabitants of the village, who had turned out in alarm, and remained for pleasure, their eyes lighted up with interest in what they saw; for trappings and regimentals, war horses and men, in towns an attraction, were here almost a sublimity.

The troops filed to their lines, dismounted, and in quick time took off their accoutrements, rolled up their sheep-skins, picketed and unbitted their horses, and made ready to erect the tents as soon as they could be taken from the waggons and brought forward.  When this was done, at a given signal the canvases flew up from the sod; and thenceforth every man had a place in which to lay his head.

Though nobody seemed to be looking on but the few at the window and in the village street, there were, as a matter of fact, many eyes converging upon that military arrival in its high and conspicuous position, not to mention the glances of birds and other wild creatures.  Men in distant gardens, women in orchards and at cottage-doors, shepherds on remote hills, turnip-hoers in blue-green enclosures miles away, captains with spy-glasses out at sea, were regarding the picture keenly.  Those three or four thousand men of one machine-like movement, some of them swashbucklers by nature; others, doubtless, of a quiet shop-keeping disposition who had inadvertently got into uniform — all of them had arrived from nobody knew where, and hence were matter of great curiosity.  They seemed to the mere eye to belong to a different order of beings from those who inhabited the valleys below.  Apparently unconscious and careless of what all the world was doing elsewhere, they remained picturesquely engrossed in the business of making themselves a habitation on the isolated spot which they had chosen.

Mrs. Garland was of a festive and sanguine turn of mind, a woman soon set up and soon set down, and the coming of the regiments quite excited her.  She thought there was reason for putting on her best cap, thought that perhaps there was not; that she would hurry on the dinner and go out in the afternoon; then that she would, after all, do nothing unusual, nor show any silly excitements whatever, since they were unbecoming in a mother and a widow.  Thus circumscribing her intentions till she was toned down to an ordinary person of forty, Mrs. Garland accompanied her daughter downstairs to dine, saying, ‘Presently we will call on Miller Loveday, and hear what he thinks of it all.’

CHAPTER II. 

SOMEBODY KNOCKS AND COMES IN

Miller Loveday was the representative of an ancient family of corn-grinders whose history is lost in the mists of antiquity.  His ancestral line was contemporaneous with that of De Ros, Howard, and De La Zouche; but, owing to some trifling deficiency in the possessions of the house of Loveday, the individual names and intermarriages of its members were not recorded during the Middle Ages, and thus their private lives in any given century were uncertain.  But it was known that the family had formed matrimonial alliances with farmers not so very small, and once with a gentleman-tanner, who had for many years purchased after their death the horses of the most aristocratic persons in the county — fiery steeds that earlier in their career had been valued at many hundred guineas.

It was also ascertained that Mr. Loveday’s great-grandparents had been eight in number, and his great-great-grandparents sixteen, every one of whom reached to years of discretion: at every stage backwards his sires and gammers thus doubled and doubled till they became a vast body of Gothic ladies and gentlemen of the rank known as ceorls or villeins, full of importance to the country at large, and ramifying throughout the unwritten history of England.  His immediate father had greatly improved the value of their residence by building a new chimney, and setting up an additional pair of millstones.

Overcombe Mill presented at one end the appearance of a hard-worked house slipping into the river, and at the other of an idle, genteel place, half-cloaked with creepers at this time of the year, and having no visible connection with flour.  It had hips instead of gables, giving it a round-shouldered look, four chimneys with no smoke coming out of them, two zigzag cracks in the wall, several open windows, with a looking-glass here and there inside, showing its warped back to the passer-by; snowy dimity curtains waving in the draught; two mill doors, one above the other, the upper enabling a person to step out upon nothing at a height of ten feet from the ground; a gaping arch vomiting the river, and a lean, long-nosed fellow looking out from the mill doorway, who was the hired grinder, except when a bulging fifteen stone man occupied the same place, namely, the miller himself.

Behind the mill door, and invisible to the mere wayfarer who did not visit the family, were chalked addition and subtraction sums, many of them originally done wrong, and the figures half rubbed out and corrected, noughts being turned into nines, and ones into twos.  These were the miller’s private calculations.  There were also chalked in the same place rows and rows of strokes like open palings, representing the calculations of the grinder, who in his youthful ciphering studies had not gone so far as Arabic figures.

In the court in front were two worn-out millstones, made useful again by being let in level with the ground.  Here people stood to smoke and consider things in muddy weather; and cats slept on the clean surfaces when it was hot.  In the large stubbard-tree at the corner of the garden was erected a pole of larch fir, which the miller had bought with others at a sale of small timber in Damer’s Wood one Christmas week.  It rose from the upper boughs of the tree to about the height of a fisherman’s mast, and on the top was a vane in the form of a sailor with his arm stretched out.  When the sun shone upon this figure it could be seen that the greater part of his countenance was gone, and the paint washed from his body so far as to reveal that he had been a soldier in red before he became a sailor in blue.  The image had, in fact, been John, one of our coming characters, and was then turned into Robert, another of them.  This revolving piece of statuary could not, however, be relied on as a vane, owing to the neighbouring hill, which formed variable currents in the wind.

The leafy and quieter wing of the mill-house was the part occupied by Mrs. Garland and her daughter, who made up in summer-time for the narrowness of their quarters by overflowing into the garden on stools and chairs.  The parlour or dining-room had a stone floor — a fact which the widow sought to disguise by double carpeting, lest the standing of Anne and herself should be lowered in the public eye.  Here now the mid-day meal went lightly and mincingly on, as it does where there is no greedy carnivorous man to keep the dishes about, and was hanging on the close when somebody entered the passage as far as the chink of the parlour door, and tapped.  This proceeding was probably adopted to kindly avoid giving trouble to Susan, the neighbour’s pink daughter, who helped at Mrs. Garland’s in the mornings, but was at that moment particularly occupied in standing on the water-butt and gazing at the soldiers, with an inhaling position of the mouth and circular eyes.

There was a flutter in the little dining-room — the sensitiveness of habitual solitude makes hearts beat for preternaturally small reasons — and a guessing as to who the visitor might be.  It was some military gentleman from the camp perhaps?  No; that was impossible.  It was the parson?  No; he would not come at dinner-time.  It was the well-informed man who travelled with drapery and the best Birmingham earrings?  Not at all; his time was not till Thursday at three.  Before they could think further the visitor moved forward another step, and the diners got a glimpse of him through the same friendly chink that had afforded him a view of the Garland dinner-table.

‘O!  It is only Loveday.’

This approximation to nobody was the miller above mentioned, a hale man of fifty-five or sixty — hale all through, as many were in those days, and not merely veneered with purple by exhilarating victuals and drinks, though the latter were not at all despised by him.  His face was indeed rather pale than otherwise, for he had just come from the mill.  It was capable of immense changes of expression: mobility was its essence, a roll of flesh forming a buttress to his nose on each side, and a deep ravine lying between his lower lip and the tumulus represented by his chin.  These fleshy lumps moved stealthily, as if of their own accord, whenever his fancy was tickled.

His eyes having lighted on the table-cloth, plates, and viands, he found himself in a position which had a sensible awkwardness for a modest man who always liked to enter only at seasonable times the presence of a girl of such pleasantly soft ways as Anne Garland, she who could make apples seem like peaches, and throw over her shillings the glamour of guineas when she paid him for flour.

‘Dinner is over, neighbour Loveday; please come in,’ said the widow, seeing his case.  The miller said something about coming in presently; but Anne pressed him to stay, with a tender motion of her lip as it played on the verge of a solicitous smile without quite lapsing into one — her habitual manner when speaking.

Loveday took off his low-crowned hat and advanced.  He had not come about pigs or fowls this time.  ‘You have been looking out, like the rest o’ us, no doubt, Mrs. Garland, at the mampus of soldiers that have come upon the down?  Well, one of the horse regiments is the — th Dragoons, my son John’s regiment, you know.’

The announcement, though it interested them, did not create such an effect as the father of John had seemed to anticipate; but Anne, who liked to say pleasant things, replied, ‘The dragoons looked nicer than the foot, or the German cavalry either.’

‘They are a handsome body of men,’ said the miller in a disinterested voice.  ‘Faith! I didn’t know they were coming, though it may be in the newspaper all the time.  But old Derriman keeps it so long that we never know things till they be in everybody’s mouth.’

This Derriman was a squireen living near, who was chiefly distinguished in the present warlike time by having a nephew in the yeomanry.

‘We were told that the yeomanry went along the turnpike road yesterday,’ said Anne; ‘and they say that they were a pretty sight, and quite soldierly.’

‘Ah! well — they be not regulars,’ said Miller Loveday, keeping back harsher criticism as uncalled for.  But inflamed by the arrival of the dragoons, which had been the exciting cause of his call, his mind would not go to yeomanry.  ‘John has not been home these five years,’ he said.

‘And what rank does he hold now?’ said the widow.

‘He’s trumpet-major, ma’am; and a good musician.’  The miller, who was a good father, went on to explain that John had seen some service, too.  He had enlisted when the regiment was lying in this neighbourhood, more than eleven years before, which put his father out of temper with him, as he had wished him to follow on at the mill.  But as the lad had enlisted seriously, and as he had often said that he would be a soldier, the miller had thought that he would let Jack take his chance in the profession of his choice.

Loveday had two sons, and the second was now brought into the conversation by a remark of Anne’s that neither of them seemed to care for the miller’s business.

‘No,’ said Loveday in a less buoyant tone.  ‘Robert, you see, must needs go to sea.’

‘He is much younger than his brother?’ said Mrs. Garland.

About four years, the miller told her.  His soldier son was two-and-thirty, and Bob was twenty-eight.  When Bob returned from his present voyage, he was to be persuaded to stay and assist as grinder in the mill, and go to sea no more.

‘A sailor-miller!’ said Anne.

‘O, he knows as much about mill business as I do,’ said Loveday; ‘he was intended for it, you know, like John.  But, bless me!’ he continued, ‘I am before my story.  I’m come more particularly to ask you, ma’am, and you, Anne my honey, if you will join me and a few friends at a leetle homely supper that I shall gi’e to please the chap now he’s come?  I can do no less than have a bit of a randy, as the saying is, now that he’s here safe and sound.’

Mrs. Garland wanted to catch her daughter’s eye; she was in some doubt about her answer.  But Anne’s eye was not to be caught, for she hated hints, nods, and calculations of any kind in matters which should be regulated by impulse; and the matron replied, ‘If so be ‘tis possible, we’ll be there.  You will tell us the day?’

He would, as soon as he had seen son John.  ‘‘Twill be rather untidy, you know, owing to my having no womenfolks in the house; and my man David is a poor dunder-headed feller for getting up a feast.  Poor chap! his sight is bad, that’s true, and he’s very good at making the beds, and oiling the legs of the chairs and other furniture, or I should have got rid of him years ago.’

‘You should have a woman to attend to the house, Loveday,’ said the widow.

‘Yes, I should, but — .  Well, ‘tis a fine day, neighbours.  Hark!  I fancy I hear the noise of pots and pans up at the camp, or my ears deceive me.  Poor fellows, they must be hungry!  Good day t’ye, ma’am.’  And the miller went away.

All that afternoon Overcombe continued in a ferment of interest in the military investment, which brought the excitement of an invasion without the strife.  There were great discussions on the merits and appearance of the soldiery.  The event opened up, to the girls unbounded possibilities of adoring and being adored, and to the young men an embarrassment of dashing acquaintances which quite superseded falling in love.  Thirteen of these lads incontinently stated within the space of a quarter of an hour that there was nothing in the world like going for a soldier.  The young women stated little, but perhaps thought the more; though, in justice, they glanced round towards the encampment from the corners of their blue and brown eyes in the most demure and modest manner that could be desired.