CHAPTER VI: YALBURY WOOD AND THE KEEPER'S HOUSE
A mood of blitheness rarely experienced even by young men was Dick's
on the following Monday morning. It was the week after the Easter
holidays, and he was journeying along with Smart the mare and the
light spring-cart, watching the damp slopes of the hill-sides as
they streamed in the warmth of the sun, which at this unsettled
season shone on the grass with the freshness of an occasional
inspector rather than as an accustomed proprietor. His errand was
to fetch Fancy, and some additional household goods, from her
father's house in the neighbouring parish to her dwelling at
Mellstock. The distant view was darkly shaded with clouds; but the
nearer parts of the landscape were whitely illumined by the visible
rays of the sun streaming down across the heavy gray shade behind.
The tranter had not yet told his son of the state of Shiner's heart
that had been suggested to him by Shiner's movements. He preferred
to let such delicate affairs right themselves; experience having
taught him that the uncertain phenomenon of love, as it existed in
other people, was not a groundwork upon which a single action of his
own life could be founded.
Geoffrey Day lived in the depths of Yalbury Wood, which formed
portion of one of the outlying estates of the Earl of Wessex, to
whom Day was head game-keeper, timber-steward, and general
overlooker for this district. The wood was intersected by the
highway from Casterbridge to London at a place not far from the
house, and some trees had of late years been felled between its
windows and the ascent of Yalbury Hill, to give the solitary
cottager a glimpse of the passers-by.
It was a satisfaction to walk into the keeper's house, even as a
stranger, on a fine spring morning like the present. A curl of
wood-smoke came from the chimney, and drooped over the roof like a
blue feather in a lady's hat; and the sun shone obliquely upon the
patch of grass in front, which reflected its brightness through the
open doorway and up the staircase opposite, lighting up each riser
with a shiny green radiance, and leaving the top of each step in
shade.
The window-sill of the front room was between four and five feet
from the floor, dropping inwardly to a broad low bench, over which,
as well as over the whole surface of the wall beneath, there always
hung a deep shade, which was considered objectionable on every
ground save one, namely, that the perpetual sprinkling of seeds and
water by the caged canary above was not noticed as an eyesore by
visitors. The window was set with thickly-leaded diamond glazing,
formed, especially in the lower panes, of knotty glass of various
shades of green. Nothing was better known to Fancy than the
extravagant manner in which these circular knots or eyes distorted
everything seen through them from the outside--lifting hats from
heads, shoulders from bodies; scattering the spokes of cart-wheels,
and bending the straight fir-trunks into semicircles. The ceiling
was carried by a beam traversing its midst, from the side of which
projected a large nail, used solely and constantly as a peg for
Geoffrey's hat; the nail was arched by a rainbow--shaped stain,
imprinted by the brim of the said hat when it was hung there
dripping wet.
The most striking point about the room was the furniture. This was
a repetition upon inanimate objects of the old principle introduced
by Noah, consisting for the most part of two articles of every sort.
The duplicate system of furnishing owed its existence to the
forethought of Fancy's mother, exercised from the date of Fancy's
birthday onwards. The arrangement spoke for itself: nobody who
knew the tone of the household could look at the goods without being
aware that the second set was a provision for Fancy, when she should
marry and have a house of her own. The most noticeable instance was
a pair of green-faced eight-day clocks, ticking alternately, which
were severally two and half minutes and three minutes striking the
hour of twelve, one proclaiming, in Italian flourishes, Thomas Wood
as the name of its maker, and the other--arched at the top, and
altogether of more cynical appearance--that of Ezekiel Saunders.
They were two departed clockmakers of Casterbridge, whose desperate
rivalry throughout their lives was nowhere more emphatically
perpetuated than here at Geoffrey's. These chief specimens of the
marriage provision were supported on the right by a couple of
kitchen dressers, each fitted complete with their cups, dishes, and
plates, in their turn followed by two dumb-waiters, two family
Bibles, two warming-pans, and two intermixed sets of chairs.
But the position last reached--the chimney-corner--was, after all,
the most attractive side of the parallelogram. It was large enough
to admit, in addition to Geoffrey himself; Geoffrey's wife, her
chair, and her work-table, entirely within the line of the mantel,
without danger or even inconvenience from the heat of the fire; and
was spacious enough overhead to allow of the insertion of wood poles
for the hanging of bacon, which were cloaked with long shreds of
soot, floating on the draught like the tattered banners on the walls
of ancient aisles.
These points were common to most chimney corners of the
neighbourhood; but one feature there was which made Geoffrey's
fireside not only an object of interest to casual aristocratic
visitors--to whom every cottage fireside was more or less a
curiosity--but the admiration of friends who were accustomed to
fireplaces of the ordinary hamlet model. This peculiarity was a
little window in the chimney-back, almost over the fire, around
which the smoke crept caressingly when it left the perpendicular
course. The window-board was curiously stamped with black circles,
burnt thereon by the heated bottoms of drinking-cups, which had
rested there after previously standing on the hot ashes of the
hearth for the purpose of warming their contents, the result giving
to the ledge the look of an envelope which has passed through
innumerable post-offices.
Fancy was gliding about the room preparing dinner, her head
inclining now to the right, now to the left, and singing the tips
and ends of tunes that sprang up in her mind like mushrooms. The
footsteps of Mrs. Day could be heard in the room overhead. Fancy
went finally to the door.
"Father! Dinner."
A tall spare figure was seen advancing by the window with periodical
steps, and the keeper entered from the garden. He appeared to be a
man who was always looking down, as if trying to recollect something
he said yesterday. The surface of his face was fissured rather than
wrinkled, and over and under his eyes were folds which seemed as a
kind of exterior eyelids. His nose had been thrown backwards by a
blow in a poaching fray, so that when the sun was low and shining in
his face, people could see far into his head. There was in him a
quiet grimness, which would in his moments of displeasure have
become surliness, had it not been tempered by honesty of soul, and
which was often wrongheadedness because not allied with subtlety.
Although not an extraordinarily taciturn man among friends slightly
richer than himself, he never wasted words upon outsiders, and to
his trapper Enoch his ideas were seldom conveyed by any other means
than nods and shakes of the head. Their long acquaintance with each
other's ways, and the nature of their labours, rendered words
between them almost superfluous as vehicles of thought, whilst the
coincidence of their horizons, and the astonishing equality of their
social views, by startling the keeper from time to time as very
damaging to the theory of master and man, strictly forbade any
indulgence in words as courtesies.
Behind the keeper came Enoch (who had been assisting in the garden)
at the well-considered chronological distance of three minutes--an
interval of non-appearance on the trapper's part not arrived at
without some reflection. Four minutes had been found to express
indifference to indoor arrangements, and simultaneousness had
implied too great an anxiety about meals.
"A little earlier than usual, Fancy," the keeper said, as he sat
down and looked at the clocks. "That Ezekiel Saunders o' thine is
tearing on afore Thomas Wood again."
"I kept in the middle between them," said Fancy, also looking at the
two clocks.
"Better stick to Thomas," said her father. "There's a healthy beat
in Thomas that would lead a man to swear by en offhand. He is as
true as the town time. How is it your stap-mother isn't here?"
As Fancy was about to reply, the rattle of wheels was heard, and
"Weh-hey, Smart!" in Mr. Richard Dewy's voice rolled into the
cottage from round the corner of the house.
"Hullo! there's Dewy's cart come for thee, Fancy--Dick driving--
afore time, too. Well, ask the lad to have pot-luck with us."
Dick on entering made a point of implying by his general bearing
that he took an interest in Fancy simply as in one of the same race
and country as himself; and they all sat down. Dick could have
wished her manner had not been so entirely free from all apparent
consciousness of those accidental meetings of theirs: but he let
the thought pass. Enoch sat diagonally at a table afar off; under
the corner cupboard, and drank his cider from a long perpendicular
pint cup, having tall fir-trees done in brown on its sides, He threw
occasional remarks into the general tide of conversation, and with
this advantage to himself; that he participated in the pleasures of
a talk (slight as it was) at meal-times, without saddling himself
with the responsibility of sustaining it.
"Why don't your stap-mother come down, Fancy?" said Geoffrey.
"You'll excuse her, Mister Dick, she's a little queer sometimes."
"O yes,--quite," said Richard, as if he were in the habit of
excusing people every day.
"She d'belong to that class of womankind that become second wives:
a rum class rather."
"Indeed," said Dick, with sympathy for an indefinite something.
"Yes; and 'tis trying to a female, especially if you've been a first
wife, as she hey."
"Very trying it must be."
"Yes: you see her first husband was a young man, who let her go too
far; in fact, she used to kick up Bob's-a-dying at the least thing
in the world. And when I'd married her and found it out, I thought,
thinks I, "'Tis too late now to begin to cure 'e;" and so I let her
bide. But she's queer,--very queer, at times!"
"I'm sorry to hear that."
"Yes: there; wives be such a provoking class o' society, because
though they be never right, they be never more than half wrong."
Fancy seemed uneasy under the infliction of this household
moralizing, which might tend to damage the airy-fairy nature that
Dick, as maiden shrewdness told her, had accredited her with. Her
dead silence impressed Geoffrey with the notion that something in
his words did not agree with her educated ideas, and he changed the
conversation.
"Did Fred Shiner send the cask o' drink, Fancy?"
"I think he did: O yes, he did."
"Nice solid feller, Fred Shiner!" said Geoffrey to Dick as he helped
himself to gravy, bringing the spoon round to his plate by way of
the potato-dish, to obviate a stain on the cloth in the event of a
spill.
Now Geoffrey's eyes had been fixed upon his plate for the previous
four or five minutes, and in removing them he had only carried them
to the spoon, which, from its fulness and the distance of its
transit, necessitated a steady watching through the whole of the
route. Just as intently as the keeper's eyes had been fixed on the
spoon, Fancy's had been fixed on her father's, without premeditation
or the slightest phase of furtiveness; but there they were fastened.
This was the reason why:
Dick was sitting next to her on the right side, and on the side of
the table opposite to her father. Fancy had laid her right hand
lightly down upon the table-cloth for an instant, and to her alarm
Dick, after dropping his fork and brushing his forehead as a reason,
flung down his own left hand, overlapping a third of Fancy's with
it, and keeping it there. So the innocent Fancy, instead of pulling
her hand from the trap, settled her eyes on her father's, to guard
against his discovery of this perilous game of Dick's. Dick
finished his mouthful; Fancy finished, her crumb, and nothing was
done beyond watching Geoffrey's eyes. Then the hands slid apart;
Fancy's going over six inches of cloth, Dick's over one. Geoffrey's
eye had risen.
"I said Fred Shiner is a nice solid feller," he repeated, more
emphatically.
"He is; yes, he is," stammered Dick; "but to me he is little more
than a stranger."
"O, sure. Now I know en as well as any man can be known. And you
know en very well too, don't ye, Fancy?"
Geoffrey put on a tone expressing that these words signified at
present about one hundred times the amount of meaning they conveyed
literally.
Dick looked anxious.
"Will you pass me some bread?" said Fancy in a flurry, the red of
her face becoming slightly disordered, and looking as solicitous as
a human being could look about a piece of bread.
"Ay, that I will," replied the unconscious Geoffrey. "Ay," he
continued, returning to the displaced idea, "we are likely to remain
friendly wi' Mr. Shiner if the wheels d'run smooth."
"An excellent thing--a very capital thing, as I should say," the
youth answered with exceeding relevance, considering that his
thoughts, instead of following Geoffrey's remark, were nestling at a
distance of about two feet on his left the whole time.
"A young woman's face will turn the north wind, Master Richard: my
heart if 'twon't." Dick looked more anxious and was attentive in
earnest at these words. "Yes; turn the north wind," added Geoffrey
after an impressive pause. "And though she's one of my own flesh
and blood . . . "
"Will you fetch down a bit of raw-mil' cheese from pantry-shelf?"
Fancy interrupted, as if she were famishing.
"Ay, that I will, chiel; chiel, says I, and Mr. Shiner only asking
last Saturday night . . . cheese you said, Fancy?"
Dick controlled his emotion at these mysterious allusions to Mr.
Shiner,--the better enabled to do so by perceiving that Fancy's
heart went not with her father's--and spoke like a stranger to the
affairs of the neighbourhood. "Yes, there's a great deal to be said
upon the power of maiden faces in settling your courses," he
ventured, as the keeper retreated for the cheese.
"The conversation is taking a very strange turn: nothing that _I_
have ever done warrants such things being said!" murmured Fancy with
emphasis, just loud enough to reach Dick's ears.
"You think to yourself; 'twas to be," cried Enoch from his distant
corner, by way of filling up the vacancy caused by Geoffrey's
momentary absence. "And so you marry her, Master Dewy, and there's
an end o't."
"Pray don't say such things, Enoch," came from Fancy severely, upon
which Enoch relapsed into servitude.
"If we be doomed to marry, we marry; if we be doomed to remain
single, we do," replied Dick.
Geoffrey had by this time sat down again, and he now made his lips
thin by severely straining them across his gums, and looked out of
the window along the vista to the distant highway up Yalbury Hill.
"That's not the case with some folk," he said at length, as if he
read the words on a board at the further end of the vista.
Fancy looked interested, and Dick said, "No?"
"There's that wife o' mine. It was her doom to be nobody's wife at
all in the wide universe. But she made up her mind that she would,
and did it twice over. Doom? Doom is nothing beside a elderly
woman--quite a chiel in her hands!"
A movement was now heard along the upstairs passage, and footsteps
descending. The door at the foot of the stairs opened, and the
second Mrs. Day appeared in view, looking fixedly at the table as
she advanced towards it, with apparent obliviousness of the presence
of any other human being than herself. In short, if the table had
been the personages, and the persons the table, her glance would
have been the most natural imaginable.
She showed herself to possess an ordinary woman's face, iron-grey
hair, hardly any hips, and a great deal of cleanliness in a broad
white apron-string, as it appeared upon the waist of her dark stuff
dress.
"People will run away with a story now, I suppose," she began
saying, "that Jane Day's tablecloths are as poor and ragged as any
union beggar's!"
Dick now perceived that the tablecloth was a little the worse for
wear, and reflecting for a moment, concluded that 'people' in step-
mother language probably meant himself. On lifting his eyes he
found that Mrs. Day had vanished again upstairs, and presently
returned with an armful of new damask-linen tablecloths, folded
square and hard as boards by long compression. These she flounced
down into a chair; then took one, shook it out from its folds, and
spread it on the table by instalments, transferring the plates and
dishes one by one from the old to the new cloth.
"And I suppose they'll say, too, that she ha'n't a decent knife and
fork in her house!"
"I shouldn't say any such ill-natured thing, I am sure--" began
Dick. But Mrs. Day had vanished into the next room. Fancy appeared
distressed.
"Very strange woman, isn't she?" said Geoffrey, quietly going on
with his dinner. "But 'tis too late to attempt curing. My heart!
'tis so growed into her that 'twould kill her to take it out. Ay,
she's very queer: you'd be amazed to see what valuable goods we've
got stowed away upstairs."
Back again came Mrs. Day with a box of bright steel horn-handled
knives, silver-plated forks, carver, and all complete. These were
wiped of the preservative oil which coated them, and then a knife
and fork were laid down to each individual with a bang, the carving
knife and fork thrust into the meat dish, and the old ones they had
hitherto used tossed away.
Geoffrey placidly cut a slice with the new knife and fork, and asked
Dick if he wanted any more.
The table had been spread for the mixed midday meal of dinner and
tea, which was common among frugal countryfolk. "The parishioners
about here," continued Mrs. Day, not looking at any living being,
but snatching up the brown delf tea-things, "are the laziest,
gossipest, poachest, jailest set of any ever I came among. And
they'll talk about my teapot and tea-things next, I suppose!" She
vanished with the teapot, cups, and saucers, and reappeared with a
tea-service in white china, and a packet wrapped in brown paper.
This was removed, together with folds of tissue-paper underneath;
and a brilliant silver teapot appeared.
"I'll help to put the things right," said Fancy soothingly, and
rising from her seat. "I ought to have laid out better things, I
suppose. But" (here she enlarged her looks so as to include Dick)
"I have been away from home a good deal, and I make shocking
blunders in my housekeeping." Smiles and suavity were then
dispensed all around by this bright little bird.
After a little more preparation and modification, Mrs. Day took her
seat at the head of the table, and during the latter or tea division
of the meal, presided with much composure. It may cause some
surprise to learn that, now her vagary was over, she showed herself
to be an excellent person with much common sense, and even a
religious seriousness of tone on matters pertaining to her
afflictions.
