by Thomas Hardy
A dismal irony seemed to lie in the words, and its effect was to irritate him. Downe, had then spoken truly. He stuck his umbrella into the sod, and seized the post with both hands, as if intending to loosen and throw it down. Then, like one bewildered by an opposition which would exist none the less though its manifestations were removed, he allowed his arms to sink to his side.
“Let it be,” he said to himself. “I have declared there shall be peace – if possible.”
Taking up his umbrella, he quietly left the inclosure, and went on his way, still keeping his back to the town. He had advanced with more decision since passing the new building, and soon a hoarse murmur rose upon the gloom; it was the sound of the sea. The road led to the harbor, at a distance of a mile from the town, from which the trade of the district was fed. After seeing the obnoxious name-board, Barnet had forgotten to open his umbrella and the rain tapped smartly on his hat, and occasionally stroked his face as he went on.
Though the lamps were still continued at the road-side, they stood at wider intervals than before, and the pavement had given place to common road. Every time he came to a lamp an increasing shine made itself visible upon his shoulders, till at last they quite glistened with wet. The murmur from the shore grew stronger, but it was still some distance off when he paused before one of the smallest of the detached houses by the way-side, standing in its own garden, the latter being divided from the road by a row of wooden palings. Scrutinizing the spot to insure that he was not mistaken, he opened the gate and gently knocked at the cottage door.
When he had patiently waited minutes enough to lead any man in ordinary cases to knock again, the door was heard to open; though it was impossible to see by whose hand, there being no light in the passage. Barnet said at random, “Does Miss Savile live here?”
A youthful voice assured him that she did live there, and by a sudden after-thought asked him to come in. It would soon get a light, it said; but the night being wet, mother had not thought it worth while to trim the passage lamp.
“Don’t trouble yourself to get a light for me,” said Barnet, hastily; “it is not necessary at all. Which is Miss Savile’s sitting-room?”
The young person, whose white pinafore could just be discerned, signified a door in the side of the passage, and Barnet went forward at the same moment, so that no light should fall upon his face. On entering the room he closed the door behind him, pausing till he heard the retreating footsteps of the child.
He found himself in an apartment which was simply and neatly, though not poorly furnished; everything, from the miniature chiffonier to the shining little daguerreotype which formed the central ornament of the mantel-piece, being in scrupulous order. The picture was inclosed by a frame of embroidered cardboard — evidently the work of feminine hands — and it represented a thin-faced, elderly lieutenant in the navy. From behind the lamp on the table a female form now rose into view: it was that of a young girls and a resemblance between her and the portrait was early discoverable. She had been so absorbed in some occupation on the other side of the lamp as to have barely found time to realise her visitor’s presence.
They both remained standing for a few seconds without speaking. The face that confronted Barnet had a beautiful outline; the Raphaelesque oval of its contour was remarkable for an English countenance, and that countenance housed in a remote country-road to an unheard-of harbor. But her features did not do justice to this splendid beginning: Nature had recollected that she was not in Italy; and the young lady’s lineaments, though not so inconsistent as to make her plain, would have been accepted rather as pleasing than as correct. The preoccupied expression which, like images on the retina, remained with her for a moment after the state that caused it had ceased, now changed into a reserved, half-proud, and slightly indignant look, in which the blood diffused itself quickly across her cheek, and additional brightness broke the shade of her rather heavy eyes.
“I know I have no business here,” he said, answering the look; “but I had a great wish to see you, and inquire how you were. You can give your hand to me, seeing how often I have held it in past days?”
“I would rather forget than remember all that, Mr. Barnet,” she answered, as she coldly complied with the request. “When I think of the circumstances of our last meeting I can hardly consider it kind of you to allude to such a thing as our past, or, indeed, to come here at all.”
“There was no harm in it surely? I don’t trouble you often, Lucy.”
“I have not had the honour of a visit from you for a very long time, certainly, and I did not expect it now, she said, with the same stiffness in her air. “I hope Mrs. Barnet is very well?”
“Yes, yes!” he impatiently returned. “At least I suppose so — though I only speak from inference.
“But she is your wife, sir,” said the young girl, tremulously.
The unwonted tones of a man’s voice in that feminine chamber had startled a canary that was roosting in its cage by the window; the bird awoke hastily, and fluttered against the bars. She went and stilled it by laying her face against the cage and murmuring a coaxing sound. It might partly have been done to still herself.
“I didn’t come to talk of Mrs. Barnet,” he pursued; “I came to talk of you, of yourself alone; to inquire how you are getting on since your great loss.” And he turned toward the portrait of her father.
“I am getting on fairly well, thank you.”
The force of her utterance was scarcely borne out by her look; but Barnet courteously reproached himself for not having guessed a thing so natural; and to dissipate all embarrassment, added, as he bent over the table, “What were you doing when I came? — painting flowers, and by candle-light?”
“Oh no,” she said, “not painting them — only sketching the outlines. I do that at night to save time — I have to get three dozen done by the end of the month.
Barnet looked as if he regretted it deeply. “You will wear your poor eyes out,” he said, with more sentiment than he had hitherto shown. “You ought not to do it. There was a time when I should have said you must not. Well — I almost wish I had never seen light with my own eyes when I think of that!”
“Is this a time or place for recalling such matters?” she asked, with dignity. “You used to have a gentlemanly respect for me, and for yourself. Don’t speak any more as you have spoken, and don’t come again. I cannot think that this visit is serious, or was closely considered by you.”
“Considered! Well, I came to see you as an old and good friend; not to mince matters, to visit a woman I loved. Don’t be angry! I could not help doing it, so many things brought you into my mind....This evening I fell in with an acquaintance, and when I saw how happy he was with his wife and family welcoming him home, though with only one-tenth of my income and chances, and thought what might have been in my case, it fairly broke down my discretion, and off I came here. Now I am here I feel that I am wrong to some extent. But the feeling that I should like to see you, and talk of those we used to know in common, was very strong.”
“Before that can be the case, a little more time must pass,” said Miss Savile, quietly; “a time long enough for me to regard with some calmness what at present I remember far too impatiently — though it may be you almost forget it. Indeed you must have forgotten it long before you acted as you did.” Her voice grew stronger and more vivacious as she added, “But I am doing my best to forget it too; and I know I shall succeed, from the progress I have made already! “
She had remained standing till now, when she turned and sat down, facing half away from him.
Barnet watched her moodily. “Yes, it is only what I deserve,” he said. “Ambition pricked me on — no, it was not ambition, it was wrong-headedness! Had I but reflected.... “ He broke out vehemently, “But always remember this, Lucy: if you had written tome only one little line after that misunderstanding, I declare I should have come back to you. That ruined me!” He slowly walked as far as the little room would allow him to g
o, and remained with his eyes on the skirting.
“But, Mr. Barnet,” how could I write to you? There was no opening for my doing so.”
“Then there ought to have been,” said Barnet, turning. “That was my fault!”
“Well, I don’t know anything about that; but as there had been nothing said by me which required any explanation by letter, I did not send one. Everything was so indefinite, and, feeling your position to be so much wealthier than mine, I fancied I might have mistaken your meaning. And when I heard of the other lady — a woman of whose family even you might be proud — I thought how foolish I had been, and said nothing.
“Then, I suppose it was destiny — accident — I don’t know what, that separated us, dear Lucy. Anyhow, you were the woman I ought to have made my wife — and I let you slip, like the foolish man that I was!”
“Oh, Mr. Barnet,” she said, almost in tears, “don’t revive the subject to me; I am the wrong one to console you. Think, sir. You should not be here — it would be so bad for me if it were known!”
“It would — it would indeed,” he said, hastily. “I am not right in doing this, and I won’t do it again.”
“It is a very common folly of human nature, you know, to think the course you did not adopt must have been the best,” she continued, with gentle solicitude, as she followed him to the door of the room. “And you don’t know that I should have accepted you, even if you had asked me to be your wife.” At this his eye met hers, and she dropped her gaze. She knew that her voice belied her. There was a silence till she looked up to add, in a voice of soothing playfulness, “My family was so much poorer than yours, even before I lost my dear father, that perhaps your companions would have made it unpleasant for us on account of my deficiencies.”
“Your disposition would soon have won them round,” said Barnet.
She archly expostulated, “Now, never mind my disposition; try to make it up withyour wife. Those are my commands to you. And now you are to leave me at once.”
“I will. I must make the best of it all, I suppose,” he replied, more cheerfully than he had as yet spoken. “But I shall never again meet with such a dear girl as you!” And he suddenly opened the door, and left her alone. When his glance again fell on the lamps that were sparsely ranged along the dreary level road, his eyes were in a state which showed straw-like motes of light radiating from each flame into the surrounding air.
On the other side of the way Barnet observed a man under an umbrella, walking parallel with himself. Presently this man left the foot-way, and gradually converged on Barnet’s course. The latter then saw that it was Charlson, a surgeon of the town, who owed him money. Charlson was a man not without ability; yet he did not prosper. Sundry circumstances stood in his way as a medical practitioner; he was needy; he was not a coddle; he gossiped with men instead of with women; he had married a stranger instead of one of the town young ladies; and he was given to conversational buffoonery. Moreover, his look was quite erroneous. Those only proper features in the family doctor, the quiet eye, and the thin, straight, passionless lips which never curl in public either for laughter or for scorn, were not his; he had a full curved mouth, and a bold black eye that made timid people nervous. His companions were what in old times would have been called boon companions — an expression which, though of irreproachable root, suggests fraternization carried to the point of unscrupulousness. All this was against him in the little town of his adoption.
Charlson had been in difficulties, and to oblige him Barnet had put his name to a bill; and, as he had expected, was called upon to meet it when it fell due. It had been a matter of only fifty pounds, which Barnet could well afford to lose, and he bore no ill-will to the thriftless surgeon on account of it. But Charlson had a little too much brazen indifferentism in his composition to be altogether a desirable acquaintance.
“I hope to be able to make that little bill-business right with you in the course of three weeks, Mr. Barnet, “ said Charlson, with hail-fellow friendliness.
Barnet replied good-naturedly that there was no hurry.
This particular three weeks had moved on in advance of Charlson’s present with the precision of a shadow for some considerable time.
“I’ve had a dream,” Charlson continued. Barnet knew from his tone that the surgeon was going to begin his characteristic nonsense, and did not encourage him, “I’ve had a dream,” repeated Charlson, who required no encouragement. “I dreamed that a gentleman, who has been very kind to me, married a haughty lady in haste, before he had quite forgotten a nice little girl he knew before, and that one wet evening, like the present, as I was walking up the harbor-road, I saw him come out of that dear little girl’s present abode.”
Barnet glanced toward the speaker. The rays from a neighbouring lamp struck through the drizzle under Charlson’s umbrella, so as just to illumine his face against the shade behind, and show that his eye was turned up under the outer corner of its lid, whence it leered with impish jocoseness as he thrust his tongue into his cheek.
“Come,” said Barnet, gravely, “we’ll have no more of that.”
“No, no — of course not,” Charlson hastily answered, seeing that his humor had carried him too far, as it had done many times before. He was profuse in his apologies, but Barnet did not reply. Of one thing he was certain — that scandal was a plant of quickroot, and that he was bound to obey Lucy’s injunction for Lucy’s own sake.
III
He did so to the letter; and though, as the crocus followed the snow-drop and the daffodil the crocus in Lucy’s garden, the harbor-road was a not unpleasant place to walk in, Barnet’s feet never trod its stones, much less approached her door. He avoided a saunter that way as he would have avoided a dangerous dram and took his airings along distance northward, among severely square and brown plowed fields, where no other townsman came. Sometimes he went round by the lower lanes of the borough, where the rope-walks stretched in which his family formerly had share, and looked at the rope-makers walking backward, overhung by apple-trees and bushes, and intruded on by cows and calves, as if trade had established itself there at considerable inconvenience to Nature.
One morning, when the sun was so warm as to raise a steam from the southeastern slopes of those flanking hills that looked so lovely above the old roofs, but made every low-chimneyed house in the town as smoky as Tophet, Barnet glanced from the windows of the town-council room for lack of interest in what was proceeding within. Several members of the corporation were present, but there was not much business doing, and in a few minutes Downe came leisurely across to him, saying that he seldom saw Barnet now.
Barnet owned that he was not often present.
Downe looked at the crimson curtain which hung down beside the panes, reflecting its hot hues into their faces, and then out of the window. At that moment the repassed along the street a tall, commanding lady, in whom the solicitor recognized Barnet’s wife. Barnet had done the same thing, and turned away.
“It will be all right some day,” said Downe, with cheering sympathy. “You have heard, then, of her last outbreak?”
Downe depressed his cheerfulness to its very reverse in a moment. “No, I have not heard of anything serious,” he said, with as long a face as one naturally round could be turned into at short notice. “I only hear vague reports of such things.”
“You may think it will be all right,” said Barnet, dryly; “but I have a different opinion...No, Downe, we must look the thing in the face. Not poppy nor mandragora — however, how are your wife and children?”
Downe said that they were all well, thanks; they were out that morning somewhere; he was just looking to see if they were walking that way. Ah, there they were, just coming down the street, and Downe pointed to the figures of two children with a nurse-maid and a lady walking behind them.
“You will come out and speak to her?” he asked.
“Not this morning. The fact is, I don’t care to speak to anybody just now.”
�
�You are too sensitive, Mr. Barnet. At school I remember you used to get as red as a rose if anybody uttered a word that hurt your feelings.”
Barnet mused. “Yes,” he admitted, “there is a grain of truth in that. It is because of that I often try to make peace at home. Life would be tolerable then at any rate, even if not particularly bright.”
“I have thought more than once of proposing a little plan to you,” said Downe, with some hesitation. “I don’t know whether it will meet your views; but take it or leave it, as you choose. In fact, it was my wife who suggested it; that she would be very glad to call on Mrs. Barnet aid get into her confidence. She seems to think that Mrs. Barnet is rather alone in the town, and without advisers. Her impression is that your wife will listen to reason. Emily has a wonderful way of winning the hearts of people of her own sex.”
“And of the other sex too, I think. She is a charming woman, and you were a lucky fellow to find her.”
“Well, perhaps I was,” simpered Downe, trying to wear an aspect of being the last man in the world to feel pride. “However, she will be likely to find out what ruffles Mrs.Barnet. Perhaps it is some misunderstanding, you know — something that she is too proud to ask you to explain, or some little thing in your conduct that irritates her because she does not fully comprehend you. The truth is, Emily would have been more ready to make advances if she bad been quite sure of her fitness for Mrs. Barnet’s society, who has of course been accustomed to London people of good position, which made Emily fearful of intruding.”
Barnet expressed his warmest thanks for the well-intentioned proposition. There was reason in Mrs. Downe’s fear — that be owned. “But do let her call,” he said. “There is no woman in England I would so soon trust on such an errand. I am afraid there willnot be any brilliant result; still, I shall take it as the kindest and nicest thing if she will tryit, and not be frightened at a repulse.”
