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CHAPTER VIII: DICK MEETS HIS FATHER
For several minutes Dick drove along homeward, with the inner eye of reflection so anxiously set on his passages at arms with Fancy, that the road and scenery were as a thin mist over the real pictures of his mind. Was she a coquette? The balance between the evidence that she did love him and that she did not was so nicely struck, that his opinion had no stability. She had let him put his hand upon hers; she had allowed her gaze to drop plumb into the depths of his – his into hers – three or four times; her manner had been very free with regard to the basin and towel; she had appeared vexed at the mention of Shiner. On the other hand, she had driven him about the house like a quiet dog or cat, said Shiner cared for her, and seemed anxious that Mr. Maybold should do the same.
Thinking thus as he neared the handpost at Mellstock Cross, sitting on the front board of the spring cart – his legs on the outside, and his whole frame jigging up and down like a candle-flame to the time of Smart’s trotting – who should he see coming down the hill but his father in the light wagon, quivering up and down on a smaller scale of shakes, those merely caused by the stones in the road. They were soon crossing each other’s front.
“Weh-hey!” said the tranter to Smiler.
“Weh-hey!” said Dick to Smart, in an echo of the same voice.
“Th’st hauled her back, I suppose?” Reuben inquired peaceably.
“Yes,” said Dick, with such a clinching period at the end that it seemed he was never going to add another word. Smiler, thinking this the close of the conversation, prepared to move on.
“Weh-hey!” said the tranter. “I tell thee what it is, Dick. That there maid is taking up thy thoughts more than’s good for thee, my sonny. Thou’rt never happy now unless th’rt making thyself miserable about her in one way or another.”
“I don’t know about that, father,” said Dick rather stupidly.
“But I do – Wey, Smiler! – ’Od rot the women, ’tis nothing else wi’ ’em nowadays but getting young men and leading ’em astray.”
“Pooh, father! you just repeat what all the common world says; that’s all you do.”
“The world’s a very sensible feller on things in jineral, Dick; very sensible indeed.”
Dick looked into the distance at a vast expanse of mortgaged estate. “I wish I was as rich as a squire when he’s as poor as a crow,” he murmured; “I’d soon ask Fancy something.”
“I wish so too, wi’ all my heart, sonny; that I do. Well, mind what beest about, that’s all.”
Smart moved on a step or two. “Supposing now, father, – We-hey, Smart! – I did think a little about her, and I had a chance, which I ha’n’t; don’t you think she’s a very good sort of – of – one?”
“Ay, good; she’s good enough. When you’ve made up your mind to marry, take the first respectable body that comes to hand – she’s as good as any other; they be all alike in the groundwork; ’tis only in the flourishes there’s a difference. She’s good enough; but I can’t see what the nation a young feller like you – wi’ a comfortable house and home, and father and mother to take care o’ thee, and who sent ’ee to a school so good that ’twas hardly fair to the other children – should want to go hollering after a young woman for, when she’s quietly making a husband in her pocket, and not troubled by chick nor chiel, to make a poverty-stric’ wife and family of her, and neither hat, cap, wig, nor waistcoat to set ’em up with: be drowned if I can see it, and that’s the long and the short o’t, my sonny.”
Dick looked at Smart’s ears, then up the hill; but no reason was suggested by any object that met his gaze.
“For about the same reason that you did, father, I suppose.”
“Dang it, my sonny, thou’st got me there!” And the tranter gave vent to a grim admiration, with the mien of a man who was too magnanimous not to appreciate artistically a slight rap on the knuckles, even if they were his own.
“Whether or no,” said Dick, “I asked her a thing going along the road.”
“Come to that, is it? Turk! won’t thy mother be in a taking! Well, she’s ready, I don’t doubt?”
“I didn’t ask her anything about having me; and if you’ll let me speak, I’ll tell ’ee what I want to know. I just said, Did she care about me?”
“Piph-ph-ph!”
“And then she said nothing for a quarter of a mile, and then she said she didn’t know. Now, what I want to know is, what was the meaning of that speech?” The latter words were spoken resolutely, as if he didn’t care for the ridicule of all the fathers in creation.
“The meaning of that speech is,” the tranter replied deliberately, “that the meaning is meant to be rather hid at present. Well, Dick, as an honest father to thee, I don’t pretend to deny what you d’know well enough; that is, that her father being rather better in the pocket than we, I should welcome her ready enough if it must be somebody.”
“But what d’ye think she really did mean?” said the unsatisfied Dick.
“I’m afeard I am not o’ much account in guessing, especially as I was not there when she said it, and seeing that your mother was the only ’ooman I ever cam’ into such close quarters as that with.”
“And what did mother say to you when you asked her?” said Dick musingly.
“I don’t see that that will help ’ee.”
“The principle is the same.”
“Well – ay: what did she say? Let’s see. I was oiling my working-day boots without taking ’em off, and wi’ my head hanging down, when she just brushed on by the garden hatch like a flittering leaf. ‘Ann,’ I said, says I, and then, – but, Dick I’m afeard ’twill be no help to thee; for we were such a rum couple, your mother and I, leastways one half was, that is myself – and your mother’s charms was more in the manner than the material.”
“Never mind! ‘Ann,’ said you.”
“‘Ann,’ said I, as I was saying.. ‘Ann,’ I said to her when I was oiling my working-day boots wi’ my head hanging down, ‘Woot hae me?’.. What came next I can’t quite call up at this distance o’ time. Perhaps your mother would know, – she’s got a better memory for her little triumphs than I. However, the long and the short o’ the story is that we were married somehow, as I found afterwards. ’Twas on White Tuesday, – Mellstock Club walked the same day, every man two and two, and a fine day ’twas, – hot as fire, – how the sun did strike down upon my back going to church! I well can mind what a bath o’ sweating I was in, body and soul! But Fance will ha’ thee, Dick – she won’t walk with another chap – no such good luck.”
“I don’t know about that,” said Dick, whipping at Smart’s flank in a fanciful way, which, as Smart knew, meant nothing in connection with going on. “There’s Pa’son Maybold, too – that’s all against me.”
“What about he? She’s never been stuffing into thy innocent heart that he’s in hove with her? Lord, the vanity o’ maidens!”
“No, no. But he called, and she looked at him in such a way, and at me in such a way – quite different the ways were, – and as I was coming off, there was he hanging up her birdcage.”
“Well, why shouldn’t the man hang up her bird-cage? Turk seize it all, what’s that got to do wi’ it? Dick, that thou beest a white-lyvered chap I don’t say, but if thou beestn’t as mad as a cappel-faced bull, let me smile no more.”
“O, ay.”
“And what’s think now, Dick?”
“I don’t know.”
“Here’s another pretty kettle o’ fish for thee. Who d’ye think’s the bitter weed in our being turned out? Did our party tell ’ee?”
“No. Why, Pa’son Maybold, I suppose.”
“Shiner, – because he’s in love with thy young woman, and d’want to see her young figure sitting up at that queer instrument, and her young fingers rum-strumming upon the keys.”
A sharp ado of sweet and bitter was going on in Dick during this communication from his father. “Shiner’s a fool! – no, that’s not it; I don’t believe any such thing, father. Why, Shiner would never take a bold step like that, unless she’d been a little made up to, and had taken it kindly. Pooh!”
“Who’s to say she didn’t?”
“I do.”
“The more fool you.”
“Why, father of me?”
“Has she ever done more to thee?”
“No.”
“Then she has done as much to he – rot ’em! Now, Dick, this is how a maid is. She’ll swear she’s dying for thee, and she is dying for thee, and she will die for thee; but she’ll fling a look over t’other shoulder at another young feller, though never leaving off dying for thee just the same.”
“She’s not dying for me, and so she didn’t fling a look at him.”
“But she may be dying for him, for she looked at thee.”
“I don’t know what to make of it at all,” said Dick gloomily.
“All I can make of it is,” the tranter said, raising his whip, arranging his different joints and muscles, and motioning to the horse to move on, “that if you can’t read a maid’s mind by her motions, nature d’seem to say thou’st ought to be a bachelor. Clk, clk! Smiler!” And the tranter moved on.
Dick held Smart’s rein firmly, and the whole concern of horse, cart, and man remained rooted in the lane. How long this condition would have lasted is unknown, had not Dick’s thoughts, after adding up numerous items of misery, gradually wandered round to the fact that as something must be done, it could not be done by staying there all night.
Reaching home he went up to his bedroom, shut the door as if he were going to be seen no more in this life, and taking a sheet of paper and uncorking the ink-bottle, he began a letter. The dignity of the writer’s mind was so powerfully apparent in every line of this effusion that it obscured the logical sequence of facts and intentions to an appreciable degree; and it was not at all clear to a reader whether he there and then left off loving Miss Fancy Day; whether he had never loved her seriously, and never meant to; whether he had been dying up to the present moment, and now intended to get well again; or whether he had hitherto been in good health, and intended to die for her forthwith.
He put this letter in an envelope, sealed it up, directed it in a stern handwriting of straight dashes – easy flourishes being rigorously excluded. He walked with it in his pocket down the lane in strides not an inch less than three feet long. Reaching her gate he put on a resolute expression – then put it off again, turned back homeward, tore up his letter, and sat down.
That letter was altogether in a wrong tone – that he must own. A heartless man-of-the-world tone was what the juncture required. That he rather wanted her, and rather did not want her – the latter for choice; but that as a member of society he didn’t mind making a query in jaunty terms, which could only be answered in the same way: did she mean anything by her bearing towards him, or did she not?
This letter was considered so satisfactory in every way that, being put into the hands of a little boy, and the order given that he was to run with it to the school, he was told in addition not to look behind him if Dick called after him to bring it back, but to run along with it just the same. Having taken this precaution against vacillation, Dick watched his messenger down the road, and turned into the house whistling an air in such ghastly jerks and starts, that whistling seemed to be the act the very furthest removed from that which was instinctive in such a youth.
The letter was left as ordered: the next morning came and passed – and no answer. The next. The next. Friday night came. Dick resolved that if no answer or sign were given by her the next day, on Sunday he would meet her face to face, and have it all out by word of mouth.
“Dick,” said his father, coming in from the garden at that moment – in each hand a hive of bees tied in a cloth to prevent their egress – “I think you’d better take these two swarms of bees to Mrs. Maybold’s to-morrow, instead o’ me, and I’ll go wi’ Smiler and the wagon.”
It was a relief; for Mrs. Maybold, the vicar’s mother, who had just taken into her head a fancy for keeping bees (pleasantly disguised under the pretence of its being an economical wish to produce her own honey), lived near the watering-place of Budmouth-Regis, ten miles off, and the business of transporting the hives thither would occupy the whole day, and to some extent annihilate the vacant time between this evening and the coming Sunday. The best spring-cart was washed throughout, the axles oiled, and the bees placed therein for the journey.
PART THE THIRD – SUMMER
CHAPTER I: DRIVING OUT OF BUDMOUTH
An easy bend of neck and graceful set of head; full and wavy bundles of dark-brown hair; light fall of little feet; pretty devices on the skirt of the dress; clear deep eyes; in short, a bunch of sweets: it was Fancy! Dick’s heart went round to her with a rush.
The scene was the corner of Mary Street in Budmouth-Regis, near the King’s statue, at which point the white angle of the last house in the row cut perpendicularly an embayed and nearly motionless expanse of salt water projected from the outer ocean – to-day lit in bright tones of green and opal. Dick and Smart had just emerged from the street, and there on the right, against the brilliant sheet of liquid colour, stood Fancy Day; and she turned and recognized him.
Dick suspended his thoughts of the letter and wonder at how she came there by driving close to the chains of the Esplanade – incontinently displacing two chairmen, who had just come to life for the summer in new clean shirts and revivified clothes, and being almost displaced in turn by a rigid boy rattling along with a baker’s cart, and looking neither to the right nor the left. He asked if she were going to Mellstock that night.
“Yes, I’m waiting for the carrier,” she replied, seeming, too, to suspend thoughts of the letter.
“Now I can drive you home nicely, and you save half an hour. Will ye come with me?”
As Fancy’s power to will anything seemed to have departed in some mysterious manner at that moment, Dick settled the matter by getting out and assisting her into the vehicle without another word.
The temporary flush upon her cheek changed to a lesser hue, which was permanent, and at length their eyes met; there was present between them a certain feeling of embarrassment, which arises at such moments when all the instinctive acts dictated by the position have been performed. Dick, being engaged with the reins, thought less of this awkwardness than did Fancy, who had nothing to do but to feel his presence, and to be more and more conscious of the fact, that by accepting a seat beside him in this way she succumbed to the tone of his note. Smart jogged along, and Dick jogged, and the helpless Fancy necessarily jogged, too; and she felt that she was in a measure captured and made a prisoner.
“I am so much obliged to you for your company, Miss Day,” he observed, as they drove past the two semicircular bays of the Old Royal Hotel, where His Majesty King George the Third had many a time attended the balls of the burgesses.
To Miss Day, crediting him with the same consciousness of mastery – a consciousness of which he was perfectly innocent – this remark sounded like a magnanimous intention to soothe her, the captive.
“I didn’t come for the pleasure of obliging you with my company,” she said.
The answer had an unexpected manner of incivility in it that must have been rather surprising to young Dewy. At the same time it may be observed, that when a young woman returns a rude answer to a young man’s civil remark, her heart is in a state which argues rather hopefully for his case than otherwise.
There was silence between them till they had left the sea-front and passed about twenty of the trees that ornamented the road leading up out of the town towards Casterbridge and Mellstock.
“Though I didn’t come for that purpose either, I would have done it,” said Dick at the twenty-first tree.
“Now, Mr. Dewy, no flirtation, because it’s wrong, and I don’t wish it.”
Dick seated himself afresh just as he had been sitting before, arranged his looks very emphatically, and cleared his throat.
“Really, anybody would think you had met me on business and were just going to commence,” said the lady intractably.
“Yes, they would.”
“Why, you never have, to be sure!”
This was a shaky beginning. He chopped round, and said cheerily, as a man who had resolved never to spoil his jollity by loving one of womankind —
“Well, how are you getting on, Miss Day, at the present time? Gaily, I don’t doubt for a moment.”
“I am not gay, Dick; you know that.”
“Gaily doesn’t mean decked in gay dresses.”
“I didn’t suppose gaily was gaily dressed. Mighty me, what a scholar you’ve grown!”
“Lots of things have happened to you this spring, I see.”
“What have you seen?”
“O, nothing; I’ve heard, I mean!”
“What have you heard?”
“The name of a pretty man, with brass studs and a copper ring and a tin watch-chain, a little mixed up with your own. That’s all.”
“That’s a very unkind picture of Mr. Shiner, for that’s who you mean! The studs are gold, as you know, and it’s a real silver chain; the ring I can’t conscientiously defend, and he only wore it once.”
“He might have worn it a hundred times without showing it half so much.”
“Well, he’s nothing to me,” she serenely observed.
“Not any more than I am?”
“Now, Mr. Dewy,” said Fancy severely, “certainly he isn’t any more to me than you are!”
“Not so much?”
She looked aside to consider the precise compass of that question. “That I can’t exactly answer,” she replied with soft archness.
As they were going rather slowly, another spring-cart, containing a farmer, farmer’s wife, and farmer’s man, jogged past them; and the farmer’s wife and farmer’s man eyed the couple very curiously. The farmer never looked up from the horse’s tail.
“Why can’t you exactly answer?” said Dick, quickening Smart a little, and jogging on just behind the farmer and farmer’s wife and man.
As no answer came, and as their eyes had nothing else to do, they both contemplated the picture presented in front, and noticed how the farmer’s wife sat flattened between the two men, who bulged over each end of the seat to give her room, till they almost sat upon their respective wheels; and they looked too at the farmer’s wife’s silk mantle, inflating itself between her shoulders like a balloon and sinking flat again, at each jog of the horse. The farmer’s wife, feeling their eyes sticking into her back, looked over her shoulder. Dick dropped ten yards further behind.
“Fancy, why can’t you answer?” he repeated.
“Because how much you are to me depends upon how much I am to you,” said she in low tones.
“Everything,” said Dick, putting his hand towards hers, and casting emphatic eyes upon the upper curve of her cheek.
“Now, Richard Dewy, no touching me! I didn’t say in what way your thinking of me affected the question – perhaps inversely, don’t you see? No touching, sir! Look; goodness me, don’t, Dick!”
The cause of her sudden start was the unpleasant appearance over Dick’s right shoulder of an empty timber-wagon and four journeymen-carpenters reclining in lazy postures inside it, their eyes directed upwards at various oblique angles into the surrounding world, the chief object of their existence being apparently to criticize to the very backbone and marrow every animate object that came within the compass of their vision. This difficulty of Dick’s was overcome by trotting on till the wagon and carpenters were beginning to look rather misty by reason of a film of dust that accompanied their wagon-wheels, and rose around their heads like a fog.
“Say you love me, Fancy.”
“No, Dick, certainly not; ’tisn’t time to do that yet.”
“Why, Fancy?”
“‘Miss Day’ is better at present – don’t mind my saying so; and I ought not to have called you Dick.”
“Nonsense! when you know that I would do anything on earth for your love. Why, you make any one think that loving is a thing that can be done and undone, and put on and put off at a mere whim.”
“No, no, I don’t,” she said gently; “but there are things which tell me I ought not to give way to much thinking about you, even if – ”
“But you want to, don’t you? Yes, say you do; it is best to be truthful. Whatever they may say about a woman’s right to conceal where her love lies, and pretend it doesn’t exist, and things like that, it is not best; I do know it, Fancy. And an honest woman in that, as well as in all her daily concerns, shines most brightly, and is thought most of in the long-run.”
“Well then, perhaps, Dick, I do love you a little,” she whispered tenderly; “but I wish you wouldn’t say any more now.”
“I won’t say any more now, then, if you don’t like it, dear. But you do love me a little, don’t you?”
“Now you ought not to want me to keep saying things twice; I can’t say any more now, and you must be content with what you have.”
“I may at any rate call you Fancy? There’s no harm in that.”
“Yes, you may.”
“And you’ll not call me Mr. Dewy any more?”
“Very well.”