The Big Book of Victorian Mysteries

by The Big Book of Victorian Mysteries (retail) (epub)

  Shepherdess Fennel fell back upon the intermediate plan of mingling short dances with short periods of talk and singing, so as to hinder any ungovernable rage in either. But this scheme was entirely confined to her own gentle mind: the shepherd himself was in the mood to exhibit the most reckless phases of hospitality.

  The fiddler was a boy of those parts, about twelve years of age, who had a wonderful dexterity in jigs and reels, though his fingers were so small and short as to necessitate a constant shifting for the high notes, from which he scrambled back to the first position with sounds not of unmixed purity of tone. At seven the shrill tweedle-dee of this youngster had begun, accompanied by a booming ground-bass from Elijah New, the parish clerk, who had thoughtfully brought with him his favourite musical instrument, the serpent. Dancing was instantaneous, Mrs. Fennel privately enjoining the players on no account to let the dance exceed the length of a quarter of an hour.

  But Elijah and the boy, in the excitement of their position, quite forgot the injunction. Moreover, Oliver Giles, a man of seventeen, one of the dancers, who was enamoured of his partner, a fair girl of thirty-three rolling years, had recklessly handed a new crown-piece to the musicians, as a bribe to keep going as long as they had muscle and wind. Mrs. Fennel, seeing the steam begin to generate on the countenances of her guests, crossed over and touched the fiddler’s elbow and put her hand on the serpent’s mouth. But they took no notice, and fearing she might lose her character of genial hostess if she were to interfere too markedly, she retired and sat down helpless. And so the dance whizzed on with cumulative fury, the performers moving in their planet-like courses, direct and retrograde from apogee to perigee, till the hand of the well-kicked clock at the bottom of the room had travelled over the circumference of an hour.

  While these cheerful events were in course of enactment within Fennel’s pastoral dwelling, an incident having considerable bearing on the party had occurred in the gloomy night without. Mrs. Fennel’s concern about the growing fierceness of the dance corresponded in point of time with the ascent of a human figure to the solitary hill of Higher Crowstairs from the direction of the distant town. This personage strode on through the rain without a pause, following the little-worn path which, further on in its course, skirted the shepherd’s cottage.

  It was nearly the time of full moon, and on this account, though the sky was lined with a uniform sheet of dripping cloud, ordinary objects out of doors were readily visible. The sad wan light revealed the lonely pedestrian to be a man of supple frame; his gait suggested that he had somewhat passed the period of perfect and instinctive agility, though not so far as to be otherwise than rapid of motion when occasion required. In point of fact he might have been about forty years of age. He appeared tall, but a recruiting sergeant, or other person accustomed to the judging of men’s heights by the eye, would have discerned that this was chiefly owing to his gauntness, and that he was not more than five feet eight or nine.

  Notwithstanding the regularity of his tread, there was caution in it, as in that of one who mentally feels his way; and despite the fact that it was not a black coat nor a dark garment of any sort that he wore, there was something about him which suggested that he naturally belonged to the black-coated tribes of men. His clothes were of fustian, and his boots hobnailed, yet in his progress he showed not the mud-accustomed bearing of hobnailed and fustianed peasantry.

  By the time that he had arrived abreast of the shepherd’s premises the rain came down, or rather came along, with yet more determined violence. The outskirts of the little homestead partially broke the force of wind and rain, and this induced him to stand still. The most salient of the shepherd’s domestic erections was an empty sty at the forward corner of his hedgeless garden, for in these latitudes the principle of masking the homelier features of your establishment by a conventional frontage was unknown. The traveller’s eye was attracted to this small building by the pallid shine of the wet slates that covered it. He turned aside, and, finding it empty, stood under the pent-roof for shelter.

  While he stood, the boom of the serpent within, and the lesser strains of the fiddler, reached the spot as an accompaniment to the surging hiss of the flying rain on the sod, its louder beating on the cabbage-leaves of the garden, on the eight or ten bee-hives just discernible by the path, and its dripping from the eaves into a row of buckets and pans that had been placed under the walls of the cottage. For at Higher Crowstairs, as at all such elevated domiciles, the grand difficulty of housekeeping was an insufficiency of water; and a casual rainfall was utilised by turning out, as catchers, every utensil that the house contained. Some queer stories might be told of the contrivances for economy in suds and dish-waters that are absolutely necessitated in upland habitations during the droughts of summer. But at this season there were no such exigencies: a mere acceptance of what the skies bestowed was sufficient for an abundant store.

  At last the notes of the serpent ceased and the house was silent. This cessation of activity aroused the solitary pedestrian from the reverie into which he had lapsed, and, emerging from the shed, with an apparently new intention, he walked up the path to the house-door. Arrived here, his first act was to kneel down on a large stone beside the row of vessels, and to drink a copious draught from one of them. Having quenched his thirst, he rose and lifted his hand to knock, but paused with his eye upon the panel. Since the dark surface of the wood revealed absolutely nothing, it was evident that he must be mentally looking through the door, as if he wished to measure thereby all the possibilities that a house of this sort might include, and how they might bear upon the question of his entry.

  In his indecision he turned and surveyed the scene around. Not a soul was anywhere visible. The garden-path stretched downward from his feet, gleaming like the track of a snail; the roof of the little well, the well cover, the top rail of the garden-gate, were varnished with the same dull liquid glaze; while, far away in the vale, a faint whiteness of more than usual extent showed that the rivers were high in the meads. Beyond all this winked a few bleared lamplights through the beating drops, lights that denoted the situation of the country-town from which he had appeared to come. The absence of all notes of life in that direction seemed to clinch his intentions, and he knocked at the door.

  Within, a desultory chat had taken the place of movement and musical sound. The hedge-carpenter was suggesting a song to the company, which nobody just then was inclined to undertake, so that the knock afforded a not unwelcome diversion.

  “Walk in!” said the shepherd promptly.

  The latch clicked upward, and out of the night our pedestrian appeared upon the door-mat. The shepherd arose, lifted two of the nearest candles, and turned to look at him.

  Their light disclosed that the stranger was dark in complexion, and not unprepossessing as to feature. His hat, which for a moment he did not remove, hung low over his eyes, without concealing that they were large, open, and determined, moving with a flash rather than a glance round the room. He seemed pleased with the survey, and, baring his shaggy head, said, in a rich deep voice, “The rain is so heavy, friends, that I ask leave to come in and rest awhile.”

  “To be sure, stranger,” said the shepherd. “And faith, you’ve been lucky in choosing your time, for we are having a bit of a fling for a glad cause—though to be sure a man could hardly wish that glad cause to happen more than once a year.”

  “Nor less,” spoke up a woman. “For ’tis best to get your family over and done with, as soon as you can, so to be all the earlier out of the fag o’t.”

  “And what may be this glad cause?” asked the stranger.

  “A birth and christening,” said the shepherd.

  The stranger hoped his host might not be made unhappy either by too many or too few of such episodes, and being invited by a gesture to a pull at the mug, he readily acquiesced. His manner which, before entering, had been so dubious, was now altogether that of a carefree
and candid man.

  “Late to be traipsing athwart this coomb—hey?” said the engaged man of fifty.

  “Late it is, master, as you say—I’ll take a seat in the chimney-corner, if you have nothing to urge against it, ma’am; for I am a little moist on the side that was next the rain.”

  Mrs. Shepherd Fennel assented, and made room for the self-invited comer, who, having got completely inside the chimney-corner, stretched out his legs and his arms with the expansiveness of a person quite at home.

  “Yes, I am rather thin in the vamp,” he said freely, seeing that the eyes of the shepherd’s wife fell upon his boots, “and I am not well-fitted, either. I have had some rough times lately, and have been forced to pick up what I can get in the way of wearing, but I must find a suit better fit for working-days when I reach home.”

  “One of hereabouts?” she inquired.

  “Not quite that—further up the country.”

  “I thought so. And so am I; and by your tongue you come from my neighbourhood.”

  “But you would hardly have heard of me,” he said quickly. “My time would be long before yours, ma’am, you see.”

  This testimony to the youthfulness of his hostess had the effect of stopping her cross-examination.

  “There is only one thing more wanted to make me happy,” continued the new comer. “And that is a little baccy, which I am sorry to say I am out of.”

  “I’ll fill your pipe,” said the shepherd.

  “I must ask you to lend me a pipe likewise.”

  “A smoker, and no pipe about ye?”

  “I have dropped it somewhere on the road.”

  The shepherd filled and handed him a new clay pipe, saying as he did so, “Hand me your baccy-box—I’ll fill that too, now I am about it.”

  The man went through the movement of searching his pockets.

  “Lost that too?” said his entertainer, with some surprise.

  “I am afraid so,” said the man with some confusion. “Give it to me in a screw of paper.”

  Lighting his pipe at the candle with a suction that drew the whole flame into the bowl, he resettled himself in the corner, and bent his looks upon the faint steam from his damp legs, as if he wished to say no more.

  Meanwhile the general body of guests had been taking little notice of this visitor by reason of an absorbing discussion in which they were engaged with the band about a tune for the next dance. The matter being settled, they were about to stand up, when an interruption came in the shape of another knock at the door.

  At the sound the man in the chimney-corner took up the poker and began stirring the fire as if doing it thoroughly were the one aim of his existence; and a second time the shepherd said, “Walk in!”

  In a moment another man stood upon the straw-woven doormat. He too was a stranger.

  This individual was one of a type radically different from the first. There was more of the commonplace in his manner, and a certain jovial cosmopolitanism sat upon his features. He was several years older than the first arrival, his hair being slightly frosted, his eyebrows bristly, and his whiskers cut back from his cheeks. His face was rather full and flabby, and yet it was not altogether a face without power. A few grog-blossoms marked the neighbourhood of his nose.

  He flung back his long drab greatcoat, revealing that beneath it he wore a suit of cinder-grey shade throughout, large heavy seals, of some metal or other that would take a polish, dangling from his fob as his only personal ornament. Shaking the water-drops from his low-crowned glazed hat, he said, “I must ask for a few minutes’ shelter, comrades, or I shall be wetted to my skin before I get to Casterbridge.”

  “Make yerself at home, master,” said the shepherd, perhaps a trifle less heartily than on the first occasion. Not that Fennel had the least tinge of niggardliness in his composition; but the room was far from large, spare chairs were not numerous, and damp companions were not altogether comfortable at close quarters for the women and girls in their bright-coloured gowns.

  However, the second comer, after taking off his greatcoat, and hanging his hat on a nail in one of the ceiling beams as if he had been specially invited to put it there, advanced and sat down at the table. This had been pushed so closely into the chimney-corner, to give all available room to the dancers, that its inner edge grazed the elbow of the man who had ensconced himself by the fire; and thus the two strangers were brought into close companionship.

  They nodded to each other by way of breaking the ice of unacquaintance, and the first stranger handed his neighbour the large mug—a huge vessel of brown ware, having its upper edge worn away like a threshold by the rub of whole genealogies of thirsty lips that had gone the way of all flesh, and bearing the following inscription burnt upon its rotund side in yellow letters:

  there is no fun

  untill i cum.

  The other man, nothing loth, raised the mug to his lips, and drank on, and on, and on—till a curious blueness overspread the countenance of the shepherd’s wife, who had regarded with no little surprise the first stranger’s free offer to the second of what did not belong to him to dispense.

  “I knew it!” said the toper to the shepherd with much satisfaction. “When I walked up your garden afore coming in, and saw the hives all of a row, I said to myself, ‘Where there’s bees there’s honey, and where there’s honey there’s mead.’ But mead of such a truly comfortable sort as this I really didn’t expect to meet in my older days.” He took yet another pull at the mug, till it assumed an ominous horizontality.

  “Glad you enjoy it!” said the shepherd warmly.

  “It is goodish mead,” assented Mrs. Fennel with an absence of enthusiasm, which seemed to say that it was possible to buy praise for one’s cellar at too heavy a price. “It is trouble enough to make—and really I hardly think we shall make any more. For honey sells well, and we can make shift with a drop o’ small mead and metheglin for common use from the comb-washings.”

  “Oh, but you’ll never have the heart!” reproachfully cried the stranger in cinder-grey, after taking up the mug a third time and setting it down empty. “I love mead, when ’tis old like this, as I love to go to church o’ Sundays, or to relieve the needy any day of the week.”

  “Ha, ha, ha!” said the man in the chimney-corner, who, in spite of the taciturnity induced by the pipe of tobacco, could not or would not refrain from this slight testimony to his comrade’s humour.

  Now the old mead of those days, brewed of the purest first-year or maiden honey, four pounds to the gallon—with its due complement of whites of eggs, cinnamon, ginger, cloves, mace, rosemary, yeast, and processes of working, bottling, and cellaring—tasted remarkably strong; but it did not taste so strong as it actually was. Hence, presently, the stranger in cinder-grey at the table, moved by its creeping influence, unbuttoned his waistcoat, threw himself back in his chair, spread his legs, and made his presence felt in various ways.

  “Well, well, as I say,” he resumed, “I am going to Casterbridge, and to Casterbridge I must go. I should have been almost there by this time; but the rain drove me into ye; and I’m not sorry for it.”

  “You don’t live in Casterbridge?” said the shepherd.

  “Not as yet; though I shortly mean to move there.”

  “Going to set up in trade, perhaps?”

  “No, no,” said the shepherd’s wife. “It is easy to see that the gentleman is rich, and don’t want to work at anything.”

  The cinder-grey stranger paused, as if to consider whether he would accept that definition of himself. He presently rejected it by answering, “Rich is not quite the word for me, dame. I do work, and I must work. And even if I only get to Casterbridge by midnight I must begin work there at eight to-morrow morning. Yes, het or wet, blow or snow, famine or sword, my day’s work to-morrow must be done.”

  “Poor man! Then, in spite o
’ seeming, you be worse off than we?” replied the shepherd’s wife.

  “ ’Tis the nature of my trade, men and maidens. ’Tis the nature of my trade more than my poverty…But really and truly I must up and off, or I shan’t get a lodging in the town.” However, the speaker did not move, and directly added, “There’s time for one more draught of friendship before I go; and I’d perform it at once if the mug were not dry.”

  “Here’s a mug o’ small,” said Mrs. Fennel. “Small, we call it, though to be sure ’tis only the first wash o’ the combs.”

  “No,” said the stranger disdainfully. “I won’t spoil your first kindness by partaking o’ your second.”

  “Certainly not,” broke in Fennel. “We don’t increase and multiply every day, and I’ll fill the mug again.” He went away in the dark place under the stairs where the barrel stood. The shepherdess followed him.

  “Why should you do this?” she said reproachfully, as soon as they were alone. “He’s emptied it once, though it held enough for ten people; and now he’s not contented wi’ the small, but must needs call for more o’ the strong! And a stranger unbeknown to any of us. For my part I don’t like the look o’ the man at all.”

  “But he’s in the house, my honey; and ’tis a wet night, and a christening. Daze it, what’s a cup of mead more or less? There’ll be plenty more next bee-burning.”

  “Very well—this time, then,” she answered, looking wistfully at the barrel. “But what is the man’s calling, and where is he one of, that he should come in and join us like this!”

  “I don’t know. I’ll ask him again.”