Complete Works of Thomas Hardy (Illustrated) (89 page)

‘Now, Worm!’ said Mr. Swancourt sharply; and Worm started into an attitude of attention at once to receive orders. Stephen and himself were then left in possession, and the work went on till early in the afternoon, when dinner was announced by Unity of the vicarage kitchen running up the hill without a bonnet.

Elfride did not make her appearance inside the building till late in the afternoon, and came then by special invitation from Stephen during dinner. She looked so intensely LIVING and full of movement as she came into the old silent place, that young Smith’s world began to be lit by ‘the purple light’ in all its definiteness. Worm was got rid of by sending him to measure the height of the tower.

What could she do but come close — so close that a minute arc of her skirt touched his foot — and asked him how he was getting on with his sketches, and set herself to learn the principles of practical mensuration as applied to irregular buildings? Then she must ascend the pulpit to re-imagine for the hundredth time how it would seem to be a preacher.

Presently she leant over the front of the pulpit.

‘Don’t you tell papa, will you, Mr. Smith, if I tell you something?’ she said with a sudden impulse to make a confidence.

‘Oh no, that I won’t,’ said he, staring up.

‘Well, I write papa’s sermons for him very often, and he preaches them better than he does his own; and then afterwards he talks to people and to me about what he said in his sermon to-day, and forgets that I wrote it for him. Isn’t it absurd?’

‘How clever you must be!’ said Stephen. ‘I couldn’t write a sermon for the world.’

‘Oh, it’s easy enough,’ she said, descending from the pulpit and coming close to him to explain more vividly. ‘You do it like this. Did you ever play a game of forfeits called “When is it? where is it? what is it?”‘

‘No, never.’

‘Ah, that’s a pity, because writing a sermon is very much like playing that game. You take the text. You think, why is it? what is it? and so on. You put that down under “Generally.” Then you proceed to the First, Secondly, and Thirdly. Papa won’t have Fourthlys — says they are all my eye. Then you have a final Collectively, several pages of this being put in great black brackets, writing opposite, “LEAVE THIS OUT IF THE FARMERS ARE FALLING ASLEEP.” Then comes your In Conclusion, then A Few Words And I Have Done. Well, all this time you have put on the back of each page, “KEEP YOUR VOICE DOWN” — I mean,’ she added, correcting herself, ‘that’s how I do in papa’s sermon-book, because otherwise he gets louder and louder, till at last he shouts like a farmer up a-field. Oh, papa is so funny in some things!’

Then, after this childish burst of confidence, she was frightened, as if warned by womanly instinct, which for the moment her ardour had outrun, that she had been too forward to a comparative stranger.

Elfride saw her father then, and went away into the wind, being caught by a gust as she ascended the churchyard slope, in which gust she had the motions, without the motives, of a hoiden; the grace, without the self-consciousness, of a pirouetter. She conversed for a minute or two with her father, and proceeded homeward, Mr. Swancourt coming on to the church to Stephen. The wind had freshened his warm complexion as it freshens the glow of a brand. He was in a mood of jollity, and watched Elfride down the hill with a smile.

‘You little flyaway! you look wild enough now,’ he said, and turned to Stephen. ‘But she’s not a wild child at all, Mr. Smith. As steady as you; and that you are steady I see from your diligence here.’

‘I think Miss Swancourt very clever,’ Stephen observed.

‘Yes, she is; certainly, she is,’ said papa, turning his voice as much as possible to the neutral tone of disinterested criticism. ‘Now, Smith, I’ll tell you something; but she mustn’t know it for the world — not for the world, mind, for she insists upon keeping it a dead secret. Why, SHE WRITES MY SERMONS FOR ME OFTEN, and a very good job she makes of them!’

‘She can do anything.’

‘She can do that. The little rascal has the very trick of the trade. But, mind you, Smith, not a word about it to her, not a single word!’

‘Not a word,’ said Smith.

‘Look there,’ said Mr. Swancourt. ‘What do you think of my roofing?’ He pointed with his walking-stick at the chancel roof,

‘Did you do that, sir?’

‘Yes, I worked in shirt-sleeves all the time that was going on. I pulled down the old rafters, fixed the new ones, put on the battens, slated the roof, all with my own hands, Worm being my assistant. We worked like slaves, didn’t we, Worm?’

‘Ay, sure, we did; harder than some here and there — hee, hee!’ said William Worm, cropping up from somewhere. ‘Like slaves, ‘a b’lieve — hee, hee! And weren’t ye foaming mad, sir, when the nails wouldn’t go straight? Mighty I! There, ‘tisn’t so bad to cuss and keep it in as to cuss and let it out, is it, sir?’

‘Well — why?’

‘Because you, sir, when ye were a-putting on the roof, only used to cuss in your mind, which is, I suppose, no harm at all.’

‘I don’t think you know what goes on in my mind, Worm.’

‘Oh, doan’t I, sir — hee, hee! Maybe I’m but a poor wambling thing, sir, and can’t read much; but I can spell as well as some here and there. Doan’t ye mind, sir, that blustrous night when ye asked me to hold the candle to ye in yer workshop, when you were making a new chair for the chancel?’

‘Yes; what of that?’

‘I stood with the candle, and you said you liked company, if ‘twas only a dog or cat — maning me; and the chair wouldn’t do nohow.’

‘Ah, I remember.’

‘No; the chair wouldn’t do nohow. ‘A was very well to look at; but, Lord! —  — ’

‘Worm, how often have I corrected you for irreverent speaking?’

‘ — ’A was very well to look at, but you couldn’t sit in the chair nohow. ‘Twas all a-twist wi’ the chair, like the letter Z, directly you sat down upon the chair. “Get up, Worm,” says you, when you seed the chair go all a-sway wi’ me. Up you took the chair, and flung en like fire and brimstone to t’other end of your shop — all in a passion. “Damn the chair!” says I. “Just what I was thinking,” says you, sir. “I could see it in your face, sir,” says I, “and I hope you and God will forgi’e me for saying what you wouldn’t.” To save your life you couldn’t help laughing, sir, at a poor wambler reading your thoughts so plain. Ay, I’m as wise as one here and there.’

‘I thought you had better have a practical man to go over the church and tower with you,’ Mr. Swancourt said to Stephen the following morning, ‘so I got Lord Luxellian’s permission to send for a man when you came. I told him to be there at ten o’clock. He’s a very intelligent man, and he will tell you all you want to know about the state of the walls. His name is John Smith.’

Elfride did not like to be seen again at the church with Stephen. ‘I will watch here for your appearance at the top of the tower,’ she said laughingly. ‘I shall see your figure against the sky.’

‘And when I am up there I’ll wave my handkerchief to you, Miss Swancourt,’ said Stephen. ‘In twelve minutes from this present moment,’ he added, looking at his watch, ‘I’ll be at the summit and look out for you.’

She went round to the corner of the shrubbery, whence she could watch him down the slope leading to the foot of the hill on which the church stood. There she saw waiting for him a white spot — a mason in his working clothes. Stephen met this man and stopped.

To her surprise, instead of their moving on to the churchyard, they both leisurely sat down upon a stone close by their meeting-place, and remained as if in deep conversation. Elfride looked at the time; nine of the twelve minutes had passed, and Stephen showed no signs of moving. More minutes passed — she grew cold with waiting, and shivered. It was not till the end of a quarter of an hour that they began to slowly wend up the hill at a snail’s pace.

‘Rude and unmannerly!’ she said to herself, colouring with pique. ‘Anybody would think he was in love with that horrid mason instead of with —  — ’

The sentence remained unspoken, though not unthought.

She returned to the porch.

‘Is the man you sent for a lazy, sit-still, do-nothing kind of man?’ she inquired of her father.

‘No,’ he said surprised; ‘quite the reverse. He is Lord Luxellian’s master-mason, John Smith.’

‘Oh,’ said Elfride indifferently, and returned towards her bleak station, and waited and shivered again. It was a trifle, after all — a childish thing — looking out from a tower and waving a handkerchief. But her new friend had promised, and why should he tease her so? The effect of a blow is as proportionate to the texture of the object struck as to its own momentum; and she had such a superlative capacity for being wounded that little hits struck her hard.

It was not till the end of half an hour that two figures were seen above the parapet of the dreary old pile, motionless as bitterns on a ruined mosque. Even then Stephen was not true enough to perform what he was so courteous to promise, and he vanished without making a sign.

He returned at midday. Elfride looked vexed when unconscious that his eyes were upon her; when conscious, severe. However, her attitude of coldness had long outlived the coldness itself, and she could no longer utter feigned words of indifference.

‘Ah, you weren’t kind to keep me waiting in the cold, and break your promise,’ she said at last reproachfully, in tones too low for her father’s powers of hearing.

‘Forgive, forgive me!’ said Stephen with dismay. ‘I had forgotten — quite forgotten! Something prevented my remembering.’

‘Any further explanation?’ said Miss Capricious, pouting.

He was silent for a few minutes, and looked askance.

‘None,’ he said, with the accent of one who concealed a sin.

CHAPTER V

     ‘Bosom’d high in tufted trees.’

It was breakfast time.

As seen from the vicarage dining-room, which took a warm tone of light from the fire, the weather and scene outside seemed to have stereotyped themselves in unrelieved shades of gray. The long-armed trees and shrubs of juniper, cedar, and pine varieties, were grayish black; those of the broad-leaved sort, together with the herbage, were grayish-green; the eternal hills and tower behind them were grayish-brown; the sky, dropping behind all, gray of the purest melancholy.

Yet in spite of this sombre artistic effect, the morning was not one which tended to lower the spirits. It was even cheering. For it did not rain, nor was rain likely to fall for many days to come.

Elfride had turned from the table towards the fire and was idly elevating a hand-screen before her face, when she heard the click of a little gate outside.

‘Ah, here’s the postman!’ she said, as a shuffling, active man came through an opening in the shrubbery and across the lawn. She vanished, and met him in the porch, afterwards coming in with her hands behind her back.

‘How many are there? Three for papa, one for Mr. Smith, none for Miss Swancourt. And, papa, look here, one of yours is from — whom do you think? — Lord Luxellian. And it has something HARD in it — a lump of something. I’ve been feeling it through the envelope, and can’t think what it is.’

‘What does Luxellian write for, I wonder?’ Mr. Swancourt had said simultaneously with her words. He handed Stephen his letter, and took his own, putting on his countenance a higher class of look than was customary, as became a poor gentleman who was going to read a letter from a peer.

Stephen read his missive with a countenance quite the reverse of the vicar’s.

                 ‘PERCY PLACE, Thursday Evening.

‘DEAR SMITH, — Old H. is in a towering rage with you for being so long

about the church sketches. Swears you are more trouble than you are

worth. He says I am to write and say you are to stay no longer on

any consideration — that he would have done it all in three hours very

easily. I told him that you were not like an experienced hand, which he

seemed to forget, but it did not make much difference. However, between

you and me privately, if I were you I would not alarm myself for a day

or so, if I were not inclined to return. I would make out the week and

finish my spree. He will blow up just as much if you appear here on

Saturday as if you keep away till Monday morning. — Yours very truly,

‘SIMPKINS JENKINS.

‘Dear me — very awkward!’ said Stephen, rather en l’air, and confused with the kind of confusion that assails an understrapper when he has been enlarged by accident to the dimensions of a superior, and is somewhat rudely pared down to his original size.

‘What is awkward?’ said Miss Swancourt.

Smith by this time recovered his equanimity, and with it the professional dignity of an experienced architect.

‘Important business demands my immediate presence in London, I regret to say,’ he replied.

‘What! Must you go at once?’ said Mr. Swancourt, looking over the edge of his letter. ‘Important business? A young fellow like you to have important business!’

‘The truth is,’ said Stephen blushing, and rather ashamed of having pretended even so slightly to a consequence which did not belong to him, — ’the truth is, Mr. Hewby has sent to say I am to come home; and I must obey him.’

‘I see; I see. It is politic to do so, you mean. Now I can see more than you think. You are to be his partner. I booked you for that directly I read his letter to me the other day, and the way he spoke of you. He thinks a great deal of you, Mr. Smith, or he wouldn’t be so anxious for your return.’

Unpleasant to Stephen such remarks as these could not sound; to have the expectancy of partnership with one of the largest-practising architects in London thrust upon him was cheering, however untenable he felt the idea to be. He saw that, whatever Mr. Hewby might think, Mr. Swancourt certainly thought much of him to entertain such an idea on such slender ground as to be absolutely no ground at all. And then, unaccountably, his speaking face exhibited a cloud of sadness, which a reflection on the remoteness of any such contingency could hardly have sufficed to cause.