by Thomas Hardy
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 a thwart 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 a license, 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!’ sheal most 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-d
ay, 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 understairs, 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 white. Convinced that his illness was serious, a growing dismay seized hold of her. The dance ended; her mother came in, and learning what had happened, looked narrowly at the sergeant-major.
‘We must not let him lie like that, lift him up,’ she said. ‘Let him rest in the window-bench on some cushions.’
They unfolded his arms and hands as they lay clasped upon the table, and on lifting his head found his features to bear the very impress of death itself. Bartholomew Miller, who had now come in, assisted Mr. Paddock to make a comfortable couch in the window-seat, where they stretched out Clark upon his back.
Still he seemed unconscious. ‘We must get a doctor,’ said Selina. ‘O, my dear John, how is it you be taken like this?’
‘My impression is that he’s dead!’ murmured Mr. Paddock. ‘He don’t breathe enough to move a tomtit’s feather.’
There were plenty to volunteer to go for a doctor, but as it would be at least an hour before he could get there the case seemed somewhat hopeless. The dancing-party ended as unceremoniously as it had begun; but the guests lingered round the premises till the doctor should arrive. When he did come the sergeant-major’s extremities were already cold, and there was no doubt that death had overtaken him almost at the moment that he had sat down.
The medical practitioner quite refused to accept the unhappy Selina’s theory that her revelation had in any way induced Clark’s sudden collapse. Both he and the coroner afterwards, who found the immediate cause to be heart-failure, held that such a supposition was unwarranted by facts. They asserted that a long day’s journey, a hurried drive, and then an exhausting dance, were sufficient for such a result upon a heart enfeebled by fatty degeneration after the privations of a Crimean winter and other trying experiences, the coincidence of the sad event with any disclosure of hers being a pure accident.
This conclusion, however, did not dislodge Selina’s opinion that the shock of her statement had been the immediate stroke which had felled a constitution so undermined.
V
At this date the Casterbridge Barracks were cavalry quarters, their adaptation to artillery having been effected some years later. It had been owing to the fact that the — th Dragoons, in which John Clark had served, happened to be lying there that Selina made his acquaintance. At the time of his death the barracks were occupied by the Scots Greys, but when the pathetic circumstances of the sergeant-major’s end became known in the town the officers of the Greys offered the services of their fine reed and brass band, that he might have a funeral marked by due military honours. His body was accordingly removed to the barracks, and carried thence to the churchyard in the Durnover quarter on the following afternoon, one of the Greys’ most ancient and docile chargers being blacked up to represent Clark’s horse on the occasion.
Everybody pitied Selina, whose story was well known. She followed the corpse as the only mourner, Clark having been without relations in this part of the country, and a communication with his regiment having brought none from a distance. She sat in a little shabby brown-black mourning carriage, squeezing herself up in a corner to be as much as possible out of sight during the slow and dramatic march through the town to the tune from Saul. When the interment had taken place, the volleys been fired, and the return journey begun, it was with something like a shock that she found the military escort to be moving at a quick march to the lively strains of ‘Off she goes!’ as if all care for the sergeant-major was expected to be ended with the late discharge of the carbines. It was, by chance, the very tune to which they had been footing when he died, and unable to bear its notes, she hastily told her driver to drop behind. The band and military party diminished up the High Street, and Selina turned over Swan bridge and homeward to Mellstock.
Then recommenced for her a life whose incidents were precisely of a suit with those which had preceded the soldier’s return; but how different in her appreciation of them! Her narrow miss of the recovered respectability they had hoped for from that tardy event worked upon her parents as an irritant, and after the first week or two of her mourning her life with them grew almost insupportable. She had impulsively taken to herself the weeds of a widow, for such she seemed to herself to be, and clothed little Johnny in sables likewise. This assumption of a moral relationship to the deceased, which she asserted to be only not a legal one by two most unexpected accidents, led the old people to indulge in sarcasm at her expense whenever they beheld her attire, though all the while it cost them more pain to utter than it gave her to hear it. Having become accustomed by her residence at home to the business carried on by her father, she surprised them one day by going off with the child to Chalk-Newton, in the direction of the town of Ivell, and opening a miniature fruit and vegetable shop, attending Ivell market with her produce. Her business grew somewhat larger, and it was soon sufficient to enable her to support herself and the boy in comfort. She called herself ‘Mrs. John Clark’ from the day of leaving home, and painted the name on her signboard — no man forbidding her.
By degrees the pain of her state was forgotten in her new circumstances, and getting to be generally accepted as the widow of a sergeant-major of dragoons –an assumption which her modest and mournful demeanour seemed to substantiate — her life became a placid one, her mind being nourished by the melancholy luxury of dreaming what might have been her future in New Zealand with John, if he had only lived to take her there. Her only travels now were a journey to Ivell on market-days, and once a fortnight to the churchyard in which Clark lay, there to tend, with Johnny’s assistance, as widows are wont to do, the flowers she had planted upon his grave.
On a day about eighteen months after his unexpected decease, Selina was surprised in her lodging over her little shop by a visit from Bartholomew Miller. He had called on her once or twice before, on which occasions he had used without a word of comment the name by which she was known.
‘I’ve come this time,’ he said, ‘less because I was in this direction than to ask you, Mrs. Clark, what you mid well guess. I’ve come o’ purpose, in short.’
She smiled.
‘ ‘Tis to ask me again to marry you?’
‘Yes, of course. You see, his coming back for ‘ee proved what I always believed of ‘ee, though others didn’t. There’s nobody but would be glad to welcome you to our parish again, now you’ve showed your independence and acted up to your trust in his promise. Well, my dear, will you come?’
‘I’d rather bide as Mrs. Clark, I think,’ she answered. ‘I am not ashamed of my position at all; for I am John’s widow in the eyes of Heaven.’
‘I quite agree — that’s why I’ve come. Still, you won’t like to be always straining at this shop-keeping and market-standing; and ‘twould be better for Johnny if you had nothing to do but tend him.’
He here touched the only weak spot in Selina’s resistance to his proposal — the good of the boy. To pr
omote that there were other men she might have married offhand without loving them if they had asked her to; but though she had known the worthy speaker from her youth, she could not for the moment fancy herself happy as Mrs. Miller.
He paused awhile. ‘I ought to tell ‘ee, Mrs. Clark,’ he said by and by, ‘that marrying is getting to be a pressing question with me. Not on my own account at all. The truth is, that mother is growing old, and I am away from home a good deal, so that it is almost necessary there should be another person in the house with her besides me. That’s the practical consideration which forces me to think of taking a wife, apart from my wish to take you; and you know there’s nobody in the world I care for so much.’
She said something about there being far better women than she, and other natural commonplaces; but assured him she was most grateful to him for feeling what he felt, as indeed she sincerely was. However, Selina would not consent to be the useful third person in his comfortable home — at any rate just then. He went away, after taking tea with her, without discerning much hope for him in her good-bye.
VI
After that evening she saw and heard nothing of him for a great while. Her fortnightly journeys to the sergeant-major’s Grave were continued, whenever weather did not hinder them; and Mr. Miller must have known, she thought, of this custom of hers. But though the churchyard was not nearly so far from his homestead as was her shop at Chalk-Newton, he never appeared in the accidental way that lovers use.
An explanation was forthcoming in the shape of a letter from her mother, who casually mentioned that Mr. Bartholomew Miller had gone away to the other side of Shottsford-Forum to be married to a thriving dairyman’s daughter that he knew there. His chief motive, it was reported, had been less one of love than a wish to provide a companion for his aged mother.
Selina was practical enough to know that she had lost a good and possibly the only opportunity of settling in life after what had happened, and for a moment she regretted her independence. But she became calm on reflection, and to fortify herself in her course started that afternoon to tend the sergeant-major’s grave, in which she took the same sober pleasure as at first.