Complete Works of Thomas Hardy (Illustrated) (724 page)

He had contrived to see again the pretty rural maiden Anna, the day after the fair, had walked out of the city with her to the earthworks of Old Melchester, and feeling a violent fancy for her, had remained in Melchester all Sunday, Monday, and Tuesday; by persuasion obtaining walks and meetings with the girl six or seven times during the interval; had in brief won her, body and soul.

He supposed it must have been owing to the seclusion in which he had lived of late in town that he had given way so unrestrainedly to a passion for an artless creature whose inexperience had, from the first, led her to place herself unreservedly in his hands.  Much he deplored trifling with her feelings for the sake of a passing desire; and he could only hope that she might not live to suffer on his account.

She had begged him to come to her again; entreated him; wept.  He had promised that he would do so, and he meant to carry out that promise.  He could not desert her now.  Awkward as such unintentional connections were, the interspace of a hundred miles — which to a girl of her limited capabilities was like a thousand — would effectually hinder this summer fancy from greatly encumbering his life; while thought of her simple love might do him the negative good of keeping him from idle pleasures in town when he wished to work hard.  His circuit journeys would take him to Melchester three or four times a year; and then he could always see her.

The pseudonym, or rather partial name, that he had given her as his before knowing how far the acquaintance was going to carry him, had been spoken on the spur of the moment, without any ulterior intention whatever.  He had not afterwards disturbed Anna’s error, but on leaving her he had felt bound to give her an address at a stationer’s not far from his chambers, at which she might write to him under the initials ‘C. B.’

In due time Raye returned to his London abode, having called at Melchester on his way and spent a few additional hours with his fascinating child of nature.  In town he lived monotonously every day.  Often he and his rooms were enclosed by a tawny fog from all the world besides, and when he lighted the gas to read or write by, his situation seemed so unnatural that he would look into the fire and think of that trusting girl at Melchester again and again.  Often, oppressed by absurd fondness for her, he would enter the dim religious nave of the Law Courts by the north door, elbow other juniors habited like himself, and like him unretained; edge himself into this or that crowded court where a sensational case was going on, just as if he were in it, though the police officers at the door knew as well as he knew himself that he had no more concern with the business in hand than the patient idlers at the gallery-door outside, who had waited to enter since eight in the morning because, like him, they belonged to the classes that live on expectation.  But he would do these things to no purpose, and think how greatly the characters in such scenes contrasted with the pink and breezy Anna.

An unexpected feature in that peasant maiden’s conduct was that she had not as yet written to him, though he had told her she might do so if she wished.  Surely a young creature had never before been so reticent in such circumstances.  At length he sent her a brief line, positively requesting her to write.  There was no answer by the return post, but the day after a letter in a neat feminine hand, and bearing the Melchester post-mark, was handed to him by the stationer.

The fact alone of its arrival was sufficient to satisfy his imaginative sentiment.  He was not anxious to open the epistle, and in truth did not begin to read it for nearly half-an-hour, anticipating readily its terms of passionate retrospect and tender adjuration.  When at last he turned his feet to the fireplace and unfolded the sheet, he was surprised and pleased to find that neither extravagance nor vulgarity was there.  It was the most charming little missive he had ever received from woman.  To be sure the language was simple and the ideas were slight; but it was so self-possessed; so purely that of a young girl who felt her womanhood to be enough for her dignity that he read it through twice.  Four sides were filled, and a few lines written across, after the fashion of former days; the paper, too, was common, and not of the latest shade and surface.  But what of those things?  He had received letters from women who were fairly called ladies, but never so sensible, so human a letter as this.  He could not single out any one sentence and say it was at all remarkable or clever; the
ensemble
of the letter it was which won him; and beyond the one request that he would write or come to her again soon there was nothing to show her sense of a claim upon him.

To write again and develop a correspondence was the last thing Raye would have preconceived as his conduct in such a situation; yet he did send a short, encouraging line or two, signed with his pseudonym, in which he asked for another letter, and cheeringly promised that he would try to see her again on some near day, and would never forget how much they had been to each other during their short acquaintance.

CHAPTER IV

To return now to the moment at which Anna, at Melchester, had received Raye’s letter.

It had been put into her own hand by the postman on his morning rounds.  She flushed down to her neck on receipt of it, and turned it over and over.  ‘It is mine?’ she said.

‘Why, yes, can’t you see it is?’ said the postman, smiling as he guessed the nature of the document and the cause of the confusion.

‘O yes, of course!’ replied Anna, looking at the letter, forcedly tittering, and blushing still more.

Her look of embarrassment did not leave her with the postman’s departure.  She opened the envelope, kissed its contents, put away the letter in her pocket, and remained musing till her eyes filled with tears.

A few minutes later she carried up a cup of tea to Mrs. Harnham in her bed-chamber.  Anna’s mistress looked at her, and said: ‘How dismal you seem this morning, Anna.  What’s the matter?’

‘I’m not dismal, I’m glad; only I — ’  She stopped to stifle a sob.

‘Well?’

‘I’ve got a letter — and what good is it to me, if I can’t read a word in it!’

‘Why, I’ll read it, child, if necessary.’

‘But this is from somebody — I don’t want anybody to read it but myself!’ Anna murmured.

‘I shall not tell anybody.  Is it from that young man?’

‘I think so.’ Anna slowly produced the letter, saying: ‘Then will you read it to me, ma’am?’

This was the secret of Anna’s embarrassment and flutterings.  She could neither read nor write.  She had grown up under the care of an aunt by marriage, at one of the lonely hamlets on the Great Mid-Wessex Plain where, even in days of national education, there had been no school within a distance of two miles.  Her aunt was an ignorant woman; there had been nobody to investigate Anna’s circumstances, nobody to care about her learning the rudiments; though, as often in such cases, she had been well fed and clothed and not unkindly treated.  Since she had come to live at Melchester with Mrs. Harnham, the latter, who took a kindly interest in the girl, had taught her to speak correctly, in which accomplishment Anna showed considerable readiness, as is not unusual with the illiterate; and soon became quite fluent in the use of her mistress’s phraseology.  Mrs. Harnham also insisted upon her getting a spelling and copy book, and beginning to practise in these.  Anna was slower in this branch of her education, and meanwhile here was the letter.

Edith Harnham’s large dark eyes expressed some interest in the contents, though, in her character of mere interpreter, she threw into her tone as much as she could of mechanical passiveness.  She read the short epistle on to its concluding sentence, which idly requested Anna to send him a tender answer.

‘Now — you’ll do it for me, won’t you, dear mistress?’ said Anna eagerly.  ‘And you’ll do it as well as ever you can, please?  Because I couldn’t bear him to think I am not able to do it myself.  I should sink into the earth with shame if he knew that!’

From some words in the letter Mrs. Harnham was led to ask questions, and the answers she received confirmed her suspicions.  Deep concern filled Edith’s heart at perceiving how the girl had committed her happiness to the issue of this new-sprung attachment.  She blamed herself for not interfering in a flirtation which had resulted so seriously for the poor little creature in her charge; though at the time of seeing the pair together she had a feeling that it was hardly within her province to nip young affection in the bud.  However, what was done could not be undone, and it behoved her now, as Anna’s only protector, to help her as much as she could.  To Anna’s eager request that she, Mrs. Harnham, should compose and write the answer to this young London man’s letter, she felt bound to accede, to keep alive his attachment to the girl if possible; though in other circumstances she might have suggested the cook as an amanuensis.

A tender reply was thereupon concocted, and set down in Edith Harnham’s hand.  This letter it had been which Raye had received and delighted in.  Written in the presence of Anna it certainly was, and on Anna’s humble note-paper, and in a measure indited by the young girl; but the life, the spirit, the individuality, were Edith Harnham’s.

‘Won’t you at least put your name yourself?’ she said.  ‘You can manage to write that by this time?’

‘No, no,’ said Anna, shrinking back.  ‘I should do it so bad.  He’d be ashamed of me, and never see me again!’

The note, so prettily requesting another from him, had, as we have seen, power enough in its pages to bring one.  He declared it to be such a pleasure to hear from her that she must write every week.  The same process of manufacture was accordingly repeated by Anna and her mistress, and continued for several weeks in succession; each letter being penned and suggested by Edith, the girl standing by; the answer read and commented on by Edith, Anna standing by and listening again.

Late on a winter evening, after the dispatch of the sixth letter, Mrs. Harnham was sitting alone by the remains of her fire.  Her husband had retired to bed, and she had fallen into that fixity of musing which takes no count of hour or temperature.  The state of mind had been brought about in Edith by a strange thing which she had done that day.  For the first time since Raye’s visit Anna had gone to stay over a night or two with her cottage friends on the Plain, and in her absence had arrived, out of its time, a letter from Raye.  To this Edith had replied on her own responsibility, from the depths of her own heart, without waiting for her maid’s collabouration.  The luxury of writing to him what would be known to no consciousness but his was great, and she had indulged herself therein.

Why was it a luxury?

Edith Harnham led a lonely life.  Influenced by the belief of the British parent that a bad marriage with its aversions is better than free womanhood with its interests, dignity, and leisure, she had consented to marry the elderly wine-merchant as a
pis aller
, at the age of seven-and-twenty — some three years before this date — to find afterwards that she had made a mistake.  That contract had left her still a woman whose deeper nature had never been stirred.

She was now clearly realising that she had become possessed to the bottom of her soul with the image of a man to whom she was hardly so much as a name.  From the first he had attracted her by his looks and voice; by his tender touch; and, with these as generators, the writing of letter after letter and the reading of their soft answers had insensibly developed on her side an emotion which fanned his; till there had resulted a magnetic reciprocity between the correspondents, notwithstanding that one of them wrote in a character not her own.  That he had been able to seduce another woman in two days was his crowning though unrecognized fascination for her as the she-animal.

They were her own impassioned and pent-up ideas — lowered to monosyllabic phraseology in order to keep up the disguise — that Edith put into letters signed with another name, much to the shallow Anna’s delight, who, unassisted, could not for the world have conceived such pretty fancies for winning him, even had she been able to write them.  Edith found that it was these, her own foisted-in sentiments, to which the young barrister mainly responded.  The few sentences occasionally added from Anna’s own lips made apparently no impression upon him.

The letter-writing in her absence Anna never discovered; but on her return the next morning she declared she wished to see her lover about something at once, and begged Mrs. Harnham to ask him to come.

There was a strange anxiety in her manner which did not escape Mrs. Harnham, and ultimately resolved itself into a flood of tears.  Sinking down at Edith’s knees, she made confession that the result of her relations with her lover it would soon become necessary to disclose.

Edith Harnham was generous enough to be very far from inclined to cast Anna adrift at this conjuncture.  No true woman ever is so inclined from her own personal point of view, however prompt she may be in taking such steps to safeguard those dear to her.  Although she had written to Raye so short a time previously, she instantly penned another Anna-note hinting clearly though delicately the state of affairs.

Raye replied by a hasty line to say how much he was affected by her news: he felt that he must run down to see her almost immediately.

But a week later the girl came to her mistress’s room with another note, which on being read informed her that after all he could not find time for the journey.  Anna was broken with grief; but by Mrs. Harnham’s counsel strictly refrained from hurling at him the reproaches and bitterness customary from young women so situated.  One thing was imperative: to keep the young man’s romantic interest in her alive.  Rather therefore did Edith, in the name of her
protégée
, request him on no account to be distressed about the looming event, and not to inconvenience himself to hasten down.  She desired above everything to be no weight upon him in his career, no clog upon his high activities.  She had wished him to know what had befallen: he was to dismiss it again from his mind.  Only he must write tenderly as ever, and when he should come again on the spring circuit it would be soon enough to discuss what had better be done.