Complete Works of Thomas Hardy (Illustrated) (235 page)

Ethelberta was awakened from vague imaginings by the close approach of the old gentleman alluded to, who spoke with a great deal of agitation.

‘I have been trying to meet with you,’ said Lord Mountclere.  ‘Come, let us be friends again! — Ethelberta, I MUST not lose you!  You cannot mean that the engagement shall be broken off?’  He was far too desirous to possess her at any price now to run a second risk of exasperating her, and forbore to make any allusion to the recent pantomime between herself and Christopher that he had beheld, though it might reasonably have filled him with dread and petulance.

‘I do not mean anything beyond this,’ said she, ‘that I entirely withdraw from it on the faintest sign that you have not abandoned such miserable jealous proceedings as those you adopted to-day.’

‘I have quite abandoned them.  Will you come a little further this way, and walk in the aisle?  You do still agree to be mine?’

‘If it gives you any pleasure, I do.’

‘Yes, yes.  I implore that the marriage may be soon — very soon.’  The viscount spoke hastily, for the notes of the organ which were plunging into their ears ever and anon from the hands of his young rival seemed inconveniently and solemnly in the way of his suit.

‘Well, Lord Mountclere?’

‘Say in a few days? — it is the only thing that will satisfy me.’

‘I am absolutely indifferent as to the day.  If it pleases you to have it early I am willing.’

‘Dare I ask that it may be this week?’ said the delighted old man.

‘I could not say that.’

‘But you can name the earliest day?’

‘I cannot now.  We had better be going from here, I think.’

The Cathedral was filling with shadows, and cold breathings came round the piers, for it was November, when night very soon succeeds noon in spots where noon is sobered to the pallor of eve.  But the service was not yet over, and before quite leaving the building Ethelberta cast one other glance towards the organ and thought of him behind it.  At this moment her attention was arrested by the form of her sister Picotee, who came in at the north door, closed the lobby-wicket softly, and went lightly forward to the choir.  When within a few yards of it she paused by a pillar, and lingered there looking up at the organ as Ethelberta had done.  No sound was coming from the ponderous mass of tubes just then; but in a short space a whole crowd of tones spread from the instrument to accompany the words of a response.  Picotee started at the burst of music as if taken in a dishonest action, and moved on in a manner intended to efface the lover’s loiter of the preceding moments from her own consciousness no less than from other people’s eyes.

‘Do you see that?’ said Ethelberta.  ‘That little figure is my dearest sister.  Could you but ensure a marriage between her and him she listens to, I would do anything you wish!’

‘That is indeed a gracious promise,’ said Lord Mountclere.  ‘And would you agree to what I asked just now?’

‘Yes.’

‘When?’  A gleeful spark accompanied this.

‘As you requested.’

‘This week?  The day after to-morrow?’

‘If you will.  But remember what lies on your side of the contract.  I fancy I have given you a task beyond your powers.’

‘Well, darling, we are at one at last,’ said Lord Mountclere, rubbing his hand against his side.  ‘And if my task is heavy and I cannot guarantee the result, I can make it very probable.  Marry me on Friday — the day after to-morrow — and I will do all that money and influence can effect to bring about their union.’

‘You solemnly promise?  You will never cease to give me all the aid in your power until the thing is done?’

‘I do solemnly promise — on the conditions named.’

‘Very good.  You will have ensured my fulfilment of my promise before I can ensure yours; but I take your word.’

‘You will marry me on Friday!  Give me your hand upon it.’

She gave him her hand.

‘Is it a covenant?’ he asked.

‘It is,’ said she.

Lord Mountclere warmed from surface to centre as if he had drunk of hippocras, and, after holding her hand for some moments, raised it gently to his lips.

‘Two days and you are mine,’ he said.

‘That I believe I never shall be.’

‘Never shall be?  Why, darling?’

‘I don’t know.  Some catastrophe will prevent it.  I shall be dead perhaps.’

‘You distress me.  Ah, — you meant me — you meant that I should be dead, because you think I am old!  But that is a mistake — I am not very old!’

‘I thought only of myself — nothing of you.’

‘Yes, I know.  Dearest, it is dismal and chilling here — let us go.’

Ethelberta mechanically moved with him, and felt there was no retreating now.  In the meantime the young ladykin whom the solemn vowing concerned had lingered round the choir screen, as if fearing to enter, yet loth to go away.  The service terminated, the heavy books were closed, doors were opened, and the feet of the few persons who had attended evensong began pattering down the paved alleys.  Not wishing Picotee to know that the object of her secret excursion had been discovered, Ethelberta now stepped out of the west doorway with the viscount before Picotee had emerged from the other; and they walked along the path together until she overtook them.

‘I fear it becomes necessary for me to stay in Melchester to-night,’ said Lord Mountclere.  ‘I have a few matters to attend to here, as the result of our arrangements.  But I will first accompany you as far as Anglebury, and see you safely into a carriage there that shall take you home.  To-morrow I will drive to Knollsea, when we will make the final preparations.’

Ethelberta would not have him go so far and back again, merely to attend upon her; hence they parted at the railway, with due and correct tenderness; and when the train had gone, Lord Mountclere returned into the town on the special business he had mentioned, for which there remained only the present evening and the following morning, if he were to call upon her in the afternoon of the next day — the day before the wedding — now so recklessly hastened on his part, and so coolly assented to on hers.

By the time that the two young people had started it was nearly dark.  Some portions of the railway stretched through little copses and plantations where, the leaf-shedding season being now at its height, red and golden patches of fallen foliage lay on either side of the rails; and as the travellers passed, all these death-stricken bodies boiled up in the whirlwind created by the velocity, and were sent flying right and left of them in myriads, a clean-fanned track being left behind.

Picotee was called from the observation of these phenomena by a remark from her sister: ‘Picotee, the marriage is to be very early indeed.  It is to be the day after to-morrow — if it can.  Nevertheless I don’t believe in the fact — I cannot.’

‘Did you arrange it so?  Nobody can make you marry so soon.’

‘I agreed to the day,’ murmured Ethelberta languidly.

‘How can it be?  The gay dresses and the preparations and the people — how can they be collected in the time, Berta?  And so much more of that will be required for a lord of the land than for a common man.  O, I can’t think it possible for a sister of mine to marry a lord!’

‘And yet it has been possible any time this last month or two, strange as it seems to you. . . .  It is to be not only a plain and simple wedding, without any lofty appliances, but a secret one — as secret as if I were some under-age heiress to an Indian fortune, and he a young man of nothing a year.’

‘Has Lord Mountclere said it must be so private?  I suppose it is on account of his family.’

‘No.  I say so; and it is on account of my family.  Father might object to the wedding, I imagine, from what he once said, or he might be much disturbed about it; so I think it better that he and the rest should know nothing till all is over.  You must dress again as my sister to-morrow, dear.  Lord Mountclere is going to pay us an early visit to conclude necessary arrangements.’

‘O, the life as a lady at Enckworth Court!  The flowers, the woods, the rooms, the pictures, the plate, and the jewels!  Horses and carriages rattling and prancing, seneschals and pages, footmen hopping up and hopping down.  It will be glory then!’

‘We might hire our father as one of my retainers, to increase it,’ said Ethelberta drily.

Picotee’s countenance fell.  ‘How shall we manage all about that?  ‘Tis terrible, really!’

‘The marriage granted, those things will right themselves by time and weight of circumstances.  You take a wrong view in thinking of glories of that sort.  My only hope is that my life will be quite private and simple, as will best become my inferiority and Lord Mountclere’s staidness.  Such a splendid library as there is at Enckworth, Picotee — quartos, folios, history, verse, Elzevirs, Caxtons — all that has been done in literature from Moses down to Scott — with such companions I can do without all other sorts of happiness.’

‘And you will not go to town from Easter to Lammastide, as other noble ladies do?’ asked the younger girl, rather disappointed at this aspect of a viscountess’s life.

‘I don’t know.’

‘But you will give dinners, and travel, and go to see his friends, and have them to see you?’

‘I don’t know.’

‘Will you not be, then, as any other peeress; and shall not I be as any other peeress’s sister?’

‘That, too, I do not know.  All is mystery.  Nor do I even know that the marriage will take place.  I feel that it may not; and perhaps so much the better, since the man is a stranger to me.  I know nothing whatever of his nature, and he knows nothing of mine.’

CHAPTER 40.

MELCHESTER (continued)

The commotion wrought in Julian’s mind by the abrupt incursion of Ethelberta into his quiet sphere was thorough and protracted.  The witchery of her presence he had grown strong enough to withstand in part; but her composed announcement that she had intended to marry another, and, as far as he could understand, was intending it still, added a new chill to the old shade of disappointment which custom was day by day enabling him to endure.  During the whole interval in which he had produced those diapason blasts, heard with such inharmonious feelings by the three auditors outside the screen, his thoughts had wandered wider than his notes in conjectures on the character and position of the gentleman seen in Ethelberta’s company.  Owing to his assumption that Lord Mountclere was but a stranger who had accidentally come in at the side door, Christopher had barely cast a glance upon him, and the wide difference between the years of the viscount and those of his betrothed was not so particularly observed as to raise that point to an item in his objections now.  Lord Mountclere was dressed with all the cunning that could be drawn from the metropolis by money and reiterated dissatisfaction; he prided himself on his upright carriage; his stick was so thin that the most malevolent could not insinuate that it was of any possible use in walking; his teeth had put on all the vigour and freshness of a second spring.  Hence his look was the slowest of possible clocks in respect of his age, and his manner was equally as much in the rear of his appearance.

Christopher was now over five-and-twenty.  He was getting so well accustomed to the spectacle of a world passing him by and splashing him with its wheels that he wondered why he had ever minded it.  His habit of dreaming instead of doing had led him up to a curious discovery.  It is no new thing for a man to fathom profundities by indulging humours: the active, the rapid, the people of splendid momentum, have been surprised to behold what results attend the lives of those whose usual plan for discharging their active labours has been to postpone them indefinitely.  Certainly, the immediate result in the present case was, to all but himself, small and invisible; but it was of the nature of highest things.  What he had learnt was that a woman who has once made a permanent impression upon a man cannot altogether deny him her image by denying him her company, and that by sedulously cultivating the acquaintance of this Creature of Contemplation she becomes to him almost a living soul.  Hence a sublimated Ethelberta accompanied him everywhere — one who never teased him, eluded him, or disappointed him: when he smiled she smiled, when he was sad she sorrowed.  He may be said to have become the literal duplicate of that whimsical unknown rhapsodist who wrote of his own similar situation —

‘By absence this good means I gain,

   That I can catch her,

   Where none can watch her,

In some close corner of my brain:

   There I embrace and kiss her;

   And so I both enjoy and miss her.’

This frame of mind naturally induced an amazing abstraction in the organist, never very vigilant at the best of times.  He would stand and look fixedly at a frog in a shady pool, and never once think of batrachians, or pause by a green bank to split some tall blade of grass into filaments without removing it from its stalk, passing on ignorant that he had made a cat-o’-nine-tails of a graceful slip of vegetation.  He would hear the cathedral clock strike one, and go the next minute to see what time it was.  ‘I never seed such a man as Mr. Julian is,’ said the head blower.  ‘He’ll meet me anywhere out-of-doors, and never wink or nod.  You’d hardly expect it.  I don’t find fault, but you’d hardly expect it, seeing how I play the same instrument as he do himself, and have done it for so many years longer than he.  How I have indulged that man, too!  If ‘tis Pedals for two martel hours of practice I never complain; and he has plenty of vagaries.  When ‘tis hot summer weather there’s nothing will do for him but Choir, Great, and Swell altogether, till yer face is in a vapour; and on a frosty winter night he’ll keep me there while he tweedles upon the Twelfth and Sixteenth till my arms be scrammed for want of motion.  And never speak a word out-of-doors.’  Somebody suggested that perhaps Christopher did not notice his coadjutor’s presence in the street; and time proved to the organ-blower that the remark was just.

Whenever Christopher caught himself at these vacuous tricks he would be struck with admiration of Ethelberta’s wisdom, foresight, and self-command in refusing to wed such an incapable man: he felt that he ought to be thankful that a bright memory of her was not also denied to him, and resolved to be content with it as a possession, since it was as much of her as he could decently maintain.