The Hand of Ethelberta

T >> Thomas Hardy >> The Hand of Ethelberta


Going at once upstairs, Ethelberta ran down the passage, and after some
hesitation softly opened the door of the sitting-room in the best suite
of apartments that the inn could boast of.

In this room sat an elderly lady writing by the light of two candles with
green shades. Well knowing, as it seemed, who the intruder was, she
continued her occupation, and her visitor advanced and stood beside the
table. The old lady wore her spectacles low down her cheek, her glance
being depressed to about the slope of her straight white nose in order to
look through them. Her mouth was pursed up to almost a youthful shape as
she formed the letters with her pen, and a slight move of the lip
accompanied every downstroke. There were two large antique rings on her
forefinger, against which the quill rubbed in moving backwards and
forwards, thereby causing a secondary noise rivalling the primary one of
the nib upon the paper.

'Mamma,' said the younger lady, 'here I am at last.'

A writer's mind in the midst of a sentence being like a ship at sea,
knowing no rest or comfort till safely piloted into the harbour of a full
stop, Lady Petherwin just replied with 'What,' in an occupied tone, not
rising to interrogation. After signing her name to the letter, she
raised her eyes.

'Why, how late you are, Ethelberta, and how heated you look!' she said.
'I have been quite alarmed about you. What do you say has happened?'

The great, chief, and altogether eclipsing thing that had happened was
the accidental meeting with an old lover whom she had once quarrelled
with; and Ethelberta's honesty would have delivered the tidings at once,
had not, unfortunately, all the rest of her attributes been dead against
that act, for the old lady's sake even more than for her own.

'I saw a great cruel bird chasing a harmless duck!' she exclaimed
innocently. 'And I ran after to see what the end of it would be--much
further than I had any idea of going. However, the duck came to a pond,
and in running round it to see the end of the fight, I could not remember
which way I had come.'

'Mercy!' said her mother-in-law, lifting her large eyelids, heavy as
window-shutters, and spreading out her fingers like the horns of a snail.
'You might have sunk up to your knees and got lost in that swampy
place--such a time of night, too. What a tomboy you are! And how did
you find your way home after all!'

'O, some man showed me the way, and then I had no difficulty, and after
that I came along leisurely.'

'I thought you had been running all the way; you look so warm.'

'It is a warm evening. . . . Yes, and I have been thinking of old times
as I walked along,' she said, 'and how people's positions in life alter.
Have I not heard you say that while I was at Bonn, at school, some family
that we had known had their household broken up when the father died, and
that the children went away you didn't know where?'

'Do you mean the Julians?'

'Yes, that was the name.'

'Why, of course you know it was the Julians. Young Julian had a day or
two's fancy for you one summer, had he not?--just after you came to us,
at the same time, or just before it, that my poor boy and you were so
desperately attached to each other.'

'O yes, I recollect,' said Ethelberta. 'And he had a sister, I think. I
wonder where they went to live after the family collapse.'

'I do not know,' said Lady Petherwin, taking up another sheet of paper.
'I have a dim notion that the son, who had been brought up to no
profession, became a teacher of music in some country town--music having
always been his hobby. But the facts are not very distinct in my
memory.' And she dipped her pen for another letter.

Ethelberta, with a rather fallen countenance, then left her mother-in-
law, and went where all ladies are supposed to go when they want to
torment their minds in comfort--to her own room. Here she thoughtfully
sat down awhile, and some time later she rang for her maid.

'Menlove,' she said, without looking towards a rustle and half a footstep
that had just come in at the door, but leaning back in her chair and
speaking towards the corner of the looking-glass, 'will you go down and
find out if any gentleman named Julian has been staying in this house?
Get to know it, I mean, Menlove, not by directly inquiring; you have ways
of getting to know things, have you not? If the devoted George were here
now, he would help--'

'George was nothing to me, ma'am.'

'James, then.'

'And I only had James for a week or ten days: when I found he was a
married man, I encouraged his addresses very little indeed.'

'If you had encouraged him heart and soul, you couldn't have fumed more
at the loss of him. But please to go and make that inquiry, will you,
Menlove?'

In a few minutes Ethelberta's woman was back again. 'A gentleman of that
name stayed here last night, and left this afternoon.'

'Will you find out his address?'

Now the lady's-maid had already been quick-witted enough to find out
that, and indeed all about him; but it chanced that a fashionable
illustrated weekly paper had just been sent from the bookseller's, and
being in want of a little time to look it over before it reached her
mistress's hands, Mrs. Menlove retired, as if to go and ask the
question--to stand meanwhile under the gas-lamp in the passage,
inspecting the fascinating engravings. But as time will not wait for
tire-women, a natural length of absence soon elapsed, and she returned
again and said,

'His address is, Upper Street, Sandbourne.'

'Thank you, that will do,' replied her mistress.

The hour grew later, and that dreamy period came round when ladies'
fancies, that have lain shut up close as their fans during the day, begin
to assert themselves anew. At this time a good guess at Ethelberta's
thoughts might have been made from her manner of passing the minutes
away. Instead of reading, entering notes in her diary, or doing any
ordinary thing, she walked to and fro, curled her pretty nether lip
within her pretty upper one a great many times, made a cradle of her
locked fingers, and paused with fixed eyes where the walls of the room
set limits upon her walk to look at nothing but a picture within her
mind.




2. CHRISTOPHER'S HOUSE--SANDBOURNE TOWN--SANDBOURNE MOOR


During the wet autumn of the same year, the postman passed one morning as
usual into a plain street that ran through the less fashionable portion
of Sandbourne, a modern coast town and watering-place not many miles from
the ancient Anglebury. He knocked at the door of a flat-faced brick
house, and it was opened by a slight, thoughtful young man, with his hat
on, just then coming out. The postman put into his hands a book packet,
addressed, 'Christopher Julian, Esq.'

Christopher took the package upstairs, opened it with curiosity, and
discovered within a green volume of poems, by an anonymous writer, the
title-page bearing the inscription, 'Metres by E.' The book was new,
though it was cut, and it appeared to have been looked into. The young
man, after turning it over and wondering where it came from, laid it on
the table and went his way, being in haste to fulfil his engagements for
the day.

In the evening, on returning home from his occupations, he sat himself
down cosily to read the newly-arrived volume. The winds of this
uncertain season were snarling in the chimneys, and drops of rain spat
themselves into the fire, revealing plainly that the young man's room was
not far enough from the top of the house to admit of a twist in the flue,
and revealing darkly a little more, if that social rule-of-three inverse,
the higher in lodgings the lower in pocket, were applicable here.
However, the aspect of the room, though homely, was cheerful, a somewhat
contradictory group of furniture suggesting that the collection consisted
of waifs and strays from a former home, the grimy faces of the old
articles exercising a curious and subduing effect on the bright faces of
the new. An oval mirror of rococo workmanship, and a heavy cabinet-piano
with a cornice like that of an Egyptian temple, adjoined a harmonium of
yesterday, and a harp that was almost as new. Printed music of the last
century, and manuscript music of the previous evening, lay there in such
quantity as to endanger the tidiness of a retreat which was indeed only
saved from a chronic state of litter by a pair of hands that sometimes
played, with the lightness of breezes, about the sewing-machine standing
in a remote corner--if any corner could be called remote in a room so
small.

Fire lights and shades from the shaking flames struck in a butterfly
flutter on the underparts of the mantelshelf, and upon the reader's cheek
as he sat. Presently, and all at once, a much greater intentness
pervaded his face: he turned back again, and read anew the subject that
had arrested his eyes. He was a man whose countenance varied with his
mood, though it kept somewhat in the rear of that mood. He looked sad
when he felt almost serene, and only serene when he felt quite cheerful.
It is a habit people acquire who have had repressing experiences.

A faint smile and flush now lightened his face, and jumping up he opened
the door and exclaimed, 'Faith! will you come here for a moment?'

A prompt step was heard on the stairs, and the young person addressed as
Faith entered the room. She was small in figure, and bore less in the
form of her features than in their shades when changing from expression
to expression the evidence that she was his sister.

'Faith--I want your opinion. But, stop, read this first.' He laid his
finger upon a page in the book, and placed it in her hand.

The girl drew from her pocket a little green-leather sheath, worn at the
edges to whity-brown, and out of that a pair of spectacles, unconsciously
looking round the room for a moment as she did so, as if to ensure that
no stranger saw her in the act of using them. Here a weakness was
uncovered at once; it was a small, pretty, and natural one; indeed, as
weaknesses go in the great world, it might almost have been called a
commendable trait. She then began to read, without sitting down.

These 'Metres by E.' composed a collection of soft and marvellously
musical rhymes, of a nature known as the vers de societe. The lines
presented a series of playful defences of the supposed strategy of
womankind in fascination, courtship, and marriage--the whole teeming with
ideas bright as mirrors and just as unsubstantial, yet forming a
brilliant argument to justify the ways of girls to men. The pervading
characteristic of the mass was the means of forcing into notice, by
strangeness of contrast, the single mournful poem that the book
contained. It was placed at the very end, and under the title of
'Cancelled Words,' formed a whimsical and rather affecting love-lament,
somewhat in the tone of many of Sir Thomas Wyatt's poems. This was the
piece which had arrested Christopher's attention, and had been pointed
out by him to his sister Faith.

'It is very touching,' she said, looking up.

'What do you think I suspect about it--that the poem is addressed to me!
Do you remember, when father was alive and we were at Solentsea that
season, about a governess who came there with a Sir Ralph Petherwin and
his wife, people with a sickly little daughter and a grown-up son?'

'I never saw any of them. I think I remember your knowing something
about a young man of that name.'

'Yes, that was the family. Well, the governess there was a very
attractive woman, and somehow or other I got more interested in her than
I ought to have done (this is necessary to the history), and we used to
meet in romantic places--and--and that kind of thing, you know. The end
of it was, she jilted me and married the son.'

'You were anxious to get away from Solentsea.'

'Was I? Then that was chiefly the reason. Well, I decided to think no
more of her, and I was helped to do it by the troubles that came upon us
shortly afterwards; it is a blessed arrangement that one does not feel a
sentimental grief at all when additional grief comes in the shape of
practical misfortune. However, on the first afternoon of the little
holiday I took for my walking tour last summer, I came to Anglebury, and
stayed about the neighbourhood for a day or two to see what it was like,
thinking we might settle there if this place failed us. The next evening
I left, and walked across the heath to Flychett--that's a village about
five miles further on--so as to be that distance on my way for next
morning; and while I was crossing the heath there I met this very woman.
We talked a little, because we couldn't help it--you may imagine the kind
of talk it was--and parted as coolly as we had met. Now this strange
book comes to me; and I have a strong conviction that she is the writer
of it, for that poem sketches a similar scene--or rather suggests it; and
the tone generally seems the kind of thing she would write--not that she
was a sad woman, either.'

'She seems to be a warm-hearted, impulsive woman, to judge from these
tender verses.'

'People who print very warm words have sometimes very cold manners. I
wonder if it is really her writing, and if she has sent it to me!'

'Would it not be a singular thing for a married woman to do? Though of
course'--(she removed her spectacles as if they hindered her from
thinking, and hid them under the timepiece till she should go on
reading)--'of course poets have morals and manners of their own, and
custom is no argument with them. I am sure I would not have sent it to a
man for the world!'

'I do not see any absolute harm in her sending it. Perhaps she thinks
that, since it is all over, we may as well die friends.'

'If I were her husband I should have doubts about the dying. And "all
over" may not be so plain to other people as it is to you.'

'Perhaps not. And when a man checks all a woman's finer sentiments
towards him by marrying her, it is only natural that it should find a
vent somewhere. However, she probably does not know of my downfall since
father's death. I hardly think she would have cared to do it had she
known that. (I am assuming that it is Ethelberta--Mrs. Petherwin--who
sends it: of course I am not sure.) We must remember that when I knew
her I was a gentleman at ease, who had not the least notion that I should
have to work for a living, and not only so, but should have first to
invent a profession to work at out of my old tastes.'

'Kit, you have made two mistakes in your thoughts of that lady. Even
though I don't know her, I can show you that. Now I'll tell you! the
first is in thinking that a married lady would send the book with that
poem in it without at any rate a slight doubt as to its propriety: the
second is in supposing that, had she wished to do it, she would have
given the thing up because of our misfortunes. With a true woman the
second reason would have had no effect had she once got over the first.
I'm a woman, and that's why I know.'

Christopher said nothing, and turned over the poems.

* * * * *

He lived by teaching music, and, in comparison with starving, thrived;
though the wealthy might possibly have said that in comparison with
thriving he starved. During this night he hummed airs in bed, thought he
would do for the ballad of the fair poetess what other musicians had done
for the ballads of other fair poetesses, and dreamed that she smiled on
him as her prototype Sappho smiled on Phaon.

The next morning before starting on his rounds a new circumstance induced
him to direct his steps to the bookseller's, and ask a question. He had
found on examining the wrapper of the volume that it was posted in his
own town.

'No copy of the book has been sold by me,' the bookseller's voice replied
from far up the Alpine height of the shop-ladder, where he stood dusting
stale volumes, as was his habit of a morning before customers came. 'I
have never heard of it--probably never shall;' and he shook out the
duster, so as to hit the delicate mean between stifling Christopher and
not stifling him.

'Surely you don't live by your shop?' said Christopher, drawing back.

The bookseller's eyes rested on the speaker's; his face changed; he came
down and placed his hand on the lapel of Christopher's coat. 'Sir,' he
said, 'country bookselling is a miserable, impoverishing, exasperating
thing in these days. Can you understand the rest?'

'I can; I forgive a starving man anything,' said Christopher.

'You go a long way very suddenly,' said the book seller. 'Half as much
pity would have seemed better. However, wait a moment.' He looked into
a list of new books, and added: 'The work you allude to was only
published last week; though, mind you, if it had been published last
century I might not have sold a copy.'

Although his time was precious, Christopher had now become so interested
in the circumstance that the unseen sender was somebody breathing his own
atmosphere, possibly the very writer herself--the book being too new to
be known--that he again passed through the blue shadow of the spire which
stretched across the street to-day, and went towards the post-office,
animated by a bright intention--to ask the postmaster if he knew the
handwriting in which the packet was addressed.

Now the postmaster was an acquaintance of Christopher's, but, as regarded
putting that question to him, there was a difficulty. Everything turned
upon whether the postmaster at the moment of asking would be in his under-
government manner, or in the manner with which mere nature had endowed
him. In the latter case his reply would be all that could be wished; in
the former, a man who had sunk in society might as well put his tongue
into a mousetrap as make an inquiry so obviously outside the pale of
legality as was this.

So he postponed his business for the present, and refrained from entering
till he passed by after dinner, when pleasant malt liquor, of that
capacity for cheering which is expressed by four large letter X's
marching in a row, had refilled the globular trunk of the postmaster and
neutralized some of the effects of officiality. The time was well
chosen, but the inquiry threatened to prove fruitless: the postmaster had
never, to his knowledge, seen the writing before. Christopher was
turning away when a clerk in the background looked up and stated that
some young lady had brought a packet with such an address upon it into
the office two days earlier to get it stamped.

'Do you know her?' said Christopher.

'I have seen her about the neighbourhood. She goes by every morning; I
think she comes into the town from beyond the common, and returns again
between four and five in the afternoon.'

'What does she wear?'

'A white wool jacket with zigzags of black braid.'

Christopher left the post-office and went his way. Among his other
pupils there were two who lived at some distance from Sandbourne--one of
them in the direction indicated as that habitually taken by the young
person; and in the afternoon, as he returned homeward, Christopher
loitered and looked around. At first he could see nobody; but when about
a mile from the outskirts of the town he discerned a light spot ahead of
him, which actually turned out to be the jacket alluded to. In due time
he met the wearer face to face; she was not Ethelberta Petherwin--quite a
different sort of individual. He had long made up his mind that this
would be the case, yet he was in some indescribable way disappointed.

Of the two classes into which gentle young women naturally divide, those
who grow red at their weddings, and those who grow pale, the present one
belonged to the former class. She was an April-natured, pink-cheeked
girl, with eyes that would have made any jeweller in England think of his
trade--one who evidently took her day in the daytime, frequently caught
the early worm, and had little to do with yawns or candlelight. She came
and passed him; he fancied that her countenance changed. But one may
fancy anything, and the pair receded each from each without turning their
heads. He could not speak to her, plain and simple as she seemed.

It is rarely that a man who can be entered and made to throb by the
channel of his ears is not open to a similar attack through the channel
of his eyes--for many doors will admit to one mansion--allowance being
made for the readier capacity of chosen and practised organs. Hence the
beauties, concords, and eloquences of the female form were never without
their effect upon Christopher, a born musician, artist, poet, seer,
mouthpiece--whichever a translator of Nature's oracles into simple speech
may be called. The young girl who had gone by was fresh and pleasant;
moreover, she was a sort of mysterious link between himself and the past,
which these things were vividly reviving in him.

The following week Christopher met her again. She had not much dignity,
he had not much reserve, and the sudden resolution to have a holiday
which sometimes impels a plump heart to rise up against a brain that
overweights it was not to be resisted. He just lifted his hat, and put
the only question he could think of as a beginning: 'Have I the pleasure
of addressing the author of a book of very melodious poems that was sent
me the other day?'

The girl's forefinger twirled rapidly the loop of braid that it had
previously been twirling slowly, and drawing in her breath, she said,
'No, sir.'

'The sender, then?'

'Yes.'

She somehow presented herself as so insignificant by the combined effect
of the manner and the words that Christopher lowered his method of
address to her level at once. 'Ah,' he said, 'such an atmosphere as the
writer of "Metres by E." seems to breathe would soon spoil cheeks that
are fresh and round as lady-apples--eh, little girl? But are you
disposed to tell me that writer's name?'

By applying a general idea to a particular case a person with the best of
intentions may find himself immediately landed in a quandary. In saying
to the country girl before him what would have suited the mass of country
lasses well enough, Christopher had offended her beyond the cure of
compliment.

'I am not disposed to tell the writer's name,' she replied, with a
dudgeon that was very great for one whose whole stock of it was a trifle.
And she passed on and left him standing alone.

Thus further conversation was checked; but, through having rearranged the
hours of his country lessons, Christopher met her the next Wednesday, and
the next Friday, and throughout the following week--no further words
passing between them. For a while she went by very demurely, apparently
mindful of his offence. But effrontery is not proved to be part of a
man's nature till he has been guilty of a second act: the best of men may
commit a first through accident or ignorance--may even be betrayed into
it by over-zeal for experiment. Some such conclusion may or may not have
been arrived at by the girl with the lady-apple cheeks; at any rate,
after the lapse of another week a new spectacle presented itself; her
redness deepened whenever Christopher passed her by, and embarrassment
pervaded her from the lowest stitch to the tip of her feather. She had
little chance of escaping him by diverging from the road, for a figure
could be seen across the open ground to the distance of half a mile on
either side. One day as he drew near as usual, she met him as women meet
a cloud of dust--she turned and looked backwards till he had passed.

This would have been disconcerting but for one reason: Christopher was
ceasing to notice her. He was a man who often, when walking abroad, and
looking as it were at the scene before his eyes, discerned successes and
failures, friends and relations, episodes of childhood, wedding feasts
and funerals, the landscape suffering greatly by these visions, until it
became no more than the patterned wall-tints about the paintings in a
gallery; something necessary to the tone, yet not regarded. Nothing but
a special concentration of himself on externals could interrupt this
habit, and now that her appearance along the way had changed from a
chance to a custom he began to lapse again into the old trick. He gazed
once or twice at her form without seeing it: he did not notice that she
trembled.

He sometimes read as he walked, and book in hand he frequently approached
her now. This went on till six weeks had passed from the time of their
first encounter. Latterly might have been once or twice heard, when he
had moved out of earshot, a sound like a small gasping sigh; but no
arrangements were disturbed, and Christopher continued to keep down his
eyes as persistently as a saint in a church window.

The last day of his engagement had arrived, and with it the last of his
walks that way. On his final return he carried in his hand a bunch of
flowers which had been presented to him at the country-house where his
lessons were given. He was taking them home to his sister Faith, who
prized the lingering blossoms of the seeding season. Soon appeared as
usual his fellow-traveller; whereupon Christopher looked down upon his
nosegay. 'Sweet simple girl,' he thought, 'I'll endeavour to make peace
with her by means of these flowers before we part for good.'