Complete Works of Thomas Hardy (Illustrated) (788 page)

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 go, 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.”

When Barnet and Downe had parted the former went to the town savings-bank, of which he was a trustee, and endeavored to forget his troubles in the contemplation of low sums of money and figures in a network of red and blue lines. He sat and watched the working-people making their deposits, to which at intervals he signed his name. Before he left in the afternoon Downe put his head inside the door.

“Emily has seen Mrs. Barnet,” he said, in a low voice. “She has got Mrs. Barnet’s promise to take her for a drive down to the shore to-morrow, if it is fine. Good-afternoon!”

Barnet shook Downe by the hand without speaking, and Downe went away.

IV

The next day was as fine as the arrangement could possibly require. As the sun passed the meridian and declined westward, the tall shadows from the scaffold-poles of Barnet’s rising residence streaked the ground as far as to the middle of the highway. Barnet himself was there inspecting the progress of the works for the first time during several weeks. A building in an old-fashioned town five-and-thirty years ago did not, as in the modern fashion rise from the sod like a booth at a fair. The foundations and lower courses were put in and allowed to settle for many weeks before the superstructure was built up, and a whole summer of drying was hardly sufficient to do justice to the important issues involved. Barnet stood within a window-niche which had as yet received no frame, and thence looked down a slope in to the road. The wheels of a chaise were heard, and then his handsome Xanthippe, in the company of Mrs. Downe, drove past on her way to the shore. They were driving slowly; there was a pleasing light in Mrs. Downe’s face, which seemed faintly to reflect itself upon the countenance of her companion — that politessedu coeur which was so natural to her having possibly begun already to work results. But whatever the situation, Barnet resolved not to interfere, or do anything to hazard the glory of the day. He might well afford to trust the issue to another when he could never direct it but to ill himself. His wife’s clinched rein-hand in its lemon-coloured glove, her stiff, erect figure, clad in velvet and lace, and her boldly outlined face, passed on, exhibiting their owner as one fixed forever above the level of her companion — socially by her early breeding, and materially by her higher cushion.

Barnet decided to allow them a proper time to themselves, and then stroll down to the shore and drive them home. After lingering on at the house for another hour, he started with this intention. A few hundred yards below “Chateau Ringdale” stood the cottage in which the late lieutenant’s daughter had her lodging. Barnet had not been so far that way for a long time, and as he approached the forbidden ground a curious warmth passed into him, which led him to perceive that, unless he were careful, he might have to fight the battle with himself about Lucy over again. A tenth of his present excuse would, however, have justified him in traveling by that road to-day.

He came opposite the dwelling, and turned his eyes for a momentary glance into the little garden that stretched from the palings to the door. Lucy was in the enclosure; she was walking and stooping to gather some flowers, possibly for the purpose of painting them, for she moved about quickly, as if anxious to save time. She did not see him; he might have passed unnoticed; but a sensation which was not in strict unison with his previous sentiments that day led him to pause in his walk and watch her. She went nimbly round and round the beds of anemones, tulips, jonquils, polyanthuses and other old-fashioned flowers, looking a very charming figure in her half-mourning bonnet, and with an incomplete nosegay in her left hand. Raising herself to pull down a lilac-blossom, she observed him.