Wessex Tales

T >> Thomas Hardy >> Wessex Tales


At what a tearing pace he had driven up that road, through the yellow
evening sunlight, the shadows flapping irksomely into his eyes as each
wayside object rushed past between him and the west! Tired workmen with
their baskets at their backs had turned on their homeward journey to
wonder at his speed. Halfway between the shore and Port-Bredy town he
had met Charlson, who had been the first surgeon to hear of the accident.
He was accompanied by his assistant in a gig. Barnet had sent on the
latter to the coast in case that Downe's poor wife should by that time
have been reclaimed from the waves, and had brought Charlson back with
him to the house.

Barnet's presence was not needed here, and he felt it to be his next duty
to set off at once and find Downe, that no other than himself might break
the news to him.

He was quite sure that no chance had been lost for Mrs. Downe by his
leaving the shore. By the time that Mrs. Barnet had been laid in the
carriage, a much larger group had assembled to lend assistance in finding
her friend, rendering his own help superfluous. But the duty of breaking
the news was made doubly painful by the circumstance that the catastrophe
which had befallen Mrs. Downe was solely the result of her own and her
husband's loving-kindness towards himself.

He found Downe in his office. When the solicitor comprehended the
intelligence he turned pale, stood up, and remained for a moment
perfectly still, as if bereft of his faculties; then his shoulders
heaved, he pulled out his handkerchief and began to cry like a child. His
sobs might have been heard in the next room. He seemed to have no idea
of going to the shore, or of doing anything; but when Barnet took him
gently by the hand and proposed to start at once, he quietly acquiesced,
neither uttering any further word nor making any effort to repress his
tears.

Barnet accompanied him to the shore, where, finding that no trace had as
yet been seen of Mrs. Downe, and that his stay would be of no avail, he
left Downe with his friends and the young doctor, and once more hastened
back to his own house.

At the door he met Charlson. 'Well!' Barnet said.

'I have just come down,' said the doctor; 'we have done everything, but
without result. I sympathize with you in your bereavement.'

Barnet did not much appreciate Charlson's sympathy, which sounded to his
ears as something of a mockery from the lips of a man who knew what
Charlson knew about their domestic relations. Indeed there seemed an odd
spark in Charlson's full black eye as he said the words; but that might
have been imaginary.

'And, Mr. Barnet,' Charlson resumed, 'that little matter between us--I
hope to settle it finally in three weeks at least.'

'Never mind that now,' said Barnet abruptly. He directed the surgeon to
go to the harbour in case his services might even now be necessary there:
and himself entered the house.

The servants were coming from his wife's chamber, looking helplessly at
each other and at him. He passed them by and entered the room, where he
stood mutely regarding the bed for a few minutes, after which he walked
into his own dressing-room adjoining, and there paced up and down. In a
minute or two he noticed what a strange and total silence had come over
the upper part of the house; his own movements, muffled as they were by
the carpet, seemed noisy, and his thoughts to disturb the air like
articulate utterances. His eye glanced through the window. Far down the
road to the harbour a roof detained his gaze: out of it rose a red
chimney, and out of the red chimney a curl of smoke, as from a fire newly
kindled. He had often seen such a sight before. In that house lived
Lucy Savile; and the smoke was from the fire which was regularly lighted
at this time to make her tea.

After that he went back to the bedroom, and stood there some time
regarding his wife's silent form. She was a woman some years older than
himself, but had not by any means overpassed the maturity of good looks
and vigour. Her passionate features, well-defined, firm, and statuesque
in life, were doubly so now: her mouth and brow, beneath her purplish
black hair, showed only too clearly that the turbulency of character
which had made a bear-garden of his house had been no temporary phase of
her existence. While he reflected, he suddenly said to himself, I wonder
if all has been done?

The thought was led up to by his having fancied that his wife's features
lacked in its complete form the expression which he had been accustomed
to associate with the faces of those whose spirits have fled for ever.
The effacement of life was not so marked but that, entering uninformed,
he might have supposed her sleeping. Her complexion was that seen in the
numerous faded portraits by Sir Joshua Reynolds; it was pallid in
comparison with life, but there was visible on a close inspection the
remnant of what had once been a flush; the keeping between the cheeks and
the hollows of the face being thus preserved, although positive colour
was gone. Long orange rays of evening sun stole in through chinks in the
blind, striking on the large mirror, and being thence reflected upon the
crimson hangings and woodwork of the heavy bedstead, so that the general
tone of light was remarkably warm; and it was probable that something
might be due to this circumstance. Still the fact impressed him as
strange. Charlson had been gone more than a quarter of an hour: could it
be possible that he had left too soon, and that his attempts to restore
her had operated so sluggishly as only now to have made themselves felt?
Barnet laid his hand upon her chest, and fancied that ever and anon a
faint flutter of palpitation, gentle as that of a butterfly's wing,
disturbed the stillness there--ceasing for a time, then struggling to go
on, then breaking down in weakness and ceasing again.

Barnet's mother had been an active practitioner of the healing art among
her poorer neighbours, and her inspirations had all been derived from an
octavo volume of Domestic Medicine, which at this moment was lying, as it
had lain for many years, on a shelf in Barnet's dressing-room. He
hastily fetched it, and there read under the head 'Drowning:'-

'Exertions for the recovery of any person who has not been immersed
for a longer period than half-an-hour should be continued for at least
four hours, as there have been many cases in which returning life has
made itself visible even after a longer interval.

'Should, however, a weak action of any of the organs show itself when
the case seems almost hopeless, our efforts must be redoubled; the
feeble spark in this case requires to be solicited; it will certainly
disappear under a relaxation of labour.'

Barnet looked at his watch; it was now barely two hours and a half from
the time when he had first heard of the accident. He threw aside the
book and turned quickly to reach a stimulant which had previously been
used. Pulling up the blind for more light, his eye glanced out of the
window. There he saw that red chimney still smoking cheerily, and that
roof, and through the roof that somebody. His mechanical movements
stopped, his hand remained on the blind-cord, and he seemed to become
breathless, as if he had suddenly found himself treading a high rope.

While he stood a sparrow lighted on the windowsill, saw him, and flew
away. Next a man and a dog walked over one of the green hills which
bulged above the roofs of the town. But Barnet took no notice.

We may wonder what were the exact images that passed through his mind
during those minutes of gazing upon Lucy Savile's house, the sparrow, the
man and the dog, and Lucy Savile's house again. There are honest men who
will not admit to their thoughts, even as idle hypotheses, views of the
future that assume as done a deed which they would recoil from doing; and
there are other honest men for whom morality ends at the surface of their
own heads, who will deliberate what the first will not so much as
suppose. Barnet had a wife whose pretence distracted his home; she now
lay as in death; by merely doing nothing--by letting the intelligence
which had gone forth to the world lie undisturbed--he would effect such a
deliverance for himself as he had never hoped for, and open up an
opportunity of which till now he had never dreamed. Whether the
conjuncture had arisen through any unscrupulous, ill-considered impulse
of Charlson to help out of a strait the friend who was so kind as never
to press him for what was due could not be told; there was nothing to
prove it; and it was a question which could never be asked. The
triangular situation--himself--his wife--Lucy Savile--was the one clear
thing.

From Barnet's actions we may infer that he supposed such and such a
result, for a moment, but did not deliberate. He withdrew his hazel eyes
from the scene without, calmly turned, rang the bell for assistance, and
vigorously exerted himself to learn if life still lingered in that
motionless frame. In a short time another surgeon was in attendance; and
then Barnet's surmise proved to be true. The slow life timidly heaved
again; but much care and patience were needed to catch and retain it, and
a considerable period elapsed before it could be said with certainty that
Mrs. Barnet lived. When this was the case, and there was no further room
for doubt, Barnet left the chamber. The blue evening smoke from Lucy's
chimney had died down to an imperceptible stream, and as he walked about
downstairs he murmured to himself, 'My wife was dead, and she is alive
again.'

It was not so with Downe. After three hours' immersion his wife's body
had been recovered, life, of course, being quite extinct. Barnet on
descending, went straight to his friend's house, and there learned the
result. Downe was helpless in his wild grief, occasionally even
hysterical. Barnet said little, but finding that some guiding hand was
necessary in the sorrow-stricken household, took upon him to supervise
and manage till Downe should be in a state of mind to do so for himself.



CHAPTER VI


One September evening, four months later, when Mrs. Barnet was in perfect
health, and Mrs. Downe but a weakening memory, an errand-boy paused to
rest himself in front of Mr. Barnet's old house, depositing his basket on
one of the window-sills. The street was not yet lighted, but there were
lights in the house, and at intervals a flitting shadow fell upon the
blind at his elbow. Words also were audible from the same apartment, and
they seemed to be those of persons in violent altercation. But the boy
could not gather their purport, and he went on his way.

Ten minutes afterwards the door of Barnet's house opened, and a tall
closely-veiled lady in a travelling-dress came out and descended the
freestone steps. The servant stood in the doorway watching her as she
went with a measured tread down the street. When she had been out of
sight for some minutes Barnet appeared at the door from within.

'Did your mistress leave word where she was going?' he asked.

'No, sir.'

'Is the carriage ordered to meet her anywhere?'

'No, sir.'

'Did she take a latch-key?'

'No, sir.'

Barnet went in again, sat down in his chair, and leaned back. Then in
solitude and silence he brooded over the bitter emotions that filled his
heart. It was for this that he had gratuitously restored her to life,
and made his union with another impossible! The evening drew on, and
nobody came to disturb him. At bedtime he told the servants to retire,
that he would sit up for Mrs. Barnet himself; and when they were gone he
leaned his head upon his hand and mused for hours.

The clock struck one, two; still his wife came not, and, with impatience
added to depression, he went from room to room till another weary hour
had passed. This was not altogether a new experience for Barnet; but she
had never before so prolonged her absence. At last he sat down again and
fell asleep.

He awoke at six o'clock to find that she had not returned. In searching
about the rooms he discovered that she had taken a case of jewels which
had been hers before her marriage. At eight a note was brought him; it
was from his wife, in which she stated that she had gone by the coach to
the house of a distant relative near London, and expressed a wish that
certain boxes, articles of clothing, and so on, might be sent to her
forthwith. The note was brought to him by a waiter at the Black-Bull
Hotel, and had been written by Mrs. Barnet immediately before she took
her place in the stage.

By the evening this order was carried out, and Barnet, with a sense of
relief, walked out into the town. A fair had been held during the day,
and the large clear moon which rose over the most prominent hill flung
its light upon the booths and standings that still remained in the
street, mixing its rays curiously with those from the flaring naphtha
lamps. The town was full of country-people who had come in to enjoy
themselves, and on this account Barnet strolled through the streets
unobserved. With a certain recklessness he made for the harbour-road,
and presently found himself by the shore, where he walked on till he came
to the spot near which his friend the kindly Mrs. Downe had lost her
life, and his own wife's life had been preserved. A tremulous pathway of
bright moonshine now stretched over the water which had engulfed them,
and not a living soul was near.

Here he ruminated on their characters, and next on the young girl in whom
he now took a more sensitive interest than at the time when he had been
free to marry her. Nothing, so far as he was aware, had ever appeared in
his own conduct to show that such an interest existed. He had made it a
point of the utmost strictness to hinder that feeling from influencing in
the faintest degree his attitude towards his wife; and this was made all
the more easy for him by the small demand Mrs. Barnet made upon his
attentions, for which she ever evinced the greatest contempt; thus
unwittingly giving him the satisfaction of knowing that their severance
owed nothing to jealousy, or, indeed, to any personal behaviour of his at
all. Her concern was not with him or his feelings, as she frequently
told him; but that she had, in a moment of weakness, thrown herself away
upon a common burgher when she might have aimed at, and possibly brought
down, a peer of the realm. Her frequent depreciation of Barnet in these
terms had at times been so intense that he was sorely tempted to
retaliate on her egotism by owning that he loved at the same low level on
which he lived; but prudence had prevailed, for which he was now
thankful.

Something seemed to sound upon the shingle behind him over and above the
raking of the wave. He looked round, and a slight girlish shape appeared
quite close to him, He could not see her face because it was in the
direction of the moon.

'Mr. Barnet?' the rambler said, in timid surprise. The voice was the
voice of Lucy Savile.

'Yes,' said Barnet. 'How can I repay you for this pleasure?'

'I only came because the night was so clear. I am now on my way home.'

'I am glad we have met. I want to know if you will let me do something
for you, to give me an occupation, as an idle man? I am sure I ought to
help you, for I know you are almost without friends.'

She hesitated. 'Why should you tell me that?' she said.

'In the hope that you will be frank with me.'

'I am not altogether without friends here. But I am going to make a
little change in my life--to go out as a teacher of freehand drawing and
practical perspective, of course I mean on a comparatively humble scale,
because I have not been specially educated for that profession. But I am
sure I shall like it much.'

'You have an opening?'

'I have not exactly got it, but I have advertised for one.'

'Lucy, you must let me help you!'

'Not at all.'

'You need not think it would compromise you, or that I am indifferent to
delicacy. I bear in mind how we stand. It is very unlikely that you
will succeed as teacher of the class you mention, so let me do something
of a different kind for you. Say what you would like, and it shall be
done.'

'No; if I can't be a drawing-mistress or governess, or something of that
sort, I shall go to India and join my brother.'

'I wish I could go abroad, anywhere, everywhere with you, Lucy, and leave
this place and its associations for ever!'

She played with the end of her bonnet-string, and hastily turned aside.
'Don't ever touch upon that kind of topic again,' she said, with a quick
severity not free from anger. 'It simply makes it impossible for me to
see you, much less receive any guidance from you. No, thank you, Mr.
Barnet; you can do nothing for me at present; and as I suppose my
uncertainty will end in my leaving for India, I fear you never will. If
ever I think you can do anything, I will take the trouble to ask you.
Till then, good-bye.'

The tone of her latter words was equivocal, and while he remained in
doubt whether a gentle irony was or was not inwrought with their sound,
she swept lightly round and left him alone. He saw her form get smaller
and smaller along the damp belt of sea-sand between ebb and flood; and
when she had vanished round the cliff into the harbour-road, he himself
followed in the same direction.

That her hopes from an advertisement should be the single thread which
held Lucy Savile in England was too much for Barnet. On reaching the
town he went straight to the residence of Downe, now a widower with four
children. The young motherless brood had been sent to bed about a
quarter of an hour earlier, and when Barnet entered he found Downe
sitting alone. It was the same room as that from which the family had
been looking out for Downe at the beginning of the year, when Downe had
slipped into the gutter and his wife had been so enviably tender towards
him. The old neatness had gone from the house; articles lay in places
which could show no reason for their presence, as if momentarily
deposited there some months ago, and forgotten ever since; there were no
flowers; things were jumbled together on the furniture which should have
been in cupboards; and the place in general had that stagnant,
unrenovated air which usually pervades the maimed home of the widower.

Downe soon renewed his customary full-worded lament over his wife, and
even when he had worked himself up to tears, went on volubly, as if a
listener were a luxury to be enjoyed whenever he could be caught.

'She was a treasure beyond compare, Mr. Barnet! I shall never see such
another. Nobody now to nurse me--nobody to console me in those daily
troubles, you know, Barnet, which make consolation so necessary to a
nature like mine. It would be unbecoming to repine, for her spirit's
home was elsewhere--the tender light in her eyes always showed it; but it
is a long dreary time that I have before me, and nobody else can ever
fill the void left in my heart by her loss--nobody--nobody!' And Downe
wiped his eyes again.

'She was a good woman in the highest sense,' gravely answered Barnet,
who, though Downe's words drew genuine compassion from his heart, could
not help feeling that a tender reticence would have been a finer tribute
to Mrs. Downe's really sterling virtues than such a second-class lament
as this.

'I have something to show you,' Downe resumed, producing from a drawer a
sheet of paper on which was an elaborate design for a canopied tomb.
'This has been sent me by the architect, but it is not exactly what I
want.'

'You have got Jones to do it, I see, the man who is carrying out my
house,' said Barnet, as he glanced at the signature to the drawing.

'Yes, but it is not quite what I want. I want something more
striking--more like a tomb I have seen in St. Paul's Cathedral. Nothing
less will do justice to my feelings, and how far short of them that will
fall!'

Barnet privately thought the design a sufficiently imposing one as it
stood, even extravagantly ornate; but, feeling that he had no right to
criticize, he said gently, 'Downe, should you not live more in your
children's lives at the present time, and soften the sharpness of regret
for your own past by thinking of their future?'

'Yes, yes; but what can I do more?' asked Downe, wrinkling his forehead
hopelessly.

It was with anxious slowness that Barnet produced his reply--the secret
object of his visit to-night. 'Did you not say one day that you ought by
rights to get a governess for the children?'

Downe admitted that he had said so, but that he could not see his way to
it. 'The kind of woman I should like to have,' he said, 'would be rather
beyond my means. No; I think I shall send them to school in the town
when they are old enough to go out alone.'

'Now, I know of something better than that. The late Lieutenant Savile's
daughter, Lucy, wants to do something for herself in the way of teaching.
She would be inexpensive, and would answer your purpose as well as
anybody for six or twelve months. She would probably come daily if you
were to ask her, and so your housekeeping arrangements would not be much
affected.'

'I thought she had gone away,' said the solicitor, musing. 'Where does
she live?'

Barnet told him, and added that, if Downe should think of her as
suitable, he would do well to call as soon as possible, or she might be
on the wing. 'If you do see her,' he said, 'it would be advisable not to
mention my name. She is rather stiff in her ideas of me, and it might
prejudice her against a course if she knew that I recommended it.'

Downe promised to give the subject his consideration, and nothing more
was said about it just then. But when Barnet rose to go, which was not
till nearly bedtime, he reminded Downe of the suggestion and went up the
street to his own solitary home with a sense of satisfaction at his
promising diplomacy in a charitable cause.



CHAPTER VII


The walls of his new house were carried up nearly to their full height.
By a curious though not infrequent reaction, Barnet's feelings about that
unnecessary structure had undergone a change; he took considerable
interest in its progress as a long-neglected thing, his wife before her
departure having grown quite weary of it as a hobby. Moreover, it was an
excellent distraction for a man in the unhappy position of having to live
in a provincial town with nothing to do. He was probably the first of
his line who had ever passed a day without toil, and perhaps something
like an inherited instinct disqualifies such men for a life of pleasant
inaction, such as lies in the power of those whose leisure is not a
personal accident, but a vast historical accretion which has become part
of their natures.

Thus Barnet got into a way of spending many of his leisure hours on the
site of the new building, and he might have been seen on most days at
this time trying the temper of the mortar by punching the joints with his
stick, looking at the grain of a floor-board, and meditating where it
grew, or picturing under what circumstances the last fire would be
kindled in the at present sootless chimneys. One day when thus occupied
he saw three children pass by in the company of a fair young woman, whose
sudden appearance caused him to flush perceptibly.

'Ah, she is there,' he thought. 'That's a blessed thing.'

Casting an interested glance over the rising building and the busy
workmen, Lucy Savile and the little Downes passed by; and after that time
it became a regular though almost unconscious custom of Barnet to stand
in the half-completed house and look from the ungarnished windows at the
governess as she tripped towards the sea-shore with her young charges,
which she was in the habit of doing on most fine afternoons. It was on
one of these occasions, when he had been loitering on the first-floor
landing, near the hole left for the staircase, not yet erected, that
there appeared above the edge of the floor a little hat, followed by a
little head.

Barnet withdrew through a doorway, and the child came to the top of the
ladder, stepping on to the floor and crying to her sisters and Miss
Savile to follow. Another head rose above the floor, and another, and
then Lucy herself came into view. The troop ran hither and thither
through the empty, shaving-strewn rooms, and Barnet came forward.

Lucy uttered a small exclamation: she was very sorry that she had
intruded; she had not the least idea that Mr. Barnet was there: the
children had come up, and she had followed.

Barnet replied that he was only too glad to see them there. 'And now,
let me show you the rooms,' he said.

She passively assented, and he took her round. There was not much to
show in such a bare skeleton of a house, but he made the most of it, and
explained the different ornamental fittings that were soon to be fixed
here and there. Lucy made but few remarks in reply, though she seemed
pleased with her visit, and stole away down the ladder, followed by her
companions.