Complete Works of Thomas Hardy (Illustrated) (322 page)

They all sat down to high tea, Anne and her mother included, and the captain sitting next to Miss Johnson.  Anne had put a brave face upon the matter — outwardly, at least — and seemed in a fair way of subduing any lingering sentiment which Bob’s return had revived.  During the evening, and while they still sat over the meal, John came down on a hurried visit, as he had promised, ostensibly on purpose to be introduced to his intended sister-in-law, but much more to get a word and a smile from his beloved Anne.  Before they saw him, they heard the trumpet-major’s smart step coming round the corner of the house, and in a moment his form darkened the door.  As it was Sunday, he appeared in his full-dress laced coat, white waistcoat and breeches, and towering plume, the latter of which he instantly lowered, as much from necessity as good manners, the beam in the mill-house ceiling having a tendency to smash and ruin all such head-gear without warning.

‘John, we’ve been hoping you would come down,’ said the miller, ‘and so we have kept the tay about on purpose.  Draw up, and speak to Mrs. Matilda Johnson. . . . Ma’am, this is Robert’s brother.’

‘Your humble servant, ma’am,’ said the trumpet-major gallantly.

As it was getting dusk in the low, small-paned room, he instinctively moved towards Miss Johnson as he spoke, who sat with her back to the window.  He had no sooner noticed her features than his helmet nearly fell from his hand; his face became suddenly fixed, and his natural complexion took itself off, leaving a greenish yellow in its stead.  The young person, on her part, had no sooner looked closely at him than she said weakly, ‘Robert’s brother!’ and changed colour yet more rapidly than the soldier had done.  The faintness, previously half counterfeit, seized on her now in real earnest.

‘I don’t feel well,’ she said, suddenly rising by an effort.  ‘This warm day has quite upset me!’

There was a regular collapse of the tea-party, like that of the Hamlet play scene.  Bob seized his sweetheart and carried her upstairs, the miller exclaiming, ‘Ah, she’s terribly worn by the journey!  I thought she was when I saw her nearly go off at the blare of the cow.  No woman would have been frightened at that if she’d been up to her natural strength.’

‘That, and being so very shy of men, too, must have made John’s handsome regimentals quite overpowering to her, poor thing,’ added Mrs. Garland, following the catastrophic young lady upstairs, whose indisposition was this time beyond question.  And yet, by some perversity of the heart, she was as eager now to make light of her faintness as she had been to make much of it two or three hours ago.

The miller and John stood like straight sticks in the room the others had quitted, John’s face being hastily turned towards a caricature of Buonaparte on the wall that he had not seen more than a hundred and fifty times before.

‘Come, sit down and have a dish of tea, anyhow,’ said his father at last.  ‘She’ll soon be right again, no doubt.’

‘Thanks; I don’t want any tea,’ said John quickly.  And, indeed, he did not, for he was in one gigantic ache from head to foot.

The light had been too dim for anybody to notice his amazement; and not knowing where to vent it, the trumpet-major said he was going out for a minute.  He hastened to the bakehouse; but David being there, he went to the pantry; but the maid being there, he went to the cart-shed; but a couple of tramps being there, he went behind a row of French beans in the garden, where he let off an ejaculation the most pious that he had uttered that Sabbath day: ‘Heaven! what’s to be done!’

And then he walked wildly about the paths of the dusky garden, where the trickling of the brooks seemed loud by comparison with the stillness around; treading recklessly on the cracking snails that had come forth to feed, and entangling his spurs in the long grass till the rowels were choked with its blades.  Presently he heard another person approaching, and his brother’s shape appeared between the stubbard tree and the hedge.

‘O, is it you?’ said the mate.

‘Yes.  I am — taking a little air.’

‘She is getting round nicely again; and as I am not wanted indoors just now, I am going into the village to call upon a friend or two I have not been able to speak to as yet.’

John took his brother Bob’s hand.  Bob rather wondered why.

‘All right, old boy,’ he said.  ‘Going into the village?  You’ll be back again, I suppose, before it gets very late?’

‘O yes,’ said Captain Bob cheerfully, and passed out of the garden.

John allowed his eyes to follow his brother till his shape could not be seen, and then he turned and again walked up and down.

CHAPTER XVIII. 

THE NIGHT AFTER THE ARRIVAL

John continued his sad and heavy pace till walking seemed too old and worn-out a way of showing sorrow so new, and he leant himself against the fork of an apple-tree like a log.  There the trumpet-major remained for a considerable time, his face turned towards the house, whose ancient, many-chimneyed outline rose against the darkened sky, and just shut out from his view the camp above.  But faint noises coming thence from horses restless at the pickets, and from visitors taking their leave, recalled its existence, and reminded him that, in consequence of Matilda’s arrival, he had obtained leave for the night — a fact which, owing to the startling emotions that followed his entry, he had not yet mentioned to his friends.

While abstractedly considering how he could best use that privilege under the new circumstances which had arisen, he heard Farmer Derriman drive up to the front door and hold a conversation with his father.  The old man had at last apparently brought the tin box of private papers that he wished the miller to take charge of during Derriman’s absence; and it being a calm night, John could hear, though he little heeded, Uncle Benjy’s reiterated supplications to Loveday to keep it safe from fire and thieves.  Then Uncle Benjy left, and John’s father went upstairs to deposit the box in a place of security, the whole proceeding reaching John’s preoccupied comprehension merely as voices during sleep.

The next thing was the appearance of a light in the bedroom which had been assigned to Matilda Johnson.  This effectually aroused the trumpet-major, and with a stealthiness unusual in him he went indoors.  No light was in the lower rooms, his father, Mrs. Garland, and Anne having gone out on the bridge to look at the new moon.  John went upstairs on tip-toe, and along the uneven passage till he came to her door.  It was standing ajar, a band of candlelight shining across the passage and up the opposite wall.  As soon as he entered the radiance he saw her.  She was standing before the looking-glass, apparently lost in thought, her fingers being clasped behind her head in abstraction, and the light falling full upon her face.

‘I must speak to you,’ said the trumpet-major.

She started, turned and grew paler than before; and then, as if moved by a sudden impulse, she swung the door wide open, and, coming out, said quite collectedly and with apparent pleasantness, ‘O yes; you are my Bob’s brother!  I didn’t, for a moment, recognize you.’

‘But you do now?’

‘As Bob’s brother.’

‘You have not seen me before?’

‘I have not,’ she answered, with a face as impassible as Talleyrand’s.

‘Good God!’

‘I have not!’ she repeated.

‘Nor any of the — th Dragoons?  Captain Jolly, for instance?’

‘No.’

‘You mistake.  I’ll remind you of particulars,’ he said drily.  And he did remind her at some length.

‘Never!’ she said desperately.

But she had miscalculated her staying powers, and her adversary’s character.  Five minutes after that she was in tears, and the conversation had resolved itself into words, which, on the soldier’s part, were of the nature of commands, tempered by pity, and were a mere series of entreaties on hers.

The whole scene did not last ten minutes.  When it was over, the trumpet-major walked from the doorway where they had been standing, and brushed moisture from his eyes.  Reaching a dark lumber-room, he stood still there to calm himself, and then descended by a Flemish-ladder to the bakehouse, instead of by the front stairs.  He found that the others, including Bob, had gathered in the parlour during his absence and lighted the candles.

Miss Johnson, having sent down some time before John re-entered the house to say that she would prefer to keep her room that evening, was not expected to join them, and on this account Bob showed less than his customary liveliness.  The miller wishing to keep up his son’s spirits, expressed his regret that, it being Sunday night, they could have no songs to make the evening cheerful; when Mrs. Garland proposed that they should sing psalms which, by choosing lively tunes and not thinking of the words, would be almost as good as ballads.

This they did, the trumpet-major appearing to join in with the rest; but as a matter of fact no sound came from his moving lips.  His mind was in such a state that he derived no pleasure even from Anne Garland’s presence, though he held a corner of the same book with her, and was treated in a winsome way which it was not her usual practice to indulge in.  She saw that his mind was clouded, and, far from guessing the reason why, was doing her best to clear it.

At length the Garlands found that it was the hour for them to leave, and John Loveday at the same time wished his father and Bob good-night, and went as far as Mrs. Garland’s door with her.

He had said not a word to show that he was free to remain out of camp, for the reason that there was painful work to be done, which it would be best to do in secret and alone.  He lingered near the house till its reflected window-lights ceased to glimmer upon the mill-pond, and all within the dwelling was dark and still.  Then he entered the garden and waited there till the back door opened, and a woman’s figure timorously came forward.  John Loveday at once went up to her, and they began to talk in low yet dissentient tones.

They had conversed about ten minutes, and were parting as if they had come to some painful arrangement, Miss Johnson sobbing bitterly, when a head stealthily arose above the dense hedgerow, and in a moment a shout burst from its owner.

‘Thieves! thieves! — my tin box! — thieves! thieves!’

Matilda vanished into the house, and John Loveday hastened to the hedge.  ‘For heaven’s sake, hold your tongue, Mr. Derriman!’ he exclaimed.

‘My tin box!’ said Uncle Benjy.  ‘O, only the trumpet-major!’

‘Your box is safe enough, I assure you.  It was only’ — here the trumpet-major gave vent to an artificial laugh — ’only a sly bit of courting, you know.’

‘Ha, ha, I see!’ said the relieved old squireen.  ‘Courting Miss Anne!  Then you’ve ousted my nephew, trumpet-major!  Well, so much the better.  As for myself, the truth on’t is that I haven’t been able to go to bed easy, for thinking that possibly your father might not take care of what I put under his charge; and at last I thought I would just step over and see if all was safe here before I turned in.  And when I saw your two shapes my poor nerves magnified ye to housebreakers, and Boneys, and I don’t know what all.’

‘You have alarmed the house,’ said the trumpet-major, hearing the clicking of flint and steel in his father’s bedroom, followed in a moment by the rise of a light in the window of the same apartment.  ‘You have got me into difficulty,’ he added gloomily, as his father opened the casement.

‘I am sorry for that,’ said Uncle Benjy.  ‘But step back; I’ll put it all right again.’

‘What, for heaven’s sake, is the matter?’ said the miller, his tasselled nightcap appearing in the opening.

‘Nothing, nothing!’ said the farmer.  ‘I was uneasy about my few bonds and documents, and I walked this way, miller, before going to bed, as I start from home to-morrow morning.  When I came down by your garden-hedge, I thought I saw thieves, but it turned out to be — to be — ’

Here a lump of earth from the trumpet-major’s hand struck Uncle Benjy in the back as a reminder.

‘To be — the bough of a cherry-tree a-waving in the wind.  Good-night.’

‘No thieves are like to try my house,’ said Miller Loveday.  ‘Now don’t you come alarming us like this again, farmer, or you shall keep your box yourself, begging your pardon for saying so.  Good-night t’ ye!’

‘Miller, will ye just look, since I am here — just look and see if the box is all right? there’s a good man!  I am old, you know, and my poor remains are not what my original self was.  Look and see if it is where you put it, there’s a good, kind man.’

‘Very well,’ said the miller good-humouredly.

‘Neighbour Loveday! on second thoughts I will take my box home again, after all, if you don’t mind.  You won’t deem it ill of me?  I have no suspicion, of course; but now I think on’t there’s rivalry between my nephew and your son; and if Festus should take it into his head to set your house on fire in his enmity, ‘twould be bad for my deeds and documents.  No offence, miller, but I’ll take the box, if you don’t mind.’

‘Faith! I don’t mind,’ said Loveday.  ‘But your nephew had better think twice before he lets his enmity take that colour.’  Receding from the window, he took the candle to a back part of the room and soon reappeared with the tin box.