by Thomas Hardy
They hardly spoke to each other, and immediately set out on their climb into the interior of this solemn country, which stood high above the rich alluvial soil they had left half an hour before. It was a long walk; thick clouds made the atmosphere dark, though it was as yet only early afternoon; and the wind howled dismally over the hills of the heath — not improbably the same heath which had witnessed the agony of the Wessex King Ina, presented to after-ages as Lear. Gertrude Lodge talked most, Rhoda replying with monosyllabic preoccupation. She had a strange dislike to walking on the side of her companion where hung the afflicted arm, moving round to the other when inadvertently near it. Much heather had been brushed by their feet when they descended upon a
cart-track, beside which stood the house of the man they sought.
He did not profess his remedial practices openly, or care anything about their continuance, his direct interests being those of a dealer in furze, turf, ‘sharp sand,’ and other local products. Indeed, he affected not to believe largely in his own powers, and when warts that had been shown him for cure miraculously disappeared — which it must be owned they infallibly did — he would say lightly, “Oh, I only drink a glass of grog upon ‘em — perhaps it’s all chance,” and immediately turn the subject.
He was at home when they arrived, having, in fact, seen them descending into his valley. He was a gray-bearded man, with a reddish face, and he looked singularly at Rhoda the first moment he beheld her. Mrs. Lodge told him her errand, and then with words of self-disparagement he examined her arm.
“Medicine can’t cure it,” he said, promptly. “ ‘Tis the work of an enemy.”
Rhoda shrank into herself and drew back.
“An enemy? What enemy?” asked Mrs. Lodge.
He shook his head. “That’s best known to yourself,” he said. “If you like l can show the person to you, though I shall not myself know who it is. I can do no more, and don’t wish to do that.”
She pressed him; on which he told Rhoda to wait outside where she stood, and took Mrs. Lodge into the room. It opened immediately from the door; and, as the latter remained ajar, Rhoda Brook could see the proceedings without taking part in them. He brought a tumbler from the dresser, nearly filled it with water, and fetching an egg, prepared it in some private way; after which he broke it on the edge of the glass, so that the white went in and the yelk remained. As it was getting gloomy, he took the glass and its contents to the window, and told Gertrude to watch them closely. They leaned over the table together, and the milkwoman could see the opaline hue of the egg-fluid changing form as it sank in the water, but she was not near enough to define the shape that it assumed.
“Do you catch the likeness of any face or figure as you look?” demanded the conjurer of the young woman.
She murmured a reply, in tones so low as to be inaudible to Rhoda, and continued to gaze intently into the glass. Rhoda turned, and walked a few steps away.
When Mrs. Lodge came out, and her face was met by the light, it appeared exceedingly pale — as pale as Rhoda’s — against the sad dun shades of the upland’s garniture. Trendle shut the door behind her, and they at once started homeward
together. But Rhoda perceived that her companion had quite changed.
“Did he charge much?” she asked, tentatively.
“Oh no — nothing. He would not take a farthing,” said Gertrude.
“And what did you see?” inquired Rhoda.
“Nothing I — care to speak of.” The constraint in her manner was remarkable; her face was so rigid as to wear an oldened aspect, faintly suggestive of the face in Rhoda’s bedchamber.
“Was it you who first proposed coming here?” Mrs. Lodge suddenly inquired, after a long pause. “How very odd, if you did!”
“No. But I am not sorry we have come, all things considered,” she replied. For the first time a sense of triumph possessed her, and she did not altogether deplore that the young thing at her side should learn that their lives had been antagonized by other influences than their own.
The subject was no more alluded to during the long and dreary walk home. But in some way or other a story was whispered about the many dairied Swenn Valley that winter that Mrs. Lodge’s gradual loss of the use of her left arm was owing to her being “overlooked” by Rhoda Brook. The latter kept her own counsel about the incubus, but her face grew sadder and thinner; and in the spring she and her boy disappeared, from the neighbourhood of Holmstoke.
VI
A SECOND ATTEMPT
Half dozen years passed away, and Mr. and Mrs. Lodge’s married experience sank into prosiness, and worse. The farmer was usually gloomy and silent: the woman whom he had wooed for her grace and beauty was contorted and disfigured in the left limb; moreover, she had brought him no child, which rendered it likely that he would be the last of a family who had occupied that valley for some two hundred years. He thought of Rhoda Brook and her son, and feared this might be a judgment from Heaven upon him.
The once blithe-hearted and enlightened Gertrude was changing into an irritable, superstitious woman, whose whole time was given to experimenting upon her ailment with every quack remedy she came across. She was honestly attached to her husband, and was ever secretly hoping against hope to win back his heart again by regaining some at least of her personal beauty. Hence it arose that her closet was lined with bottles, packets, and ointment-pots of every description — nay, bunches of mystic herbs, charms, and books of necromancy, which in her school-girl time she would have
ridiculed as folly.
“D — d if you won’t poison yourself with these apothecary messes and witch mixtures some time or other,” said her husband, when his eye chanced to fall upon the multitudinous array.
She did not reply, but turned her sad, soft glance upon him in such heart-swollen reproach that he looked sorry for his words, and added, “I only meant it for your good, you know, Gertrude.”
“I’ll clear out the whole lot, and destroy them,” said she, huskily, “and attempt such remedies no more!”
“You want somebody to cheer you,” he observed. “I once thought of adopting a boy; but he is too old now. And he is gone away I don’t know where.”
She guessed to whom he alluded; for Rhoda Brook’s story had in the course of years become known to her; though not a word had ever passed between her husband and herself on the subject. Neither had she ever spoken to him of her visit to Conjurer Trendle, and of what was revealed to her, or she thought was revealed to her, by that solitary heath-man.
She was now five-and-twenty; but she seemed older. “Six years of marriage, and only a few months of love, “ she sometimes whispered to herself. And then she thought of the apparent cause, and said, with a tragic glance at her withering limb, “If I could only again be as I was when he first saw me!”
She obediently destroyed her nostrums and charms; but there remained a hankering wish to try something else — some other sort of cure altogether. She had never revisited Trendle since she had been conducted to the house of the solitary by Rhoda against her will; but it now suddenly occurred to Gertrude that she would, in a last desperate effort at deliverance from this seeming curse, again seek out the man, if he yet lived. He was entitled to a certain credence, for the indistinct form he had raised in the glass had undoubtedly resembled the only woman in the world who — as she now knew, though not then — could have a reason for bearing her ill-will. The visit should be paid.
This time she went alone, though she nearly got lost on the heath, and roamed a considerable distance out of her way. Trendle’s house was reached at last, however; he was not indoors, and instead of waiting at the cottage she went to where his bent figure was pointed out to her at work a long way off. Trendle remembered her, and laying down the handful of furze-root which he was gathering and throwing into a heap, he offered to accompany her in her homeward direction, as the distance was considerable and the days were short. So they walked together, his head bowed nearly to the earth, and his form
of a colour with it.
“You can send away warts and other excrescenses, I know,” she said; “why can’t you send away this?” And the arm was uncovered.
“You think too much of my powers!” said Trendle; “and I am old and weak now, too. No, no; it is too much for me to attempt in my own person. What have ye tried?”
She named to him some of the hundred medicaments and counter-spells which she had adopted from time to time. He shook his head.
“Some were good enough,” he said, approvingly; “but not many of them for such as this. This is of the nature of a blight, not of the nature of a wound; and if you ever do throw it off, it will be all at once.”
“If I only could!”
“There is only one chance of doing it known to me. It has never failed in kindred afflictions — that l can declare. But it is hard to carry out, and especially for a woman.”
“Tell me!” said she.
“You must touch with the limb the neck of a man who’s been hanged.”
She started a little at the image he had raised.
“Before he’s cold — just after he’s cut down,” continued the conjurer, impassively.
“How can that do good?”
“It will turn the blood and change the constitution; But, as I say, to do it is hard. You must get into jail, and wait for him when he’s brought off the gallows. Lots have done it, though perhaps not such pretty women as you. I used to send dozens for skin complaints. But that was in former times. The last I sent was in ‘13 — near twenty years ago.”
He had no more to tell her; and, when he had put her into a straight track homeward, turned and left her, refusing all money, as at first.
VII
A RIDE
The communication sank deep into Gertrude’s mind. Her nature was rather a timid one; and probably of all remedies that the white wizard could have suggested there was not one which would have filled her with so much aversion as this, not to speak of the immense obstacles in the way of its adoption.
Casterbridge, the county-town, was a dozen or fifteen miles off; and though in those days, when men were executed for horse-stealing, arson, and burglary, an assize seldom passed without a hanging, it was not likely that she could get access to body of the criminal unaided. And the fear of her husband’s anger made her reluctant to breathe a word of Trendle’s suggestion to him or to anybody about him.
She did nothing for months, and patiently bore her disfigurement as before. But her woman’s nature, craving for renewed love, through the medium of renewed beauty (she was but twenty-five), was ever stimulating her to try what, any rate, could hardly do her any harm. “What came by a spell will go by a spell surely,” she would say.
Whenever her imagination pictured the act she shrank in terror from the possibility of it; then the words, of the conjurer, “It will turn your blood,” were seen to be capable of a scientific no less than a ghastly interpretation; the mastering desire returned, and urged her on again.
There was at this time but one county-paper, and that her husband only occasionally borrowed. But old-fashioned days had old-fashioned means and news was extensively conveyed by word of mouth from market to market or from fair to fair; so that, whenever such an event as an execution was about to take place, few within a radius of twenty miles were ignorant of the coming sight; and, so far as Holmstoke was concerned, some enthusiasts had been known to walk all the way to Casterbridge and back in one day, solely to witness the spectacle. The next assizes were in March; and when Gertrude Lodge heard that they had been held, she inquired stealthily at the inn as to the result, as soon as she could find opportunity.
She was, however, too late. The time at which the sentences were to be carried out had arrived, and to make the journey and obtain admission at such short notice required at least her husband’s assistance. She dared not tell him, for she had found by delicate experiment that these smoldering village beliefs made him furious if mentioned, partly because he half entertained them himself. It was therefore necessary to wait for another opportunity.
Her determination received a fillip from learning that two epileptic children had attended from this very village of Holmstoke many years before with beneficial results, though the experiment had been strongly condemned by the neighbouring clergy. April, May, June passed; and it is no overstatement to say that by the end of the last-named month Gertrude well-nigh longed for the death of a fellow-creature.
Instead of her formal prayers each night, her unconscious prayer was, “O Lord, hang some guilty or innocent person soon!” This time she made earlier inquiries, and was altogether more systematic in her proceedings. Moreover, the season was summer, between the haymaking and the harvest, and in the leisure thus afforded her husband had been holiday-taking away from home.
The assizes were in July, and she went to the inn as before. There was to be one execution — only one, for arson.
Her greatest problem was not how to get to Casterbridge, but what means she should adopt for obtaining admission to the jail. Though access for such purposes had formerly never been denied, the custom had fallen into desuetude; and in contemplating her possible difficulties, she was again almost driven to fall back upon her husband. But, on sounding him about the assizes, he was so uncommunicative, so more than usually cold, that she did not proceed, and decided that whatever she did she would do alone.
Fortune, obdurate hitherto, showed her unexpected favour. On the Thursday before the Saturday fixed for the execution, Lodge remarked to her that he was going away from home for another day or two on business at a fair, and that he was sorry he could not take her with him.
She exhibited on this occasion so much readiness to stay at home that he looked at her in surprise. Time had been when she would have shown deep disappointment at the loss of such a jaunt. However, he lapsed into his usual taciturnity, and on the day named left Holmstoke.
It was now her turn. She at first had thought of driving, but on reflection held that driving would not do, since it would necessitate her keeping to the turnpike-road, and so increase by tenfold the risk of her ghastly errand being found out. She decided to ride, and avoid the beaten track, notwithstanding that in her husband’s stables there was no animal just at present which by any stretch of imagination could be considered a lady’s mount, in spite of his promise before marriage to always keep a mare for her. He had, however, many horses, fine ones of their kind; and among the rest was a serviceable creature, an equine Amazon, with a back as broad as a sofa, on which Gertrude had occasionally take an airing when unwell. This horse she chose.
On Friday afternoon one of the men brought it round. She was dressed, and before going down looked at her shriveled arm. “Ah!” she said to it, “if it had not been for you this terrible ordeal would have been saved me!”
When strapping up the bundle in which she carried a few articles of clothing, she took occasion to say to the servant, “I take these in case I should not get back to-night from the person I am going to visit. Don’t be alarmed if I am not in by ten, and close up the house as usual. I shall be at home tomorrow for certain.” She meant then to privately tell her husband; the deed accomplished was not like the deed projected. He would almost certainly forgive her.
And then the pretty palpitating Gertrude Lodge went from her husband’s homestead; but though her goal was Casterbridge, she did not take the direct route thither through Stickleford. Her cunning course at first was in precisely the opposite direction. As soon as she was out of sight, however, she turned to the left, by a road which led into Egdon, and on entering the heath wheeled round, and set out in the true course, due westerly. A more private way down the county could not be imagined; and as to direction, she had merely to keep her horse’s head to a point a little to the right of the sun. She knew that she would light upon a furze-cutter or cottager of some sort from time to time, from whom she might correct her bearing.
Though the date was comparatively recent, Egdon was much less fragment
ary in character than now. The attempts — successful and otherwise — at cultivation on the lower slopes, which intrude and break up the original heath into small detached heaths, had not been carried far; Inclosure Acts had not taken effect, and the banks and fences which now exclude the cattle of those villagers who formerly enjoyed rights of commonage thereon, and the carts of those who had turbary privileges which kept them in firing all the year round, were not erected. Gertrude therefore rode along with no other obstacles than the prickly furze-bushes, the mats of heather, the white watercourses, and the natural steeps and declivities of the ground.
Her horse was sure, if heavy-footed and slow, and though a draught animal, was easy-paced; had it been otherwise, she was not a woman who could have ventured to ride over such a bit of country with a half-dead arm. It was therefore nearly eight o’clock when she drew rein to breathe the mare on the last outlying high point of heath-land toward Casterbridge previous to leaving Egdon for the cultivated valleys.
She halted before a pond flanked by the ends of two hedges; a railing ran through the centre of the pond, dividing it in half. Over the railing she saw the low green country; over the green trees the roofs of the town; over the roofs a white, flat facade, denoting the entrance to the county-jail. On the roof of this front specks were moving about; they seemed to be workmen erecting something. Her flesh crept. She descended slowly, and was soon amid cornfields and pastures. In another half-hour, when it was almost dusk, Gertrude reached the White Hart, the first inn of the town on that side.
Little surprise was excited by her arrival: farmers’ wives rode on horseback then more than they do now — though, for that matter, Mrs. Lodge was not imagined to be a wife at all; the inn-keeper supposed her some harum-scarum young woman who had come to attend ‘hang-fair’ next day. Neither her husband nor herself ever dealt in Casterbridge market, so that she was unknown. While dismounting she beheld a crowd of boys standing at the door of a harness-maker’s shop just above the inn, looking inside it with deep interest.
