A Changed Man and Other Tales - Thomas Hardy (best books under 200 pages .txt) 📗

struck me we might like to ask in a neighbour or two. But perhaps it would be taking a liberty?’

‘O no, not at all,’ said Mr. Paddock, who was now in the room, in a judicial measured manner. ‘Very thoughtful of ‘ee, only ‘twas not necessary, for we had just laid in an extry stock of eatables and drinkables in preparation for the coming event.’

”Twas very kind, upon my heart,’ said the soldier, ‘to think me worth such a jocund preparation, since you could only have got my letter this morning.’

Selina gazed at her father to stop him, and exchanged embarrassed glances with Miller. Contrary to her hopes Sergeant-Major Clark plainly did not know that the preparations referred to were for something quite other than his own visit.

The movement of the horse outside, and the impatient tapping of a whip-handle upon the vehicle reminded them that Clark’s driver was still in waiting. The provisions were brought into the house, and the cart dismissed. Miller, with very little pressure indeed, accepted an invitation to supper, and a few neighbours were induced to come in to make up a cheerful party.

During the laying of the meal, and throughout its continuance, Selina, who sat beside her first intended husband, tried frequently to break the news to him of her engagement to the other—now terminated so suddenly, and so happily for her heart, and her sense of womanly virtue. But the talk ran entirely upon the late war; and though fortified by half a horn of the strong ale brought by the sergeant-major she decided that she might have a better opportunity when supper was over of revealing the situation to him in private.

Having supped, Clark leaned back at ease in his chair and looked around. ‘We used sometimes to have a dance in that other room after supper, Selina dear, I recollect. We used to clear out all the furniture into this room before beginning. Have you kept up such goings on?’

‘No, not at all!’ said his sweetheart, sadly.

‘We were not unlikely to revive it in a few days,’ said Mr. Paddock. ‘But, howsomever, there’s seemingly many a slip, as the saying is.’

‘Yes, I’ll tell John all about that by and by!’ interposed Selina; at which, perceiving that the secret which he did not like keeping was to be kept even yet, her father held his tongue with some show of testiness.

The subject of a dance having been broached, to put the thought in practice was the feeling of all. Soon after the tables and chairs were borne from the opposite room to this by zealous hands, and two of the villagers sent home for a fiddle and tambourine, when the majority began to tread a measure well known in that secluded vale. Selina naturally danced with the sergeant-major, not altogether to her father’s satisfaction, and to the real uneasiness of her mother, both of whom would have preferred a postponement of festivities till the rashly anticipated relationship between their daughter and Clark in the past had been made fact by the church’s ordinances. They did not, however, express a positive objection, Mr. Paddock remembering, with self-reproach, that it was owing to his original strongly expressed disapproval of Selina’s being a soldier’s wife that the wedding had been delayed, and finally hindered—with worse consequences than were expected; and ever since the misadventure brought about by his government he had allowed events to steer their own courses.

‘My tails will surely catch in your spurs, John!’ murmured the daughter of the house, as she whirled around upon his arm with the rapt soul and look of a somnambulist. ‘I didn’t know we should dance, or I would have put on my other frock.’

‘I’ll take care, my love. We’ve danced here before. Do you think your father objects to me now? I’ve risen in rank. I fancy he’s still a little against me.’

‘He has repented, times enough.’

‘And so have I! If I had married you then ‘twould have saved many a misfortune. I have sometimes thought it might have been possible to rush the ceremony through somehow before I left; though we were only in the second asking, were we? And even if I had come back straight here when we returned from the Crimea, and married you then, how much happier I should have been!’

‘Dear John, to say that! Why didn’t you?’

‘O—dilatoriness and want of thought, and a fear of facing your father after so long. I was in hospital a great while, you know. But how familiar the place seems again! What’s that I saw on the beaufet in the other room? It never used to be there. A sort of withered corpse of a cake—not an old bride-cake surely?’

‘Yes, John, ours. ‘Tis the very one that was made for our wedding three years ago.’

‘Sakes alive! Why, time shuts up together, and all between then and now seems not to have been! What became of that wedding-gown that they were making in this room, I remember—a bluish, whitish, frothy thing?’

‘I have that too.’

‘Really! … Why, Selina—’

‘Yes!’

‘Why not put it on now?’

‘Wouldn’t it seem—. And yet, O how I should like to! It would remind them all, if we told them what it was, how we really meant to be married on that bygone day!’ Her eyes were again laden with wet.

‘Yes … The pity that we didn’t—the pity!’ Moody mournfulness seemed to hold silent awhile one not naturally taciturn. ‘Well—will you?’ he said.

‘I will—the next dance, if mother don’t mind.’

Accordingly, just before the next figure was formed, Selina disappeared, and speedily came downstairs in a creased and box-worn, but still airy and pretty, muslin gown, which was indeed the very one that had been meant to grace her as a bride three years before.

‘It is dreadfully old-fashioned,’ she apologized.

‘Not at all. What a grand thought of mine! Now, let’s to’t again.’

She explained to some of them, as he led her to the second dance, what the frock had been meant for, and that she had put it on at his request. And again athwart and around the room they went.

‘You seem the bride!’ he said.

‘But I couldn’t wear this gown to be married in now!’ she replied, ecstatically, ‘or I shouldn’t have put it on and made it dusty. It is really too old-fashioned, and so folded and fretted out, you can’t think. That was with my taking it out so many times to look at. I have never put it on—never—till now!’

‘Selina, I am thinking of giving up the army. Will you emigrate with me to New Zealand? I’ve an uncle out there doing well, and he’d soon help me to making a larger income. The English army is glorious, but it ain’t altogether enriching.’

‘Of course, anywhere that you decide upon. Is it healthy there for Johnny?’

‘A lovely climate. And I shall never be happy in England … Aha!’ he concluded again, with a bitterness of unexpected strength, ‘would to Heaven I had come straight back here!’

As the dance brought round one neighbour after another the re-united pair were thrown into juxtaposition with Bob Heartall among the rest who had been called in; one whose chronic expression was that he carried inside him a joke on the point of bursting with its own vastness. He took occasion now to let out a little of its quality, shaking his head at Selina as he addressed her in an undertone -

‘This is a bit of a topper to the bridegroom, ho ho! ‘Twill teach en the liberty you’ll expect when you’ve married en!’

‘What does he mean by a “topper,”’ the sergeant-major asked, who, not being of local extraction, despised the venerable local language, and also seemed to suppose ‘bridegroom’ to be an anticipatory name for himself. ‘I only hope I shall never be worse treated than you’ve treated me to-night!’

Selina looked frightened. ‘He didn’t mean you, dear,’ she said as they moved on. ‘We thought perhaps you knew what had happened, owing to your coming just at this time. Had you—heard anything about— what I intended?’

‘Not a breath—how should I—away up in Yorkshire? It was by the merest accident that I came just at this date to make peace with you for my delay.’

‘I was engaged to be married to Mr. Bartholomew Miller. That’s what it is! I would have let ‘ee know by letter, but there was no time, only hearing from ‘ee this afternoon … You won’t desert me for it, will you, John? Because, as you know, I quite supposed you dead, and—and—’ Her eyes were full of tears of trepidation, and he might have felt a sob heaving within her.

 

IV

 

The soldier was silent during two or three double bars of the tune. ‘When were you to have been married to the said Mr. Bartholomew Miller?’ he inquired.

‘Quite soon.’

‘How soon?’

‘Next week—O yes—just the same as it was with you and me. There’s a strange fate of interruption hanging over me, I sometimes think! He had bought the licence, which I preferred so that it mightn’t be like—ours. But it made no difference to the fate of it.’

‘Had bought the licence! The devil!’

‘Don’t be angry, dear John. I didn’t know!’

‘No, no, I’m not angry.’

‘It was so kind of him, considering!’

‘Yes … I see, of course, how natural your action was—never thinking of seeing me any more! Is it the Mr. Miller who is in this dance?’

‘Yes.’

Clark glanced round upon Bartholomew and was silent again, for some little while, and she stole a look at him, to find that he seemed changed. ‘John, you look ill!’ she almost sobbed. ”Tisn’t me, is it?’

‘O dear, no. Though I hadn’t, somehow, expected it. I can’t find fault with you for a moment—and I don’t … This is a deuce of a long dance, don’t you think? We’ve been at it twenty minutes if a second, and the figure doesn’t allow one much rest. I’m quite out of breath.’

‘They like them so dreadfully long here. Shall we drop out? Or I’ll stop the fiddler.’

‘O no, no, I think I can finish. But although I look healthy enough I have never been so strong as I formerly was, since that long illness I had in the hospital at Scutari.’

‘And I knew nothing about it!’

‘You couldn’t, dear, as I didn’t write. What a fool I have been altogether!’ He gave a twitch, as of one in pain. ‘I won’t dance again when this one is over. The fact is I have travelled a long way to-day, and it seems to have knocked me up a bit.’

There could be no doubt that the sergeant-major was unwell, and Selina made herself miserable by still believing that her story was the cause of his ailment. Suddenly he said in a changed voice, and she perceived that he was paler than ever: ‘I must sit down.’

Letting go her waist he went quickly to the other room. She followed, and found him in the nearest chair, his face bent down upon his hands and arms, which were resting on the table.

‘What’s the matter?’ said her father, who sat there dozing by the fire.

‘John isn’t well … We are going to New Zealand when we are married, father. A lovely country! John, would you like something to drink?’

‘A drop o’ that Schiedam of old Owlett’s, that’s under stairs, perhaps,’ suggested her father. ‘Not that nowadays ‘tis much better than licensed liquor.’

‘John,’ she said, putting her face close to his and pressing his arm. ‘Will you have a drop of spirits or something?’

He did not reply, and Selina observed that his ear and the side of his face were quite