Adam Bede
by George Eliot (Mary Anne Evans)
Hypertext Meanings and Commentaries
from the Encyclopedia of the Self
by Mark Zimmerman
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Chapter XXV

The Games

THE great dance was not to begin until eight o'clock, but for any
lads and lasses who liked to dance on the shady grass before then,
there was music always at hand--for was not the band of the
Benefit Club capable of playing excellent jigs, reels, and
hornpipes? And, besides this, there was a grand band hired from
Rosseter, who, with their wonderful wind-instruments and puffed-
out cheeks, were themselves a delightful show to the small boys
and girls. To say nothing of Joshua Rann's fiddle, which, by an
act of generous forethought, he had provided himself with, in case
any one should be of sufficiently pure taste to prefer dancing to
a solo on that instrument.

Meantime, when the sun had moved off the great open space in front
of the house, the games began. There were, of course, well-soaped
poles to be climbed by the boys and youths, races to be run by the
old women, races to be run in sacks, heavy weights to be lifted by
the strong men, and a long list of challenges to such ambitious
attempts as that of walking as many yards possible on one leg--
feats in which it was generally remarked that Wiry Ben, being "the
lissom'st, springest fellow i' the country," was sure to be pre-
eminent. To crown all, there was to be a donkey-race--that
sublimest of all races, conducted on the grand socialistic idea of
everybody encouraging everybody else's donkey, and the sorriest
donkey winning.

And soon after four o ciock, splendid old Mrs. Irwine, in her
damask satin and jewels and black lace, was led out by Arthur,
followed by the whole family party, to her raised seat under the
striped marquee, where she was to give out the prizes to the
victors. Staid, formal Miss Lydia had requested to resign that
queenly office to the royal old lady, and Arthur was pleased with
this opportunity of gratifying his godmother's taste for
stateliness. Old Mr. Donnithorne, the delicately clean, finely
scented, withered old man, led out Miss Irwine, with his air of
punctilious, acid politeness; Mr. Gawaine brought Miss Lydia,
looking neutral and stiff in an elegant peach-blossom silk; and
Mr. Irwine came last with his pale sister Anne. No other friend
of the family, besides Mr. Gawaine, was invited to-day; there was
to be a grand dinner for the neighbouring gentry on the morrow,
but to-day all the forces were required for the entertainment of
the tenants.

There was a sunk fence in front of the marquee, dividing the lawn
from the park, but a temporary bridge had been made for the
passage of the victors, and the groups of people standing, or
seated here and there on benches, stretched on each side of the
open space from the white marquees up to the sunk fence.

"Upon my word it's a pretty sight," said the old lady, in her deep
voice, when she was seated, and looked round on the bright scene
with its dark-green background; "and it's the last fete-day I'm
likely to see, unless you make haste and get married, Arthur. But
take care you get a charming bride, else I would rather die
without seeing her."

"You're so terribly fastidious, Godmother," said Arthur, "I'm
afraid I should never satisfy you with my choice."

"Well, I won't forgive you if she's not handsome. I can't be put
off with amiability, which is always the excuse people are making
for the existence of plain people. And she must not be silly;
that will never do, because you'll want managing, and a silly
woman can't manage you. Who is that tall young man, Dauphin, with
the mild face? There, standing without his hat, and taking such
care of that tall old woman by the side of him--his mother, of
course. I like to see that."

"What, don't you know him, Mother?" said Mr. Irwine. "That is
Seth Bede, Adam's brother--a Methodist, but a very good fellow.
Poor Seth has looked rather down-hearted of late; I thought it was
because of his father's dying in that sad way, but Joshua Rann
tells me he wanted to marry that sweet little Methodist preacher
who was here about a month ago, and I suppose she refused him."

"Ah, I remember hearing about her. But there are no end of people
here that I don't know, for they're grown up and altered so since
I used to go about."

"What excellent sight you have!" said old Mr. Donnithorne, who was
holding a double glass up to his eyes, "to see the expression of
that young man's face so far off. His face is nothing but a pale
blurred spot to me. But I fancy I have the advantage of you when
we come to look close. I can read small print without
spectacles."

"Ah, my dear sir, you began with being very near-sighted, and
those near-sighted eyes always wear the best. I want very strong
spectacles to read with, but then I think my eyes get better and
better for things at a distance. I suppose if I could live
another fifty years, I should be blind to everything that wasn't
out of other people's sight, like a man who stands in a well and
sees nothing but the stars."

"See," said Arthur, "the old women are ready to set out on their
race now. Which do you bet on, Gawaine?"

"The long-legged one, unless they're going to have several heats,
and then the little wiry one may win."

"There are the Poysers, Mother, not far off on the right hand,"
said Miss Irwine. "Mrs. Poyser is looking at you. Do take notice
of her."

"To be sure I will," said the old lady, giving a gracious bow to
Mrs. Poyser. "A woman who sends me such excellent cream-cheese is
not to be neglected. Bless me! What a fat child that is she is
holding on her knee! But who is that pretty girl with dark eyes?"

"That is Hetty Sorrel," said Miss Lydia Donnithorne, "Martin
Poyser's niece--a very likely young person, and well-looking too.
My maid has taught her fine needlework, and she has mended some
lace of mine very respectably indeed--very respectably."

"Why, she has lived with the Poysers six or seven years, Mother;
you must have seen her," said Miss Irwine.

"No, I've never seen her, child--at least not as she is now," said
Mrs. Irwine, continuing to look at Hetty. "Well-looking, indeed!
She's a perfect beauty! I've never seen anything so pretty since
my young days. What a pity such beauty as that should be thrown
away among the farmers, when it's wanted so terribly among the
good families without fortune! I daresay, now, she'll marry a man
who would have thought her just as pretty if she had had round
eyes and red hair."

Arthur dared not turn his eyes towards Hetty while Mrs. Irwine was
speaking of her. He feigned not to hear, and to be occupied with
something on the opposite side. But he saw her plainly enough
without looking; saw her in heightened beauty, because he heard
her beauty praised--for other men's opinion, you know, was like a
native climate to Arthur's feelings: it was the air on which they
thrived the best, and grew strong. Yes! She was enough to turn
any man's head: any man in his place would have done and felt the
same. And to give her up after all, as he was determined to do,
would be an act that he should always look back upon with pride.

"No, Mother," and Mr. Irwine, replying to her last words; "I can't
agree with you there. The common people are not quite so stupid
as you imagine. The commonest man, who has his ounce of sense and
feeling, is conscious of the difference between a lovely, delicate
woman and a coarse one. Even a dog feels a difference in their
presence. The man may be no better able than the dog to explain
the influence the more refined beauty has on him, but he feels
it."

"Bless me, Dauphin, what does an old bachelor like you know about
it?"

"Oh, that is one of the matters in which old bachelors are wiser
than married men, because they have time for more general
contemplation. Your fine critic of woman must never shackle his
judgment by calling one woman his own. But, as an example of what
I was saying, that pretty Methodist preacher I mentioned just now
told me that she had preached to the roughest miners and had never
been treated with anything but the utmost respect and kindness by
them. The reason is--though she doesn't know it--that there's so
much tenderness, refinement, and purity about her. Such a woman
as that brings with her 'airs from heaven' that the coarsest
fellow is not insensible to."

"Here's a delicate bit of womanhood, or girlhood, coming to
receive a prize, I suppose," said Mr. Gawaine. "She must be one
of the racers in the sacks, who had set off before we came."

The "bit of womanhood" was our old acquaintance Bessy Cranage,
otherwise Chad's Bess, whose large red cheeks and blowsy person
had undergone an exaggeration of colour, which, if she had
happened to be a heavenly body, would have made her sublime.
Bessy, I am sorry to say, had taken to her ear-rings again since
Dinah's departure, and was otherwise decked out in such small
finery as she could muster. Any one who could have looked into
poor Bessy's heart would have seen a striking resemblance between
her little hopes and anxieties and Hetty's. The advantage,
perhaps, would have been on Bessy's side in the matter of feeling.
But then, you see, they were so very different outside! You would
have been inclined to box Bessy's ears, and you would have longed
to kiss Hetty.

Bessy had been tempted to run the arduous race, partly from mere
hedonish gaiety, partly because of the prize. Some one had said
there were to be cloaks and other nice clothes for prizes, and she
approached the marquee, fanning herself with her handkerchief, but
with exultation sparkling in her round eyes.

"Here is the prize for the first sack-race," said Miss Lydia,
taking a large parcel from the table where the prizes were laid
and giving it to Mrs. Irwine before Bessy came up, "an excellent
grogram gown and a piece of flannel."

"You didn't think the winner was to be so young, I suppose, Aunt?"
said Arthur. "Couldn't you find something else for this girl, and
save that grim-looking gown for one of the older women?"

"I have bought nothing but what is useful and substantial," said
Miss Lydia, adjusting her own lace; "I should not think of
encouraging a love of finery in young women of that class. I have
a scarlet cloak, but that is for the old woman who wins."

This speech of Miss Lydia's produced rather a mocking expression
in Mrs. Irwine's face as she looked at Arthur, while Bessy came up
and dropped a series of curtsies.

"This is Bessy Cranage, mother," said Mr. Irwine, kindly, "Chad
Cranage's daughter. You remember Chad Cranage, the blacksmith?"

"Yes, to be sure," said Mrs. Irwine. "Well, Bessy, here is your
prize--excellent warm things for winter. I'm sure you have had
hard work to win them this warm day."

Bessy's lip fell as she saw the ugly, heavy gown--which felt so
hot and disagreeable too, on this July day, and was such a great
ugly thing to carry. She dropped her curtsies again, without
looking up, and with a growing tremulousness about the corners of
her mouth, and then turned away.

"Poor girl," said Arthur; "I think she's disappointed. I wish it
had been something more to her taste."

"She's a bold-looking young person," observed Miss Lydia. "Not at
all one I should like to encourage."

Arthur silently resolved that he would make Bessy a present of
money before the day was over, that she might buy something more
to her mind; but she, not aware of the consolation in store for
her, turned out of the open space, where she was visible from the
marquee, and throwing down the odious bundle under a tree, began
to cry--very much tittered at the while by the small boys. In
this situation she was descried by her discreet matronly cousin,
who lost no time in coming up, having just given the baby into her
husband's charge.

"What's the matter wi' ye?" said Bess the matron, taking up the
bundle and examining it. "Ye'n sweltered yoursen, I reckon,
running that fool's race. An' here, they'n gi'en you lots o' good
grogram and flannel, as should ha' been gi'en by good rights to
them as had the sense to keep away from such foolery. Ye might
spare me a bit o' this grogram to make clothes for the lad--ye war
ne'er ill-natured, Bess; I ne'er said that on ye."

"Ye may take it all, for what I care," said Bess the maiden, with
a pettish movement, beginning to wipe away her tears and recover
herself.

"Well, I could do wi't, if so be ye want to get rid on't," said
the disinterested cousin, walking quickly away with the bundle,
lest Chad's Bess should change her mind.

But that bonny-cheeked lass was blessed with an elasticity of
spirits that secured her from any rankling grief; and by the time
the grand climax of the donkey-race came on, her disappointment
was entirely lost in the delightful excitement of attempting to
stimulate the last donkey by hisses, while the boys applied the
argument of sticks. But the strength of the donkey mind lies in
adopting a course inversely as the arguments urged, which, well
considered, requires as great a mental force as the direct
sequence; and the present donkey proved the first-rate order of
his intelligence by coming to a dead standstill just when the
blows were thickest. Great was the shouting of the crowd, radiant
the grinning of Bill Downes the stone-sawyer and the fortunate
rider of this superior beast, which stood calm and stiff-legged in
the midst of its triumph.

Arthur himself had provided the prizes for the men, and Bill was
made happy with a splendid pocket-knife, supplied with blades and
gimlets enough to make a man at home on a desert island. He had
hardly returned from the marquee with the prize in his hand, when
it began to be understood that Wiry Ben proposed to amuse the
company, before the gentry went to dinner, with an impromptu and
gratuitous performance--namely, a hornpipe, the main idea of which
was doubtless borrowed; but this was to be developed by the dancer
in so peculiar and complex a manner that no one could deny him the
praise of originality. Wiry Ben's pride in his dancing--an
accomplishment productive of great effect at the yearly Wake--had
needed only slightly elevating by an extra quantity of good ale to
convince him that the gentry would be very much struck with his
performance of his hornpipe; and he had been decidedly encouraged
in this idea by Joshua Rann, who observed that it was nothing but
right to do something to please the young squire, in return for
what he had done for them. You will be the less surprised at this
opinion in so grave a personage when you learn that Ben had
requested Mr. Rann to accompany him on the fiddle, and Joshua felt
quite sure that though there might not be much in the dancing, the
music would make up for it. Adam Bede, who was present in one of
the large marquees, where the plan was being discussed, told Ben
he had better not make a fool of himself--a remark which at once
fixed Ben's determination: he was not going to let anything alone
because Adam Bede turned up his nose at it.

"What's this, what's this?" said old Mr. Donnithorne. "Is it
something you've arranged, Arthur? Here's the clerk coming with
his fiddle, and a smart fellow with a nosegay in his button-hole."

"No," said Arthur; "I know nothing about it. By Jove, he's going
to dance! It's one of the carpenters--I forget his name at this
moment."

"It's Ben Cranage--Wiry Ben, they call him," said Mr. Irwine;
"rather a loose fish, I think. Anne, my dear, I see that fiddle-
scraping is too much for you: you're getting tired. Let me take
you in now, that you may rest till dinner."

Miss Anne rose assentingly, and the good brother took her away,
while Joshua's preliminary scrapings burst into the "White
Cockade," from which he intended to pass to a variety of tunes, by
a series of transitions which his good ear really taught him to
execute with some skill. It would have been an exasperating fact
to him, if he had known it, that the general attention was too
thoroughly absorbed by Ben's dancing for any one to give much heed
to the music.

Have you ever seen a real English rustic perform a solo dance?
Perhaps you have only seen a ballet rustic, smiling like a merry
countryman in crockery, with graceful turns of the haunch and
insinuating movements of the head. That is as much like the real
thing as the "Bird Waltz" is like the song of birds. Wiry Ben
never smiled: he looked as serious as a dancing monkey--as serious
as if he had been an experimental philosopher ascertaining in his
own person the amount of shaking and the varieties of angularity
that could be given to the human limbs.

To make amends for the abundant laughter in the striped marquee,
Arthur clapped his hands continually and cried "Bravo!"  But Ben
had one admirer whose eyes followed his movements with a fervid
gravity that equalled his own. It was Martin Poyser, who was
seated on a bench, with Tommy between his legs.

"What dost think o' that?" he said to his wife. "He goes as pat
to the music as if he was made o' clockwork. I used to be a
pretty good un at dancing myself when I was lighter, but I could
niver ha' hit it just to th' hair like that."

"It's little matter what his limbs are, to my thinking," re-turned
Mrs. Poyser. "He's empty enough i' the upper story, or he'd niver
come jigging an' stamping i' that way, like a mad grasshopper, for
the gentry to look at him. They're fit to die wi' laughing, I can
see."

"Well, well, so much the better, it amuses 'em," said Mr. Poyser,
who did not easily take an irritable view of things. "But they're
going away now, t' have their dinner, I reckon. Well move about a
bit, shall we, and see what Adam Bede's doing. He's got to look
after the drinking and things: I doubt he hasna had much fun."

Chapter XXVI

The Dance

ARTHUR had chosen the entrance-hall for the ballroom: very wisely,
for no other room could have heen so airy, or would have had the
advantage of the wide doors opening into the garden, as well as a
ready entrance into the other rooms. To be sure, a stone floor
was not the pleasantest to dance on, but then, most of the dancers
had known what it was to enjoy a Christmas dance on kitchen
quarries. It was one of those entrance-halls which make the
surrounding rooms look like closets--with stucco angels, trumpets,
and flower-wreaths on the lofty ceiling, and great medallions of
miscellaneous heroes on the walls, alternating with statues in
niches. Just the sort of place to be ornamented well with green
boughs, and Mr. Craig had been proud to show his taste and his
hothouse plants on the occasion. The broad steps of the stone
staircase were covered with cushions to serve as seats for the
children, who were to stay till half-past nine with the servant-
maids to see the dancing, and as this dance was confined to the
chief tenants, there was abundant room for every one. The lights
were charmingly disposed in coloured-paper lamps, high up among
green boughs, and the farmers' wives and daughters, as they peeped
in, believed no scene could be more splendid; they knew now quite
well in what sort of rooms the king and queen lived, and their
thoughts glanced with some pity towards cousins and acquaintances
who had not this fine opportunity of knowing how things went on in
the great world. The lamps were already lit, though the sun had
not long set, and there was that calm light out of doors in which
we seem to see all objects more distinctly than in the broad day.

It was a pretty scene outside the house: the farmers and their
families were moving about the lawn, among the flowers and shrubs,
or along the broad straight road leading from the east front,
where a carpet of mossy grass spread on each side, studded here
and there with a dark flat-boughed cedar, or a grand pyramidal fir
sweeping the ground with its branches, all tipped with a fringe of
paler green. The groups of cottagers in the park were gradually
diminishing, the young ones being attracted towards the lights
that were beginning to gleam from the windows of the gallery in
the abbey, which was to be their dancing-room, and some of the
sober elder ones thinking it time to go home quietly. One of
these was Lisbeth Bede, and Seth went with her--not from filial
attention only, for his conscience would not let him join in
dancing. It had been rather a melancholy day to Seth: Dinah had
never been more constantly present with him than in this scene,
where everything was so unlike her. He saw her all the more
vividly after looking at the thoughtless faces and gay-coloured
dresses of the young women--just as one feels the beauty and the
greatness of a pictured Madonna the more when it has been for a
moment screened from us by a vulgar head in a bonnet. But this
presence of Dinah in his mind only helped him to bear the better
with his mother's mood, which had been becoming more and more
querulous for the last hour. Poor Lisbeth was suffering from a
strange conflict of feelings. Her joy and pride in the honour
paid to her darling son Adam was beginning to be worsted in the
conflict with the jealousy and fretfulness which had revived when
Adam came to tell her that Captain Donnithorne desired him to join
the dancers in the hall. Adam was getting more and more out of
her reach; she wished all the old troubles back again, for then it
mattered more to Adam what his mother said and did.

"Eh, it's fine talkin' o' dancin'," she said, "an' thy father not
a five week in's grave. An' I wish I war there too, i'stid o'
bein' left to take up merrier folks's room above ground."

"Nay, don't look at it i' that way, Mother," said Adam, who was
determined to be gentle to her to-day. "I don't mean to dance--I
shall only look on. And since the captain wishes me to be there,
it 'ud look as if I thought I knew better than him to say as I'd
rather not stay. And thee know'st how he's behaved to me to-day."

"Eh, thee't do as thee lik'st, for thy old mother's got no right
t' hinder thee. She's nought but th' old husk, and thee'st
slipped away from her, like the ripe nut."

"Well, Mother," said Adam, "I'll go and tell the captain as it
hurts thy feelings for me to stay, and I'd rather go home upo'
that account: he won't take it ill then, I daresay, and I'm
willing." He said this with some effort, for he really longed to
be near Hetty this evening.

"Nay, nay, I wonna ha' thee do that--the young squire 'ull be
angered. Go an' do what thee't ordered to do, an' me and Seth
'ull go whome. I know it's a grit honour for thee to be so looked
on--an' who's to be prouder on it nor thy mother? Hadna she the
cumber o' rearin' thee an' doin' for thee all these 'ears?"

"Well, good-bye, then, Mother--good-bye, lad--remember Gyp when
you get home," said Adam, turning away towards the gate of the
pleasure-grounds, where he hoped he might be able to join the
Poysers, for he had been so occupied throughout the afternoon that
he had had no time to speak to Hetty. His eye soon detected a
distant group, which he knew to be the right one, returning to the
house along the broad gravel road, and he hastened on to meet
them.

"Why, Adam, I'm glad to get sight on y' again," said Mr. Poyser,
who was carrying Totty on his arm. "You're going t' have a bit o'
fun, I hope, now your work's all done. And here's Hetty has
promised no end o' partners, an' I've just been askin' her if
she'd agreed to dance wi' you, an' she says no."

"Well, I didn't think o' dancing to-night," said Adam, already
tempted to change his mind, as he looked at Hetty.

"Nonsense!" said Mr. Poyser. "Why, everybody's goin' to dance to-
night, all but th' old squire and Mrs. Irwine. Mrs. Best's been
tellin' us as Miss Lyddy and Miss Irwine 'ull dance, an' the young
squire 'ull pick my wife for his first partner, t' open the ball:
so she'll be forced to dance, though she's laid by ever sin' the
Christmas afore the little un was born. You canna for shame stand
still, Adam, an' you a fine young fellow and can dance as well as
anybody."

"Nay, nay," said Mrs. Poyser, "it 'ud be unbecomin'. I know the
dancin's nonsense, but if you stick at everything because it's
nonsense, you wonna go far i' this life. When your broth's ready-
made for you, you mun swallow the thickenin', or else let the
broth alone."

"Then if Hetty 'ull d'ance with me," said Adam, yielding either to
Mrs. Poyser's argument or to something else, "I'll dance whichever
dance she's free."

"I've got no partner for the fourth dance," said Hetty; "I'll
dance that with you, if you like."

"Ah," said Mr. Poyser, "but you mun dance the first dance, Adam,
else it'll look partic'ler. There's plenty o' nice partners to
pick an' choose from, an' it's hard for the gells when the men
stan' by and don't ask 'em."

Adam felt the justice of Mr. Poyser's observation: it would not do
for him to dance with no one besides Hetty; and remembering that
Jonathan Burge had some reason to feel hurt to-day, he resolved to
ask Miss Mary to dance with him the first dance, if she had no
other partner.

"There's the big clock strikin' eight," said Mr. Poyser; "we must
make haste in now, else the squire and the ladies 'ull be in afore
us, an' that wouldna look well."

When they had entered the hall, and the three children under
Molly's charge had been seated on the stairs, the folding-doors of
the drawing-room were thrown open, and Arthur entered in his
regimentals, leading Mrs. Irwine to a carpet-covered dais
ornamented with hot-house plants, where she and Miss Anne were to
be seated with old Mr. Donnithorne, that they might look on at the
dancing, like the kings and queens in the plays. Arthur had put
on his uniform to please the tenants, he said, who thought as much
of his militia dignity as if it had been an elevation to the
premiership. He had not the least objection to gratify them in
that way: his uniform was very advantageous to his figure.

The old squire, before sitting down, walked round the hall to
greet the tenants and make polite speeches to the wives: he was
always polite; but the farmers had found out, after long puzzling,
that this polish was one of the signs of hardness. It was
observed that he gave his most elaborate civility to Mrs. Poyser
to-night, inquiring particularly about her health, recommending
her to strengthen herself with cold water as he did, and avoid all
drugs. Mrs. Poyser curtsied and thanked him with great self-
command, but when he had passed on, she whispered to her husband,
"I'll lay my life he's brewin' some nasty turn against us. Old
Harry doesna wag his tail so for nothin'."  Mr. Poyser had no time
to answer, for now Arthur came up and said, "Mrs. Poyser, I'm come
to request the favour of your hand for the first dance; and, Mr.
Poyser, you must let me take you to my aunt, for she claims you as
her partner."

The wife's pale cheek flushed with a nervous sense of unwonted
honour as Arthur led her to the top of the room; but Mr. Poyser,
to whom an extra glass had restored his youthful confidence in his
good looks and good dancing, walked along with them quite proudly,
secretly flattering himself that Miss Lydia had never had a
partner in HER life who could lift her off the ground as he would.
In order to balance the honours given to the two parishes, Miss
Irwine danced with Luke Britton, the largest Broxton farmer, and
Mr. Gawaine led out Mrs. Britton. Mr. Irwine, after seating his
sister Anne, had gone to the abbey gallery, as he had agreed with
Arthur beforehand, to see how the merriment of the cottagers was
prospering. Meanwhile, all the less distinguished couples had
taken their places: Hetty was led out by the inevitable Mr. Craig,
and Mary Burge by Adam; and now the music struck up, and the
glorious country-dance, best of all dances, began.

Pity it was not a boarded floor! Then the rhythmic stamping of
the thick shoes would have been better than any drums. That merry
stamping, that gracious nodding of the head, that waving bestowal
of the hand--where can we see them now? That simple dancing of
well-covered matrons, laying aside for an hour the cares of house
and dairy, remembering but not affecting youth, not jealous but
proud of the young maidens by their side--that holiday
sprightliness of portly husbands paying little compliments to
their wives, as if their courting days were come again--those lads
and lasses a little confused and awkward with their partners,
having nothing to say--it would be a pleasant variety to see all
that sometimes, instead of low dresses and large skirts, and
scanning glances exploring costumes, and languid men in lacquered
boots smiling with double meaning.

There was but one thing to mar Martin Poyser's pleasure in this
dance: it was that he was always in close contact with Luke
Britton, that slovenly farmer. He thought of throwing a little
glazed coldness into his eye in the crossing of hands; but then,
as Miss Irwine was opposite to him instead of the offensive Luke,
he might freeze the wrong person. So he gave his face up to
hilarity, unchilled by moral judgments.

How Hetty's heart beat as Arthur approached her! He had hardly
looked at her to-day: now he must take her hand. Would he press
it? Would he look at her? She thought she would cry if he gave
her no sign of feeling. Now he was there--he had taken her hand--
yes, he was pressing it. Hetty turned pale as she looked up at
him for an instant and met his eyes, before the dance carried him
away. That pale look came upon Arthur like the beginning of a
dull pain, which clung to him, though he must dance and smile and
joke all the same. Hetty would look so, when he told her what he
had to tell her; and he should never be able to bear it--he should
be a fool and give way again. Hetty's look did not really mean so
much as he thought: it was only the sign of a struggle between the
desire for him to notice her and the dread lest she should betray
the desire to others. But Hetty's face had a language that
transcended her feelings. There are faces which nature charges
with a meaning and pathos not belonging to the single human soul
that flutters beneath them, but speaking the joys and sorrows of
foregone generations--eyes that tell of deep love which doubtless
has been and is somewhere, but not paired with these eyes--perhaps
paired with pale eyes that can say nothing; just as a national
language may be instinct with poetry unfelt by the lips that use
it. That look of Hetty's oppressed Arthur with a dread which yet
had something of a terrible unconfessed delight in it, that she
loved him too well. There was a hard task before him, for at that
moment he felt he would have given up three years of his youth for
the happiness of abandoning himself without remorse to his passion
for Hetty.

These were the incongruous thoughts in his mind as he led Mrs.
Poyser, who was panting with fatigue, and secretly resolving that
neither judge nor jury should force her to dance another dance, to
take a quiet rest in the dining-room, where supper was laid out
for the guests to come and take it as they chose.

"I've desired Hetty to remember as she's got to dance wi' you,
sir," said the good innocent woman; "for she's so thoughtless,
she'd be like enough to go an' engage herself for ivery dance. So
I told her not to promise too many."

"Thank you, Mrs. Poyser," said Arthur, not without a twinge.
"Now, sit down in this comfortable chair, and here is Mills ready
to give you what you would like best."

He hurried away to seek another matronly partner, for due honour
must be paid to the married women before he asked any of the young
ones; and the country-dances, and the stamping, and the gracious
nodding, and the waving of the hands, went on joyously.

At last the time had come for the fourth dance--longed for by the
strong, grave Adam, as if he had been a delicate-handed youth of
eighteen; for we are all very much alike when we are in our first
love; and Adam had hardly ever touched Hetty's hand for more than
a transient greeting--had never danced with her but once before.
His eyes had followed her eagerly to-night in spite of himself,
and had taken in deeper draughts of love. He thought she behaved
so prettily, so quietly; she did not seem to be flirting at all
she smiled less than usual; there was almost a sweet sadness about
her. "God bless her!" he said inwardly; "I'd make her life a
happy 'un, if a strong arm to work for her, and a heart to love
her, could do it."

And then there stole over him delicious thoughts of coming home
from work, and drawing Hetty to his side, and feeling her cheek
softly pressed against his, till he forgot where he was, and the
music and the tread of feet might have been the falling of rain
and the roaring of the wind, for what he knew.

But now the third dance was ended, and he might go up to her and
claim her hand. She was at the far end of the hall near the
staircase, whispering with Molly, who had just given the sleeping
Totty into her arms before running to fetch shawls and bonnets
from the landing. Mrs. Poyser had taken the two boys away into
the dining-room to give them some cake before they went home in
the cart with Grandfather and Molly was to follow as fast as
possible.

"Let me hold her," said Adam, as Molly turned upstairs; "the
children are so heavy when they're asleep."

Hetty was glad of the relief, for to hold Totty in her arms,
standing, was not at all a pleasant variety to her. But this
second transfer had the unfortunate effect of rousing Totty, who
was not behind any child of her age in peevishness at an
unseasonable awaking. While Hetty was in the act of placing her
in Adam's arms, and had not yet withdrawn her own, Totty opened
her eyes, and forthwith fought out with her left fist at Adam's
arm, and with her right caught at the string of brown beads round
Hetty's neck. The locket leaped out from her frock, and the next
moment the string was broken, and Hetty, helpless, saw beads and
locket scattered wide on the floor.

"My locket, my locket!" she said, in a loud frightened whisper to
Adam; "never mind the beads."

Adam had already seen where the locket fell, for it had attracted
his glance as it leaped out of her frock. It had fallen on the
raised wooden dais where the band sat, not on the stone floor; and
as Adam picked it up, he saw the glass with the dark and light
locks of hair under it. It had fallen that side upwards, so the
glass was not broken. He turned it over on his hand, and saw the
enamelled gold back.

"It isn't hurt," he said, as he held it towards Hetty, who was
unable to take it because both her hands were occupied with Totty.

"Oh, it doesn't matter, I don't mind about it," said Hetty, who
had been pale and was now red.

"Not matter?" said Adam, gravely. "You seemed very frightened
about it. I'll hold it till you're ready to take it," he added,
quietly closing his hand over it, that she might not think he
wanted to look at it again.

By this time Molly had come with bonnet and shawl, and as soon as
she had taken Totty, Adam placed the locket in Hetty's hand. She
took it with an air of indifference and put it in her pocket, in
her heart vexed and angry with Adam because he had seen it, but
determined now that she would show no more signs of agitation.

"See," she said, "they're taking their places to dance; let us
go."

Adam assented silently. A puzzled alarm had taken possession of
him. Had Hetty a lover he didn't know of? For none of her
relations, he was sure, would give her a locket like that; and
none of her admirers, with whom he was acquainted, was in the
position of an accepted lover, as the giver of that locket must
be. Adam was lost in the utter impossibility of finding any
person for his fears to alight on. He could only feel with a
terrible pang that there was something in Hetty's life unknown to
him; that while he had been rocking himself in the hope that she
would come to love him, she was already loving another. The
pleasure of the dance with Hetty was gone; his eyes, when they
rested on her, had an uneasy questioning expression in them; he
could think of nothing to say to her; and she too was out of
temper and disinclined to speak. They were both glad when the
dance was ended.

Adam was determined to stay no longer; no one wanted him, and no
one would notice if he slipped away. As soon as he got out of
doors, he began to walk at his habitual rapid pace, hurrying along
without knowing why, busy with the painful thought that the memory
of this day, so full of honour and promise to him, was poisoned
for ever. Suddenly, when he was far on through the Chase, he
stopped, startled by a flash of reviving hope. After all, he
might be a fool, making a great misery out of a trifle. Hetty,
fond of finery as she was, might have bought the thing herself.
It looked too expensive for that--it looked like the things on
white satin in the great jeweller's shop at Rosseter. But Adam
had very imperfect notions of the value of such things, and he
thought it could certainly not cost more than a guinea. Perhaps
Hetty had had as much as that in Christmas boxes, and there was no
knowing but she might have been childish enough to spend it in
that way; she was such a young thing, and she couldn't help loving
finery! But then, why had she been so frightened about it at
first, and changed colour so, and afterwards pretended not to
care? Oh, that was because she was ashamed of his seeing that she
had such a smart thing--she was conscious that it was wrong for
her to spend her money on it, and she knew that Adam disapproved
of finery. It was a proof she cared about what he liked and
disliked. She must have thought from his silence and gravity
afterwards that he was very much displeased with her, that he was
inclined to be harsh and severe towards her foibles. And as he
walked on more quietly, chewing the cud of this new hope, his only
uneasiness was that he had behaved in a way which might chill
Hetty's feeling towards him. For this last view of the matter
must be the true one. How could Hetty have an accepted lover,
quite unknown to him? She was never away from her uncle's house
for more than a day; she could have no acquaintances that did not
come there, and no intimacies unknown to her uncle and aunt. It
would be folly to believe that the locket was given to her by a
lover. The little ring of dark hair he felt sure was her own; he
could form no guess about the light hair under it, for he had not
seen it very distinctly. It might be a bit of her father's or
mother's, who had died when she was a child, and she would
naturally put a bit of her own along with it.

And so Adam went to bed comforted, having woven for himself an
ingenious web of probabilities--the surest screen a wise man can
place between himself and the truth. His last waking thoughts
melted into a dream that he was with Hetty again at the Hall Farm,
and that he was asking her to forgive him for being so cold and
silent.

And while he was dreaming this, Arthur was leading Hetty to the
dance and saying to her in low hurried tones, "I shall be in the
wood the day after to-morrow at seven; come as early as you can."
And Hetty's foolish joys and hopes, which had flown away for a
little space, scared by a mere nothing, now all came fluttering
back, unconscious of the real peril. She was happy for the first
time this long day, and wished that dance would last for hours.
Arthur wished it too; it was the last weakness he meant to indulge
in; and a man never lies with more delicious languor under the
influence of a passion than when he has persuaded himself that he
shall subdue it to-morrow.

But Mrs. Poyser's wishes were quite the reverse of this, for her
mind was filled with dreary forebodings as to the retardation of
to-morrow morning's cheese in consequence of these late hours.
Now that Hetty had done her duty and danced one dance with the
young squire, Mr. Poyser must go out and see if the cart was come
back to fetch them, for it was half-past ten o'clock, and
notwithstanding a mild suggestion on his part that it would be bad
manners for them to be the first to go, Mrs. Poyser was resolute
on the point, "manners or no manners."

"What! Going already, Mrs. Poyser?" said old Mr. Donnithorne, as
she came to curtsy and take leave; "I thought we should not part
with any of our guests till eleven. Mrs. Irwine and I, who are
elderly people, think of sitting out the dance till then."

"Oh, Your Honour, it's all right and proper for gentlefolks to
stay up by candlelight--they've got no cheese on their minds.
We're late enough as it is, an' there's no lettin' the cows know
as they mustn't want to be milked so early to-morrow mornin'. So,
if you'll please t' excuse us, we'll take our leave."

"Eh!" she said to her husband, as they set off in the cart, "I'd
sooner ha' brewin' day and washin' day together than one o' these
pleasurin' days. There's no work so tirin' as danglin' about an'
starin' an' not rightly knowin' what you're goin' to do next; and
keepin' your face i' smilin' order like a grocer o' market-day for
fear people shouldna think you civil enough. An' you've nothing
to show for't when it's done, if it isn't a yallow face wi' eatin'
things as disagree."

"Nay, nay," said Mr. Poyser, who was in his merriest mood, and
felt that he had had a great day, "a bit o' pleasuring's good for
thee sometimes. An' thee danc'st as well as any of 'em, for I'll
back thee against all the wives i' the parish for a light foot an'
ankle. An' it was a great honour for the young squire to ask thee
first--I reckon it was because I sat at th' head o' the table an'
made the speech. An' Hetty too--she never had such a partner
before--a fine young gentleman in reg'mentals. It'll serve you to
talk on, Hetty, when you're an old woman--how you danced wi' th'
young squire the day he come o' age."

Book Four

Chapter XXVII

A crisis

IT was beyond the middle of August--nearly three weeks after the
birthday feast. The reaping of the wheat had begun in our north
midland county of Loamshire, but the harvest was likely still to
be retarded by the heavy rains, which were causing inundations and
much damage throughout the country. From this last trouble the
Broxton and Hayslope farmers, on their pleasant uplands and in
their brook-watered valleys, had not suffered, and as I cannot
pretend that they were such exceptional farmers as to love the
general good better than their own, you will infer that they were
not in very low spirits about the rapid rise in the price of
bread, so long as there was hope of gathering in their own corn
undamaged; and occasional days of sunshine and drying winds
flattered this hope.

The eighteenth of August was one of these days when the sunshine
looked brighter in all eyes for the gloom that went before. Grand
masses of cloud were hurried across the blue, and the great round
hills behind the Chase seemed alive with their flying shadows; the
sun was hidden for a moment, and then shone out warm again like a
recovered joy; the leaves, still green, were tossed off the
hedgerow trees by the wind; around the farmhouses there was a
sound of clapping doors; the apples fell in the orchards; and the
stray horses on the green sides of the lanes and on the common had
their manes blown about their faces. And yet the wind seemed only
part of the general gladness because the sun was shining. A merry
day for the children, who ran and shouted to see if they could top
the wind with their voices; and the grown-up people too were in
good spirits, inclined to believe in yet finer days, when the wind
had fallen. If only the corn were not ripe enough to be blown out
of the husk and scattered as untimely seed!

And yet a day on which a blighting sorrow may fall upon a man.
For if it be true that Nature at certain moments seems charged
with a presentiment of one individual lot must it not also be true
that she seems unmindful uncon-scious of another? For there is no
hour that has not its births of gladness and despair, no morning
brightness that does not bring new sickness to desolation as well
as new forces to genius and love. There are so many of us, and
our lots are so different, what wonder that Nature's mood is often
in harsh contrast with the great crisis of our lives? We are
children of a large family, and must learn, as such children do,
not to expect that our hurts will be made much of--to be content
with little nurture and caressing, and help each other the more.

It was a busy day with Adam, who of late had done almost double
work, for he was continuing to act as foreman for Jonathan Burge,
until some satisfactory person could be found to supply his place,
and Jonathan was slow to find that person. But he had done the
extra work cheerfully, for his hopes were buoyant again about
Hetty. Every time she had seen him since the birthday, she had
seemed to make an effort to behave all the more kindly to him,
that she might make him understand she had forgiven his silence
and coldness during the dance. He had never mentioned the locket
to her again; too happy that she smiled at him--still happier
because he observed in her a more subdued air, something that he
interpreted as the growth of womanly tenderness and seriousness.
"Ah!" he thought, again and again, "she's only seventeen; she'll
be thoughtful enough after a while. And her aunt allays says how
clever she is at the work. She'll make a wife as Mother'll have
no occasion to grumble at, after all." To be sure, he had only
seen her at home twice since the birthday; for one Sunday, when he
was intending to go from church to the Hall Farm, Hetty had joined
the party of upper servants from the Chase and had gone home with
them--almost as if she were inclined to encourage Mr. Craig.
"She's takin' too much likin' to them folks i' the house keeper's
room," Mrs. Poyser remarked. "For my part, I was never overfond
o' gentlefolks's servants--they're mostly like the fine ladies'
fat dogs, nayther good for barking nor butcher's meat, but on'y
for show." And another evening she was gone to Treddleston to buy
some things; though, to his great surprise, as he was returning
home, he saw her at a distance getting over a stile quite out of
the Treddleston road. But, when he hastened to her, she was very
kind, and asked him to go in again when he had taken her to the
yard gate. She had gone a little farther into the fields after
coming from Treddleston because she didn't want to go in, she
said: it was so nice to be out of doors, and her aunt always made
such a fuss about it if she wanted to go out. "Oh, do come in
with me!" she said, as he was going to shake hands with her at the
gate, and he could not resist that. So he went in, and Mrs.
Poyser was contented with only a slight remark on Hetty's being
later than was expected; while Hetty, who had looked out of
spirits when he met her, smiled and talked and waited on them all
with unusual promptitude.

That was the last time he had seen her; but he meant to make
leisure for going to the Farm to-morrow. To-day, he knew, was her
day for going to the Chase to sew with the lady's maid, so he
would get as much work done as possible this evening, that the
next might be clear.

One piece of work that Adam was superintending was some slight
repairs at the Chase Farm, which had been hitherto occupied by
Satchell, as bailiff, but which it was now rumoured that the old
squire was going to let to a smart man in top-boots, who had been
seen to ride over it one day. Nothing but the desire to get a
tenant could account for the squire's undertaking repairs, though
the Saturday-evening party at Mr. Casson's agreed over their pipes
that no man in his senses would take the Chase Farm unless there
was a bit more ploughland laid to it. However that might be, the
repairs were ordered to be executed with all dispatch, and Adam,
acting for Mr. Burge, was carrying out the order with his usual
energy. But to-day, having been occupied elsewhere, he had not
been able to arrive at the Chase Farm till late in the afternoon,
and he then discovered that some old roofing, which he had
calculated on preserving, had given way. There was clearly no
good to be done with this part of the building without pulling it
all down, and Adam immediately saw in his mind a plan for building
it up again, so as to make the most convenient of cow-sheds and
calf-pens, with a hovel for implements; and all without any great
expense for materials. So, when the workmen were gone, he sat
down, took out his pocket-book, and busied himself with sketching
a plan, and making a specification of the expenses that he might
show it to Burge the next morning, and set him on persuading the
squire to consent. To "make a good job" of anything, however
small, was always a pleasure to Adam, and he sat on a block, with
his book resting on a planing-table, whistling low every now and
then and turning his head on one side with a just perceptible
smile of gratification--of pride, too, for if Adam loved a bit of
good work, he loved also to think, "I did it!"  And I believe the
only people who are free from that weakness are those who have no
work to call their own. It was nearly seven before he had
finished and put on his jacket again; and on giving a last look
round, he observed that Seth, who had been working here to-day,
had left his basket of tools behind him. "Why, th' lad's forgot
his tools," thought Adam, "and he's got to work up at the shop to-
morrow. There never was such a chap for wool-gathering; he'd
leave his head behind him, if it was loose. However, it's lucky
I've seen 'em; I'll carry 'em home."

The buildings of the Chase Farm lay at one extremity of the Chase,
at about ten minutes' walking distance from the Abbey. Adam had
come thither on his pony, intending to ride to the stables and put
up his nag on his way home. At the stables he encountered Mr.
Craig, who had come to look at the captain's new horse, on which
he was to ride away the day after to-morrow; and Mr. Craig
detained him to tell how all the servants were to collect at the
gate of the courtyard to wish the young squire luck as he rode
out; so that by the time Adam had got into the Chase, and was
striding along with the basket of tools over his shoulder, the sun
was on the point of setting, and was sending level crimson rays
among the great trunks of the old oaks, and touching every bare
patch of ground with a transient glory that made it look like a
jewel dropt upon the grass. The wind had fallen now, and there
was only enough breeze to stir the delicate-stemmed leaves. Any
one who had been sitting in the house all day would have been glad
to walk now; but Adam had been quite enough in the open air to
wish to shorten his way home, and he bethought himself that he
might do so by striking across the Chase and going through the
Grove, where he had never been for years. He hurried on across
the Chase, stalking along the narrow paths between the fern, with
Gyp at his heels, not lingering to watch the magnificent changes
of the light--hardly once thinking of it--yet feeling its presence
in a certain calm happy awe which mingled itself with his busy
working-day thoughts. How could he help feeling it? The very
deer felt it, and were more timid.

Presently Adam's thoughts recurred to what Mr. Craig had said
about Arthur Donnithorne, and pictured his going away, and the
changes that might take place before he came back; then they
travelled back affectionately over the old scenes of boyish
companionship, and dwelt on Arthur's good qualities, which Adam
had a pride in, as we all have in the virtues of the superior who
honours us. A nature like Adam's, with a great need of love and
reverence in it, depends for so much of its happiness on what it
can believe and feel about others! And he had no ideal world of
dead heroes; he knew little of the life of men in the past; he
must find the beings to whom he could cling with loving admiration
among those who came within speech of him. These pleasant
thoughts about Arthur brought a milder expression than usual into
his keen rough face: perhaps they were the reason why, when he
opened the old green gate leading into the Grove, he paused to pat
Gyp and say a kind word to him.

After that pause, he strode on again along the broad winding path
through the Grove. What grand beeches! Adam delighted in a fine
tree of all things; as the fisherman's sight is keenest on the
sea, so Adam's perceptions were more at home with trees than with
other objects. He kept them in his memory, as a painter does,
with all the flecks and knots in their bark, all the curves and
angles of their boughs, and had often calculated the height and
contents of a trunk to a nicety, as he stood looking at it. No
wonder that, not-withstanding his desire to get on, he could not
help pausing to look at a curious large beech which he had seen
standing before him at a turning in the road, and convince himself
that it was not two trees wedded together, but only one. For the
rest of his life he remembered that moment when he was calmly
examining the beech, as a man remembers his last glimpse of the
home where his youth was passed, before the road turned, and he
saw it no more. The beech stood at the last turning before the
Grove ended in an archway of boughs that let in the eastern light;
and as Adam stepped away from the tree to continue his walk, his
eyes fell on two figures about twenty yards before him.

He remained as motionless as a statue, and turned almost as pale.
The two figures were standing opposite to each other, with clasped
hands about to part; and while they were bending to kiss, Gyp, who
had been running among the brushwood, came out, caught sight of
them, and gave a sharp bark. They separated with a start--one
hurried through the gate out of the Grove, and the other, turning
round, walked slowly, with a sort of saunter, towards Adam who
still stood transfixed and pale, clutching tighter the stick with
which he held the basket of tools over his shoulder, and looking
at the approaching figure with eyes in which amazement was fast
turning to fierceness.

Arthur Donnithorne looked flushed and excited; he had tried to
make unpleasant feelings more bearable by drinking a little more
wine than usual at dinner to-day, and was still enough under its
flattering influence to think more lightly of this unwished-for
rencontre with Adam than he would otherwise have done. After all,
Adam was the best person who could have happened to see him and
Hetty together--he was a sensible fellow, and would not babble
about it to other people. Arthur felt confident that he could
laugh the thing off and explain it away. And so he sauntered
forward with elaborate carelessness--his flushed face, his evening
dress of fine cloth and fine linen, his hands half-thrust into his
waistcoat pockets, all shone upon by the strange evening light
which the light clouds had caught up even to the zenith, and were
now shedding down between the topmost branches above him.

Adam was still motionless, looking at him as he came up. He
understood it all now--the locket and everything else that had
been doubtful to him: a terrible scorching light showed him the
hidden letters that changed the meaning of the past. If he had
moved a muscle, he must inevitably have sprung upon Arthur like a
tiger; and in the conflicting emotions that filled those long
moments, he had told himself that he would not give loose to
passion, he would only speak the right thing. He stood as if
petrified by an unseen force, but the force was his own strong
will.

"Well, Adam," said Arthur, "you've been looking at the fine old
beeches, eh? They're not to be come near by the hatchet, though;
this is a sacred grove. I overtook pretty little Hetty Sorrel as
I was coming to my den--the Hermitage, there. She ought not to
come home this way so late. So I took care of her to the gate,
and asked for a kiss for my pains. But I must get back now, for
this road is confoundedly damp. Good-night, Adam. I shall see
you to-morrow--to say good-bye, you know."

Arthur was too much preoccupied with the part he was playing
himself to be thoroughly aware of the expression in Adam's face.
He did not look directly at Adam, but glanced carelessly round at
the trees and then lifted up one foot to look at the sole of his
boot. He cared to say no more--he had thrown quite dust enough
into honest Adam's eyes--and as he spoke the last words, he walked
on.

"Stop a bit, sir," said Adam, in a hard peremptory voice, without
turning round. "I've got a word to say to you."

Arthur paused in surprise. Susceptible persons are more affected
by a change of tone than by unexpected words, and Arthur had the
susceptibility of a nature at once affectionate and vain. He was
still more surprised when he saw that Adam had not moved, but
stood with his back to him, as if summoning him to return. What
did he mean? He was going to make a serious business of this
affair. Arthur felt his temper rising. A patronising disposition
always has its meaner side, and in the confusion of his irritation
and alarm there entered the feeling that a man to whom he had
shown so much favour as to Adam was not in a position to criticize
his conduct. And yet he was dominated, as one who feels himself
in the wrong always is, by the man whose good opinion he cares
for. In spite of pride and temper, there was as much deprecation
as anger in his voice when he said, "What do you mean, Adam?"

"I mean, sir"--answered Adam, in the same harsh voice, still
without turning round--"I mean, sir, that you don't deceive me by
your light words. This is not the first time you've met Hetty
Sorrel in this grove, and this is not the first time you've kissed
her."

Arthur felt a startled uncertainty how far Adam was speaking from
knowledge, and how far from mere inference. And this uncertainty,
which prevented him from contriving a prudent answer, heightened
his irritation. He said, in a high sharp tone, "Well, sir, what
then?"

"Why, then, instead of acting like th' upright, honourable man
we've all believed you to be, you've been acting the part of a
selfish light-minded scoundrel. You know as well as I do what
it's to lead to when a gentleman like you kisses and makes love to
a young woman like Hetty, and gives her presents as she's
frightened for other folks to see. And I say it again, you're
acting the part of a selfish light-minded scoundrel though it cuts
me to th' heart to say so, and I'd rather ha' lost my right hand."

"Let me tell you, Adam," said Arthur, bridling his growing anger
and trying to recur to his careless tone, "you're not only
devilishly impertinent, but you're talking nonsense. Every pretty
girl is not such a fool as you, to suppose that when a gentleman
admires her beauty and pays her a little attention, he must mean
something particular. Every man likes to flirt with a pretty
girl, and every pretty girl likes to be flirted with. The wider
the distance between them, the less harm there is, for then she's
not likely to deceive herself."

"I don't know what you mean by flirting," said Adam, "but if you
mean behaving to a woman as if you loved her, and yet not loving
her all the while, I say that's not th' action of an honest man,
and what isn't honest does come t' harm. I'm not a fool, and
you're not a fool, and you know better than what you're saying.
You know it couldn't be made public as you've behaved to Hetty as
y' have done without her losing her character and bringing shame
and trouble on her and her relations. What if you meant nothing
by your kissing and your presents? Other folks won't believe as
you've meant nothing; and don't tell me about her not deceiving
herself. I tell you as you've filled her mind so with the thought
of you as it'll mayhap poison her life, and she'll never love
another man as 'ud make her a good husband."

Arthur had felt a sudden relief while Adam was speaking; he
perceived that Adam had no positive knowledge of the past, and
that there was no irrevocable damage done by this evening's
unfortunate rencontre. Adam could still be deceived. The candid
Arthur had brought himself into a position in which successful
lying was his only hope. The hope allayed his anger a little.

"Well, Adam," he said, in a tone of friendly concession, "you're
perhaps right. Perhaps I've gone a little too far in taking
notice of the pretty little thing and stealing a kiss now and
then. You're such a grave, steady fellow, you don't understand
the temptation to such trifling. I'm sure I wouldn't bring any
trouble or annoyance on her and the good Poysers on any account if
I could help it. But I think you look a little too seriously at
it. You know I'm going away immediately, so I shan't make any
more mistakes of the kind. But let us say good-night"--Arthur
here turned round to walk on--"and talk no more about the matter.
The whole thing will soon be forgotten."

"No, by God!" Adam burst out with rage that could be controlled no
longer, throwing down the basket of tools and striding forward
till he was right in front of Arthur. All his jealousy and sense
of personal injury, which he had been hitherto trying to keep
under, had leaped up and mastered him. What man of us, in the
first moments of a sharp agony, could ever feel that the fellow-
man who has been the medium of inflicting it did not mean to hurt
us? In our instinctive rebellion against pain, we are children
again, and demand an active will to wreak our vengeance on. Adam
at this moment could only feel that he had been robbed of Hetty--
robbed treacherously by the man in whom he had trusted--and he
stood close in front of Arthur, with fierce eyes glaring at him,
with pale lips and clenched hands, the hard tones in which he had
hitherto been constraining himself to express no more than a just
indignation giving way to a deep agitated voice that seemed to
shake him as he spoke.

"No, it'll not be soon forgot, as you've come in between her and
me, when she might ha' loved me--it'll not soon be forgot as
you've robbed me o' my happiness, while I thought you was my best
friend, and a noble-minded man, as I was proud to work for. And
you've been kissing her, and meaning nothing, have you? And I
never kissed her i' my life--but I'd ha' worked hard for years for
the right to kiss her. And you make light of it. You think
little o' doing what may damage other folks, so as you get your
bit o' trifling, as means nothing. I throw back your favours, for
you're not the man I took you for. I'll never count you my friend
any more. I'd rather you'd act as my enemy, and fight me where I
stand--it's all th' amends you can make me."

Poor Adam, possessed by rage that could find no other vent, began
to throw off his coat and his cap, too blind with passion to
notice the change that had taken place in Arthur while he was
speaking. Arthur's lips were now as pale as Adam's; his heart was
beating violently. The discovery that Adam loved Hetty was a
shock which made him for the moment see himself in the light of
Adam's indignation, and regard Adam's suffering as not merely a
consequence, but an element of his error. The words of hatred and
contempt--the first he had ever heard in his life--seemed like
scorching missiles that were making ineffaceable scars on him.
All screening self-excuse, which rarely falls quite away while
others respect us, forsook him for an instant, and he stood face
to face with the first great irrevocable evil he had ever
committed. He was only twenty-one, and three months ago--nay,
much later--he had thought proudly that no man should ever be able
to reproach him justly. His first impulse, if there had been time
for it, would perhaps have been to utter words of propitiation;
but Adam had no sooner thrown off his coat and cap than he became
aware that Arthur was standing pale and motionless, with his hands
still thrust in his waistcoat pockets.

"What!" he said, "won't you fight me like a man? You know I won't
strike you while you stand so."

"Go away, Adam," said Arthur, "I don't want to fight you."

"No," said Adam, bitterly; "you don't want to fight me--you think
I'm a common man, as you can injure without answering for it."

"I never meant to injure you," said Arthur, with returning anger.
"I didn't know you loved her."

"But you've made her love you," said Adam. "You're a double-faced
man--I'll never believe a word you say again."

"Go away, I tell you," said Arthur, angrily, "or we shall both
repent."

"No," said Adam, with a convulsed voice, "I swear I won't go away
without fighting you. Do you want provoking any more? I tell you
you're a coward and a scoundrel, and I despise you."

The colour had all rushed back to Arthur's face; in a moment his
right hand was clenched, and dealt a blow like lightning, which
sent Adam staggering backward. His blood was as thoroughly up as
Adam's now, and the two men, forgetting the emotions that had gone
before, fought with the instinctive fierceness of panthers in the
deepening twilight darkened by the trees. The delicate-handed
gentleman was a match for the workman in everything but strength,
and Arthur's skill enabled him to protract the struggle for some
long moments. But between unarmed men the battle is to the
strong, where the strong is no blunderer, and Arthur must sink
under a well-planted blow of Adam's as a steel rod is broken by an
iron bar. The blow soon came, and Arthur fell, his head lying
concealed in a tuft of fern, so that Adam could only discern his
darkly clad body.

He stood still in the dim light waiting for Arthur to rise.

The blow had been given now, towards which he had been straining
all the force of nerve and muscle--and what was the good of it?
What had he done by fighting? Only satisfied his own passion,
only wreaked his own vengeance. He had not rescued Hetty, nor
changed the past--there it was, just as it had been, and he
sickened at the vanity of his own rage.

But why did not Arthur rise? He was perfectly motionless, and the
time seemed long to Adam. Good God! had the blow been too much
for him? Adam shuddered at the thought of his own strength, as
with the oncoming of this dread he knelt down by Arthur's side and
lifted his head from among the fern. There was no sign of life:
the eyes and teeth were set. The horror that rushed over Adam
completely mastered him, and forced upon him its own belief. He
could feel nothing but that death was in Arthur's face, and that
he was helpless before it. He made not a single movement, but
knelt like an image of despair gazing at an image of death.

Chapter XXVIII

A Dilemma

IT was only a few minutes measured by the clock--though Adam
always thought it had been a long while--before he perceived a
gleam of consciousness in Arthur's face and a slight shiver
through his frame. The intense joy that flooded his soul brought
back some of the old affection with it.

"Do you feel any pain, sir?" he said, tenderly, loosening Arthur's
cravat.

Arthur turned his eyes on Adam with a vague stare which gave way
to a slightly startled motion as if from the shock of returning
memory. But he only shivered again and said nothing.

"Do you feel any hurt, sir?" Adam said again, with a trembling in
his voice.

Arthur put his hand up to his waistcoat buttons, and when Adam had
unbuttoned it, he took a longer breath. "Lay my head down," he
said, faintly, "and get me some water if you can."

Adam laid the head down gently on the fern again, and emptying the
tools out of the flag-basket, hurried through the trees to the
edge of the Grove bordering on the Chase, where a brook ran below
the bank.

When he returned with his basket leaking, but still half-full,
Arthur looked at him with a more thoroughly reawakened
consciousness.

"Can you drink a drop out o' your hand, sir?" said Adam, kneeling
down again to lift up Arthur's head.

"No," said Arthur, "dip my cravat in and souse it on my head."

The water seemed to do him some good, for he presently raised
himself a little higher, resting on Adam's arm.

"Do you feel any hurt inside sir?" Adam asked again

"No--no hurt," said Arthur, still faintly, "but rather done up."

After a while he said, "I suppose I fainted away when you knocked
me down."

"Yes, sir, thank God," said Adam. "I thought it was worse."

"What! You thought you'd done for me, eh? Come help me on my
legs."

"I feel terribly shaky and dizzy," Arthur said, as he stood
leaning on Adam's arm; "that blow of yours must have come against
me like a battering-ram. I don't believe I can walk alone."

"Lean on me, sir; I'll get you along," said Adam. "Or, will you
sit down a bit longer, on my coat here, and I'll prop y' up.
You'll perhaps be better in a minute or two."

"No," said Arthur. "I'll go to the Hermitage--I think I've got
some brandy there. There's a short road to it a little farther
on, near the gate. If you'll just help me on."

They walked slowly, with frequent pauses, but without speaking
again. In both of them, the concentration in the present which
had attended the first moments of Arthur's revival had now given
way to a vivid recollection of the previous scene. It was nearly
dark in the narrow path among the trees, but within the circle of
fir-trees round the Hermitage there was room for the growing
moonlight to enter in at the windows. Their steps were noiseless
on the thick carpet of fir-needles, and the outward stillness
seemed to heighten their inward consciousness, as Arthur took the
key out of his pocket and placed it in Adam's hand, for him to
open the door. Adam had not known before that Arthur had
furnished the old Hermitage and made it a retreat for himself, and
it was a surprise to him when he opened the door to see a snug
room with all the signs of frequent habitation.

Arthur loosed Adam's arm and threw himself on the ottoman.
"You'll see my hunting-bottle somewhere," he said. "A leather
case with a bottle and glass in."

Adam was not long in finding the case. "There's very little
brandy in it, sir," he said, turning it downwards over the glass,
as he held it before the window; "hardly this little glassful."

"Well, give me that," said Arthur, with the peevishness of
physical depression. When he had taken some sips, Adam said,
"Hadn't I better run to th' house, sir, and get some more brandy?
I can be there and back pretty soon. It'll be a stiff walk home
for you, if you don't have something to revive you."

"Yes--go. But don't say I'm ill. Ask for my man Pym, and tell
him to get it from Mills, and not to say I'm at the Hermitage.
Get some water too."

Adam was relieved to have an active task--both of them were
relieved to be apart from each other for a short time. But Adam's
swift pace could not still the eager pain of thinking--of living
again with concentrated suffering through the last wretched hour,
and looking out from it over all the new sad future.

Arthur lay still for some minutes after Adam was gone, but
presently he rose feebly from the ottoman and peered about slowly
in the broken moonlight, seeking something. It was a short bit of
wax candle that stood amongst a confusion of writing and drawing
materials. There was more searching for the means of lighting the
candle, and when that was done, he went cautiously round the room,
as if wishing to assure himself of the presence or absence of
something. At last he had found a slight thing, which he put
first in his pocket, and then, on a second thought, took out again
and thrust deep down into a waste-paper basket. It was a woman's
little, pink, silk neckerchief. He set the candle on the table,
and threw himself down on the ottoman again, exhausted with the
effort.

When Adam came back with his supplies, his entrance awoke Arthur
from a doze.

"That's right," Arthur said; "I'm tremendously in want of some
brandy-vigour."

"I'm glad to see you've got a light, sir," said Adam. "I've been
thinking I'd better have asked for a lanthorn."

"No, no; the candle will last long enough--I shall soon be up to
walking home now."

"I can't go before I've seen you safe home, sir," said Adam,
hesitatingly.

"No: it will be better for you to stay--sit down."

Adam sat down, and they remained opposite to each other in uneasy
silence, while Arthur slowly drank brandy-and-water, with visibly
renovating effect. He began to lie in a more voluntary position,
and looked as if he were less overpowered by bodily sensations.
Adam was keenly alive to these indications, and as his anxiety
about Arthur's condition began to be allayed, he felt more of that
impatience which every one knows who has had his just indignation
suspended by the physical state of the culprit. Yet there was one
thing on his mind to be done before he could recur to
remonstrance: it was to confess what had been unjust in his own
words. Perhaps he longed all the more to make this confession,
that his indignation might be free again; and as he saw the signs
of returning ease in Arthur, the words again and again came to his
lips and went back, checked by the thought that it would be better
to leave everything till to-morrow. As long as they were silent
they did not look at each other, and a foreboding came across Adam
that if they began to speak as though they remembered the past--if
they looked at each other with full recognition--they must take
fire again. So they sat in silence till the bit of wax candle
flickered low in the socket, the silence all the while becoming
more irksome to Adam. Arthur had just poured out some more
brandy-and-water, and he threw one arm behind his head and drew up
one leg in an attitude of recovered ease, which was an
irresistible temptation to Adam to speak what was on his mind.

"You begin to feel more yourself again, sir," he said, as the
candle went out and they were half-hidden from each other in the
faint moonlight.

"Yes: I don't feel good for much--very lazy, and not inclined to
move; but I'll go home when I've taken this dose."

There was a slight pause before Adam said, "My temper got the
better of me, and I said things as wasn't true. I'd no right to
speak as if you'd known you was doing me an injury: you'd no
grounds for knowing it; I've always kept what I felt for her as
secret as I could."

He paused again before he went on.

"And perhaps I judged you too harsh--I'm apt to be harsh--and you
may have acted out o' thoughtlessness more than I should ha'
believed was possible for a man with a heart and a conscience.
We're not all put together alike, and we may misjudge one another.
God knows, it's all the joy I could have now, to think the best of
you."

Arthur wanted to go home without saying any more--he was too
painfully embarrassed in mind, as well as too weak in body, to
wish for any further explanation to-night. And yet it was a
relief to him that Adam reopened the subject in a way the least
difficult for him to answer. Arthur was in the wretched position
of an open, generous man who has committed an error which makes
deception seem a necessity. The native impulse to give truth in
return for truth, to meet trust with frank confession, must be
suppressed, and duty was becoming a question of tactics. His deed
was reacting upon him--was already governing him tyrannously and
forcing him into a course that jarred with his habitual feelings.
The only aim that seemed admissible to him now was to deceive Adam
to the utmost: to make Adam think better of him than he deserved.
And when he heard the words of honest retractation--when he heard
the sad appeal with which Adam ended--he was obliged to rejoice in
the remains of ignorant confidence it implied. He did not answer
immediately, for he had to be judicious and not truthful.

"Say no more about our anger, Adam," he said, at last, very
languidly, for the labour of speech was unwelcome to him; "I
forgive your momentary injustice--it was quite natural, with the
exaggerated notions you had in your mind. We shall be none the
worse friends in future, I hope, because we've fought. You had
the best of it, and that was as it should be, for I believe I've
been most in the wrong of the two. Come, let us shake hands."

Arthur held out his hand, but Adam sat still.

"I don't like to say 'No' to that, sir," he said, "but I can't
shake hands till it's clear what we mean by't. I was wrong when I
spoke as if you'd done me an injury knowingly, but I wasn't wrong
in what I said before, about your behaviour t' Hetty, and I can't
shake hands with you as if I held you my friend the same as ever
till you've cleared that up better."

Arthur swallowed his pride and resentment as he drew back his
hand. He was silent for some moments, and then said, as
indifferently as he could, "I don't know what you mean by clearing
up, Adam. I've told you already that you think too seriously of a
little flirtation. But if you are right in supposing there is any
danger in it--I'm going away on Saturday, and there will be an end
of it. As for the pain it has given you, I'm heartily sorry for
it. I can say no more."

Adam said nothing, but rose from his chair and stood with his face
towards one of the windows, as if looking at the blackness of the
moonlit fir-trees; but he was in reality conscious of nothing but
the conflict within him. It was of no use now--his resolution not
to speak till to-morrow. He must speak there and then. But it
was several minutes before he turned round and stepped nearer to
Arthur, standing and looking down on him as he lay.

"It'll be better for me to speak plain," he said, with evident
effort, "though it's hard work. You see, sir, this isn't a trifle
to me, whatever it may be to you. I'm none o' them men as can go
making love first to one woman and then t' another, and don't
think it much odds which of 'em I take. What I feel for Hetty's a
different sort o' love, such as I believe nobody can know much
about but them as feel it and God as has given it to 'em. She's
more nor everything else to me, all but my conscience and my good
name. And if it's true what you've been saying all along--and if
it's only been trifling and flirting as you call it, as 'll be put
an end to by your going away--why, then, I'd wait, and hope her
heart 'ud turn to me after all. I'm loath to think you'd speak
false to me, and I'll believe your word, however things may look."

"You would be wronging Hetty more than me not to believe it," said
Arthur, almost violently, starting up from the ottoman and moving
away. But he threw himself into a chair again directly, saying,
more feebly, "You seem to forget that, in suspecting me, you are
casting imputations upon her."

"Nay, sir," Adam said, in a calmer voice, as if he were half-
relieved--for he was too straightforward to make a distinction
between a direct falsehood and an indirect one--"Nay, sir, things
don't lie level between Hetty and you. You're acting with your
eyes open, whatever you may do; but how do you know what's been in
her mind? She's all but a child--as any man with a conscience in
him ought to feel bound to take care on. And whatever you may
think, I know you've disturbed her mind. I know she's been fixing
her heart on you, for there's a many things clear to me now as I
didn't understand before. But you seem to make light o' what she
may feel--you don't think o' that."

"Good God, Adam, let me alone!" Arthur burst out impetuously; "I
feel it enough without your worrying me."

He was aware of his indiscretion as soon as the words had escaped
him.

"Well, then, if you feel it," Adam rejoined, eagerly; "if you feel
as you may ha' put false notions into her mind, and made her
believe as you loved her, when all the while you meant nothing,
I've this demand to make of you--I'm not speaking for myself, but
for her. I ask you t' undeceive her before you go away. Y'aren't
going away for ever, and if you leave her behind with a notion in
her head o' your feeling about her the same as she feels about
you, she'll be hankering after you, and the mischief may get
worse. It may be a smart to her now, but it'll save her pain i'
th' end. I ask you to write a letter--you may trust to my seeing
as she gets it. Tell her the truth, and take blame to yourself
for behaving as you'd no right to do to a young woman as isn't
your equal. I speak plain, sir, but I can't speak any other way.
There's nobody can take care o' Hetty in this thing but me."

"I can do what I think needful in the matter," said Arthur, more
and more irritated by mingled distress and perplexity, "without
giving promises to you. I shall take what measures I think
proper."

"No," said Adam, in an abrupt decided tone, "that won't do. I
must know what ground I'm treading on. I must be safe as you've
put an end to what ought never to ha' been begun. I don't forget
what's owing to you as a gentleman, but in this thing we're man
and man, and I can't give up."

There was no answer for some moments. Then Arthur said, "I'll see
you to-morrow. I can bear no more now; I'm ill." He rose as he
spoke, and reached his cap, as if intending to go.

"You won't see her again!" Adam exclaimed, with a flash of
recurring anger and suspicion, moving towards the door and placing
his back against it. "Either tell me she can never be my wife--
tell me you've been lying--or else promise me what I've said."

Adam, uttering this alternative, stood like a terrible fate before
Arthur, who had moved forward a step or two, and now stopped,
faint, shaken, sick in mind and body. It seemed long to both of
them--that inward struggle of Arthur's--before he said, feebly, "I
promise; let me go."

Adam moved away from the door and opened it, but when Arthur
reached the step, he stopped again and leaned against the door-
post.

"You're not well enough to walk alone, sir," said Adam. "Take my
arm again."

Arthur made no answer, and presently walked on, Adam following.
But, after a few steps, he stood still again, and said, coldly, "I
believe I must trouble you. It's getting late now, and there may
be an alarm set up about me at home."

Adam gave his arm, and they walked on without uttering a word,
till they came where the basket and the tools lay.

"I must pick up the tools, sir," Adam said. "They're my
brother's. I doubt they'll be rusted. If you'll please to wait a
minute."

Arthur stood still without speaking, and no other word passed
between them till they were at the side entrance, where he hoped
to get in without being seen by any one. He said then, "Thank
you; I needn't trouble you any further."

"What time will it be conven'ent for me to see you to-morrow,
sir?" said Adam.

"You may send me word that you're here at five o'clock," said
Arthur; "not before."

"Good-night, sir," said Adam. But he heard no reply; Arthur had
turned into the house.

Chapter XXIX

The Next Morning

ARTHUR did not pass a sleepless night; he slept long and well.
For sleep comes to the perplexed--if the perplexed are only weary
enough. But at seven he rang his bell and astonished Pym by
declaring he was going to get up, and must have breakfast brought
to him at eight.

"And see that my mare is saddled at half-past eight, and tell my
grandfather when he's down that I'm better this morning and am
gone for a ride."

He had been awake an hour, and could rest in bed no longer. In
bed our yesterdays are too oppressive: if a man can only get up,
though it be but to whistle or to smoke, he has a present which
offers some resistance to the past--sensations which assert
themselves against tyrannous memories. And if there were such a
thing as taking averages of feeling, it would certainly be found
that in the hunting and shooting seasons regret, self-reproach,
and mortified pride weigh lighter on country gentlemen than in
late spring and summer. Arthur felt that he should be more of a
man on horseback. Even the presence of Pym, waiting on him with
the usual deference, was a reassurance to him after the scenes of
yesterday. For, with Arthur's sensitiveness to opinion, the loss
of Adam's respect was a shock to his self-contentment which
suffused his imagination with the sense that he had sunk in all
eyes--as a sudden shock of fear from some real peril makes a
nervous woman afraid even to step, because all her perceptions are
suffused with a sense of danger.

Arthur's, as you know, was a loving nature. Deeds of kindness
were as easy to him as a bad habit: they were the common issue of
his weaknesses and good qualities, of his egoism and his sympathy.
He didn't like to witness pain, and he liked to have grateful eyes
beaming on him as the giver of pleasure. When he was a lad of
seven, he one day kicked down an old gardener's pitcher of broth,
from no motive but a kicking impulse, not reflecting that it was
the old man's dinner; but on learning that sad fact, he took his
favourite pencil-case and a silver-hafted knife out of his pocket
and offered them as compensation. He had been the same Arthur
ever since, trying to make all offences forgotten in benefits. If
there were any bitterness in his nature, it could only show itself
against the man who refused to be conciliated by him. And perhaps
the time was come for some of that bitterness to rise. At the
first moment, Arthur had felt pure distress and self-reproach at
discovering that Adam's happiness was involved in his relation to
Hetty. If there had been a possibility of making Adam tenfold
amends--if deeds of gift, or any other deeds, could have restored
Adam's contentment and regard for him as a benefactor, Arthur
would not only have executed them without hesitation, but would
have felt bound all the more closely to Adam, and would never have
been weary of making retribution. But Adam could receive no
amends; his suffering could not be cancelled; his respect and
affection could not be recovered by any prompt deeds of atonement.
He stood like an immovable obstacle against which no pressure
could avail; an embodiment of what Arthur most shrank from
believing in--the irrevocableness of his own wrongdoing. The
words of scorn, the refusal to shake hands, the mastery asserted
over him in their last conversation in the Hermitage--above all,
the sense of having been knocked down, to which a man does not
very well reconcile himself, even under the most heroic
circumstances--pressed on him with a galling pain which was
stronger than compunction. Arthur would so gladly have persuaded
himself that he had done no harm! And if no one had told him the
contrary, he could have persuaded himself so much better. Nemesis
can seldom forge a sword for herself out of our consciences--out
of the suffering we feel in the suffering we may have caused:
there is rarely metal enough there to make an effective weapon.
Our moral sense learns the manners of good society and smiles when
others smile, but when some rude person gives rough names to our
actions, she is apt to take part against us. And so it was with
Arthur: Adam's judgment of him, Adam's grating words, disturbed
his self-soothing arguments.

Not that Arthur had been at ease before Adam's discovery.
Struggles and resolves had transformed themselves into compunction
and anxiety. He was distressed for Hetty's sake, and distressed
for his own, that he must leave her behind. He had always, both
in making and breaking resolutions, looked beyond his passion and
seen that it must speedily end in separation; but his nature was
too ardent and tender for him not to suffer at this parting; and
on Hetty's account he was filled with uneasiness. He had found
out the dream in which she was living--that she was to be a lady
in silks and satins--and when he had first talked to her about his
going away, she had asked him tremblingly to let her go with him
and be married. It was his painful knowledge of this which had
given the most exasperating sting to Adam's reproaches. He had
said no word with the purpose of deceiving her--her vision was all
spun by her own childish fancy--but he was obliged to confess to
himself that it was spun half out of his own actions. And to
increase the mischief, on this last evening he had not dared to
hint the truth to Hetty; he had been obliged to soothe her with
tender, hopeful words, lest he should throw her into violent
distress. He felt the situation acutely, felt the sorrow of the
dear thing in the present, and thought with a darker anxiety of
the tenacity which her feelings might have in the future. That
was the one sharp point which pressed against him; every other he
could evade by hopeful self-persuasion. The whole thing had been
secret; the Poysers had not the shadow of a suspicion. No one,
except Adam, knew anything of what had passed--no one else was
likely to know; for Arthur had impressed on Hetty that it would be
fatal to betray, by word or look, that there had been the least
intimacy between them; and Adam, who knew half their secret, would
rather help them to keep it than betray it. It was an unfortunate
business altogether, but there was no use in making it worse than
it was by imaginary exaggerations and forebodings of evil that
might never come. The temporary sadness for Hetty was the worst
consequence; he resolutely turned away his eyes from any bad
consequence that was not demonstrably inevitable. But--but Hetty
might have had the trouble in some other way if not in this. And
perhaps hereafter he might be able to do a great deal for her and
make up to her for all the tears she would shed about him. She
would owe the advantage of his care for her in future years to the
sorrow she had incurred now. So good comes out of evil. Such is
the beautiful arrangement of things!

Are you inclined to ask whether this can be the same Arthur who,
two months ago, had that freshness of feeling, that delicate
honour which shrinks from wounding even a sentiment, and does not
contemplate any more positive offence as possible for it?--who
thought that his own self-respect was a higher tribunal than any
external opinion? The same, I assure you, only under different
conditions. Our deeds determine us, as much as we determine our
deeds, and until we know what has been or will be the peculiar
combination of outward with inward facts, which constitutes a
man's critical actions, it will be better not to think ourselves
wise about his character. There is a terrible coercion in our
deeds, which may first turn the honest man into a deceiver and
then reconcile him to the change, for this reason--that the second
wrong presents itself to him in the guise of the only practicable
right. The action which before commission has been seen with that
blended common sense and fresh untarnished feeling which is the
healthy eye of the soul, is looked at afterwards with the lens of
apologetic ingenuity, through which all things that men call
beautiful and ugly are seen to be made up of textures very much
alike. Europe adjusts itself to a fait accompli, and so does an
individual character--until the placid adjustment is disturbed by
a convulsive retribution.

No man can escape this vitiating effect of an offence against his
own sentiment of right, and the effect was the stronger in Arthur
because of that very need of self-respect which, while his
conscience was still at ease, was one of his best safeguards.
Self-accusation was too painful to him--he could not face it. He
must persuade himself that he had not been very much to blame; he
began even to pity himself for the necessity he was under of
deceiving Adam--it was a course so opposed to the honesty of his
own nature. But then, it was the only right thing to do.

Well, whatever had been amiss in him, he was miserable enough in
consequence: miserable about Hetty; miserable about this letter
that he had promised to write, and that seemed at one moment to be
a gross barbarity, at another perhaps the greatest kindness he
could do to her. And across all this reflection would dart every
now and then a sudden impulse of passionate defiance towards all
consequences. He would carry Hetty away, and all other
considerations might go to....

In this state of mind the four walls of his room made an
intolerable prison to him; they seemed to hem in and press down
upon him all the crowd of contradictory thoughts and conflicting
feelings, some of which would fly away in the open air. He had
only an hour or two to make up his mind in, and he must get clear
and calm. Once on Meg's back, in the fresh air of that fine
morning, he should be more master of the situation.

The pretty creature arched her bay neck in the sunshine, and pawed
the gravel, and trembled with pleasure when her master stroked her
nose, and patted her, and talked to her even in a more caressing
tone than usual. He loved her the better because she knew nothing
of his secrets. But Meg was quite as well acquainted with her
master's mental state as many others of her sex with the mental
condition of the nice young gentlemen towards whom their hearts
are in a state of fluttering expectation.

Arthur cantered for five miles beyond the Chase, till he was at
the foot of a hill where there were no hedges or trees to hem in
the road. Then he threw the bridle on Meg's neck and prepared to
make up his mind.

Hetty knew that their meeting yesterday must be the last before
Arthur went away--there was no possibility of their contriving
another without exciting suspicion--and she was like a frightened
child, unable to think of anything, only able to cry at the
mention of parting, and then put her face up to have the tears
kissed away. He could do nothing but comfort her, and lull her
into dreaming on. A letter would be a dreadfully abrupt way of
awakening her! Yet there was truth in what Adam said--that it
would save her from a lengthened delusion, which might be worse
than a sharp immediate pain. And it was the only way of
satisfying Adam, who must be satisfied, for more reasons than one.
If he could have seen her again! But that was impossible; there
was such a thorny hedge of hindrances between them, and an
imprudence would be fatal. And yet, if he COULD see her again,
what good would it do? Only cause him to suffer more from the
sight of her distress and the remembrance of it. Away from him
she was surrounded by all the motives to self-control.

A sudden dread here fell like a shadow across his imagination--the
dread lest she should do something violent in her grief; and close
upon that dread came another, which deepened the shadow. But he
shook them off with the force of youth and hope. What was the
ground for painting the future in that dark way? It was just as
likely to be the reverse. Arthur told himself he did not deserve
that things should turn out badly. He had never meant beforehand
to do anything his conscience disapproved; he had been led on by
circumstances. There was a sort of implicit confidence in him
that he was really such a good fellow at bottom, Providence would
not treat him harshly.

At all events, he couldn't help what would come now: all he could
do was to take what seemed the best course at the present moment.
And he persuaded himself that that course was to make the way open
between Adam and Hetty. Her heart might really turn to Adam, as
he said, after a while; and in that case there would have been no
great harm done, since it was still Adam's ardent wish to make her
his wife. To be sure, Adam was deceived--deceived in a way that
Arthur would have resented as a deep wrong if it had been
practised on himself. That was a reflection that marred the
consoling prospect. Arthur's cheeks even burned in mingled shame
and irritation at the thought. But what could a man do in such a
dilemma? He was bound in honour to say no word that could injure
Hetty: his first duty was to guard her. He would never have told
or acted a lie on his own account. Good God! What a miserable
fool he was to have brought himself into such a dilemma; and yet,
if ever a man had excuses, he had. (Pity that consequences are
determined not by excuses but by actions!)

Well, the letter must be written; it was the only means that
promised a solution of the difficulty. The tears came into
Arthur's eyes as he thought of Hetty reading it; but it would be
almost as hard for him to write it; he was not doing anything easy
to himself; and this last thought helped him to arrive at a
conclusion. He could never deliberately have taken a step which
inflicted pain on another and left himself at ease. Even a
movement of jealousy at the thought of giving up Hetty to Adam
went to convince him that he was making a sacrifice.

When once he had come to this conclusion, he turned Meg round and
set off home again in a canter. The letter should be written the
first thing, and the rest of the day would be filled up with other
business: he should have no time to look behind him. Happily,
Irwine and Gawaine were coming to dinner, and by twelve o'clock
the next day he should have left the Chase miles behind him.
There was some security in this constant occupation against an
uncontrollable impulse seizing him to rush to Hetty and thrust
into her hand some mad proposition that would undo everything.
Faster and faster went the sensitive Meg, at every slight sign
from her rider, till the canter had passed into a swift gallop.

"I thought they said th' young mester war took ill last night,"
said sour old John, the groom, at dinner-time in the servants'
hall. "He's been ridin' fit to split the mare i' two this
forenoon."

"That's happen one o' the symptims, John," said the facetious
coachman.

"Then I wish he war let blood for 't, that's all," said John,
grimly.

Adam had been early at the Chase to know how Arthur was, and had
been relieved from all anxiety about the effects of his blow by
learning that he was gone out for a ride. At five o'clock he was
punctually there again, and sent up word of his arrival. In a few
minutes Pym came down with a letter in his hand and gave it to
Adam, saying that the captain was too busy to see him, and had
written everything he had to say. The letter was directed to
Adam, but he went out of doors again before opening it. It
contained a sealed enclosure directed to Hetty. On the inside of
the cover Adam read:

"In the enclosed letter I have written everything you wish. I
leave it to you to decide whether you will be doing best to
deliver it to Hetty or to return it to me. Ask yourself once more
whether you are not taking a measure which may pain her more than
mere silence.

"There is no need for our seeing each other again now. We shall
meet with better feelings some months hence.

A.D."

"Perhaps he's i' th' right on 't not to see me," thought Adam.
"It's no use meeting to say more hard words, and it's no use
meeting to shake hands and say we're friends again. We're not
friends, an' it's better not to pretend it. I know forgiveness is
a man's duty, but, to my thinking, that can only mean as you're to
give up all thoughts o' taking revenge: it can never mean as
you're t' have your old feelings back again, for that's not
possible. He's not the same man to me, and I can't feel the same
towards him. God help me! I don't know whether I feel the same
towards anybody: I seem as if I'd been measuring my work from a
false line, and had got it all to measure over again."

But the question about delivering the letter to Hetty soon
absorbed Adam's thoughts. Arthur had procured some relief to
himself by throwing the decision on Adam with a warning; and Adam,
who was not given to hesitation, hesitated here. He determined to
feel his way--to ascertain as well as he could what was Hetty's
state of mind before he decided on delivering the letter.

Chapter XXX

The Delivery of the Letter

THE next Sunday Adam joined the Poysers on their way out of
church, hoping for an invitation to go home with them. He had the
letter in his pocket, and was anxious to have an opportunity of
talking to Hetty alone. He could not see her face at church, for
she had changed her seat, and when he came up to her to shake
hands, her manner was doubtful and constrained. He expected this,
for it was the first time she had met him since she had been aware
that he had seen her with Arthur in the Grove.

"Come, you'll go on with us, Adam," Mr. Poyser said when they
reached the turning; and as soon as they were in the fields Adam
ventured to offer his arm to Hetty. The children soon gave them
an opportunity of lingering behind a little, and then Adam said:

"Will you contrive for me to walk out in the garden a bit with you
this evening, if it keeps fine, Hetty? I've something partic'lar
to talk to you about."

Hetty said, "Very well."  She was really as anxious as Adam was
that she should have some private talk with him. She wondered
what he thought of her and Arthur. He must have seen them
kissing, she knew, but she had no conception of the scene that had
taken place between Arthur and Adam. Her first feeling had been
that Adam would be very angry with her, and perhaps would tell her
aunt and uncle, but it never entered her mind that he would dare
to say anything to Captain Donnithorne. It was a relief to her
that he behaved so kindly to her to-day, and wanted to speak to
her alone, for she had trembled when she found he was going home
with them lest he should mean "to tell."  But, now he wanted to
talk to her by herself, she should learn what he thought and what
he meant to do. She felt a certain confidence that she could
persuade him not to do anything she did not want him to do; she
could perhaps even make him believe that she didn't care for
Arthur; and as long as Adam thought there was any hope of her
having him, he would do just what she liked, she knew. Besides,
she MUST go on seeming to encourage Adam, lest her uncle and aunt
should be angry and suspect her of having some secret lover.

Hetty's little brain was busy with this combination as she hung on
Adam's arm and said "yes" or "no" to some slight observations of
his about the many hawthorn-berries there would be for the birds
this next winter, and the low-hanging clouds that would hardly
hold up till morning. And when they rejoined her aunt and uncle,
she could pursue her thoughts without interruption, for Mr. Poyser
held that though a young man might like to have the woman he was
courting on his arm, he would nevertheless be glad of a little
reasonable talk about business the while; and, for his own part,
he was curious to heal the most recent news about the Chase Farm.
So, through the rest of the walk, he claimed Adam's conversation
for himself, and Hetty laid her small plots and imagined her
little scenes of cunning blandishment, as she walked along by the
hedgerows on honest Adam's arm, quite as well as if she had been
an elegantly clad coquette alone in her boudoir. For if a country
beauty in clumsy shoes be only shallow-hearted enough, it is
astonishing how closely her mental processes may resemble those of
a lady in society and crinoline, who applies her refined intellect
to the problem of committing indiscretions without compromising
herself. Perhaps the resemblance was not much the less because
Hetty felt very unhappy all the while. The parting with Arthur
was a double pain to her--mingling with the tumult of passion and
vanity there was a dim undefined fear that the future might shape
itself in some way quite unlike her dream. She clung to the
comforting hopeful words Arthur had uttered in their last meeting--
"I shall come again at Christmas, and then we will see what can
be done."  She clung to the belief that he was so fond of her, he
would never be happy without her; and she still hugged her secret--
that a great gentleman loved her--with gratified pride, as a
superiority over all the girls she knew. But the uncertainty of
the future, the possibilities to which she could give no shape,
began to press upon her like the invisible weight of air; she was
alone on her little island of dreams, and all around her was the
dark unknown water where Arthur was gone. She could gather no
elation of spirits now by looking forward, but only by looking
backward to build confidence on past words and caresses. But
occasionally, since Thursday evening, her dim anxieties had been
almost lost behind the more definite fear that Adam might betray
what he knew to her uncle and aunt, and his sudden proposition to
talk with her alone had set her thoughts to work in a new way.
She was eager not to lose this evening's opportunity; and after
tea, when the boys were going into the garden and Totty begged to
go with them, Hetty said, with an alacrity that surprised Mrs.
Poyser, "I'll go with her, Aunt."

It did not seem at all surprising that Adam said he would go too,
and soon he and Hetty were left alone together on the walk by the
filbert-trees, while the boys were busy elsewhere gathering the
large unripe nuts to play at "cob-nut" with, and Totty was
watching them with a puppylike air of contemplation. It was but a
short time--hardly two months--since Adam had had his mind filled
with delicious hopes as he stood by Hetty's side un this garden.
The remembrance of that scene had often been with him since
Thursday evening: the sunlight through the apple-tree boughs, the
red bunches, Hetty's sweet blush. It came importunately now, on
this sad evening, with the low-hanging clouds, but he tried to
suppress it, lest some emotion should impel him to say more than
was needful for Hetty's sake.

"After what I saw on Thursday night, Hetty," he began, "you won't
think me making too free in what I'm going to say. If you was
being courted by any man as 'ud make you his wife, and I'd known
you was fond of him and meant to have him, I should have no right
to speak a word to you about it; but when I see you're being made
love to by a gentleman as can never marry you, and doesna think o'
marrying you, I feel bound t' interfere for you. I can't speak
about it to them as are i' the place o' your parents, for that
might bring worse trouble than's needful."

Adam's words relieved one of Hetty's fears, but they also carried
a meaning which sickened her with a strengthened foreboding. She
was pale and trembling, and yet she would have angrily
contradicted Adam, if she had dared to betray her feelings. But
she was silent.

"You're so young, you know, Hetty," he went on, almost tenderly,
"and y' haven't seen much o' what goes on in the world. It's
right for me to do what I can to save you from getting into
trouble for want o' your knowing where you're being led to. If
anybody besides me knew what I know about your meeting a gentleman
and having fine presents from him, they'd speak light on you, and
you'd lose your character. And besides that, you'll have to
suffer in your feelings, wi' giving your love to a man as can
never marry you, so as he might take care of you all your life."

Adam paused and looked at Hetty, who was plucking the leaves from
the filbert-trees and tearing them up in her hand. Her little
plans and preconcerted speeches had all forsaken her, like an ill-
learnt lesson, under the terrible agitation produced by Adam's
words. There was a cruel force in their calm certainty which
threatened to grapple and crush her flimsy hopes and fancies. She
wanted to resist them--she wanted to throw them off with angry
contradiction--but the determination to conceal what she felt
still governed her. It was nothing more than a blind prompting
now, for she was unable to calculate the effect of her words.

"You've no right to say as I love him," she said, faintly, but
impetuously, plucking another rough leaf and tearing it up. She
was very beautiful in her paleness and agitation, with her dark
childish eyes dilated and her breath shorter than usual. Adam's
heart yearned over her as he looked at her. Ah, if he could but
comfort her, and soothe her, and save her from this pain; if he
had but some sort of strength that would enable him to rescue her
poor troubled mind, as he would have rescued her body in the face
of all danger!

"I doubt it must be so, Hetty," he said, tenderly; "for I canna
believe you'd let any man kiss you by yourselves, and give you a
gold box with his hair, and go a-walking i' the Grove to meet him,
if you didna love him. I'm not blaming you, for I know it 'ud
begin by little and little, till at last you'd not be able to
throw it off. It's him I blame for stealing your love i' that
way, when he knew he could never make you the right amends. He's
been trifling with you, and making a plaything of you, and caring
nothing about you as a man ought to care."

"Yes, he does care for me; I know better nor you," Hetty burst
out. Everything was forgotten but the pain and anger she felt at
Adam's words.

"Nay, Hetty," said Adam, "if he'd cared for you rightly, he'd
never ha' behaved so. He told me himself he meant nothing by his
kissing and presents, and he wanted to make me believe as you
thought light of 'em too. But I know better nor that. I can't
help thinking as you've been trusting to his loving you well
enough to marry you, for all he's a gentleman. And that's why I
must speak to you about it, Hetty, for fear you should be
deceiving yourself. It's never entered his head the thought o'
marrying you."

"How do you know? How durst you say so?" said Hetty, pausing in
her walk and trembling. The terrible decision of Adam's tone
shook her with fear. She had no presence of mind left for the
reflection that Arthur would have his reasons for not telling the
truth to Adam. Her words and look were enough to determine Adam:
he must give her the letter.

"Perhaps you can't believe me, Hetty, because you think too well
of him--because you think he loves you better than he does. But
I've got a letter i' my pocket, as he wrote himself for me to give
you. I've not read the letter, but he says he's told you the
truth in it. But before I give you the letter, consider, Hetty,
and don't let it take too much hold on you. It wouldna ha' been
good for you if he'd wanted to do such a mad thing as marry you:
it 'ud ha' led to no happiness i' th' end."

Hetty said nothing; she felt a revival of hope at the mention of a
letter which Adam had not read. There would be something quite
different in it from what he thought.

Adam took out the letter, but he held it in his hand still, while
he said, in a tone of tender entreaty, "Don't you bear me ill
will, Hetty, because I'm the means o' bringing you this pain. God
knows I'd ha' borne a good deal worse for the sake o' sparing it
you. And think--there's nobody but me knows about this, and I'll
take care of you as if I was your brother. You're the same as
ever to me, for I don't believe you've done any wrong knowingly."

Hetty had laid her hand on the letter, but Adam did not loose it
till he had done speaking. She took no notice of what he said--
she had not listened; but when he loosed the letter, she put it
into her pocket, without opening it, and then began to walk more
quickly, as if she wanted to go in.

"You're in the right not to read it just yet," said Adam. "Read
it when you're by yourself. But stay out a little bit longer, and
let us call the children: you look so white and ill, your aunt may
take notice of it."

Hetty heard the warning. It recalled to her the necessity of
rallying her native powers of concealment, which had half given
way under the shock of Adam's words. And she had the letter in
her pocket: she was sure there was comfort in that letter in spite
of Adam. She ran to find Totty, and soon reappeared with
recovered colour, leading Totty, who was making a sour face
because she had been obliged to throw away an unripe apple that
she had set her small teeth in.

"Hegh, Totty," said Adam, "come and ride on my shoulder--ever so
high--you'll touch the tops o' the trees."

What little child ever refused to be comforted by that glorious
sense of being seized strongly and swung upward? I don't believe
Ganymede cried when the eagle carried him away, and perhaps
deposited him on Jove's shoulder at the end. Totty smiled down
complacently from her secure height, and pleasant was the sight to
the mother's eyes, as she stood at the house door and saw Adam
coming with his small burden.

"Bless your sweet face, my pet," she said, the mother's strong
love filling her keen eyes with mildness, as Totty leaned forward
and put out her arms. She had no eyes for Hetty at that moment,
and only said, without looking at her, "You go and draw some ale,
Hetty; the gells are both at the cheese."

After the ale had been drawn and her uncle's pipe lighted, there
was Totty to be taken to bed, and brought down again in her night-
gown because she would cry instead of going to sleep. Then there
was supper to be got ready, and Hetty must be continually in the
way to give help. Adam stayed till he knew Mrs. Poyser expected
him to go, engaging her and her husband in talk as constantly as
he could, for the sake of leaving Hetty more at ease. He
lingered, because he wanted to see her safely through that
evening, and he was delighted to find how much self-command she
showed. He knew she had not had time to read the letter, but he
did not know she was buoyed up by a secret hope that the letter
would contradict everything he had said. It was hard work for him
to leave her--hard to think that he should not know for days how
she was bearing her trouble. But he must go at last, and all he
could do was to press her hand gently as he said "Good-bye," and
hope she would take that as a sign that if his love could ever be
a refuge for her, it was there the same as ever. How busy his
thoughts were, as he walked home, in devising pitying excuses for
her folly, in referring all her weakness to the sweet lovingness
of her nature, in blaming Arthur, with less and less inclination
to admit that his conduct might be extenuated too! His
exasperation at Hetty's suffering--and also at the sense that she
was possibly thrust for ever out of his own reach--deafened him to
any plea for the miscalled friend who had wrought this misery.
Adam was a clear-sighted, fair-minded man--a fine fellow, indeed,
morally as well as physically. But if Aristides the Just was ever
in love and jealous, he was at that moment not perfectly
magnanimous. And I cannot pretend that Adam, in these painful
days, felt nothing but righteous indignation and loving pity. He
was bitterly jealous, and in proportion as his love made him
indulgent in his judgment of Hetty, the bitterness found a vent in
his feeling towards Arthur.

"Her head was allays likely to be turned," he thought, "when a
gentleman, with his fine manners, and fine clothes, and his white
hands, and that way o' talking gentlefolks have, came about her,
making up to her in a bold way, as a man couldn't do that was only
her equal; and it's much if she'll ever like a common man now."
He could not help drawing his own hands out of his pocket and
looking at them--at the hard palms and the broken finger-nails.
"I'm a roughish fellow, altogether; I don't know, now I come to
think on't, what there is much for a woman to like about me; and
yet I might ha' got another wife easy enough, if I hadn't set my
heart on her. But it's little matter what other women think about
me, if she can't love me. She might ha' loved me, perhaps, as
likely as any other man--there's nobody hereabouts as I'm afraid
of, if he hadn't come between us; but now I shall belike be
hateful to her because I'm so different to him. And yet there's
no telling--she may turn round the other way, when she finds he's
made light of her all the while. She may come to feel the vally
of a man as 'ud be thankful to be bound to her all his life. But
I must put up with it whichever way it is--I've only to be
thankful it's been no worse. I am not th' only man that's got to
do without much happiness i' this life. There's many a good bit
o' work done with a bad heart. It's God's will, and that's enough
for us: we shouldn't know better how things ought to be than He
does, I reckon, if we was to spend our lives i' puzzling. But it
'ud ha' gone near to spoil my work for me, if I'd seen her brought
to sorrow and shame, and through the man as I've always been proud
to think on. Since I've been spared that, I've no right to
grumble. When a man's got his limbs whole, he can bear a smart
cut or two."

As Adam was getting over a stile at this point in his reflections,
he perceived a man walking along the field before him. He knew it
was Seth, returning from an evening preaching, and made haste to
overtake him.

"I thought thee'dst be at home before me," he said, as Seth turned
round to wait for him, "for I'm later than usual to-night."

"Well, I'm later too, for I got into talk, after meeting, with
John Barnes, who has lately professed himself in a state of
perfection, and I'd a question to ask him about his experience.
It's one o' them subjects that lead you further than y' expect--
they don't lie along the straight road."

They walked along together in silence two or three minutes. Adam
was not inclined to enter into the subtleties of religious
experience, but he was inclined to interchange a word or two of
brotherly affection and confidence with Seth. That was a rare
impulse in him, much as the brothers loved each other. They
hardly ever spoke of personal matters, or uttered more than an
allusion to their family troubles. Adam was by nature reserved in
all matters of feeling, and Seth felt a certain timidity towards
his more practical brother.

"Seth, lad," Adam said, putting his arm on his brother's shoulder,
"hast heard anything from Dinah Morris since she went away?"

"Yes," said Seth. "She told me I might write her word after a
while, how we went on, and how mother bore up under her trouble.
So I wrote to her a fortnight ago, and told her about thee having
a new employment, and how Mother was more contented; and last
Wednesday, when I called at the post at Treddles'on, I found a
letter from her. I think thee'dst perhaps like to read it, but I
didna say anything about it because thee'st seemed so full of
other things. It's quite easy t' read--she writes wonderful for a
woman."

Seth had drawn the letter from his pocket and held it out to Adam,
who said, as he took it, "Aye, lad, I've got a tough load to carry
just now--thee mustna take it ill if I'm a bit silenter and
crustier nor usual. Trouble doesna make me care the less for
thee. I know we shall stick together to the last."

"I take nought ill o' thee, Adam. I know well enough what it
means if thee't a bit short wi' me now and then."

"There's Mother opening the door to look out for us," said Adam,
as they mounted the slope. "She's been sitting i' the dark as
usual. Well, Gyp, well, art glad to see me?"

Lisbeth went in again quickly and lighted a candle, for she had
heard the welcome rustling of footsteps on the grass, before Gyp's
joyful bark.

"Eh, my lads! Th' hours war ne'er so long sin' I war born as
they'n been this blessed Sunday night. What can ye both ha' been
doin' till this time?"

"Thee shouldstna sit i' the dark, Mother," said Adam; "that makes
the time seem longer."

"Eh, what am I to do wi' burnin' candle of a Sunday, when there's
on'y me an' it's sin to do a bit o' knittin'? The daylight's long
enough for me to stare i' the booke as I canna read. It 'ud be a
fine way o' shortenin' the time, to make it waste the good candle.
But which on you's for ha'in' supper? Ye mun ayther be clemmed or
full, I should think, seein' what time o' night it is."

"I'm hungry, Mother," said Seth, seating himself at the little
table, which had been spread ever since it was light.

"I've had my supper," said Adam. "Here, Gyp," he added, taking
some cold potato from the table and rubbing the rough grey head
that looked up towards him.

"Thee needstna be gi'in' th' dog," said Lisbeth; "I'n fed him well
a'ready. I'm not like to forget him, I reckon, when he's all o'
thee I can get sight on."

"Come, then, Gyp," said Adam, "we'll go to bed. Good-night,
Mother; I'm very tired."

"What ails him, dost know?" Lisbeth said to Seth, when Adam was
gone upstairs. "He's like as if he was struck for death this day
or two--he's so cast down. I found him i' the shop this forenoon,
arter thee wast gone, a-sittin' an' doin' nothin'--not so much as
a booke afore him."

"He's a deal o' work upon him just now, Mother," said Seth, "and I
think he's a bit troubled in his mind. Don't you take notice of
it, because it hurts him when you do. Be as kind to him as you
can, Mother, and don't say anything to vex him."

"Eh, what dost talk o' my vexin' him? An' what am I like to be
but kind? I'll ma' him a kettle-cake for breakfast i' the
mornin'."

Adam, meanwhile, was reading Dinah's letter by the light of his
dip candle.

DEAR BROTHER SETH--Your letter lay three days beyond my knowing of
it at the post, for I had not money enough by me to pay the
carriage, this being a time of great need and sickness here, with
the rains that have fallen, as if the windows of heaven were
opened again; and to lay by money, from day to day, in such a
time, when there are so many in present need of all things, would
be a want of trust like the laying up of the manna. I speak of
this, because I would not have you think me slow to answer, or
that I had small joy in your rejoicing at the worldly good that
has befallen your brother Adam. The honour and love you bear him
is nothing but meet, for God has given him great gifts, and he
uses them as the patriarch Joseph did, who, when he was exalted to
a place of power and trust, yet yearned with tenderness towards
his parent and his younger brother.

"My heart is knit to your aged mother since it was granted me to
be near her in the day of trouble. Speak to her of me, and tell
her I often bear her in my thoughts at evening time, when I am
sitting in the dim light as I did with her, and we held one
another's hands, and I spoke the words of comfort that were given
to me. Ah, that is a blessed time, isn't it, Seth, when the
outward light is fading, and the body is a little wearied with its
work and its labour. Then the inward light shines the brighter,
and we have a deeper sense of resting on the Divine strength. I
sit on my chair in the dark room and close my eyes, and it is as
if I was out of the body and could feel no want for evermore. For
then, the very hardship, and the sorrow, and the blindness, and
the sin I have beheld and been ready to weep over--yea, all the
anguish of the children of men, which sometimes wraps me round
like sudden darkness--I can bear with a willing pain, as if I was
sharing the Redeemer's cross. For I feel it, I feel it--infinite
love is suffering too--yea, in the fulness of knowledge it
suffers, it yearns, it mourns; and that is a blind self-seeking
which wants to be freed from the sorrow wherewith the whole
creation groaneth and travaileth. Surely it is not true
blessedness to be free from sorrow, while there is sorrow and sin
in the world: sorrow is then a part of love, and love does not
seek to throw it off. It is not the spirit only that tells me
this--I see it in the whole work and word of the Gospel. Is there
not pleading in heaven? Is not the Man of Sorrows there in that
crucified body wherewith he ascended? And is He not one with the
Infinite Love itself--as our love is one with our sorrow?

"These thoughts have been much borne in on me of late, and I have
seen with new clearness the meaning of those words, 'If any man
love me, let him take up my cross.'  I have heard this enlarged on
as if it meant the troubles and persecutions we bring on ourselves
by confessing Jesus. But surely that is a narrow thought. The
true cross of the Redeemer was the sin and sorrow of this world--
that was what lay heavy on his heart--and that is the cross we
shall share with him, that is the cup we must drink of with him,
if we would have any part in that Divine Love which is one with
his sorrow.

"In my outward lot, which you ask about, I have all things and
abound. I have had constant work in the mill, though some of the
other hands have been turned off for a time, and my body is
greatly strengthened, so that I feel little weariness after long
walking and speaking. What you say about staying in your own
country with your mother and brother shows me that you have a true
guidance; your lot is appointed there by a clear showing, and to
seek a greater blessing elsewhere would be like laying a false
offering on the altar and expecting the fire from heaven to kindle
it. My work and my joy are here among the hills, and I sometimes
think I cling too much to my life among the people here, and
should be rebellious if I was called away.

"I was thankful for your tidings about the dear friends at the
Hall Farm, for though I sent them a letter, by my aunt's desire,
after I came back from my sojourn among them, I have had no word
from them. My aunt has not the pen of a ready writer, and the
work of the house is sufficient for the day, for she is weak in
body. My heart cleaves to her and her children as the nearest of
all to me in the flesh--yea, and to all in that house. I am
carried away to them continually in my sleep, and often in the
midst of work, and even of speech, the thought of them is borne in
on me as if they were in need and trouble, which yet is dark to
me. There may be some leading here; but I wait to be taught. You
say they are all well.

"We shall see each other again in the body, I trust, though, it
may be, not for a long while; for the brethren and sisters at
Leeds are desirous to have me for a short space among them, when I
have a door opened me again to leave Snowfield.

"Farewell, dear brother--and yet not farewell. For those children
of God whom it has been granted to see each other face to face,
and to hold communion together, and to feel the same spirit
working in both can never more be sundered though the hills may
lie between. For their souls are enlarged for evermore by that
union, and they bear one another about in their thoughts
continually as it were a new strength.--Your faithful Sister and
fellow-worker in Christ,

DINAH MORRIS."

"I have not skill to write the words so small as you do and my pen
moves slow. And so I am straitened, and say but little of what is
in my mind. Greet your mother for me with a kiss. She asked me
to kiss her twice when we parted."

Adam had refolded the letter, and was sitting meditatively with
his head resting on his arm at the head of the bed, when Seth came
upstairs.

"Hast read the letter?" said Seth.

"Yes," said Adam. "I don't know what I should ha' thought of her
and her letter if I'd never seen her: I daresay I should ha'
thought a preaching woman hateful. But she's one as makes
everything seem right she says and does, and I seemed to see her
and hear her speaking when I read the letter. It's wonderful how
I remember her looks and her voice. She'd make thee rare and
happy, Seth; she's just the woman for thee."

"It's no use thinking o' that," said Seth, despondingly. "She
spoke so firm, and she's not the woman to say one thing and mean
another."

"Nay, but her feelings may grow different. A woman may get to
love by degrees--the best fire dosna flare up the soonest. I'd
have thee go and see her by and by: I'd make it convenient for
thee to be away three or four days, and it 'ud be no walk for
thee--only between twenty and thirty mile."

"I should like to see her again, whether or no, if she wouldna be
displeased with me for going," said Seth.

"She'll be none displeased," said Adam emphatically, getting up
and throwing off his coat. "It might be a great happiness to us
all if she'd have thee, for mother took to her so wonderful and
seemed so contented to be with her."

"Aye," said Seth, rather timidly, "and Dinah's fond o' Hetty too;
she thinks a deal about her."

Adam made no reply to that, and no other word but "good-night"
passed between them.

Chapter XXXI

In Hetty's Bed-Chamber

IT was no longer light enough to go to bed without a candle, even
in Mrs. Poyser's early household, and Hetty carried one with her
as she went up at last to her bedroom soon after Adam was gone,
and bolted the door behind her.

Now she would read her letter. It must--it must have comfort in
it. How was Adam to know the truth? It was always likely he
should say what he did say.

She set down the candle and took out the letter. It had a faint
scent of roses, which made her feel as if Arthur were close to
her. She put it to her lips, and a rush of remembered sensations
for a moment or two swept away all fear. But her heart began to
flutter strangely, and her hands to tremble as she broke the seal.
She read slowly; it was not easy for her to read a gentleman's
handwriting, though Arthur had taken pains to write plainly.

"DEAREST HETTY--I have spoken truly when I have said that I loved
you, and I shall never forget our love. I shall be your true
friend as long as life lasts, and I hope to prove this to you in
many ways. If I say anything to pain you in this letter, do not
believe it is for want of love and tenderness towards you, for
there is nothing I would not do for you, if I knew it to be really
for your happiness. I cannot bear to think of my little Hetty
shedding tears when I am not there to kiss them away; and if I
followed only my own inclinations, I should be with her at this
moment instead of writing. It is very hard for me to part from
her--harder still for me to write words which may seem unkind,
though they spring from the truest kindness.

"Dear, dear Hetty, sweet as our love has been to me, sweet as it
would be to me for you to love me always, I feel that it would
have been better for us both if we had never had that happiness,
and that it is my duty to ask you to love me and care for me as
little as you can. The fault has all been mine, for though I have
been unable to resist the longing to be near you, I have felt all
the while that your affection for me might cause you grief. I
ought to have resisted my feelings. I should have done so, if I
had been a better fellow than I am; but now, since the past cannot
be altered, I am bound to save you from any evil that I have power
to prevent. And I feel it would be a great evil for you if your
affections continued so fixed on me that you could think of no
other man who might be able to make you happier by his love than I
ever can, and if you continued to look towards something in the
future which cannot possibly happen. For, dear Hetty, if I were
to do what you one day spoke of, and make you my wife, I should do
what you yourself would come to feel was for your misery instead
of your welfare. I know you can never be happy except by marrying
a man in your own station; and if I were to marry you now, I
should only be adding to any wrong I have done, besides offending
against my duty in the other relations of life. You know nothing,
dear Hetty, of the world in which I must always live, and you
would soon begin to dislike me, because there would be so little
in which we should be alike.

"And since I cannot marry you, we must part--we must try not to
feel like lovers any more. I am miserable while I say this, but
nothing else can be. Be angry with me, my sweet one, I deserve
it; but do not believe that I shall not always care for you--
always be grateful to you--always remember my Hetty; and if any
trouble should come that we do not now foresee, trust in me to do
everything that lies in my power.

"I have told you where you are to direct a letter to, if you want
to write, but I put it down below lest you should have forgotten.
Do not write unless there is something I can really do for you;
for, dear Hetty, we must try to think of each other as little as
we can. Forgive me, and try to forget everything about me, except
that I shall be, as long as I live, your affectionate friend,

ARTHUR DONNITHORNE.

Slowly Hetty had read this letter; and when she looked up from it
there was the reflection of a blanched face in the old dim glass--
a white marble face with rounded childish forms, but with
something sadder than a child's pain in it. Hetty did not see the
face--she saw nothing--she only felt that she was cold and sick
and trembling. The letter shook and rustled in her hand. She
laid it down. It was a horrible sensation--this cold and
trembling. It swept away the very ideas that produced it, and
Hetty got up to reach a warm cloak from her clothes-press, wrapped
it round her, and sat as if she were thinking of nothing but
getting warm. Presently she took up the letter with a firmer
hand, and began to read it through again. The tears came this
time--great rushing tears that blinded her and blotched the paper.
She felt nothing but that Arthur was cruel--cruel to write so,
cruel not to marry her. Reasons why he could not marry her had no
existence for her mind; how could she believe in any misery that
could come to her from the fulfilment of all she had been longing
for and dreaming of? She had not the ideas that could make up the
notion of that misery.

As she threw down the letter again, she caught sight of her face
in the glass; it was reddened now, and wet with tears; it was
almost like a companion that she might complain to--that would
pity her. She leaned forward on her elbows, and looked into those
dark overflooding eyes and at the quivering mouth, and saw how the
tears came thicker and thicker, and how the mouth became convulsed
with sobs.

The shattering of all her little dream-world, the crushing blow on
her new-born passion, afflicted her pleasure-craving nature with
an overpowering pain that annihilated all impulse to resistance,
and suspended her anger. She sat sobbing till the candle went
out, and then, wearied, aching, stupefied with crying, threw
herself on the bed without undressing and went to sleep.

There was a feeble dawn in the room when Hetty awoke, a little
after four o'clock, with a sense of dull misery, the cause of
which broke upon her gradually as she began to discern the objects
round her in the dim light. And then came the frightening thought
that she had to conceal her misery as well as to bear it, in this
dreary daylight that was coming. She could lie no longer. She
got up and went towards the table: there lay the letter. She
opened her treasure-drawer: there lay the ear-rings and the
locket--the signs of all her short happiness--the signs of the
lifelong dreariness that was to follow it. Looking at the little
trinkets which she had once eyed and fingered so fondly as the
earnest of her future paradise of finery, she lived back in the
moments when they had been given to her with such tender caresses,
such strangely pretty words, such glowing looks, which filled her
with a bewildering delicious surprise--they were so much sweeter
than she had thought anything could be. And the Arthur who had
spoken to her and looked at her in this way, who was present with
her now--whose arm she felt round her, his cheek against hers, his
very breath upon her--was the cruel, cruel Arthur who had written
that letter, that letter which she snatched and crushed and then
opened again, that she might read it once more. The half-benumbed
mental condition which was the effect of the last night's violent
crying made it necessary to her to look again and see if her
wretched thoughts were actually true--if the letter was really so
cruel. She had to hold it close to the window, else she could not
have read it by the faint light. Yes! It was worse--it was more
cruel. She crushed it up again in anger. She hated the writer of
that letter--hated him for the very reason that she hung upon him
with all her love--all the girlish passion and vanity that made up
her love.

She had no tears this morning. She had wept them all away last
night, and now she felt that dry-eyed morning misery, which is
worse than the first shock because it has the future in it as well
as the present. Every morning to come, as far as her imagination
could stretch, she would have to get up and feel that the day
would have no joy for her. For there is no despair so absolute as
that which comes with the first moments of our first great sorrow,
when we have not yet known what it is to have suffered and be
healed, to have despaired and to have recovered hope. As Hetty
began languidly to take off the clothes she had worn all the
night, that she might wash herself and brush her hair, she had a
sickening sense that her life would go on in this way. She should
always be doing things she had no pleasure in, getting up to the
old tasks of work, seeing people she cared nothing about, going to
church, and to Treddleston, and to tea with Mrs. Best, and
carrying no happy thought with her. For her short poisonous
delights had spoiled for ever all the little joys that had once
made the sweetness of her life--the new frock ready for
Treddleston Fair, the party at Mr. Britton's at Broxton wake, the
beaux that she would say "No" to for a long while, and the
prospect of the wedding that was to come at last when she would
have a silk gown and a great many clothes all at once. These
things were all flat and dreary to her now; everything would be a
weariness, and she would carry about for ever a hopeless thirst
and longing.

She paused in the midst of her languid undressing and leaned
against the dark old clothes-press. Her neck and arms were bare,
her hair hung down in delicate rings--and they were just as
beautiful as they were that night two months ago, when she walked
up and down this bed-chamber glowing with vanity and hope. She
was not thinking of her neck and arms now; even her own beauty was
indifferent to her. Her eyes wandered sadly over the dull old
chamber, and then looked out vacantly towards the growing dawn.
Did a remembrance of Dinah come across her mind? Of her
foreboding words, which had made her angry? Of Dinah's
affectionate entreaty to think of her as a friend in trouble? No,
the impression had been too slight to recur. Any affection or
comfort Dinah could have given her would have been as indifferent
to Hetty this morning as everything else was except her bruised
passion. She was only thinking she could never stay here and go
on with the old life--she could better bear something quite new
than sinking back into the old everyday round. She would like to
run away that very morning, and never see any of the old faces
again. But Hetty's was not a nature to face difficulties--to dare
to loose her hold on the familiar and rush blindly on some unknown
condition. Hers was a luxurious and vain nature--not a passionate
one--and if she were ever to take any violent measure, she must be
urged to it by the desperation of terror. There was not much room
for her thoughts to travel in the narrow circle of her
imagination, and she soon fixed on the one thing she would do to
get away from her old life: she would ask her uncle to let her go
to be a lady's maid. Miss Lydia's maid would help her to get a
situation, if she krew Hetty had her uncle's leave.

When she had thought of this, she fastened up her hair and began
to wash: it seemed more possible to her to go downstairs and try
to behave as usual. She would ask her uncle this very day. On
Hetty's blooming health it would take a great deal of such mental
suffering as hers to leave any deep impress; and when she was
dressed as neatly as usual in her working-dress, with her hair
tucked up under her little cap, an indifferent observer would have
been more struck with the young roundness of her cheek and neck
and the darkness of her eyes and eyelashes than with any signs of
sadness about her. But when she took up the crushed letter and
put it in her drawer, that she might lock it out of sight, hard
smarting tears, having no relief in them as the great drops had
that fell last night, forced their way into her eyes. She wiped
them away quickly: she must not cry in the day-time. Nobody
should find out how miserable she was, nobody should know she was
disappointed about anything; and the thought that the eyes of her
aunt and uncle would be upon her gave her the self-command which
often accompanies a great dread. For Hetty looked out from her
secret misery towards the possibility of their ever knowing what
had happened, as the sick and weary prisoner might think of the
possible pillory. They would think her conduct shameful, and
shame was torture. That was poor little Hetty's conscience.

So she locked up her drawer and went away to her early work.

In the evening, when Mr. Poyser was smoking his pipe, and his
good-nature was therefore at its superlative moment, Hetty seized
the opportunity of her aunt's absence to say, "Uncle, I wish you'd
let me go for a lady's maid."

Mr. Poyser took the pipe from his mouth and looked at Hetty in
mild surprise for some moments. She was sewing, and went on with
her work industriously.

"Why, what's put that into your head, my wench?" he said at last,
after he had given one conservative puff.

"I should like it--I should like it better than farm-work."

"Nay, nay; you fancy so because you donna know it, my wench. It
wouldn't be half so good for your health, nor for your luck i'
life. I'd like you to stay wi' us till you've got a good husband:
you're my own niece, and I wouldn't have you go to service, though
it was a gentleman's house, as long as I've got a home for you."

Mr. Poyser paused, and puffed away at his pipe.

"I like the needlework," said Hetty, "and I should get good
wages."

"Has your aunt been a bit sharp wi' you?" said Mr. Poyser, not
noticing Hetty's further argument. "You mustna mind that, my
wench--she does it for your good. She wishes you well; an' there
isn't many aunts as are no kin to you 'ud ha' done by you as she
has."

"No, it isn't my aunt," said Hetty, "but I should like the work
better."

"It was all very well for you to learn the work a bit--an' I gev
my consent to that fast enough, sin' Mrs. Pomfret was willing to
teach you. For if anything was t' happen, it's well to know how
to turn your hand to different sorts o' things. But I niver meant
you to go to service, my wench; my family's ate their own bread
and cheese as fur back as anybody knows, hanna they, Father? You
wouldna like your grand-child to take wage?"

"Na-a-y," said old Martin, with an elongation of the word, meant
to make it bitter as well as negative, while he leaned forward and
looked down on the floor. "But the wench takes arter her mother.
I'd hard work t' hould HER in, an' she married i' spite o' me--a
feller wi' on'y two head o' stock when there should ha' been ten
on's farm--she might well die o' th' inflammation afore she war
thirty."

It was seldom the old man made so long a speech, but his son's
question had fallen like a bit of dry fuel on the embers of a long
unextinguished resentment, which had always made the grandfather
more indifferent to Hetty than to his son's children. Her
mother's fortune had been spent by that good-for-nought Sorrel,
and Hetty had Sorrel's blood in her veins.

"Poor thing, poor thing!" said Martin the younger, who was sorry
to have provoked this retrospective harshness. "She'd but bad
luck. But Hetty's got as good a chance o' getting a solid, sober
husband as any gell i' this country."

After throwing out this pregnant hint, Mr. Poyser recurred to his
pipe and his silence, looking at Hetty to see if she did not give
some sign of having renounced her ill-advised wish. But instead
of that, Hetty, in spite of herself, began to cry, half out of ill
temper at the denial, half out of the day's repressed sadness.

"Hegh, hegh!" said Mr. Poyser, meaning to check her playfully,
"don't let's have any crying. Crying's for them as ha' got no
home, not for them as want to get rid o' one. What dost think?"
he continued to his wife, who now came back into the house-place,
knitting with fierce rapidity, as if that movement were a
necessary function, like the twittering of a crab's antennae.

"Think? Why, I think we shall have the fowl stole before we are
much older, wi' that gell forgetting to lock the pens up o'
nights. What's the matter now, Hetty? What are you crying at?"

"Why, she's been wanting to go for a lady's maid," said Mr.
Poyser. "I tell her we can do better for her nor that."

"I thought she'd got some maggot in her head, she's gone about wi'
her mouth buttoned up so all day. It's all wi' going so among
them servants at the Chase, as we war fools for letting her. She
thinks it 'ud be a finer life than being wi' them as are akin to
her and ha' brought her up sin' she war no bigger nor Marty. She
thinks there's nothing belongs to being a lady's maid but wearing
finer clothes nor she was born to, I'll be bound. It's what rag
she can get to stick on her as she's thinking on from morning till
night, as I often ask her if she wouldn't like to be the mawkin i'
the field, for then she'd be made o' rags inside and out. I'll
never gi' my consent to her going for a lady's maid, while she's
got good friends to take care on her till she's married to
somebody better nor one o' them valets, as is neither a common man
nor a gentleman, an' must live on the fat o' the land, an's like
enough to stick his hands under his coat-tails and expect his wife
to work for him."

"Aye, aye," said Mr. Poyser, "we must have a better husband for
her nor that, and there's better at hand. Come, my wench, give
over crying and get to bed. I'll do better for you nor letting
you go for a lady's maid. Let's hear no more on't."

When Hetty was gone upstairs he said, "I canna make it out as she
should want to go away, for I thought she'd got a mind t' Adam
Bede. She's looked like it o' late."

"Eh, there's no knowing what she's got a liking to, for things
take no more hold on her than if she was a dried pea. I believe
that gell, Molly--as is aggravatin' enough, for the matter o'
that--but I believe she'd care more about leaving us and the
children, for all she's been here but a year come Michaelmas, nor
Hetty would. But she's got this notion o' being a lady's maid wi'
going among them servants--we might ha' known what it 'ud lead to
when we let her go to learn the fine work. But I'll put a stop to
it pretty quick."

"Thee'dst be sorry to part wi' her, if it wasn't for her good,"
said Mr. Poyser. "She's useful to thee i' the work."

"Sorry? Yes, I'm fonder on her nor she deserves--a little hard-
hearted hussy, wanting to leave us i' that way. I can't ha' had
her about me these seven year, I reckon, and done for her, and
taught her everything wi'out caring about her. An' here I'm
having linen spun, an' thinking all the while it'll make sheeting
and table-clothing for her when she's married, an' she'll live i'
the parish wi' us, and never go out of our sights--like a fool as
I am for thinking aught about her, as is no better nor a cherry
wi' a hard stone inside it."

"Nay, nay, thee mustna make much of a trifle," said Mr. Poyser,
soothingly. "She's fond on us, I'll be bound; but she's young,
an' gets things in her head as she can't rightly give account on.
Them young fillies 'ull run away often wi'-ou; knowing why."

Her uncle's answers, however, had had another effect on Hetty
besides that of disappointing her and making her cry. She knew
quite well whom he had in his mind in his allusions to marriage,
and to a sober, solid husband; and when she was in her bedroom
again, the possibility of her marrying Adam presented itself to
her in a new light. In a mind where no strong sympathies are at
work, where there is no supreme sense of right to which the
agitated nature can cling and steady itself to quiet endurance,
one of the first results of sorrow is a desperate vague clutching
after any deed that will change the actual condition. Poor
Hetty's vision of consequences, at no time more than a narrow
fantastic calculation of her own probable pleasures and pains, was
now quite shut out by reckless irritation under present suffering,
and she was ready for one of those convulsive, motiveless actions
by which wretched men and women leap from a temporary sorrow into
a lifelong misery.

Why should she not marry Adam? She did not care what she did, so
that it made some change in her life. She felt confident that he
would still want to marry her, and any further thought about
Adam's happiness in the matter had never yet visited her.

"Strange!" perhaps you will say, "this rush of impulse to-wards a
course that might have seemed the most repugnant to her present
state of mind, and in only the second night of her sadness!"

Yes, the actions of a little trivial soul like Hetty's, struggling
amidst the serious sad destinies of a human being, are strange.
So are the motions of a little vessel without ballast tossed about
on a stormy sea. How pretty it looked with its parti-coloured
sail in the sunlight, moored in the quiet bay!

"Let that man bear the loss who loosed it from its moorings."

But that will not save the vessel--the pretty thing that might
have been a lasting joy.

Chapter XXXII

Mrs. Poyser "Has Her Say Out"

THE next Saturday evening there was much excited discussion at the
Donnithorne Arms concerning an incident which had occurred that
very day--no less than a second appearance of the smart man in
top-boots said by some to be a mere farmer in treaty for the Chase
Farm, by others to be the future steward, but by Mr. Casson
himself, the personal witness to the stranger's visit, pronounced
contemptuously to be nothing better than a bailiff, such as
Satchell had been before him. No one had thought of denying Mr.
Casson's testimony to the fact that he had seen the stranger;
nevertheless, he proffered various corroborating circumstances.

"I see him myself," he said; "I see him coming along by the Crab-
tree Meadow on a bald-faced hoss. I'd just been t' hev a pint--it
was half after ten i' the fore-noon, when I hev my pint as reg'lar
as the clock--and I says to Knowles, as druv up with his waggon,
'You'll get a bit o' barley to-day, Knowles,' I says, 'if you look
about you'; and then I went round by the rick-yard, and towart the
Treddles'on road, and just as I come up by the big ash-tree, I see
the man i' top-boots coming along on a bald-faced hoss--I wish I
may never stir if I didn't. And I stood still till he come up,
and I says, 'Good morning, sir,' I says, for I wanted to hear the
turn of his tongue, as I might know whether he was a this-country
man; so I says, 'Good morning, sir: it 'll 'old hup for the barley
this morning, I think. There'll be a bit got hin, if we've good
luck.' And he says, 'Eh, ye may be raight, there's noo tallin','
he says, and I knowed by that"--here Mr. Casson gave a wink--"as
he didn't come from a hundred mile off. I daresay he'd think me a
hodd talker, as you Loamshire folks allays does hany one as talks
the right language."

"The right language!" said Bartle Massey, contemptuously. "You're
about as near the right language as a pig's squeaking is like a
tune played on a key-bugle."

"Well, I don't know," answered Mr. Casson, with an angry smile.
"I should think a man as has lived among the gentry from a by, is
likely to know what's the right language pretty nigh as well as a
schoolmaster."

"Aye, aye, man," said Bartle, with a tone of sarcastic
consolation, "you talk the right language for you. When Mike
Holdsworth's goat says ba-a-a, it's all right--it 'ud be unnatural
for it to make any other noise."

The rest of the party being Loamsnire men, Mr. Casson had the
laugh strongly against him, and wisely fell back on the previous
question, which, far from being exhausted in a single evening, was
renewed in the churchyard, before service, the next day, with the
fresh interest conferred on all news when there is a fresh person
to hear it; and that fresh hearer was Martin Poyser, who, as his
wife said, "never went boozin' with that set at Casson's, a-
sittin' soakin' in drink, and looking as wise as a lot o' cod-fish
wi' red faces."

It was probably owing to the conversation she had had with her
husband on their way from church concerning this problematic
stranger that Mrs. Poyser's thoughts immediately reverted to him
when, a day or two afterwards, as she was standing at the house-
door with her knitting, in that eager leisure which came to her
when the afternoon cleaning was done, she saw the old squire enter
the yard on his black pony, followed by John the groom. She
always cited it afterwards as a case of prevision, which really
had something more in it than her own remarkable penetration, that
the moment she set eyes on the squire she said to herself, "I
shouldna wonder if he's come about that man as is a-going to take
the Chase Farm, wanting Poyser to do something for him without
pay. But Poyser's a fool if he does."

Something unwonted must clearly be in the wind, for the old
squire's visits to his tenantry were rare; and though Mrs. Poyser
had during the last twelvemonth recited many imaginary speeches,
meaning even more than met the ear, which she was quite determined
to make to him the next time he appeared within the gates of the
Hall Farm, the speeches had always remained imaginary.

"Good-day, Mrs. Poyser," said the old squire, peering at her with
his short-sighted eyes--a mode of looking at her which, as Mrs.
Poyser observed, "allays aggravated me: it was as if you was a
insect, and he was going to dab his finger-nail on you."

However, she said, "Your servant, sir," and curtsied with an air
of perfect deference as she advanced towards him: she was not the
woman to misbehave towards her betters, and fly in the face of the
catechism, without severe provocation.

"Is your husband at home, Mrs. Poyser?"

"Yes, sir; he's only i' the rick-yard. I'll send for him in a
minute, if you'll please to get down and step in."

"Thank you; I will do so. I want to consult him about a little
matter; but you are quite as much concerned in it, if not more. I
must have your opinion too."

"Hetty, run and tell your uncle to come in," said Mrs. Poyser, as
they entered the house, and the old gentleman bowed low in answer
to Hetty's curtsy; while Totty, conscious of a pinafore stained
with gooseberry jam, stood hiding her face against the clock and
peeping round furtively.

"What a fine old kitchen this is!" said Mr. Donnithorne, looking
round admiringly. He always spoke in the same deliberate, well-
chiselled, polite way, whether his words were sugary or venomous.
"And you keep it so exquisitely clean, Mrs. Poyser. I like these
premises, do you know, beyond any on the estate."

"Well, sir, since you're fond of 'em, I should be glad if you'd
let a bit o' repairs be done to 'em, for the boarding's i' that
state as we're like to be eaten up wi' rats and mice; and the
cellar, you may stan' up to your knees i' water in't, if you like
to go down; but perhaps you'd rather believe my words. Won't you
please to sit down, sir?"

"Not yet; I must see your dairy. I have not seen it for years,
and I hear on all hands about your fine cheese and butter," said
the squire, looking politely unconscious that there could be any
question on which he and Mrs. Poyser might happen to disagree. "I
think I see the door open, there. You must not be surprised if I
cast a covetous eye on your cream and butter. I don't expect that
Mrs. Satchell's cream and butter will bear comparison with yours."

"I can't say, sir, I'm sure. It's seldom I see other folks's
butter, though there's some on it as one's no need to see--the
smell's enough."

"Ah, now this I like," said Mr. Donnithorne, looking round at the
damp temple of cleanliness, but keeping near the door. "I'm sure
I should like my breakfast better if I knew the butter and cream
came from this dairy. Thank you, that really is a pleasant sight.
Unfortunately, my slight tendency to rheumatism makes me afraid of
damp: I'll sit down in your comfortable kitchen. Ah, Poyser, how
do you do? In the midst of business, I see, as usual. I've been
looking at your wife's beautiful dairy--the best manager in the
parish, is she not?"

Mr. Poyser had just entered in shirt-sleeves and open waistcoat,
with a face a shade redder than usual, from the exertion of
"pitching."  As he stood, red, rotund, and radiant, before the
small, wiry, cool old gentleman, he looked like a prize apple by
the side of a withered crab.

"Will you please to take this chair, sir?" he said, lifting his
father's arm-chair forward a little: "you'll find it easy."

"No, thank you, I never sit in easy-chairs," said the old
gentleman, seating himself on a small chair near the door. "Do
you know, Mrs. Poyser--sit down, pray, both of you--I've been far
from contented, for some time, with Mrs. Satchell's dairy
management. I think she has not a good method, as you have."

"Indeed, sir, I can't speak to that," said Mrs. Poyser in a hard
voice, rolling and unrolling her knitting and looking icily out of
the window, as she continued to stand opposite the squire. Poyser
might sit down if he liked, she thought; she wasn't going to sit
down, as if she'd give in to any such smooth-tongued palaver. Mr.
Poyser, who looked and felt the reverse of icy, did sit down in
his three-cornered chair.

"And now, Poyser, as Satchell is laid up, I am intending to let
the Chase Farm to a respectable tenant. I'm tired of having a
farm on my own hands--nothing is made the best of in such cases,
as you know. A satisfactory bailiff is hard to find; and I think
you and I, Poyser, and your excellent wife here, can enter into a
little arrangement in consequence, which will be to our mutual
advantage."

"Oh," said Mr. Poyser, with a good-natured blankness of
imagination as to the nature of the arrangement.

"If I'm called upon to speak, sir," said Mrs. Poyser, after
glancing at her husband with pity at his softness, "you know
better than me; but I don't see what the Chase Farm is t' us--
we've cumber enough wi' our own farm. Not but what I'm glad to
hear o' anybody respectable coming into the parish; there's some
as ha' been brought in as hasn't been looked on i' that
character."

"You're likely to find Mr. Thurle an excellent neighbour, I assure
you--such a one as you will feel glad to have accommodated by the
little plan I'm going to mention, especially as I hope you will
find it as much to your own advantage as his."

"Indeed, sir, if it's anything t' our advantage, it'll be the
first offer o' the sort I've heared on. It's them as take
advantage that get advantage i' this world, I think. Folks have
to wait long enough afore it's brought to 'em."

"The fact is, Poyser," said the squire, ignoring Mrs. Poyser's
theory of worldly prosperity, "there is too much dairy land, and
too little plough land, on the Chase Farm to suit Thurle's
purpose--indeed, he will only take the farm on condition of some
change in it: his wife, it appears, is not a clever dairy-woman,
like yours. Now, the plan I'm thinking of is to effect a little
exchange. If you were to have the Hollow Pastures, you might
increase your dairy, which must be so profitable under your wife's
management; and I should request you, Mrs. Poyser, to supply my
house with milk, cream, and butter at the market prices. On the
other hand, Poyser, you might let Thurle have the Lower and Upper
Ridges, which really, with our wet seasons, would be a good
riddance for you. There is much less risk in dairy land than corn
land."

Mr. Poyser was leaning forward, with his elbows on his knees, his
head on one side, and his mouth screwed up--apparently absorbed in
making the tips of his fingers meet so as to represent with
perfect accuracy the ribs of a ship. He was much too acute a man
not to see through the whole business, and to foresee perfectly
what would be his wife's view of the subject; but he disliked
giving unpleasant answers. Unless it was on a point of farming
practice, he would rather give up than have a quarrel, any day;
and, after all, it mattered more to his wife than to him. So,
after a few moments' silence, he looked up at her and said mildly,
"What dost say?"

Mrs. Poyser had had her eyes fixed on her husband with cold
severity during his silence, but now she turned away her head with
a toss, looked icily at the opposite roof of the cow-shed, and
spearing her knitting together with the loose pin, held it firmly
between her clasped hands.

"Say? Why, I say you may do as you like about giving up any o'
your corn-land afore your lease is up, which it won't be for a
year come next Michaelmas, but I'll not consent to take more dairy
work into my hands, either for love or money; and there's nayther
love nor money here, as I can see, on'y other folks's love o'
theirselves, and the money as is to go into other folks's pockets.
I know there's them as is born t' own the land, and them as is
born to sweat on't"--here Mrs. Poyser paused to gasp a little--
"and I know it's christened folks's duty to submit to their
betters as fur as flesh and blood 'ull bear it; but I'll not make
a martyr o' myself, and wear myself to skin and bone, and worret
myself as if I was a churn wi' butter a-coming in't, for no
landlord in England, not if he was King George himself."

"No, no, my dear Mrs. Poyser, certainly not," said the squire,
still confident in his own powers of persuasion, "you must not
overwork yourself; but don't you think your work will rather be
lessened than increased in this way? There is so much milk
required at the Abbey that you will have little increase of cheese
and butter making from the addition to your dairy; and I believe
selling the milk is the most profitable way of disposing of dairy
produce, is it not?"

"Aye, that's true," said Mr. Poyser, unable to repress an opinion
on a question of farming profits, and forgetting that it was not
in this case a purely abstract question.

"I daresay," said Mrs. Poyser bitterly, turning her head half-way
towards her husband and looking at the vacant arm-chair--"I
daresay it's true for men as sit i' th' chimney-corner and make
believe as everything's cut wi' ins an' outs to fit int'
everything else. If you could make a pudding wi' thinking o' the
batter, it 'ud be easy getting dinner. How do I know whether the
milk 'ull be wanted constant? What's to make me sure as the house
won't be put o' board wage afore we're many months older, and then
I may have to lie awake o' nights wi' twenty gallons o' milk on my
mind--and Dingall 'ull take no more butter, let alone paying for
it; and we must fat pigs till we're obliged to beg the butcher on
our knees to buy 'em, and lose half of 'em wi' the measles. And
there's the fetching and carrying, as 'ud be welly half a day's
work for a man an' hoss--that's to be took out o' the profits, I
reckon? But there's folks 'ud hold a sieve under the pump and
expect to carry away the water."

"That difficulty--about the fetching and carrying--you will not
have, Mrs. Poyser," said the squire, who thought that this
entrance into particulars indicated a distant inclination to
compromise on Mrs. Poyser's part. "Bethell will do that regularly
with the cart and pony."

"Oh, sir, begging your pardon, I've never been used t' having
gentlefolks's servants coming about my back places, a-making love
to both the gells at once and keeping 'em with their hands on
their hips listening to all manner o' gossip when they should be
down on their knees a-scouring. If we're to go to ruin, it shanna
be wi' having our back kitchen turned into a public."

"Well, Poyser," said the squire, shifting his tactics and looking
as if he thought Mrs. Poyser had suddenly withdrawn from the
proceedings and left the room, "you can turn the Hollows into
feeding-land. I can easily make another arrangement about
supplying my house. And I shall not forget your readiness to
accommodate your landlord as well as a neighbour. I know you will
be glad to have your lease renewed for three years, when the
present one expires; otherwise, I daresay Thurle, who is a man of
some capital, would be glad to take both the farms, as they could
be worked so well together. But I don't want to part with an old
tenant like you."

To be thrust out of the discussion in this way would have been
enough to complete Mrs. Poyser's exasperation, even without the
final threat. Her husband, really alarmed at the possibility of
their leaving the old place where he had been bred and born--for
he believed the old squire had small spite enough for anything--
was beginning a mild remonstrance explanatory of the inconvenience
he should find in having to buy and sell more stock, with, "Well,
sir, I think as it's rether hard..." when Mrs. Poyser burst in
with the desperate determination to have her say out this once,
though it were to rain notices to quit and the only shelter were
the work-house.

"Then, sir, if I may speak--as, for all I'm a woman, and there's
folks as thinks a woman's fool enough to stan' by an' look on
while the men sign her soul away, I've a right to speak, for I
make one quarter o' the rent, and save another quarter--I say, if
Mr. Thurle's so ready to take farms under you, it's a pity but
what he should take this, and see if he likes to live in a house
wi' all the plagues o' Egypt in't--wi' the cellar full o' water,
and frogs and toads hoppin' up the steps by dozens--and the floors
rotten, and the rats and mice gnawing every bit o' cheese, and
runnin' over our heads as we lie i' bed till we expect 'em to eat
us up alive--as it's a mercy they hanna eat the children long ago.
I should like to see if there's another tenant besides Poyser as
'ud put up wi' never having a bit o' repairs done till a place
tumbles down--and not then, on'y wi' begging and praying and
having to pay half--and being strung up wi' the rent as it's much
if he gets enough out o' the land to pay, for all he's put his own
money into the ground beforehand. See if you'll get a stranger to
lead such a life here as that: a maggot must be born i' the rotten
cheese to like it, I reckon. You may run away from my words,
sir," continued Mrs. Poyser, following the old squire beyond the
door--for after the first moments of stunned surprise he had got
up, and, waving his hand towards her with a smile, had walked out
towards his pony. But it was impossible for him to get away
immediately, for John was walking the pony up and down the yard,
and was some distance from the causeway when his master beckoned.

"You may run away from my words, sir, and you may go spinnin'
underhand ways o' doing us a mischief, for you've got Old Harry to
your friend, though nobody else is, but I tell you for once as
we're not dumb creatures to be abused and made money on by them as
ha' got the lash i' their hands, for want o' knowing how t' undo
the tackle. An' if I'm th' only one as speaks my mind, there's
plenty o' the same way o' thinking i' this parish and the next to
't, for your name's no better than a brimstone match in
everybody's nose--if it isna two-three old folks as you think o'
saving your soul by giving 'em a bit o' flannel and a drop o'
porridge. An' you may be right i' thinking it'll take but little
to save your soul, for it'll be the smallest savin' y' iver made,
wi' all your scrapin'."

There are occasions on which two servant-girls and a waggoner may
be a formidable audience, and as the squire rode away on his black
pony, even the gift of short-sightedness did not prevent him from
being aware that Molly and Nancy and Tim were grinning not far
from him. Perhaps he suspected that sour old John was grinning
behind him--which was also the fact. Meanwhile the bull-dog, the
black-and-tan terrier, Alick's sheep-dog, and the gander hissing
at a safe distance from the pony's heels carried out the idea of
Mrs. Poyser's solo in an irnpressive quartet.

Mrs. Poyser, however, had no sooner seen the pony move off than
she turned round, gave the two hilarious damsels a look which
drove them into the back kitchen, and unspearing her knitting,
began to knit again with her usual rapidity as she re-entered the
house.

"Thee'st done it now," said Mr. Poyser, a little alarmed and
uneasy, but not without some triumphant amusement at his wife's
outbreak.

"Yes, I know I've done it," said Mrs. Poyser; "but I've had my say
out, and I shall be th' easier for't all my life. There's no
pleasure i' living if you're to be corked up for ever, and only
dribble your mind out by the sly, like a leaky barrel. I shan't
repent saying what I think, if I live to be as old as th' old
squire; and there's little likelihood--for it seems as if them as
aren't wanted here are th' only folks as aren't wanted i' th'
other world."

"But thee wutna like moving from th' old place, this Michaelmas
twelvemonth," said Mr. Poyser, "and going into a strange parish,
where thee know'st nobody. It'll be hard upon us both, and upo'
Father too."

"Eh, it's no use worreting; there's plenty o' things may happen
between this and Michaelmas twelvemonth. The captain may be
master afore them, for what we know," said Mrs. Poyser, inclined
to take an unusually hopeful view of an embarrassment which had
been brought about by her own merit and not by other people's
fault.

"I'M none for worreting," said Mr. Poyser, rising from his three-
cornered chair and walking slowly towards the door; "but I should
be loath to leave th' old place, and the parish where I was bred
and born, and Father afore me. We should leave our roots behind
us, I doubt, and niver thrive again."

Chapter XXXIII

More Links

THE barley was all carried at last, and the harvest suppers went
by without waiting for the dismal black crop of beans. The apples
and nuts were gathered and stored; the scent of whey departed from
the farm-houses, and the scent of brewing came in its stead. The
woods behind the Chase, and all the hedgerow trees, took on a
solemn splendour under the dark low-hanging skies. Michaelmas was
come, with its fragrant basketfuls of purple damsons, and its
paler purple daisies, and its lads and lasses leaving or seeking
service and winding along between the yellow hedges, with their
bundles under their arms. But though Michaelmas was come, Mr.
Thurle, that desirable tenant, did not come to the Chase Farm, and
the old squire, afler all, had been obliged to put in a new
bailiff. It was known throughout the two parishes that the
squire's plan had been frustrated because the Poysers had refused
to be "put upon," and Mrs. Poyser's outbreak was discussed in all
the farm-houses with a zest which was only heightened by frequent
repetition. The news that "Bony" was come back from Egypt was
comparatively insipid, and the repulse of the French in Italy was
nothing to Mrs. Poyser's repulse of the old squire. Mr. Irwine
had heard a version of it in every parishioner's house, with the
one exception of the Chase. But since he had always, with
marvellous skill, avoided any quarrel with Mr. Donnithorne, he
could not allow himself the pleasure of laughing at the old
gentleman's discomfiture with any one besides his mother, who
declared that if she were rich she should like to allow Mrs.
Poyser a pension for life, and wanted to invite her to the
parsonage that she might hear an account of the scene from Mrs.
Poyser's own lips.

"No, no, Mother," said Mr. Irwine; "it was a little bit of
irregular justice on Mrs. Poyser's part, but a magistrate like me
must not countenance irregular justice. There must be no report
spread that I have taken notice of the quarrel, else I shall lose
the little good influence I have over the old man."

"Well, I like that woman even better than her cream-cheeses," said
Mrs. Irwine. "She has the spirit of three men, with that pale
face of hers. And she says such sharp things too."

"Sharp! Yes, her tongue is like a new-set razor. She's quite
original in her talk too; one of those untaught wits that help to
stock a country with proverbs. I told you that capital thing I
heard her say about Craig--that he was like a cock, who thought
the sun had risen to hear him crow. Now that's an AEsop's fable
in a sentence."

"But it will be a bad business if the old gentleman turns them out
of the farm next Michaelmas, eh?" said Mrs. Irwine.

"Oh, that must not be; and Poyser is such a good tenant that
Donnithorne is likely to think twice, and digest his spleen rather
than turn them out. But if he should give them notice at Lady
Day, Arthur and I must move heaven and earth to mollify him. Such
old parishioners as they are must not go."

"Ah, there's no knowing what may happen before Lady day," said
Mrs. Irwine. "It struck me on Arthur's birthday that the old man
was a little shaken: he's eighty-three, you know. It's really an
unconscionable age. It's only women who have a right to live as
long as that."

"When they've got old-bachelor sons who would be forlorn without
them," said Mr. Irwine, laughing, and kissing his mother's hand.

Mrs. Poyser, too, met her husband's occasional forebodings of a
notice to quit with "There's no knowing what may happen before
Lady day"--one of those undeniable general propositions which are
usually intended to convey a particular meaning very far from
undeniable. But it is really too hard upon human nature that it
should be held a criminal offence to imagine the death even of the
king when he is turned eighty-three. It is not to be believed
that any but the dullest Britons can be good subjects under that
hard condition.

Apart from this foreboding, things went on much as usual in the
Poyser household. Mrs. Poyser thought she noticed a surprising
improvement in Hetty. To be sure, the girl got "closer tempered,
and sometimes she seemed as if there'd be no drawing a word from
her with cart-ropes," but she thought much less about her dress,
and went after the work quite eagerly, without any telling. And
it was wonderful how she never wanted to go out now--indeed, could
hardly be persuaded to go; and she bore her aunt's putting a stop
to her weekly lesson in fine-work at the Chase without the least
grumbling or pouting. It must be, after all, that she had set her
heart on Adam at last, and her sudden freak of wanting to be a
lady's maid must have been caused by some little pique or
misunderstanding between them, which had passed by. For whenever
Adam came to the Hall Farm, Hetty seemed to be in better spirits
and to talk more than at other times, though she was almost sullen
when Mr. Craig or any other admirer happened to pay a visit there.

Adam himself watched her at first with trembling anxiety, which
gave way to surprise and delicious hope. Five days after
delivering Arthur's letter, he had ventured to go to the Hall Farm
again--not without dread lest the sight of him might be painful to
her. She was not in the house-place when he entered, and he sat
talking to Mr. and Mrs. Poyser for a few minutes with a heavy fear
on his heart that they might presently tell him Hetty was ill.
But by and by there came a light step that he knew, and when Mrs.
Poyser said, "Come, Hetty, where have you been?" Adam was obliged
to turn round, though he was afraid to see the changed look there
must be in her face. He almost started when he saw her smiling as
if she were pleased to see him--looking the same as ever at a
first glance, only that she had her cap on, which he had never
seen her in before when he came of an evening. Still, when he
looked at her again and again as she moved about or sat at her
work, there was a change: the cheeks were as pink as ever, and she
smiled as much as she had ever done of late, but there was
something different in her eyes, in the expression of her face, in
all her movements, Adam thought--something harder, older, less
child-like. "Poor thing!" he said to himself, "that's allays
likely. It's because she's had her first heartache. But she's
got a spirit to bear up under it. Thank God for that."

As the weeks went by, and he saw her always looking pleased to see
him--turning up her lovely face towards him as if she meant him to
understand that she was glad for him to come--and going about her
work in the same equable way, making no sign of sorrow, he began
to believe that her feeling towards Arthur must have been much
slighter than he had imagined in his first indignation and alarm,
and that she had been able to think of her girlish fancy that
Arthur was in love with her and would marry her as a folly of
which she was timely cured. And it perhaps was, as he had
sometimes in his more cheerful moments hoped it would be--her
heart was really turning with all the more warmth towards the man
she knew to have a serious love for her.

Possibly you think that Adam was not at all sagacious in his
interpretations, and that it was altogether extremely unbecoming
in a sensible man to behave as he did--falling in love with a girl
who really had nothing more than her beauty to recommend her,
attributing imaginary virtues to her, and even condescending to
cleave to her after she had fallen in love with another man,
waiting for her kind looks as a patient trembling dog waits for
his master's eye to be turned upon him. But in so complex a thing
as human nature, we must consider, it is hard to find rules
without exceptions. Of course, I know that, as a rule, sensible
men fall in love with the most sensible women of their
acquaintance, see through all the pretty deceits of coquettish
beauty, never imagine themselves loved when they are not loved,
cease loving on all proper occasions, and marry the woman most
fitted for them in every respect--indeed, so as to compel the
approbation of all the maiden ladies in their neighbourhood. But
even to this rule an exception will occur now and then in the
lapse of centuries, and my friend Adam was one. For my own part,
however, I respect him none the less--nay, I think the deep love
he had for that sweet, rounded, blossom-like, dark-eyed Hetty, of
whose inward self he was really very ignorant, came out of the
very strength of his nature and not out of any inconsistent
weakness. Is it any weakness, pray, to be wrought on by exquisite
music? To feel its wondrous harmonies searching the subtlest
windings of your soul, the delicate fibres of life where no memory
can penetrate, and binding together your whole being past and
present in one unspeakable vibration, melting you in one moment
with all the tenderness, all the love that has been scattered
through the toilsome years, concentrating in one emotion of heroic
courage or resignation all the hard-learnt lessons of self-
renouncing sympathy, blending your present joy with past sorrow
and your present sorrow with all your past joy? If not, then
neither is it a weakness to be so wrought upon by the exquisite
curves of a woman's cheek and neck and arms, by the liquid depths
of her beseeching eyes, or the sweet childish pout of her lips.
For the beauty of a lovely woman is like music: what can one say
more? Beauty has an expression beyond and far above the one
woman's soul that it clothes, as the words of genius have a wider
meaning than the thought that prompted them. It is more than a
woman's love that moves us in a woman's eyes--it seems to be a
far-off mighty love that has come near to us, and made speech for
itself there; the rounded neck, the dimpled arm, move us by
something more than their prettiness--by their close kinship with
all we have known of tenderness and peace. The noblest nature
sees the most of this impersonal expression in beauty (it is
needless to say that there are gentlemen with whiskers dyed and
undyed who see none of it whatever), and for this reason, the
noblest nature is often the most blinded to the character of the
one woman's soul that the beauty clothes. Whence, I fear, the
tragedy of human life is likely to continue for a long time to
come, in spite of mental philosophers who are ready with the best
receipts for avoiding all mistakes of the kind.

Our good Adam had no fine words into which he could put his
feeling for Hetty: he could not disguise mystery in this way with
the appearance of knowledge; he called his love frankly a mystery,
as you have heard him. He only knew that the sight and memory of
her moved him deeply, touching the spring of all love and
tenderness, all faith and courage within him. How could he
imagine narrowness, selfishness, hardness in her? He created the
mind he believed in out of his own, which was large, unselfish,
tender.

The hopes he felt about Hetty softened a little his feeling
towards Arthur. Surely his attentions to Hetty must have been of
a slight kind; they were altogether wrong, and such as no man in
Arthur's position ought to have allowed himself, but they must
have had an air of playfulness about them, which had probably
blinded him to their danger and had prevented them from laying any
strong hold on Hetty's heart. As the new promise of happiness
rose for Adam, his indignation and jealousy began to die out.
Hetty was not made unhappy; he almost believed that she liked him
best; and the thought sometimes crossed his mind that the
friendship which had once seemed dead for ever might revive in the
days to come, and he would not have to say "good-bye" to the grand
old woods, but would like them better because they were Arthur's.
For this new promise of happiness following so quickly on the
shock of pain had an intoxicating effect on the sober Adam, who
had all his life been used to much hardship and moderate hope.
Was he really going to have an easy lot after all? It seemed so,
for at the beginning of November, Jonathan Burge, finding it
impossible to replace Adam, had at last made up his mind to offer
him a share in the business, without further condition than that
he should continue to give his energies to it and renounce all
thought of having a separate business of his own. Son-in-law or
no son-in-law, Adam had made himself too necessary to be parted
with, and his headwork was so much more important to Burge than
his skill in handicraft that his having the management of the
woods made little difference in the value of his services; and as
to the bargains about the squire's timber, it would be easy to
call in a third person. Adam saw here an opening into a
broadening path of prosperous work such as he had thought of with
ambitious longing ever since he was a lad: he might come to build
a bridge, or a town hall, or a factory, for he had always said to
himself that Jonathan Burge's building buisness was like an acorn,
which might be the mother of a great tree. So he gave his hand to
Burge on that bargain, and went home with his mind full of happy
visions, in which (my refined reader will perhaps be shocked when
I say it) the image of Hetty hovered, and smiled over plans for
seasoning timber at a trifling expense, calculations as to the
cheapening of bricks per thousand by water-carriage, and a
favourite scheme for the strengthening of roofs and walls with a
peculiar form of iron girder. What then? Adam's enthusiasm lay
in these things; and our love is inwrought in our enthusiasm as
electricity is inwrought in the air, exalting its power by a
subtle presence.

Adam would be able to take a separate house now, and provide for
his mother in the old one; his prospects would justify his
marrying very soon, and if Dinah consented to have Seth, their
mother would perhaps be more contented to live apart from Adam.
But he told himself that he would not be hasty--he would not try
Hetty's feeling for him until it had had time to grow strong and
firm. However, tomorrow, after church, he would go to the Hall
Farm and tell them the news. Mr. Poyser, he knew, would like it
better than a five-pound note, and he should see if Hetty's eyes
brightened at it. The months would be short with all he had to
fill his mind, and this foolish eagerness which had come over him
of late must not hurry him into any premature words. Yet when he
got home and told his mother the good news, and ate his supper,
while she sat by almost crying for joy and wanting him to eat
twice as much as usual because of this good-luck, he could not
help preparing her gently for the coming change by talking of the
old house being too small for them all to go on living in it
always.

Chapter XXXIV

The Betrothal

IT was a dry Sunday, and really a pleasant day for the 2d of
November. There was no sunshine, but the clouds were high, and
the wind was so still that the yellow leaves which fluttered down
from the hedgerow elms must have fallen from pure decay.
Nevertheless, Mrs. Poyser did not go to church, for she had taken
a cold too serious to be neglected; only two winters ago she had
been laid up for weeks with a cold; and since his wife did not go
to church, Mr. Poyser considered that on the whole it would be as
well for him to stay away too and "keep her company."  He could
perhaps have given no precise form to the reasons that determined
this conclusion, but it is well known to all experienced minds
that our firmest convictions are often dependent on subtle
impressions for which words are quite too coarse a medium.
However it was, no one from the Poyser family went to church that
afternoon except Hetty and the boys; yet Adam was bold enough to
join them after church, and say that he would walk home with them,
though all the way through the village he appeared to be chiefly
occupied with Marty and Tommy, telling them about the squirrels in
Binton Coppice, and promising to take them there some day. But
when they came to the fields he said to the boys, "Now, then,
which is the stoutest walker? Him as gets to th' home-gate first
shall be the first to go with me to Binton Coppice on the donkey.
But Tommy must have the start up to the next stile, because he's
the smallest."

Adam had never behaved so much like a determined lover before. As
soon as the boys had both set off, he looked down at Hetty and
said, "Won't you hang on my arm, Hetty?" in a pleading tone, as if
he had already asked her and she had refused. Hetty looked up at
him smilingly and put her round arm through his in a moment. It
was nothing to her, putting her arm through Adam's, but she knew
he cared a great deal about having her arm through his, and she
wished him to care. Her heart beat no faster, and she looked at
the half-bare hedgerows and the ploughed field with the same sense
of oppressive dulness as before. But Adam scarcely felt that he
was walking. He thought Hetty must know that he was pressing her
arm a little--a very little. Words rushed to his lips that he
dared not utter--that he had made up his mind not to utter yet--
and so he was silent for the length of that field. The calm
patience with which he had once waited for Hetty's love, content
only with her presence and the thought of the future, had forsaken
him since that terrible shock nearly three months ago. The
agitations of jealousy had given a new restlessness to his
passion--had made fear and uncertainty too hard almost to bear.
But though he might not speak to Hetty of his love, he would tell
her about his new prospects and see if she would be pleased. So
when he was enough master of himself to talk, he said, "I'm going
to tell your uncle some news that'll surprise him, Hetty; and I
think he'll be glad to hear it too."

"What's that?" Hetty said indifferently.

"Why, Mr. Burge has offered me a share in his business, and I'm
going to take it."

There was a change in Hetty's face, certainly not produced by any
agreeable impression from this news. In fact she felt a momentary
annoyance and alarm, for she had so often heard it hinted by her
uncle that Adam might have Mary Burge and a share in the business
any day, if he liked, that she associated the two objects now, and
the thought immediately occurred that perhaps Adam had given her
up because of what had happened lately, and had turned towards
Mary Burge. With that thought, and before she had time to
remember any reasons why it could not be true, came a new sense of
forsakenness and disappointment. The one thing--the one person--
her mind had rested on in its dull weariness, had slipped away
from her, and peevish misery filled her eyes with tears. She was
looking on the ground, but Adam saw her face, saw the tears, and
before he had finished saying, "Hetty, dear Hetty, what are you
crying for?" his eager rapid thought had flown through all the
causes conceivable to him, and had at last alighted on half the
true one. Hetty thought he was going to marry Mary Burge--she
didn't like him to marry--perhaps she didn't like him to marry any
one but herself? All caution was swept away--all reason for it
was gone, and Adam could feel nothing but trembling joy. He
leaned towards her and took her hand, as he said:

"I could afford to be married now, Hetty--I could make a wife
comfortable; but I shall never want to be married if you won't
have me."

Hetty looked up at him and smiled through her tears, as she had
done to Arthur that first evening in the wood, when she had
thought he was not coming, and yet he came. It was a feebler
relief, a feebler triumph she felt now, but the great dark eyes
and the sweet lips were as beautiful as ever, perhaps more
beautiful, for there was a more luxuriant womanliness about Hetty
of late. Adam could hardly believe in the happiness of that
moment. His right hand held her left, and he pressed her arm
close against his heart as he leaned down towards her.

"Do you really love me, Hetty? Will you be my own wife, to love
and take care of as long as I live?"

Hetty did not speak, but Adam's face was very close to hers, and
she put up her round cheek against his, like a kitten. She wanted
to be caressed--she wanted to feel as if Arthur were with her
again.

Adam cared for no words after that, and they hardly spoke through
the rest of the walk. He only said, "I may tell your uncle and
aunt, mayn't I, Hetty?" and she said, "Yes."

The red fire-light on the hearth at the Hall Farm shone on joyful
faces that evening, when Hetty was gone upstairs and Adam took the
opportunity of telling Mr. and Mrs. Poyser and the grandfather
that he saw his way to maintaining a wife now, and that Hetty had
consented to have him.

"I hope you have no objections against me for her husband," said
Adam; "I'm a poor man as yet, but she shall want nothing as I can
work for."

"Objections?" said Mr. Poyser, while the grandfather leaned
forward and brought out his long "Nay, nay."  "What objections can
we ha' to you, lad? Never mind your being poorish as yet; there's
money in your head-piece as there's money i' the sown field, but
it must ha' time. You'n got enough to begin on, and we can do a
deal tow'rt the bit o' furniture you'll want. Thee'st got
feathers and linen to spare--plenty, eh?"

This question was of course addressed to Mrs. Poyser, who was
wrapped up in a warm shawl and was too hoarse to speak with her
usual facility. At first she only nodded emphatically, but she
was presently unable to resist the temptation to be more explicit.

"It ud be a poor tale if I hadna feathers and linen," she said,
hoarsely, "when I never sell a fowl but what's plucked, and the
wheel's a-going every day o' the week."

"Come, my wench," said Mr. Poyser, when Hetty came down, "come and
kiss us, and let us wish you luck."

Hetty went very quietly and kissed the big good-natured man.

"There!" he said, patting her on the back, "go and kiss your aunt
and your grandfather. I'm as wishful t' have you settled well as
if you was my own daughter; and so's your aunt, I'll be bound, for
she's done by you this seven 'ear, Hetty, as if you'd been her
own. Come, come, now," he went on, becoming jocose, as soon as
Hetty had kissed her aunt and the old man, "Adam wants a kiss too,
I'll warrant, and he's a right to one now."

Hetty turned away, smiling, towards her empty chair.

"Come, Adam, then, take one," persisted Mr. Poyser, "else y' arena
half a man."

Adam got up, blushing like a small maiden--great strong fellow as
he was--and, putting his arm round Hetty stooped down and gently
kissed her lips.

It was a pretty scene in the red fire-light; for there were no
candles--why should there be, when the fire was so bright and was
reflected from all the pewter and the polished oak? No one wanted
to work on a Sunday evening. Even Hetty felt something like
contentment in the midst of all this love. Adam's attachment to
her, Adam's caress, stirred no passion in her, were no longer
enough to satisfy her vanity, but they were the best her life
offered her now--they promised her some change.

There was a great deal of discussion before Adam went away, about
the possibility of his finding a house that would do for him to
settle in. No house was empty except the one next to Will
Maskery's in the village, and that was too small for Adam now.
Mr. Poyser insisted that the best plan would be for Seth and his
mother to move and leave Adam in the old home, which might be
enlarged after a while, for there was plenty of space in the
woodyard and garden; but Adam objected to turning his mother out.

"Well, well," said Mr. Poyser at last, "we needna fix everything
to-night. We must take time to consider. You canna think o'
getting married afore Easter. I'm not for long courtships, but
there must be a bit o' time to make things comfortable."

"Aye, to be sure," said Mrs. Poyser, in a hoarse whisper;
"Christian folks can't be married like cuckoos, I reckon."

"I'm a bit daunted, though," said Mr. Poyser, "when I think as we
may have notice to quit, and belike be forced to take a farm
twenty mile off."

"Eh," said the old man, staring at the floor and lifting his hands
up and down, while his arms rested on the elbows of his chair,
"it's a poor tale if I mun leave th' ould spot an be buried in a
strange parish. An' you'll happen ha' double rates to pay," he
added, looking up at his son.

"Well, thee mustna fret beforehand, father," said Martin the
younger. "Happen the captain 'ull come home and make our peace
wi' th' old squire. I build upo' that, for I know the captain 'll
see folks righted if he can."

Chapter XXXV

The Hidden Dread

IT was a busy time for Adam--the time between the beginning of
November and the beginning of February, and he could see little of
Hetty, except on Sundays. But a happy time, nevertheless, for it
was taking him nearer and nearer to March, when they were to be
married, and all the little preparations for their new
housekeeping marked the progress towards the longed-for day. Two
new rooms had been "run up" to the old house, for his mother and
Seth were to live with them after all. Lisbeth had cried so
piteously at the thought of leaving Adam that he had gone to Hetty
and asked her if, for the love of him, she would put up with his
mother's ways and consent to live with her. To his great delight,
Hetty said, "Yes; I'd as soon she lived with us as not."  Hetty's
mind was oppressed at that moment with a worse difficulty than
poor Lisbeth's ways; she could not care about them. So Adam was
consoled for the disappointment he had felt when Seth had come
back from his visit to Snowfield and said "it was no use--Dinah's
heart wasna turned towards marrying."  For when he told his mother
that Hetty was willing they should all live together and there was
no more need of them to think of parting, she said, in a more
contented tone than he had heard her speak in since it had been
settled that he was to be married, "Eh, my lad, I'll be as still
as th' ould tabby, an' ne'er want to do aught but th' offal work,
as she wonna like t' do. An' then we needna part the platters an'
things, as ha' stood on the shelf together sin' afore thee wast
born."

There was only one cloud that now and then came across Adam's
sunshine: Hetty seemed unhappy sometimes. But to all his
anxious, tender questions, she replied with an assurance that she
was quite contented and wished nothing different; and the next
time he saw her she was more lively than usual. It might be that
she was a little overdone with work and anxiety now, for soon
after Christmas Mrs. Poyser had taken another cold, which had
brought on inflammation, and this illness had confined her to her
room all through January. Hetty had to manage everything
downstairs, and half-supply Molly's place too, while that good
damsel waited on her mistress, and she seemed to throw herself so
entirely into her new functions, working with a grave steadiness
which was new in her, that Mr. Poyser often told Adam she was
wanting to show him what a good housekeeper he would have; but he
"doubted the lass was o'erdoing it--she must have a bit o' rest
when her aunt could come downstairs."

This desirable event of Mrs. Poyser's coming downstairs happened
in the early part of February, when some mild weather thawed the
last patch of snow on the Binton Hills. On one of these days,
soon after her aunt came down, Hetty went to Treddleston to buy
some of the wedding things which were wanting, and which Mrs.
Poyser had scolded her for neglecting, observing that she supposed
"it was because they were not for th' outside, else she'd ha'
bought 'em fast enough."

It was about ten o'clock when Hetty set off, and the slight hoar-
frost that had whitened the hedges in the early morning had
disappeared as the sun mounted the cloudless sky. Bright February
days have a stronger charm of hope about them than any other days
in the year. One likes to pause in the mild rays of the sun, and
look over the gates at the patient plough-horses turning at the
end of the furrow, and think that the beautiful year is all before
one. The birds seem to feel just the same: their notes are as
clear as the clear air. There are no leaves on the trees and
hedgerows, but how green all the grassy fields are! And the dark
purplish brown of the ploughed earth and of the bare branches is
beautiful too. What a glad world this looks like, as one drives
or rides along the valleys and over the hills! I have often
thought so when, in foreign countries, where the fields and woods
have looked to me like our English Loamshire--the rich land tilled
with just as much care, the woods rolling down the gentle slopes
to the green meadows--I have come on sormething by the roadside
which has reminded me that I am not in Loamshire: an image of a
great agony--the agony of the Cross. It has stood perhaps by the
clustering apple-blossoms, or in the broad sunshine by the
cornfield, or at a turning by the wood where a clear brook was
gurgling below; and surely, if there came a traveller to this
world who knew nothing of the story of man's life upon it, this
image of agony would seem to him strangely out of place in the
midst of this joyous nature. He would not know that hidden behind
the apple-blossoms, or among the golden corn, or under the
shrouding boughs of the wood, there might be a human heart beating
heavily with anguish--perhaps a young blooming girl, not knowing
where to turn for refuge from swift-advancing shame, understanding
no more of this life of ours than a foolish lost lamb wandering
farther and farther in the nightfall on the lonely heath, yet
tasting the bitterest of life's bitterness.

Such things are sometimes hidden among the sunny fields and behind
the blossoming orchards; and the sound of the gurgling brook, if
you came close to one spot behind a small bush, would be mingled
for your ear with a despairing human sob. No wonder man's
religion has much sorrow in it: no wonder he needs a suffering
God.

Hetty, in her red cloak and warm bonnet, with her basket in her
hand, is turning towards a gate by the side of the Treddleston
road, but not that she may have a more lingering enjoyment of the
sunshine and think with hope of the long unfolding year. She
hardly knows that the sun is shining; and for weeks, now, when she
has hoped at all, it has been for something at which she herself
trembles and shudders. She only wants to be out of the high-road,
that she may walk slowly and not care how her face looks, as she
dwells on wretched thoughts; and through this gate she can get
into a field-path behind the wide thick hedgerows. Her great dark
eyes wander blankly over the fields like the eyes of one who is
desolate, homeless, unloved, not the promised bride of a brave
tender man. But there are no tears in them: her tears were all
wept away in the weary night, before she went to sleep. At the
next stile the pathway branches off: there are two roads before
her--one along by the hedgerow, which will by and by lead her into
the road again, the other across the fields, which will take her
much farther out of the way into the Scantlands, low shrouded
pastures where she will see nobody. She chooses this and begins
to walk a little faster, as if she had suddenly thought of an
object towards which it was worth while to hasten. Soon she is in
the Scantlands, where the grassy land slopes gradually downwards,
and she leaves the level ground to follow the slope. Farther on
there is a clump of trees on the low ground, and she is making her
way towards it. No, it is not a clump of trees, but a dark
shrouded pool, so full with the wintry rains that the under boughs
of the elder-bushes lie low beneath the water. She sits down on
the grassy bank, against the stooping stem of the great oak that
hangs over the dark pool. She has thought of this pool often in
the nights of the month that has just gone by, and now at last she
is come to see it. She clasps her hands round her knees, and
leans forward, and looks earnestly at it, as if trying to guess
what sort of bed it would make for her young round limbs.

No, she has not courage to jump into that cold watery bed, and if
she had, they might find her--they might find out why she had
drowned herself. There is but one thing left to her: she must go
away, go where they can't find her.

After the first on-coming of her great dread, some weeks after her
betrothal to Adam, she had waited and waited, in the blind vague
hope that something would happen to set her free from her terror;
but she could wait no longer. All the force of her nature had
been concentrated on the one effort of concealment, and she had
shrunk with irresistible dread from every course that could tend
towards a betrayal of her miserable secret. Whenever the thought
of writing to Arthur had occurred to her, she had rejected it. He
could do nothing for her that would shelter her from discovery and
scorn among the relatives and neighbours who once more made all
her world, now her airy dream had vanished. Her imagination no
longer saw happiness with Arthur, for he could do nothing that
would satisfy or soothe her pride. No, something else would
happen--something must happen--to set her free from this dread.
In young, childish, ignorant souls there is constantly this blind
trust in some unshapen chance: it is as hard to a boy or girl to
believe that a great wretchedness will actually befall them as to
believe that they will die.

But now necessity was pressing hard upon her--now the time of her
marriage was close at hand--she could no longer rest in this blind
trust. She must run away; she must hide herself where no familiar
eyes could detect her; and then the terror of wandering out into
the world, of which she knew nothing, made the possibility of
going to Arthur a thought which brought some comfort with it. She
felt so helpless now, so unable to fashion the future for herself,
that the prospect of throwing herself on him had a relief in it
which was stronger than her pride. As she sat by the pool and
shuddered at the dark cold water, the hope that he would receive
her tenderly--that he would care for her and think for her--was
like a sense of lulling warmth, that made her for the moment
indifferent to everything else; and she began now to think of
nothing but the scheme by which she should get away.

She had had a letter from Dinah lately, full of kind words about
the coming marriage, which she had heard of from Seth; and when
Hetty had read this letter aloud to her uncle, he had said, "I
wish Dinah 'ud come again now, for she'd be a comfort to your aunt
when you're gone. What do you think, my wench, o' going to see
her as soon as you can be spared and persuading her to come back
wi' you? You might happen persuade her wi' telling her as her
aunt wants her, for all she writes o' not being able to come."
Hetty had not liked the thought of going to Snowfield, and felt no
longing to see Dinah, so she only said, "It's so far off, Uncle."
But now she thought this proposed visit would serve as a pretext
for going away. She would tell her aunt when she got home again
that she should like the change of going to Snowfield for a week
or ten days. And then, when she got to Stoniton, where nobody
knew her, she would ask for the coach that would take her on the
way to Windsor. Arthur was at Windsor, and she would go to him.

As soon as Hetty had determined on this scheme, she rose from the
grassy bank of the pool, took up her basket, and went on her way
to Treddleston, for she must buy the wedding things she had come
out for, though she would never want them. She must be careful
not to raise any suspicion that she was going to run away.

Mrs. Poyser was quite agreeably surprised that Hetty wished to go
and see Dinah and try to bring her back to stay over the wedding.
The sooner she went the better, since the weather was pleasant
now; and Adam, when he came in the evening, said, if Hetty could
set off to-morrow, he would make time to go with her to
Treddleston and see her safe into the Stoniton coach.

"I wish I could go with you and take care of you, Hetty," he said,
the next morning, leaning in at the coach door; "but you won't
stay much beyond a week--the time 'ull seem long."

He was looking at her fondly, and his strong hand beld hers in its
grasp. Hetty felt a sense of protection in his presence--she was
used to it now: if she could have had the past undone and known no
other love than her quiet liking for Adam! The tears rose as she
gave him the last look.

"God bless her for loving me," said Adam, as he went on his way to
work again, with Gyp at his heels.

But Hetty's tears were not for Adam--not for the anguish that
would come upon him when he found she was gone from him for ever.
They were for the misery of her own lot, which took her away from
this brave tender man who offered up his whole life to her, and
threw her, a poor helpless suppliant, on the man who would think
it a misfortune that she was obliged to cling to him.

At three o'clock that day, when Hetty was on the coach that was to
take her, they said, to Leicester--part of the long, long way to
Windsor--she felt dimly that she might be travelling all this
weary journey towards the beginning of new misery.

Yet Arthur was at Windsor; he would surely not be angry with her.
If he did not mind about her as he used to do, he had promised to
be good to her.

Book Five

Chapter XXXVI

The Journey of Hope

A LONG, lonely journey, with sadness in the heart; away from the
familiar to the strange: that is a hard and dreary thing even to
the rich, the strong, the instructed; a hard thing, even when we
are called by duty, not urged by dread.

What was it then to Hetty? With her poor narrow thoughts, no
longer melting into vague hopes, but pressed upon by the chill of
definite fear, repeating again and again the same small round of
memories--shaping again and again the same childish, doubtful
images of what was to come--seeing nothing in this wide world but
the little history of her own pleasures and pains; with so little
money in her pocket, and the way so long and difficult. Unless
she could afford always to go in the coaches--and she felt sure
she could not, for the journey to Stoniton was more expensive than
she had expected--it was plain that she must trust to carriers'
carts or slow waggons; and what a time it would be before she
could get to the end of her journey! The burly old coachman from
Oakbourne, seeing such a pretty young woman among the outside
passengers, had invited her to come and sit beside him; and
feeling that it became him as a man and a coachman to open the
dialogue with a joke, he applied himself as soon as they were off
the stones to the elaboration of one suitable in all respects.
After many cuts with his whip and glances at Hetty out of the
corner of his eye, he lifted his lips above the edge of his
wrapper and said, "He's pretty nigh six foot, I'll be bound, isna
he, now?"

"Who?" said Hetty, rather startled.

"Why, the sweetheart as you've left behind, or else him as you're
goin' arter--which is it?"

Hetty felt her face flushing and then turning pale. She thought
this coachman must know something about her. He must know Adam,
and might tell him where she was gone, for it is difficult to
country people to believe that those who make a figure in their
own parish are not known everywhere else, and it was equally
difficult to Hetty to understand that chance words could happen to
apply closely to her circumstances. She was too frightened to
speak.

"Hegh, hegh!" said the coachman, seeing that his joke was not so
gratifying as he had expected, "you munna take it too ser'ous; if
he's behaved ill, get another. Such a pretty lass as you can get
a sweetheart any day."

Hetty's fear was allayed by and by, when she found that the
coachman made no further allusion to her personal concerns; but it
still had the effect of preventing her from asking him what were
the places on the road to Windsor. She told him she was only
going a little way out of Stoniton, and when she got down at the
inn where the coach stopped, she hastened away with her basket to
another part of the town. When she had formed her plan of going
to Windsor, she had not foreseen any difficulties except that of
getting away, and after she had overcome this by proposing the
visit to Dinah, her thoughts flew to the meeting with Arthur and
the question how he would behave to her--not resting on any
probable incidents of the journey. She was too entirely ignorant
of traveling to imagine any of its details, and with all her store
of money--her three guineas--in her pocket, she thought herself
amply provided. It was not until she found how much it cost her
to get to Stoniton that she began to be alarmed about the journey,
and then, for the first time, she felt her ignorance as to the
places that must be passed on her way. Oppressed with this new
alarm, she walked along the grim Stoniton streets, and at last
turned into a shabby little inn, where she hoped to get a cheap
lodging for the night. Here she asked the landlord if he could
tell her what places she must go to, to get to Windsor.

"Well, I can't rightly say. Windsor must be pretty nigh London,
for it's where the king lives," was the answer. "Anyhow, you'd
best go t' Ashby next--that's south'ard. But there's as many
places from here to London as there's houses in Stoniton, by what
I can make out. I've never been no traveller myself. But how
comes a lone young woman like you to be thinking o' taking such a
journey as that?"

"I'm going to my brother--he's a soldier at Windsor," said Hetty,
frightened at the landlord's questioning look. "I can't afford to
go by the coach; do you think there's a cart goes toward Ashby in
the morning?"

"Yes, there may be carts if anybody knowed where they started
from; but you might run over the town before you found out. You'd
best set off and walk, and trust to summat overtaking you."

Every word sank like lead on Hetty's spirits; she saw the journey
stretch bit by bit before her now. Even to get to Ashby seemed a
hard thing: it might take the day, for what she knew, and that was
nothing to the rest of the journey. But it must be done--she must
get to Arthur. Oh, how she yearned to be again with somebody who
would care for her! She who had never got up in the morning
without the certainty of seeing familiar faces, people on whom she
had an acknowledged claim; whose farthest journey had been to
Rosseter on the pillion with her uncle; whose thoughts had always
been taking holiday in dreams of pleasure, because all the
business of her life was managed for her--this kittenlike Hetty,
who till a few months ago had never felt any other grief than that
of envying Mary Burge a new ribbon, or being girded at by her aunt
for neglecting Totty, must now make her toilsome way in
loneliness, her peaceful home left behind for ever, and nothing
but a tremulous hope of distant refuge before her. Now for the
first time, as she lay down to-night in the strange hard bed, she
felt that her home had been a happy one, that her uncle had been
very good to her, that her quiet lot at Hayslope among the things
and people she knew, with her little pride in her one best gown
and bonnet, and nothing to hide from any one, was what she would
like to wake up to as a reality, and find that all the feverish
life she had known besides was a short nightmare. She thought of
all she had left behind with yearning regret for her own sake.
Her own misery filled her heart--there was no room in it for other
people's sorrow. And yet, before the cruel letter, Arthur had
been so tender and loving. The memory of that had still a charm
for her, though it was no more than a soothing draught that just
made pain bearable. For Hetty could conceive no other existence
for herself in future than a hidden one, and a hidden life, even
with love, would have had no delights for her; still less a life
mingled with shame. She knew no romances, and had only a feeble
share in the feelings which are the source of romance, so that
well-read ladies may find it difflcult to understand her state of
mind. She was too igrorant of everything beyond the simple
notions and habits in which she had been brought up to have any
more definite idea of her probable future than that Arthur would
take care of her somehow, and shelter her from anger and scorn.
He would not marry her and make her a lady; and apart from that
she could think of nothing he could give towards which she looked
with longing and ambition.

The next morning she rose early, and taking only some milk and
bread for her breakfast, set out to walk on the road towards
Ashby, under a leaden-coloured sky, with a narrowing streak of
yellow, like a departing hope, on the edge of the horizon. Now in
her faintness of heart at the length and difficulty of her
journey, she was most of all afraid of spending her money, and
becoming so destitute that she would have to ask people's charity;
for Hettv had the pride not only of a proud nature but of a proud
class--the class that pays the most poor-rates, and most shudders
at the idea of profiting by a poor-rate. It had not yet occurred
to her that she might get money for her locket and earrings which
she carried with her, and she applied all her small arithmetic and
knowledge of prices to calculating how many meals and how many
rides were contained in her two guineas, and the odd shillings,
which had a melancholy look, as if they were the pale ashes of the
other bright-flaming coin.

For the first few miles out of Stoniton, she walked on bravely,
always fixing on some tree or gate or projecting bush at the most
distant visible point in the road as a goal, and feeling a faint
joy when she had reached it. But when she came to the fourth
milestone, the first she had happened to notice among the long
grass by the roadside, and read that she was still only four miles
beyond Stoniton, her courage sank. She had come only this little
way, and yet felt tired, and almost hungry again in the keen
morning air; for though Hetty was accustomed to much movement and
exertion indoors, she was not used to long walks which produced
quite a different sort of fatigue from that of household activity.
As she was looking at the milestone she felt some drops falling on
her face--it was beginning to rain. Here was a new trouble which
had not entered into her sad thoughts before, and quite weighed
down by this sudden addition to her burden, she sat down on the
step of a stile and began to sob hysterically. The beginning of
hardship is like the first taste of bitter food--it seems for a
moment unbearable; yet, if there is nothing else to satisfy our
hunger, we take another bite and find it possible to go on. When
Hetty recovered from her burst of weeping, she rallied her
fainting courage: it was raining, and she must try to get on to a
village where she might find rest and shelter. Presently, as she
walked on wearily, she heard the rumbling of heavy wheels behind
her; a covered waggon was coming, creeping slowly along with a
slouching driver cracking his whip beside the horses. She waited
for it, thinking that if the waggoner were not a very sour-looking
man, she would ask him to take her up. As the waggon approached
her, the driver had fallen behind, but there was something in the
front of the big vehicle which encouraged her. At any previous
moment in her life she would not have noticed it, but now, the new
susceptibility that suffering had awakened in her caused this
object to impress her strongly. It was only a small white-and-
liver-coloured spaniel which sat on the front ledge of the waggon,
with large timid eyes, and an incessant trembling in the body,
such as you may have seen in some of these small creatures. Hetty
cared little for animals, as you know, but at this moment she felt
as if the helpless timid creature had some fellowship with her,
and without being quite aware of the reason, she was less doubtful
about speaking to the driver, who now came forward--a large ruddy
man, with a sack over his shoulders, by way of scarf or mantle.

"Could you take me up in your waggon, if you're going towards
Ashby?" said Hetty. "I'll pay you for it."

"Aw," said the big fellow, with that slowly dawning smile which
belongs to heavy faces, "I can take y' up fawst enough wi'out
bein' paid for't if you dooant mind lyin' a bit closish a-top o'
the wool-packs. Where do you coom from? And what do you want at
Ashby?"

"I come from Stoniton. I'm going a long way--to Windsor."

"What! Arter some service, or what?"

"Going to my brother--he's a soldier there."

"Well, I'm going no furder nor Leicester--and fur enough too--but
I'll take you, if you dooant mind being a bit long on the road.
Th' hosses wooant feel YOUR weight no more nor they feel the
little doog there, as I puck up on the road a fortni't agoo. He
war lost, I b'lieve, an's been all of a tremble iver sin'. Come,
gi' us your basket an' come behind and let me put y' in."

To lie on the wool-packs, with a cranny left between the curtains
of the awning to let in the air, was luxury to Hetty now, and she
half-slept away the hours till the driver came to ask her if she
wanted to get down and have "some victual"; he himself was going
to eat his dinner at this "public."  Late at night they reached
Leicester, and so this second day of Hetty's journey was past.
She had spent no money except what she had paid for her food, but
she felt that this slow journeying would be intolerable for her
another day, and in the morning she found her way to a coach-
office to ask about the road to Windsor, and see if it would cost
her too much to go part of the distance by coach again. Yes! The
distance was too great--the coaches were too dear--she must give
them up; but the elderly clerk at the office, touched by her
pretty anxious face, wrote down for her the names of the chief
places she must pass through. This was the only comfort she got
in Leicester, for the men stared at her as she went along the
street, and for the first time in her life Hetty wished no one
would look at her. She set out walking again; but this day she
was fortunate, for she was soon overtaken by a carrier's cart
which carried her to Hinckley, and by the help of a return chaise,
with a drunken postilion--who frightened her by driving like Jehu
the son of Nimshi, and shouting hilarious remarks at her, twisting
himself backwards on his saddle--she was before night in the heart
of woody Warwickshire: but still almost a hundred miles from
Windsor, they told her. Oh what a large world it was, and what
hard work for her to find her way in it! She went by mistake to
Stratford-on-Avon, finding Stratford set down in her list of
places, and then she was told she had come a long way out of the
right road. It was not till the fifth day that she got to Stony
Stratford. That seems but a slight journey as you look at the
map, or remember your own pleasant travels to and from the meadowy
banks of the Avon. But how wearily long it was to Hetty! It
seemed to her as if this country of flat fields, and hedgerows,
and dotted houses, and villages, and market-towns--all so much
alike to her indifferent eyes--must have no end, and she must go
on wandering among them for ever, waiting tired at toll-gates for
some cart to come, and then finding the cart went only a little
way--a very little way--to the miller's a mile off perhaps; and
she hated going into the public houses, where she must go to get
food and ask questions, because there were always men lounging
there, who stared at her and joked her rudely. Her body was very
weary too with these days of new fatigue and anxiety; they had
made her look more pale and worn than all the time of hidden dread
she had gone through at home. When at last she reached Stony
Stratford, her impatience and weariness had become too strong for
her economical caution; she determined to take the coach for the
rest of the way, though it should cost her all her remaining
money. She would need nothing at Windsor but to find Arthur.
When she had paid the fare for the last coach, she had only a
shilling; and as she got down at the sign of the Green Man in
Windsor at twelve o'clock in the middle of the seventh day, hungry
and faint, the coachman came up, and begged her to "remember him."
She put her hand in her pocket and took out the shilling, but the
tears came with the sense of exhaustion and the thought that she
was giving away her last means of getting food, which she really
required before she could go in search of Arthur. As she held out
the shilling, she lifted up her dark tear-filled eyes to the
coachman's face and said, "Can you give me back sixpence?"

"No, no," he said, gruffly, "never mind--put the shilling up
again."

The landlord of the Green Man had stood near enough to witness
this scene, and he was a man whose abundant feeding served to keep
his good nature, as well as his person, in high condition. And
that lovely tearful face of Hetty's would have found out the
sensitive fibre in most men.

"Come, young woman, come in," he said, "and have adrop o'
something; you're pretty well knocked up, I can see that."

He took her into the bar and said to his wife, "Here, missis, take
this young woman into the parlour; she's a little overcome"--for
Hetty's tears were falling fast. They were merely hysterical
tears: she thought she had no reason for weeping now, and was
vexed that she was too weak and tired to help it. She was at
Windsor at last, not far from Arthur.

She looked with eager, hungry eyes at the bread and meat and beer
that the landlady brought her, and for some minutes she forgot
everything else in the delicious sensations of satisfying hunger
and recovering from exhaustion. The landlady sat opposite to her
as she ate, and looked at her earnestly. No wonder: Hetty had
thrown off her bonnet, and her curls had fallen down. Her face
was all the more touching in its youth and beauty because of its
weary look, and the good woman's eyes presently wandered to her
figure, which in her hurried dressing on her journey she had taken
no pains to conceal; moreover, the stranger's eye detects what the
familiar unsuspecting eye leaves unnoticed.

"Why, you're not very fit for travelling," she said, glancing
while she spoke at Hetty's ringless hand. "Have you come far?"

"Yes," said Hetty, roused by this question to exert more self-
command, and feeling the better for the food she had taken. "I've
come a good long way, and it's very tiring. But I'm better now.
Could you tell me which way to go to this place?"  Here Hetty took
from her pocket a bit of paper: it was the end of Arthur's letter
on which he had written his address.

While she was speaking, the landlord had come in and had begun to
look at her as earnestly as his wife had done. He took up the
piece of paper which Hetty handed across the table, and read the
address.

"Why, what do you want at this house?" he said. It is in the
nature of innkeepers and all men who have no pressing business of
their own to ask as many questions as possible before giving any
information.

"I want to see a gentleman as is there," said Hetty.

"But there's no gentleman there," returned the landlord. "It's
shut up--been shut up this fortnight. What gentleman is it you
want? Perhaps I can let you know where to find him."

"It's Captain Donnithorne," said Hetty tremulously, her heart
beginning to beat painfully at this disappointment of her hope
that she should find Arthur at once.

"Captain Donnithorne? Stop a bit," said the landlard, slowly.
"Was he in the Loamshire Militia? A tall young officer with a
fairish skin and reddish whiskers--and had a servant by the name
o' Pym?"

"Oh yes," said Hetty; "you know him--where is he?"

"A fine sight o' miles away from here. The Loamshire Militia's
gone to Ireland; it's been gone this fortnight."

"Look there! She's fainting," said the landlady, hastening to
support Hetty, who had lost her miserable consciousness and looked
like a beautiful corpse. They carried her to the sofa and
loosened her dress.

"Here's a bad business, I suspect," said the landlord, as he
brought in some water.

"Ah, it's plain enough what sort of business it is," said the
wife. "She's not a common flaunting dratchell, I can see that.
She looks like a respectable country girl, and she comes from a
good way off, to judge by her tongue. She talks something like
that ostler we had that come from the north. He was as honest a
fellow as we ever had about the house--they're all honest folks in
the north."

"I never saw a prettier young woman in my life," said the husband.
"She's like a pictur in a shop-winder. It goes to one's 'eart to
look at her."

"It 'ud have been a good deal better for her if she'd been uglier
and had more conduct," said the landlady, who on any charitable
construction must have been supposed to have more "conduct" than
beauty. "But she's coming to again. Fetch a drop more water."

Chapter XXXVII

The Journey in Despair

HETTY was too ill through the rest of that day for any questions
to be addressed to her--too ill even to think with any
distinctness of the evils that were to come. She only felt that
all her hope was crushed, and that instead of having found a
refuge she had only reached the borders of a new wilderness where
no goal lay before her. The sensations of bodily sickness, in a
comfortable bed, and with the tendance of the good-natured
landlady, made a sort of respite for her; such a respite as there
is in the faint weariness which obliges a man to throw himself on
the sand instead of toiling onward under the scorching sun.

But when sleep and rest had brought back the strength necessary
for the keenness of mental suffering--when she lay the next
morning looking at the growing light which was like a cruel task-
master returning to urge from her a fresh round of hated hopeless
labour--she began to think what course she must take, to remember
that all her money was gone, to look at the prospect of further
wandering among strangers with the new clearness shed on it by the
experience of her journey to Windsor. But which way could she
turn? It was impossible for her to enter into any service, even
if she could obtain it. There was nothing but immediate beggary
before her. She thought of a young woman who had been found
against the church wall at Hayslope one Sunday, nearly dead with
cold and hunger--a tiny infant in her arms. The woman was rescued
and taken to the parish. "The parish!" You can perhaps hardly
understand the effect of that word on a mind like Hetty's, brought
up among people who were somewhat hard in their feelings even
towards poverty, who lived among the fields, and had little pity
for want and rags as a cruel inevitable fate such as they
sometimes seem in cities, but held them a mark of idleness and
vice--and it was idleness and vice that brought burdens on the
parish. To Hetty the "parish" was next to the prison in obloquy,
and to ask anything of strangers--to beg--lay in the same far-off
hideous region of intolerable shame that Hetty had all her life
thought it impossible she could ever come near. But now the
remembrance of that wretched woman whom she had seen herself, on
her way from church, being carried into Joshua Rann's, came back
upon her with the new terrible sense that there was very little
now to divide HER from the same lot. And the dread of bodily
hardship mingled with the dread of shame; for Hetty had the
luxurious nature of a round soft-coated pet animal.

How she yearned to be back in her safe home again, cherished and
cared for as she had always been! Her aunt's scolding about
trifles would have been music to her ears now; she longed for it;
she used to hear it in a time when she had only trifles to hide.
Could she be the same Hetty that used to make up the butter in the
dairy with the Guelder roses peeping in at the window--she, a
runaway whom her friends would not open their doors to again,
lying in this strange bed, with the knowledge that she had no
money to pay for what she received, and must offer those strangers
some of the clothes in her basket? It was then she thought of her
locket and ear-rings, and seeing her pocket lie near, she reached
it and spread the contents on the bed before her. There were the
locket and ear-rings in the little velvet-lined boxes, and with
them there was a beautiful silver thimble which Adam had bought
her, the words "Remember me" making the ornament of the border; a
steel purse, with her one shilling in it;and a small red-leather
case, fastening with a strap. Those beautiful little ear-rings,
with their delicate pearls and garnet, that she had tried in her
ears with such longing in the bright sunshine on the 30th of July!
She had no longing to put them in her ears now: her head with its
dark rings of hair lay back languidly on the pillow, and the
sadness that rested about her brow and eyes was something too hard
for regretful memory. Yet she put her hands up to her ears: it
was because there were some thin gold rings in them, which were
also worth a little money. Yes, she could surely get some money
for her ornaments: those Arthur had given her must have cost a
great deal of money. The landlord and landlady had been good to
her; perhaps they would help her to get the money for these
things.

But this money would not keep her long. What should she do when
it was gone? Where should she go? The horrible thought of want
and beggary drove her once to think she would go back to her uncle
and aunt and ask them to forgive her and have pity on her. But
she shrank from that idea again, as she might have shrunk from
scorching metal. She could never endure that shame before her
uncle and aunt, before Mary Burge, and the servants at the Chase,
and the people at Broxton, and everybody who knew her. They
should never know what had happened to her. What could she do?
She would go away from Windsor--travel again as she had done the
last week, and get among the flat green fields with the high
hedges round them, where nobody could see her or know her; and
there, perhaps, when there was nothing else she could do, she
should get courage to drown herself in some pond like that in the
Scantlands. Yes, she would get away from Windsor as soon as
possible: she didn't like these people at the inn to know about
her, to know that she had come to look for Captain Donnithorne.
She must think of some reason to tell them why she had asked for
him.

With this thought she began to put the things back into her
pocket, meaning to get up and dress before the landlady came to
her. She had her hand on the red-leather case, when it occurred
to her that there might be something in this case which she had
forgotten--something worth selling; for without knowing what she
should do with her life, she craved the means of living as long as
possible; and when we desire eagerly to find something, we are apt
to search for it in hopeless places. No, there was nothing but
common needles and pins, and dried tulip-petals between the paper
leaves where she had written down her little money-accounts. But
on one of these leaves there was a name, which, often as she had
seen it before, now flashed on Hetty's mind like a newly
discovered message. The name was--Dinah Morris, Snowfield. There
was a text above it, written, as well as the name, by Dinah's own
hand with a little pencil, one evening that they were sitting
together and Hetty happened to have the red case lying open before
her. Hetty did not read the text now: she was only arrested by
the name. Now, for the first time, she remembered without
indifference the affectionate kindness Dinah had shown her, and
those words of Dinah in the bed-chamber--that Hetty must think of
her as a friend in trouble. Suppose she were to go to Dinah, and
ask her to help her? Dinah did not think about things as other
people did. She was a mystery to Hetty, but Hetty knew she was
always kind. She couldn't imagine Dinah's face turning away from
her in dark reproof or scorn, Dinah's voice willingly speaking ill
of her, or rejoicing in her misery as a punishment. Dinah did not
seem to belong to that world of Hetty's, whose glance she dreaded
like scorching fire. But even to her Hetty shrank from beseeching
and confession. She could not prevail on herself to say, "I will
go to Dinah": she only thought of that as a possible alternative,
if she had not courage for death.

The good landlady was amazed when she saw Hetty come downstairs
soon after herself, neatly dressed, and looking resolutely self-
possessed. Hetty told her she was quite well this morning. She
had only been very tired and overcome with her journey, for she
had come a long way to ask about her brother, who had run away,
and they thought he was gone for a soldier, and Captain
Donnithorne might know, for he had been very kind to her brother
once. It was a lame story, and the landlady looked doubtfully at
Hetty as she told it; but there was a resolute air of self-
reliance about her this morning, so different from the helpless
prostration of yesterday, that the landlady hardly knew how to
make a remark that might seem like prying into other people's
affairs. She only invited her to sit down to breakfast with them,
and in the course of it Hetty brought out her ear-rings and
locket, and asked the landlord if he could help her to get money
for them. Her journey, she said, had cost her much more than she
expected, and now she had no money to get back to her friends,
which she wanted to do at once.

It was not the first time the landlady had seen the ornaments, for
she had examined the contents of Hetty's pocket yesterday, and she
and her husband had discussed the fact of a country girl having
these beautiful things, with a stronger conviction than ever that
Hetty had been miserably deluded by the fine young officer.

"Well," said the landlord, when Hetty had spread the precious
trifles before him, "we might take 'em to the jeweller's shop, for
there's one not far off; but Lord bless you, they wouldn't give
you a quarter o' what the things are worth. And you wouldn't like
to part with 'em?" he added, looking at her inquiringly.

"Oh, I don't mind," said Hetty, hastily, "so as I can get money to
go back."

"And they might think the things were stolen, as you wanted to
sell 'em," he went on, "for it isn't usual for a young woman like
you to have fine jew'llery like that."

The blood rushed to Hetty's face with anger. "I belong to
respectable folks," she said; "I'm not a thief."

"No, that you aren't, I'll be bound," said the landlady; "and
you'd no call to say that," looking indignantly at her husband.
"The things were gev to her: that's plain enough to be seen."

"I didn't mean as I thought so," said the husband, apologetically,
"but I said it was what the jeweller might think, and so he
wouldn't be offering much money for 'em."

"Well," said the wife, "suppose you were to advance some money on
the things yourself, and then if she liked to redeem 'em when she
got home, she could. But if we heard nothing from her after two
months, we might do as we liked with 'em."

I will not say that in this accommodating proposition the landlady
had no regard whatever to the possible reward of her good nature
in the ultimate possession of the locket and ear-rings: indeed,
the effect they would have in that case on the mind of the
grocer's wife had presented itself with remarkable vividness to
her rapid imagination. The landlord took up the ornaments and
pushed out his lips in a meditative manner. He wished Hetty well,
doubtless; but pray, how many of your well-wishers would decline
to make a little gain out of you? Your landlady is sincerely
affected at parting with you, respects you highly, and will really
rejoice if any one else is generous to you; but at the same time
she hands you a bill by which she gains as high a percentage as
possible.

"How much money do you want to get home with, young woman?" said
the well-wisher, at length.

"Three guineas," answered Hetty, fixing on the sum she set out
with, for want of any other standard, and afraid of asking too
much.

"Well, I've ho objections to advance you three guineas," said the
landlord; "and if you like to send it me back and get the
jewellery again, you can, you know. The Green Man isn't going to
run away."

"Oh yes, I'll be very glad if you'll give me that," said Hetty,
relieved at the thought that she would not have to go to the
jeweller's and be stared at and questioned.

"But if you want the things again, you'll write before long," said
the landlady, "because when two months are up, we shall make up
our minds as you don't want 'em."

"Yes," said Hetty indifferently.

The husband and wife were equally content with this arrangement.
The husband thought, if the ornaments were not redeemed, he could
make a good thing of it by taking them to London and selling them.
The wife thought she would coax the good man into letting her keep
them. And they were accommodating Hetty, poor thing--a pretty,
respectable-looking young woman, apparently in a sad case. They
declined to take anything for her food and bed: she was quite
welcome. And at eleven o'clock Hetty said "Good-bye" to them with
the same quiet, resolute air she had worn all the morning,
mounting the coach that was to take her twenty miles back along
the way she had come.

There is a strength of self-possession which is the sign that the
last hope has departed. Despair no more leans on others than
perfect contentment, and in despair pride ceases to be
counteracted by the sense of dependence.

Hetty felt that no one could deliver her from the evils that would
make life hateful to her; and no one, she said to herself, should
ever know her misery and humiliation. No; she would not confess
even to Dinah. She would wander out of sight, and drown herself
where her body would never be found, and no one should know what
had become of her.

When she got off this coach, she began to walk again, and take
cheap rides in carts, and get cheap meals, going on and on without
distinct purpose, yet strangely, by some fascination, taking the
way she had come, though she was determined not to go back to her
own country. Perhaps it was because she had fixed her mind on the
grassy Warwickshire fields, with the bushy tree-studded hedgerows
that made a hiding-place even in this leafless season. She went
more slowly than she came, often getting over the stiles and
sitting for hours under the hedgerows, looking before her with
blank, beautiful eyes; fancying herself at the edge of a hidden
pool, low down, like that in the Scantlands; wondering if it were
very painful to be drowned, and if there would be anything worse
after death than what she dreaded in life. Religious doctrines
had taken no hold on Hetty's mind. She was one of those numerous
people who have had godfathers and godmothers, learned their
catechism, been confirmed, and gone to church every Sunday, and
yet, for any practical result of strength in life, or trust in
death, have never appropriated a single Christian idea or
Christian feeling. You would misunderstand her thoughts during
these wretched days, if you imagined that they were influenced
either by religious fears or religious hopes.

She chose to go to Stratford-on-Avon again, where she had gone
before by mistake, for she remembered some grassy fields on her
former way towards it--fields among which she thought she might
find just the sort of pool she had in her mind. Yet she took care
of her money still; she carried her basket; death seemed still a
long way off, and life was so strong in her. She craved food and
rest--she hastened towards them at the very moment she was
picturing to herself the bank from which she would leap towards
death. It was already five days since she had left Windsor, for
she had wandered about, always avoiding speech or questioning
looks, and recovering her air of proud self-dependence whenever
she was under observation, choosing her decent lodging at night,
and dressing herself neatly in the morning, and setting off on her
way steadily, or remaining under shelter if it rained, as if she
had a happy life to cherish.

And yet, even in her most self-conscious moments, the face was
sadly different from that which had smiled at itself in the old
specked glass, or smiled at others when they glanced at it
admiringly. A hard and even fierce look had come in the eyes,
though their lashes were as long as ever, and they had all their
dark brightness. And the cheek was never dimpled with smiles now.
It was the same rounded, pouting, childish prettiness, but with
all love and belief in love departed from it--the sadder for its
beauty, like that wondrous Medusa-face, with the passionate,
passionless lips.

At last she was among the fields she had been dreaming of, on a
long narrow pathway leading towards a wood. If there should be a
pool in that wood! It would be better hidden than one in the
fields. No, it was not a wood, only a wild brake, where there had
once been gravel-pits, leaving mounds and hollows studded with
brushwood and small trees. She roamed up and down, thinking there
was perhaps a pool in every hollow before she came to it, till her
limbs were weary, and she sat down to rest. The afternoon was far
advanced, and the leaden sky was darkening, as if the sun were
setting behind it. After a little while Hetty started up again,
feeling that darkness would soon come on; and she must put off
finding the pool till to-morrow, and make her way to some shelter
for the night. She had quite lost her way in the fields, and
might as well go in one direction as another, for aught she knew.
She walked through field after field, and no village, no house was
in sight; but there, at the corner of this pasture, there was a
break in the hedges; the land seemed to dip down a little, and two
trees leaned towards each other across the opening. Hetty's heart
gave a great heat as she thought there must be a pool there. She
walked towards it heavily over the tufted grass, with pale lips
and a sense of trembling. It was as if the thing were come in
spite of herself, instead of being the object of her search.

There it was, black under the darkening sky: no motion, no sound
near. She set down her basket, and then sank down herself on the
grass, trembling. The pool had its wintry depth now: by the time
it got shallow, as she remembered the pools did at Hayslope, in
the summer, no one could find out that it was her body. But then
there was her basket--she must hide that too. She must throw it
into the water--make it heavy with stones first, and then throw it
in. She got up to look about for stones, and soon brought five or
six, which she laid down beside her basket, and then sat down
again. There was no need to hurry--there was all the night to
drown herself in. She sat leaning her elbow on the basket. She
was weary, hungry. There were some buns in her basket--three,
which she had supplied herself with at the place where she ate her
dinner. She took them out now and ate them eagerly, and then sat
still again, looking at the pool. The soothed sensation that came
over her from the satisfaction of her hunger, and this fixed
dreamy attitude, brought on drowsiness, and presently her head
sank down on her knees. She was fast asleep.

When she awoke it was deep night, and she felt chill. She was
frightened at this darkness--frightened at the long night before
her. If she could but throw herself into the water! No, not yet.
She began to walk about that she might get warm again, as if she
would have more resolution then. Oh how long the time was in that
darkness! The bright hearth and the warmth and the voices of
home, the secure uprising and lying down, the familiar fields, the
familiar people, the Sundays and holidays with their simple joys
of dress and feasting--all the sweets of her young life rushed
before her now, and she seemed to be stretching her arms towards
them across a great gulf. She set her teeth when she thought of
Arthur. She cursed him, without knowing what her cursing would
do. She wished he too might know desolation, and cold, and a life
of shame that he dared not end by death.

The horror of this cold, and darkness, and solitude--out of all
human reach--became greater every long minute. It was almost as
if she were dead already, and knew that she was dead, and longed
to get back to life again. But no: she was alive still; she had
not taken the dreadful leap. She felt a strange contradictory
wretchedness and exultation: wretchedness, that she did not dare
to face death; exultation, that she was still in life--that she
might yet know light and warmth again. She walked backwards and
forwards to warm herself, beginning to discern something of the
objects around her, as her eyes became accustomed to the night--
the darker line of the hedge, the rapid motion of some living
creature--perhaps a field-mouse--rushing across the grass. She no
longer felt as if the darkness hedged her in. She thought she
could walk back across the field, and get over the stile; and
then, in the very next field, she thought she remembered there was
a hovel of furze near a sheepfold. If she could get into that
hovel, she would be warmer. She could pass the night there, for
that was what Alick did at Hayslope in lambing-time. The thought
of this hovel brought the energy of a new hope. She took up her
basket and walked across the field, but it was some time before
she got in the right direction for the stile. The exercise and
the occupation of finding the stile were a stimulus to her,
however, and lightened the horror of the darkness and solitude.
There were sheep in the next field, and she startled a group as
she set down her basket and got over the stile; and the sound of
their movement comforted her, for it assured her that her
impression was right--this was the field where she had seen the
hovel, for it was the field where the sheep were. Right on along
the path, and she would get to it. She reached the opposite gate,
and felt her way along its rails and the rails of the sheep-fold,
till her hand encountered the pricking of the gorsy wall.
Delicious sensation! She had found the shelter. She groped her
way, touching the prickly gorse, to the door, and pushed it open.
It was an ill-smelling close place, but warm, and there was straw
on the ground. Hetty sank down on the straw with a sense of
escape. Tears came--she had never shed tears before since she
left Windsor--tears and sobs of hysterical joy that she had still
hold of life, that she was still on the familiar earth, with the
sheep near her. The very consciousness of her own limbs was a
delight to her: she turned up her sleeves, and kissed her arms
with the passionate love of life. Soon warmth and weariness
lulled her in the midst of her sobs, and she fell continually into
dozing, fancying herself at the brink of the pool again--fancying
that she had jumped into the water, and then awaking with a start,
and wondering where she was. But at last deep dreamless sleep
came; her head, guarded by her bonnet, found a pillow against the
gorsy wall, and the poor soul, driven to and fro between two equal
terrors, found the one relief that was possible to it--the relief
of unconsciousness.

Alas! That relief seems to end the moment it has begun. It
seemed to Hetty as if those dozen dreams had only passed into
another dream--that she was in the hovel, and her aunt was
standing over her with a candle in her hand. She trembled under
her aunt's glance, and opened her eyes. There was no candle, but
there was light in the hovel--the light of early morning through
the open door. And there was a face looking down on her; but it
was an unknown face, belonging to an elderly man in a smock-frock.

"Why, what do you do here, young woman?" the man said roughly.

Hetty trembled still worse under this real fear and shame than she
had done in her momentary dream under her aunt's glance. She felt
that she was like a beggar already--found sleeping in that place.
But in spite of her trembling, she was so eager to account to the
man for her presence here, that she found words at once.

"I lost my way," she said. "I'm travelling--north'ard, and I got
away from the road into the fields, and was overtaken by the dark.
Will you tell me the way to the nearest village?"

She got up as she was speaking, and put her hands to her bonnet to
adjust it, and then laid hold of her basket.

The man looked at her with a slow bovine gaze, without giving her
any answer, for some seconds. Then he turned away and walked
towards the door of the hovel, but it was not till he got there
that he stood still, and, turning his shoulder half-round towards
her, said, "Aw, I can show you the way to Norton, if you like.
But what do you do gettin' out o' the highroad?" he added, with a
tone of gruff reproof. "Y'ull be gettin' into mischief, if you
dooant mind."

"Yes," said Hetty, "I won't do it again. I'll keep in the road,
if you'll be so good as show me how to get to it."

"Why dooant you keep where there's a finger-poasses an' folks to
ax the way on?" the man said, still more gruffly. "Anybody 'ud
think you was a wild woman, an' look at yer."

Hetty was frightened at this gruff old man, and still more at this
last suggestion that she looked like a wild woman. As she
followed him out of the hovel she thought she would give him a
sixpence for telling her the way, and then he would not suppose
she was wild. As he stopped to point out the road to her, she put
her hand in her pocket to get the six-pence ready, and when he was
turning away, without saying good-morning, she held it out to him
and said, "Thank you; will you please to take something for your
trouble?"

He looked slowly at the sixpence, and then said, "I want none o'
your money. You'd better take care on't, else you'll get it stool
from yer, if you go trapesin' about the fields like a mad woman a-
thatway."

The man left her without further speech, and Hetty held on her
way. Another day had risen, and she must wander on. It was no
use to think of drowning herself--she could not do it, at least
while she had money left to buy food and strength to journey on.
But the incident on her waking this morning heightened her dread
of that time when her money would be all gone; she would have to
sell her basket and clothes then, and she would really look like a
beggar or a wild woman, as the man had said. The passionate joy
in life she had felt in the night, after escaping from the brink
of the black cold death in the pool, was gone now. Life now, by
the morning light, with the impression of that man's hard
wondering look at her, was as full of dread as death--it was
worse; it was a dread to which she felt chained, from which she
shrank and shrank as she did from the black pool, and yet could
find no refuge from it.

She took out her money from her purse, and looked at it. She had
still two-and-twenty shillings; it would serve her for many days
more, or it would help her to get on faster to Stonyshire, within
reach of Dinah. The thought of Dinah urged itself more strongly
now, since the experience of the night had driven her shuddering
imagination away from the pool. If it had been only going to
Dinah--if nobody besides Dinah would ever know--Hetty could have
made up her mind to go to her. The soft voice, the pitying eyes,
would have drawn her. But afterwards the other people must know,
and she could no more rush on that shame than she could rush on
death.

She must wander on and on, and wait for a lower depth of despair
to give her courage. Perhaps death would come to her, for she was
getting less and less able to bear the day's weariness. And yet--
such is the strange action of our souls, drawing us by a lurking
desire towards the very ends we dread--Hetty, when she set out
again from Norton, asked the straightest road northwards towards
Stonyshire, and kept it all that day.

Poor wandering Hetty, with the rounded childish face and the hard,
unloving, despairing soul looking out of it--with the narrow heart
and narrow thoughts, no room in them for any sorrows but her own,
and tasting that sorrow with the more intense bitterness! My
heart bleeds for her as I see her toiling along on her weary feet,
or seated in a cart, with her eyes fixed vacantly on the road
before her, never thinking or caring whither it tends, till hunger
comes and makes her desire that a village may be near.

What will be the end, the end of her objectless wandering, apart
from all love, caring for human beings only through her pride,
clinging to life only as the hunted wounded brute clings to it?

God preserve you and me from being the beginners of such miserty!

Chapter XXXVIII

The Quest

THE first ten days after Hetty's departure passed as quietly as
any other days with the family at the Hall Farm, and with Adam at
his daily work. They had expected Hetty to stay away a week or
ten days at least, perhaps a little longer if Dinah came back with
her, because there might then be somethung to detain them at
Snowfield. But when a fortnight had passed they began to feel a
little surprise that Hetty did not return; she must surely have
found it pleasanter to be with Dinah than any one could have
supposed. Adam, for his part, was getting very impatient to see
her, and he resolved that, if she did not appear the next day
(Saturday), he would set out on Sunday morning to fetch her.
There was no coach on a Sunday, but by setting out before it was
light, and perhaps getting a lift in a cart by the way, he would
arrive pretty early at Snowfield, and bring back Hetty the next
day--Dinah too, if she were coming. It was quite time Hetty came
home, and he would afford to lose his Monday for the sake of
bringing her.

His project was quite approved at the Farm when he went there on
Saturday evening. Mrs. Poyser desired him emphatically not to
come back without Hetty, for she had been quite too long away,
considering the things she had to get ready by the middle of
March, and a week was surely enough for any one to go out for
their health. As for Dinah, Mrs. Poyser had small hope of their
bringing her, unless they could make her believe the folks at
Hayslope were twice as miserable as the folks at Snowfield.
"Though," said Mrs. Poyser, by way of conclusion, "you might tell
her she's got but one aunt left, and SHE'S wasted pretty nigh to a
shadder; and we shall p'rhaps all be gone twenty mile farther off
her next Michaelmas, and shall die o' broken hearts among strange
folks, and leave the children fatherless and motherless."

"Nay, nay," said Mr. Poyser, who certainly had the air of a man
perfectly heart-whole, "it isna so bad as that. Thee't looking
rarely now, and getting flesh every day. But I'd be glad for
Dinah t' come, for she'd help thee wi' the little uns: they took
t' her wonderful."

So at daybreak, on Sunday, Adam set off. Seth went with him the
first mile or two, for the thought of Snowfield and the
possibility that Dinah might come again made him restless, and the
walk with Adam in the cold morning air, both in their best
clothes, helped to give him a sense of Sunday calm. It was the
last morning in February, with a low grey sky, and a slight hoar-
frost on the green border of the road and on the black hedges.
They heard the gurgling of the full brooklet hurrying down the
hill, and the faint twittering of the early birds. For they
walked in silence, though with a pleased sense of companionship.

"Good-bye, lad," said Adam, laying his hand on Seth's shoulder and
looking at him affectionately as they were about to part. "I wish
thee wast going all the way wi' me, and as happy as I am."

"I'm content, Addy, I'm content," said Seth cheerfully. "I'll be
an old bachelor, belike, and make a fuss wi' thy children."

The'y turned away from each other, and Seth walked leisurely
homeward, mentally repeating one of his favourite hymns--he was
very fond of hymns:

Dark and cheerless is the morn
Unaccompanied by thee:
Joyless is the day's return
Till thy mercy's beams I see:
Till thou inward light impart,
Glad my eyes and warm my heart.

Visit, then, this soul of mine,
Pierce the gloom of sin and grief--
Fill me, Radiancy Divine,
Scatter all my unbelief.
More and more thyself display,
Shining to the perfect day.

Adam walked much faster, and any one coming along the Oakbourne
road at sunrise that morning must have had a pleasant sight in
this tall broad-chested man, striding along with a carriage as
upright and firm as any soldier's, glancing with keen glad eyes at
the dark-blue hills as they began to show themselves on his way.
Seldom in Adam's life had his face been so free from any cloud of
anxiety as it was this morning; and this freedom from care, as is
usual with constructive practical minds like his, made him all the
more observant of the objects round him and all the more ready to
gather suggestions from them towards his own favourite plans and
ingenious contrivances. His happy love--the knowledge that his
steps were carrying him nearer and nearer to Hetty, who was so
soon to be his--was to his thoughts what the sweet morning air was
to his sensations: it gave him a consciousness of well-being that
made activity delightful. Every now and then there was a rush of
more intense feeling towards her, which chased away other images
than Hetty; and along with that would come a wondering
thankfulness that all this happiness was given to him--that this
life of ours had such sweetness in it. For Adam had a devout
mind, though he was perhaps rather impatient of devout words, and
his tenderness lay very close to his reverence, so that the one
could hardly be stirred without the other. But after feeling had
welled up and poured itself out in this way, busy thought would
come back with the greater vigour; and this morning it was intent
on schemes by which the roads might be improved that were so
imperfect all through the country, and on picturing all the
benefits that might come from the exertions of a single country
gentleman, if he would set himself to getting the roads made good
in his own district.

It seemed a very short walk, the ten miles to Oakbourne, that
pretty town within sight of the blue hills, where he break-fasted.
After this, the country grew barer and barer: no more rolling
woods, no more wide-branching trees near frequent homesteads, no
more bushy hedgerows, but greystone walls intersecting the meagre
pastures, and dismal wide-scattered greystone houses on broken
lands where mines had been and were no longer. "A hungry land,"
said Adam to himself. "I'd rather go south'ard, where they say
it's as flat as a table, than come to live here; though if Dinah
likes to live in a country where she can be the most comfort to
folks, she's i' the right to live o' this side; for she must look
as if she'd come straight from heaven, like th' angels in the
desert, to strengthen them as ha' got nothing t' eat."  And when
at last he came in sight of Snowfield, he thought it looked like a
town that was "fellow to the country," though the stream through
the valley where the great mill stood gave a pleasant greenness to
the lower fields. The town lay, grim, stony, and unsheltered, up
the side of a steep hill, and Adam did not go forward to it at
present, for Seth had told him where to find Dinah. It was at a
thatched cottage outside the town, a little way from the mill--an
old cottage, standing sideways towards the road, with a little bit
of potato-ground before it. Here Dinah lodged with an elderly
couple; and if she and Hetty happened to be out, Adam could learn
where they were gone, or when they would be at home again. Dinah
might be out on some preaching errand, and perhaps she would have
left Hetty at home. Adam could not help hoping this, and as he
recognized the cottage by the roadside before him, there shone out
in his face that involuntary smile which belongs to the
expectation of a near joy.

He hurried his step along the narrow causeway, and rapped at the
door. It was opened by a very clean old woman, with a slow
palsied shake of the head.

"Is Dinah Morris at home?" said Adam.

"Eh?...no," said the old woman, looking up at this tall stranger
with a wonder that made her slower of speech than usual. "Will
you please to come in?" she added, retiring from the door, as if
recollecting herself. "Why, ye're brother to the young man as
come afore, arena ye?"

"Yes," said Adam, entering. "That was Seth Bede. I'm his brother
Adam. He told me to give his respects to you and your good
master."

"Aye, the same t' him. He was a gracious young man. An' ye
feature him, on'y ye're darker. Sit ye down i' th' arm-chair. My
man isna come home from meeting."

Adam sat down patiently, not liking to hurry the shaking old woman
with questions, but looking eagerly towards the narrow twisting
stairs in one corner, for he thought it was possible Hetty might
have heard his voice and would come down them.

"So you're come to see Dinah Morris?" said the old woman, standing
opposite to him. "An' you didn' know she was away from home,
then?"

"No," said Adam, "but I thought it likely she might be away,
seeing as it's Sunday. But the other young woman--is she at home,
or gone along with Dinah?"

The old woman looked at Adam with a bewildered air.

"Gone along wi' her?" she said. "Eh, Dinah's gone to Leeds, a big
town ye may ha' heared on, where there's a many o' the Lord's
people. She's been gone sin' Friday was a fortnight: they sent
her the money for her journey. You may see her room here," she
went on, opening a door and not noticing the effect of her words
on Adam. He rose and followed her, and darted an eager glance
into the little room with its narrow bed, the portrait of Wesley
on the wall, and the few books lying on the large Bible. He had
had an irrational hope that Hetty might be there. He could not
speak in the first moment after seeing that the room was empty; an
undefined fear had seized him--something had happened to Hetty on
the journey. Still the old woman was so slow of; speech and
apprehension, that Hetty might be at Snowfield after all.

"It's a pity ye didna know," she said. "Have ye come from your
own country o' purpose to see her?"

"But Hetty--Hetty Sorrel," said Adam, abruptly; "Where is she?"

"I know nobody by that name," said the old woman, wonderingly.
"Is it anybody ye've heared on at Snowfield?"

"Did there come no young woman here--very young and pretty--Friday
was a fortnight, to see Dinah Morris?"

"Nay; I'n seen no young woman."

"Think; are you quite sure? A girl, eighteen years old, with dark
eyes and dark curly hair, and a red cloak on, and a basket on her
arm? You couldn't forget her if you saw her."

"Nay; Friday was a fortnight--it was the day as Dinah went away--
there come nobody. There's ne'er been nobody asking for her till
you come, for the folks about know as she's gone. Eh dear, eh
dear, is there summat the matter?"

The old woman had seen the ghastly look of fear in Adam's face.
But he was not stunned or confounded: he was thinking eagerly
where he could inquire about Hetty.

"Yes; a young woman started from our country to see Dinah, Friday
was a fortnight. I came to fetch her back. I'm afraid something
has happened to her. I can't stop. Good-bye."

He hastened out of the cottage, and the old woman followed him to
the gate, watching him sadly with her shaking head as he almost
ran towards the town. He was going to inquire at the place where
the Oakbourne coach stopped.

No! No young woman like Hetty had been seen there. Had any
accident happened to the coach a fortnight ago? No. And there
was no coach to take him back to Oakbourne that day. Well, he
would walk: he couldn't stay here, in wretched inaction. But the
innkeeper, seeing that Adam was in great anxiety, and entering
into this new incident with the eagerness of a man who passes a
great deal of time with his hands in his pockets looking into an
obstinately monotonous street, offered to take him back to
Oakbourne in his own "taxed cart" this very evening. It was not
five o'clock; there was plenty of time for Adam to take a meal and
yet to get to Oakbourne before ten o'clock. The innkeeper
declared that he really wanted to go to Oakbourne, and might as
well go to-night; he should have all Monday before him then.
Adam, after making an ineffectual attempt to eat, put the food in
his pocket, and, drinking a draught of ale, declared himself ready
to set off. As they approached the cottage, it occurred to him
that he would do well to learn from the old woman where Dinah was
to be found in Leeds: if there was trouble at the Hall Farm--he
only half-admitted the foreboding that there would be--the Poysers
might like to send for Dinah. But Dinah had not left any address,
and the old woman, whose memory for names was infirm, could not
recall the name of the "blessed woman" who was Dinah's chief
friend in the Society at Leeds.

During that long, long journey in the taxed cart, there was time
for all the conjectures of importunate fear and struggling hope.
In the very first shock of discovering that Hetty had not been to
Snowfield, the thought of Arthur had darted through Adam like a
sharp pang, but he tried for some time to ward off its return by
busying himself with modes of accounting for the alarming fact,
quite apart from that intolerable thought. Some accident had
happened. Hetty had, by some strange chance, got into a wrong
vehicle from Oakbourne: she had been taken ill, and did not want
to frighten them by letting them know. But this frail fence of
vague improbabilities was soon hurled down by a rush of distinct
agonizing fears. Hetty had been deceiving herself in thinking
that she could love and marry him: she had been loving Arthur all
the while; and now, in her desperation at the nearness of their
marriage, she had run away. And she was gone to him. The old
indignation and jealousy rose again, and prompted the suspicion
that Arthur had been dealing falsely--had written to Hetty--had
tempted her to come to him--being unwilling, after all, that she
should belong to another man besides himself. Perhaps the whole
thing had been contrived by him, and he had given her directions
how to follow him to Ireland--for Adam knew that Arthur had been
gone thither three weeks ago, having recently learnt it at the
Chase. Every sad look of Hetty's, since she had been engaged to
Adam, returned upon him now with all the exaggeration of painful
retrospect. He had been foolishly sanguine and confident. The
poor thing hadn't perhaps known her own mind for a long while; had
thought that she could forget Arthur; had been momentarily drawn
towards the man who offered her a protecting, faithful love. He
couldn't bear to blame her: she never meant to cause him this
dreadful pain. The blame lay with that man who had selfishly
played with her heart--had perhaps even deliberately lured her
away.

At Oakbourne, the ostler at the Royal Oak remembered such a young
woman as Adam described getting out of the Treddleston coach more
than a fortnight ago--wasn't likely to forget such a pretty lass
as that in a hurry--was sure she had not gone on by the Buxton
coach that went through Snowfield, but had lost sight of her while
he went away with the horses and had never set eyes on her again.
Adam then went straight to the house from which the Stonition
coach started: Stoniton was the most obvious place for Hetty to go
to first, whatever might be her destination, for she would hardly
venture on any but the chief coach-roads. She had been noticed
here too, and was remembered to have sat on the box by the
coachman; but the coachman could not be seen, for another man had
been driving on that road in his stead the last three or four
days. He could probably be seen at Stoniton, through inquiry at
the inn where the coach put up. So the anxious heart-stricken
Adam must of necessity wait and try to rest till morning--nay,
till eleven o'clock, when the coach started.

At Stoniton another delay occurred, for the old coachman who had
driven Hetty would not be in the town again till night. When he
did come he remembered Hetty well, and remembered his own joke
addressed to her, quoting it many times to Adam, and observing
with equal frequency that he thought there was something more than
common, because Hetty had not laughed when he joked her. But he
declared, as the people had done at the inn, that he had lost
sight of Hetty directly she got down. Part of the next morning
was consumed in inquiries at every house in the town from which a
coach started--(all in vain, for you know Hetty did not start from
Stonition by coach, but on foot in the grey morning)--and then in
walking out to the first toll-gates on the different lines of
road, in the forlorn hope of finding some recollection of her
there. No, she was not to be traced any farther; and the next
hard task for Adam was to go home and carry the wretched tidings
to the Hall Farm. As to what he should do beyond that, he had
come to two distinct resolutions amidst the tumult of thought and
feeling which was going on within him while he went to and fro.
He would not mention what he knew of Arthur Donnithorne's
behaviour to Hetty till there was a clear necessity for it: it was
still possible Hetty might come back, and the disclosure might be
an injury or an offence to her. And as soon as he had been home
and done what was necessary there to prepare for his further
absence, he would start off to Ireland: if he found no trace of
Hetty on the road, he would go straight to Arthur Donnithorne and
make himself certain how far he was acquainted with her movements.
Several times the thought occurred to him that he would consult
Mr. Irwine, but that would be useless unless he told him all, and
so betrayed the secret about Arthur. It seems strange that Adam,
in the incessant occupation of his mind about Hetty, should never
have alighted on the probability that she had gone to Windsor,
ignorant that Arthur was no longer there. Perhaps the reason was
that he could not conceive Hetty's throwing herself on Arthur
uncalled; he imagined no cause that could have driven her to such
a step, after that letter written in August. There were but two
alternatives in his mind: either Arthur had written to her again
and enticed her away, or she had simply fled from her approaching
marriage with himself because she found, after all, she could not
love him well enough, and yet was afraid of her friends' anger if
she retracted.

With this last determination on his mind, of going straight to
Arthur, the thought that he had spent two days in inquiries which
had proved to be almost useless, was torturing to Adam; and yet,
since he would not tell the Poysers his conviction as to where
Hetty was gone, or his intention to follow her thither, he must be
able to say to them that he had traced her as far as possible.

It was after twelve o'clock on Tuesday night when Adam reached
Treddleston; and, unwilling to disturb his mother and Seth, and
also to encounter their questions at that hour, he threw himself
without undressing on a bed at the "Waggon Overthrown," and slept
hard from pure weariness. Not more than four hours, however, for
before five o'clock he set out on his way home in the faint
morning twilight. He always kept a key of the workshop door in
his pocket, so that he could let himself in; and he wished to
enter without awaking his mother, for he was anxious to avoid
telling her the new trouble himself by seeing Seth first, and
asking him to tell her when it should be necessary. He walked
gently along the yard, and turned the key gently in the door; but,
as he expected, Gyp, who lay in the workshop, gave a sharp bark.
It subsided when he saw Adam, holding up his finger at him to
impose silence, and in his dumb, tailless joy he must content
himself with rubbing his body against his master's legs.

Adam was too heart-sick to take notice of Gyp's fondling. He
threw himself on the bench and stared dully at the wood and the
signs of work around him, wondering if he should ever come to feel
pleasure in them again, while Gyp, dimly aware that there was
something wrong with his master, laid his rough grey head on
Adam's knee and wrinkled his brows to look up at him. Hitherto,
since Sunday afternoon, Adam had been constantly among strange
people and in strange places, having no associations with the
details of his daily life, and now that by the light of this new
morning he was come back to his home and surrounded by the
familiar objects that seemed for ever robbed of their charm, the
reality--the hard, inevitable reality of his troubles pressed upon
him with a new weight. Right before him was an unfinished chest
of drawers, which he had been making in spare moments for Hetty's
use, when his home should be hers.

Seth had not heard Adam's entrance, but he had been roused by
Gyp's bark, and Adam heard him moving about in the room above,
dressing himself. Seth's first thoughts were about his brother:
he would come home to-day, surely, for the business would be
wanting him sadly by to-morrow, but it was pleasant to think he
had had a longer holiday than he had expected. And would Dinah
come too? Seth felt that that was the greatest happiness he could
look forward to for himself, though he had no hope left that she
would ever love him well enough to marry him; but he had often
said to himself, it was better to be Dinah's friend and brother
than any other woman's husband. If he could but be always near
her, instead of living so far off!

He came downstairs and opened the inner door leading from the
kitchen into the workshop, intending to let out Gyp; but he stood
still in the doorway, smitten with a sudden shock at the sight of
Adam seated listlessly on the bench, pale, unwashed, with sunken
blank eyes, almost like a drunkard in the morning. But Seth felt
in an instant what the marks meant--not drunkenness, but some
great calamity. Adam looked up at him without speaking, and Seth
moved forward towards the bench, himself trembling so that speech
did not come readily.

"God have mercy on us, Addy," he said, in a low voice, sitting
down on the bench beside Adam, "what is it?"

Adam was unable to speak. The strong man, accustomed to suppress
the signs of sorrow, had felt his heart swell like a child's at
this first approach of sympathy. He fell on Seth's neck and
sobbed.

Seth was prepared for the worst now, for, even in his
recollections of their boyhood, Adam had never sobbed before.

"Is it death, Adam? Is she dead?" he asked, in a low tone, when
Adam raised his head and was recovering himself.

"No, lad; but she's gone--gone away from us. She's never been to
Snowfield. Dinah's been gone to Leeds ever since last Friday was
a fortnight, the very day Hetty set out. I can't find out where
she went after she got to Stoniton."

Seth was silent from utter astonishment: he knew nothing that
could suggest to him a reason for Hetty's going away.

"Hast any notion what she's done it for?" he said, at last.

"She can't ha' loved me. She didn't like our marriage when it
came nigh--that must be it," said Adam. He had determined to
mention no further reason.

"I hear Mother stirring," said Seth. "Must we tell her?"

"No, not yet," said Adam, rising from the bench and pushing the
hair from his face, as if he wanted to rouse himself. "I can't
have her told yet; and I must set out on another journey directly,
after I've been to the village and th' Hall Farm. I can't tell
thee where I'm going, and thee must say to her I'm gone on
business as nobody is to know anything about. I'll go and wash
myself now."  Adam moved towards the door of the workshop, but
after a step or two he turned round, and, meeting Seth's eyes with
a calm sad glance, he said, "I must take all the money out o' the
tin box, lad; but if anything happens to me, all the rest 'll be
thine, to take care o' Mother with."

Seth was pale and trembling: he felt there was some terrible
secret under all this. "Brother," he said, faintly--he never
called Adam "Brother" except in solemn moments--"I don't believe
you'll do anything as you can't ask God's blessing on."

"Nay, lad," said Adam, "don't be afraid. I'm for doing nought but
what's a man's duty."

The thought that if he betrayed his trouble to his mother, she
would only distress him by words, half of blundering affection,
half of irrepressible triumph that Hetty proved as unfit to be his
wife as she had always foreseen, brought back some of his habitual
firmness and self-command. He had felt ill on his journey home--
he told her when she came down--had stayed all night at
Tredddleston for that reason; and a bad headache, that still hung
about him this morning, accounted for his paleness and heavy eyes.

He determined to go to the village, in the first place, attend to
his business for an hour, and give notice to Burge of his being
obliged to go on a journey, which he must beg him not to mention
to any one; for he wished to avoid going to the Hall Farm near
breakfast-time, when the children and servants would be in the
house-place, and there must be exclamations in their hearing about
his having returned without Hetty. He waited until the clock
struck nine before he left the work-yard at the village, and set
off, through the fields, towards the Farm. It was an immense
relief to him, as he came near the Home Close, to see Mr. Poyser
advancing towards him, for this would spare him the pain of going
to the house. Mr. Poyser was walking briskly this March morning,
with a sense of spring business on his mind: he was going to cast
the master's eye on the shoeing of a new cart-horse, carrying his
spud as a useful companion by the way. His surprise was great
when he caught sight of Adam, but he was not a man given to
presentiments of evil.

"Why, Adam, lad, is't you? Have ye been all this time away and
not brought the lasses back, after all? Where are they?"

"No, I've not brought 'em," said Adam, turning round, to indicate
that he wished to walk back with Mr. Poyser.

"Why," said Martin, looking with sharper attention at Adam, "ye
look bad. Is there anything happened?"

"Yes," said Adam, heavily. "A sad thing's happened. I didna find
Hetty at Snowfield."

Mr. Poyser's good-natured face showed signs of troubled
astonishment. "Not find her? What's happened to her?" he said,
his thoughts flying at once to bodily accident.

"That I can't tell, whether anything's happened to her. She never
went to Snowfield--she took the coach to Stoniton, but I can't
learn nothing of her after she got down from the Stoniton coach."

"Why, you donna mean she's run away?" said Martin, standing still,
so puzzled and bewildered that the fact did not yet make itself
felt as a trouble by him.

"She must ha' done," said Adam. "She didn't like our marriage
when it came to the point--that must be it. She'd mistook her
feelings."

Martin was silent for a minute or two, looking on the ground and
rooting up the grass with his spud, without knowing what he was
doing. His usual slowness was always trebled when the subject of
speech was painful. At last he looked up, right in Adam's face,
saying, "Then she didna deserve t' ha' ye, my lad. An' I feel i'
fault myself, for she was my niece, and I was allays hot for her
marr'ing ye. There's no amends I can make ye, lad--the more's the
pity: it's a sad cut-up for ye, I doubt."

Adam could say nothing; and Mr. Poyser, after pursuing his walk
for a little while, went on, "I'll be bound she's gone after
trying to get a lady's maid's place, for she'd got that in her
head half a year ago, and wanted me to gi' my consent. But I'd
thought better on her"--he added, shaking his head slowly and
sadly--"I'd thought better on her, nor to look for this, after
she'd gi'en y' her word, an' everything been got ready."

Adam had the strongest motives for encouraging this supposition in
Mr. Poyser, and he even tried to believe that it might possibly be
true. He had no warrant for the certainty that she was gone to
Arthur.

"It was better it should be so," he said, as quietly as he could,
"if she felt she couldn't like me for a husband. Better run away
before than repent after. I hope you won't look harshly on her if
she comes back, as she may do if she finds it hard to get on away
from home."

"I canna look on her as I've done before," said Martin decisively.
"She's acted bad by you, and by all of us. But I'll not turn my
back on her: she's but a young un, and it's the first harm I've
knowed on her. It'll be a hard job for me to tell her aunt. Why
didna Dinah come back wi' ye? She'd ha' helped to pacify her aunt
a bit."

"Dinah wasn't at Snowfield. She's been gone to Leeds this
fortnight, and I couldn't learn from th' old woman any direction
where she is at Leeds, else I should ha' brought it you."

"She'd a deal better be staying wi' her own kin," said Mr. Poyser,
indignantly, "than going preaching among strange folks a-that'n."

"I must leave you now, Mr. Poyser," said Adam, "for I've a deal to
see to."

"Aye, you'd best be after your business, and I must tell the
missis when I go home. It's a hard job."

"But," said Adam, "I beg particular, you'll keep what's happened
quiet for a week or two. I've not told my mother yet, and there's
no knowing how things may turn out."

"Aye, aye; least said, soonest mended. We'n no need to say why
the match is broke off, an' we may hear of her after a bit. Shake
hands wi' me, lad: I wish I could make thee amends."

There was something in Martin Poyser's throat at that moment which
caused him to bring out those scanty words in rather a broken
fashion. Yet Adam knew what they meant all the better, and the
two honest men grasped each other's hard hands in mutual
understanding.

There was nothing now to hinder Adam from setting off. He had
told Seth to go to the Chase and leave a message for the squire,
saying that Adam Bede had been obliged to start off suddenly on a
journey--and to say as much, and no more, to any one else who made
inquiries about him. If the Poysers learned that he was gone away
again, Adam knew they would infer that he was gone in search of
Hetty.

He had intended to go right on his way from the Hall Farm, but now
the impulse which had frequently visited him before--to go to Mr.
Irwine, and make a confidant of him--recurred with the new force
which belongs to a last opportunity. He was about to start on a
long journey--a difficult one--by sea--and no soul would know
where he was gone. If anything happened to him? Or, if he
absolutely needed help in any matter concerning Hetty? Mr. Irwine
was to be trusted; and the feeling which made Adam shrink from
telling anything which was her secret must give way before the
need there was that she should have some one else besides himself
who would be prepared to defend her in the worst extremity.
Towards Arthur, even though he might have incurred no new guilt,
Adam felt that he was not bound to keep silence when Hetty's
interest called on him to speak.

"I must do it," said Adam, when these thoughts, which had spread
themselves through hours of his sad journeying, now rushed upon
him in an instant, like a wave that had been slowly gathering;
"it's the right thing. I can't stand alone in this way any
longer."

Chapter XXXIX

The Tidings

ADAM turned his face towards Broxton and walked with his swiftest
stride, looking at his watch with the fear that Mr. Irwine might
be gone out--hunting, perhaps. The fear and haste together
produced a state of strong excitement before he reached the
rectory gate, and outside it he saw the deep marks of a recent
hoof on the gravel.

But the hoofs were turned towards the gate, not away from it, and
though there was a horse against the stable door, it was not Mr.
Irwine's: it had evidently had a journey this morning, and must
belong to some one who had come on business. Mr. Irwine was at
home, then; but Adam could hardly find breath and calmness to tell
Carroll that he wanted to speak to the rector. The double
suffering of certain and uncertain sorrow had begun to shake the
strong man. The butler looked at him wonderingly, as he threw
himself on a bench in the passage and stared absently at the clock
on the opposite wall. The master had somebody with him, he said,
but he heard the study door open--the stranger seemed to be coming
out, and as Adam was in a hurry, he would let the master know at
once.

Adam sat looking at the clock: the minute-hand was hurrying along
the last five minutes to ten with a loud, hard, indifferent tick,
and Adam watched the movement and listened to the sound as if he
had had some reason for doing so. In our times of bitter
suffering there are almost always these pauses, when our
consciousness is benumbed to everything but some trivial
perception or sensation. It is as if semi-idiocy came to give us
rest from the memory and the dread which refuse to leave us in our
sleep.

Carroll, coming back, recalled Adam to the sense of his burden.
He was to go into the study immediately. "I can't think what that
strange person's come about," the butler added, from mere
incontinence of remark, as he preceded Adam to the door, "he's
gone i' the dining-room. And master looks unaccountable--as if he
was frightened."  Adam took no notice of the words: he could not
care about other people's business. But when he entered the study
and looked in Mr. Irwine's face, he felt in an instant that there
was a new expression in it, strangely different from the warm
friendliness it had always worn for him before. A letter lay open
on the table, and Mr. Irwine's hand was on it, but the changed
glance he cast on Adam could not be owing entirely to
preoccupation with some disagreeable business, for he was looking
eagerly towards the door, as if Adam's entrance were a matter of
poignant anxiety to him.

"You want to speak to me, Adam," he said, in that low
constrainedly quiet tone which a man uses when he is determined to
suppress agitation. "Sit down here."  He pointed to a chair just
opposite to him, at no more than a yard's distance from his own,
and Adam sat down with a sense that this cold manner of Mr.
Irwine's gave an additional unexpected difficulty to his
disclosure. But when Adam had made up his mind to a measure, he
was not the man to renounce it for any but imperative reasons.

"I come to you, sir," he said, "as the gentleman I look up to most
of anybody. I've something very painful to tell you--something as
it'll pain you to hear as well as me to tell. But if I speak o'
the wrong other people have done, you'll see I didn't speak till
I'd good reason."

Mr. Irwine nodded slowly, and Adam went on rather tremulously,
"You was t' ha' married me and Hetty Sorrel, you know, sir, o' the
fifteenth o' this month. I thought she loved me, and I was th'
happiest man i' the parish. But a dreadful blow's come upon me."

Mr. Irwine started up from his chair, as if involuntarily, but
then, determined to control himself, walked to the window and
looked out.

"She's gone away, sir, and we don't know where. She said she was
going to Snowfield o' Friday was a fortnight, and I went last
Sunday to fetch her back; but she'd never been there, and she took
the coach to Stoniton, and beyond that I can't trace her. But now
I'm going a long journey to look for her, and I can't trust t'
anybody but you where I'm going."

Mr. Irwine came back from the window and sat down.

"Have you no idea of the reason why she went away?" he said.

"It's plain enough she didn't want to marry me, sir," said Adam.
"She didn't like it when it came so near. But that isn't all, I
doubt. There's something else I must tell you, sir. There's
somebody else concerned besides me."

A gleam of something--it was almost like relief or joy--came
across the eager anxiety of Mr. Irwine's face at that moment.
Adam was looking on the ground, and paused a little: the next
words were hard to speak. But when he went on, he lifted up his
head and looked straight at Mr. Irwine. He would do the thing he
had resolved to do, without flinching.

"You know who's the man I've reckoned my greatest friend," he
said, "and used to be proud to think as I should pass my life i'
working for him, and had felt so ever since we were lads...."

Mr. Irwine, as if all self-control had forsaken him, grasped
Adam's arm, which lay on the table, and, clutching it tightly like
a man in pain, said, with pale lips and a low hurried voice, "No,
Adam, no--don't say it, for God's sake!"

Adam, surprised at the violence of Mr. Irwine's feeling, repented
of the words that had passed his lips and sat in distressed
silence. The grasp on his arm gradually relaxed, and Mr. Irwine
threw himself back in his chair, saying, "Go on--I must know it."

"That man played with Hetty's feelings, and behaved to her as he'd
no right to do to a girl in her station o' life--made her presents
and used to go and meet her out a-walking. I found it out only
two days before he went away--found him a-kissing her as they were
parting in the Grove. There'd been nothing said between me and
Hetty then, though I'd loved her for a long while, and she knew
it. But I reproached him with his wrong actions, and words and
blows passed between us; and he said solemnly to me, after that,
as it had been all nonsense and no more than a bit o' flirting.
But I made him write a letter to tell Hetty he'd meant nothing,
for I saw clear enough, sir, by several things as I hadn't
understood at the time, as he'd got hold of her heart, and I
thought she'd belike go on thinking of him and never come to love
another man as wanted to marry her. And I gave her the letter,
and she seemed to bear it all after a while better than I'd
expected...and she behaved kinder and kinder to me...I daresay she
didn't know her own feelings then, poor thing, and they came back
upon her when it was too late...I don't want to blame her...I
can't think as she meant to deceive me. But I was encouraged to
think she loved me, and--you know the rest, sir. But it's on my
mind as he's been false to me, and 'ticed her away, and she's gone
to him--and I'm going now to see, for I can never go to work again
till I know what's become of her."

During Adam's narrative, Mr. Irwine had had time to recover his
self-mastery in spite of the painful thoughts that crowded upon
him. It was a bitter remembrance to him now--that morning when
Arthur breakfasted with him and seemed as if he were on the verge
of a confession. It was plain enough now what he had wanted to
confess. And if their words had taken another turn...if he
himself had been less fastidious about intruding on another man's
secrets...it was cruel to think how thin a film had shut out
rescue from all this guilt and misery. He saw the whole history
now by that terrible illumination which the present sheds back
upon the past. But every other feeling as it rushed upon his was
thrown into abeyance by pity, deep respectful pity, for the man
who sat before him--already so bruised, going forth with sad blind
resignedness to an unreal sorrow, while a real one was close upon
him, too far beyond the range of common trial for him ever to have
feared it. His own agitation was quelled by a certain awe that
comes over us in the presence of a great anguish, for the anguish
he must inflict on Adam was already present to him. Again he put
his hand on the arm that lay on the table, but very gently this
time, as he said solemnly:

"Adam, my dear friend, you have had some hard trials in your life.
You can bear sorrow manfully, as well as act manfully. God
requires both tasks at our hands. And there is a heavier sorrow
coming upon you than any you have yet known. But you are not
guilty--you have not the worst of all sorrows. God help him who
has!"

The two pale faces looked at each other; in Adam's there was
trembling suspense, in Mr. Irwine's hesitating, shrinking pity.
But he went on.

"I have had news of Hetty this morning. She is not gone to him.
She is in Stonyshire--at Stoniton."

Adam started up from his chair, as if he thought he could have
leaped to her that moment. But Mr. Irwine laid hold of his arm
again and said, persuasively, "Wait, Adam, wait."  So he sat down.

"She is in a very unhappy position--one which will make it worse
for you to find her, my poor friend, than to have lost her for
ever."

Adam's lips moved tremulously, but no sound came. They moved
again, and he whispered, "Tell me."

"She has been arrested...she is in prison."

It was as if an insulting blow had brought back the spirit of
resistance into Adam. The blood rushed to his face, and he said,
loudly and sharply, "For what?"

"For a great crime--the murder of her child."

"It CAN'T BE!" Adam almost shouted, starting up from his cnair and
making a stride towards the door; but he turned round again,
setting his back against the bookcase, and looking fiercely at Mr.
Irwine. "It isn't possible. She never had a child. She can't be
guilty. WHO says it?"

"God grant she may be innocent, Adam. We can still hope she is."

"But who says she is guilty?" said Adam violently. "Tell me
everything."

"Here is a letter from the magistrate before whom she was taken,
and the constable who arrested her is in the dining-room. She
will not confess her name or where she comes from; but I fear, I
fear, there can be no doubt it is Hetty. The description of her
person corresponds, only that she is said to look very pale and
ill. She had a small red-leather pocket-book in her pocket with
two names written in it--one at the beginning, 'Hetty Sorrel,
Hayslope,' and the other near the end, 'Dinah Morris, Snowfield.'
She will not say which is her own name--she denies everything, and
will answer no questions, and application has been made to me, as
a magistrate, that I may take measures for identifying her, for it
was thought probable that the name which stands first is her own
name."

"But what proof have they got against her, if it IS Hetty?" said
Adam, still violently, with an effort that seemed to shake his
whole frame. "I'll not believe it. It couldn't ha' been, and
none of us know it."

"Terrible proof that she was under the temptation to commit the
crime; but we have room to hope that she did not really commit it.
Try and read that letter, Adam."

Adam took the letter between his shaking hands and tried to fix
his eyes steadily on it. Mr. Irwine meanwhile went out to give
some orders. When he came back, Adam's eyes were still on the
first page--he couldn't read--he could not put the words together
and make out what they meant. He threw it down at last and
clenched his fist.

"It's HIS doing," he said; "if there's been any crime, it's at his
door, not at hers. HE taught her to deceive--HE deceived me
first. Let 'em put HIM on his trial--let him stand in court
beside her, and I'll tell 'em how he got hold of her heart, and
'ticed her t' evil, and then lied to me. Is HE to go free, while
they lay all the punishment on her...so weak and young?"

The image called up by these last words gave a new direction to
poor Adam's maddened feelings. He was silent, looking at the
corner of the room as if he saw something there. Then he burst
out again, in a tone of appealing anguish, "I can't bear it...O
God, it's too hard to lay upon me--it's too hard to think she's
wicked."

Mr. Irwine had sat down again in silence. He was too wise to
utter soothing words at present, and indeed, the sight of Adam
before him, with that look of sudden age which sometimes comes
over a young face in moments of terrible emotion--the hard
bloodless look of the skin, the deep lines about the quivering
mouth, the furrows in the brow--the sight of this strong firm man
shattered by the invisible stroke of sorrow, moved him so deeply
that speech was not easy. Adam stood motionless, with his eyes
vacantly fixed in this way for a minute or two; in that short
space he was living through all his love again.

"She can't ha' done it," he said, still without moving his eyes,
as if he were only talking to himself: "it was fear made her hide
it...I forgive her for deceiving me...I forgive thee, Hetty...thee
wast deceived too...it's gone hard wi' thee, my poor Hetty...but
they'll never make me believe it."

He was silent again for a few moments, and then he said, with
fierce abruptness, "I'll go to him--I'll bring him back--I'll make
him go and look at her in her misery--he shall look at her till he
can't forget it--it shall follow him night and day--as long as he
lives it shall follow him--he shan't escape wi' lies this time--
I'll fetch him, I'll drag him myself."

In the act of going towards the door, Adam paused automatically
and looked about for his hat, quite unconscious where he was or
who was present with him. Mr. Irwine had followed him, and now
took him by the arm, saying, in a quiet but decided tone, "No,
Adam, no; I'm sure you will wish to stay and see what good can be
done for her, instead of going on a useless errand of vengeance.
The punishment will surely fall without your aid. Besides, he is
no longer in Ireland. He must be on his way home--or would be,
long before you arrived, for his grandfather, I know, wrote for
him to come at least ten days ago. I want you now to go with me
to Stoniton. I have ordered a horse for you to ride with us, as
soon as you can compose yourself."

While Mr. Irwine was speaking, Adam recovered his consciousness of
the actual scene. He rubbed his hair off his forehead and
listened.

"Remember," Mr. Irwine went on, "there are others to think of, and
act for, besides yourself, Adam: there are Hetty's friends, the
good Poysers, on whom this stroke will fall more heavily than I
can bear to think. I expect it from your strength of mind, Adam--
from your sense of duty to God and man--that you will try to act
as long as action can be of any use."

In reality, Mr. Irwine proposed this journey to Stoniton for
Adam's own sake. Movement, with some object before him, was the
best means of counteracting the violence of suffering in these
first hours.

"You will go with me to Stoniton, Adam?" he said again, after a
moment's pause. "We have to see if it is really Hetty who is
there, you know."

"Yes, sir," said Adam, "I'll do what you think right. But the
folks at th' Hall Farm?"

"I wish them not to know till I return to tell them myself. I
shall have ascertained things then which I am uncertain about now,
and I shall return as soon as possible. Come now, the horses are
ready."

Chapter XL

The Bitter Waters Spread

MR. IRWINE returned from Stoniton in a post-chaise that night, and
the first words Carroll said to him, as he entered the house,
were, that Squire Donnithorne was dead--found dead in his bed at
ten o'clock that morning--and that Mrs. Irwine desired him to say
she should be awake when Mr. Irwine came home, and she begged him
not to go to bed without seeing her.

"Well, Dauphin," Mrs. Irwine said, as her son entered her room,
"you're come at last. So the old gentleman's fidgetiness and low
spirits, which made him send for Arthur in that sudden way, really
meant something. I suppose Carroll has told you that Donnithorne
was found dead in his bed this morning. You will believe my
prognostications another time, though I daresay I shan't live to
prognosticate anything but my own death."

"What have they done about Arthur?" said Mr. Irwine. "Sent a
messenger to await him at Liverpool?"

"Yes, Ralph was gone before the news was brought to us. Dear
Arthur, I shall live now to see him master at the Chase, and
making good times on the estate, like a generous-hearted fellow as
he is. He'll be as happy as a king now."

Mr. Irwine could not help giving a slight groan: he was worn with
anxiety and exertion, and his mother's light words were almost
intolerable.

"What are you so dismal about, Dauphin? Is there any bad news?
Or are you thinking of the danger for Arthur in crossing that
frightful Irish Channel at this time of year?"

"No, Mother, I'm not thinking of that; but I'm not prepared to
rejoice just now."

"You've been worried by this law business that you've been to
Stoniton about. What in the world is it, that you can't tell me?"

"You will know by and by, mother. It would not be right for me to
tell you at present. Good-night: you'll sleep now you have no
longer anything to listen for."

Mr. Irwine gave up his intention of sending a letter to meet
Arthur, since it would not now hasten his return: the news of his
grandfather's death would bring him as soon as he could possibly
come. He could go to bed now and get some needful rest, before
the time came for the morning's heavy duty of carrying his
sickening news to the Hall Farm and to Adam's home.

Adam himself was not come back from Stoniton, for though he shrank
from seeing Hetty, he could not bear to go to a distance from her
again.

"It's no use, sir," he said to the rector, "it's no use for me to
go back. I can't go to work again while she's here, and I
couldn't bear the sight o' the things and folks round home. I'll
take a bit of a room here, where I can see the prison walls, and
perhaps I shall get, in time, to bear seeing her."

Adam had not been shaken in his belief that Hetty was innocent of
the crime she was charged with, for Mr. Irwine, feeling that the
belief in her guilt would be a crushing addition to Adam's load,
had kept from him the facts which left no hope in his own mind.
There was not any reason for thrusting the whole burden on Adam at
once, and Mr. Irwine, at parting, only said, "If the evidence
should tell too strongly against her, Adam, we may still hope for
a pardon. Her youth and other circumstances will be a plea for
her."

"Ah, and it's right people should know how she was tempted into
the wrong way," said Adam, with bitter earnestness. "It's right
they should know it was a fine gentleman made love to her, and
turned her head wi' notions. You'll remember, sir, you've
promised to tell my mother, and Seth, and the people at the farm,
who it was as led her wrong, else they'll think harder of her than
she deserves. You'll be doing her a hurt by sparing him, and I
hold him the guiltiest before God, let her ha' done what she may.
If you spare him, I'll expose him!"

"I think your demand is just, Adam," said Mr. Irwine, "but when
you are calmer, you will judge Arthur more mercifully. I say
nothing now, only that his punishment is in other hands than
ours."

Mr. Irwine felt it hard upon him that he should have to tell of
Arthur's sad part in the story of sin and sorrow--he who cared for
Arthur with fatherly affection, who had cared for him with
fatherly pride. But he saw clearly that the secret must be known
before long, even apart from Adam's determination, since it was
scarcely to be supposed that Hetty would persist to the end in her
obstinate silence. He made up his mind to withhold nothing from
the Poysers, but to tell them the worst at once, for there was no
time to rob the tidings of their suddenness. Hetty's trial must
come on at the Lent assizes, and they were to be held at Stoniton
the next week. It was scarcely to be hoped that Martin Poyser
could escape the pain of being called as a witness, and it was
better he should know everything as long beforehand as possible.

Before ten o'clock on Thursday morning the home at the Hall Farm
was a house of mourning for a misfortune felt to be worse than
death. The sense of family dishonour was too keen even in the
kind-hearted Martin Poyser the younger to leave room for any
compassion towards Hetty. He and his father were simple-minded
farmers, proud of their untarnished character, proud that they
came of a family which had held up its head and paid its way as
far back as its name was in the parish register; and Hetty had
brought disgrace on them all--disgrace that could never be wiped
out. That was the all-conquering feeling in the mind both of
father and son--the scorching sense of disgrace, which neutralised
all other sensibility--and Mr. Irwine was struck with surprise to
observe that Mrs. Poyser was less severe than her husband. We are
often startled by the severity of mild people on exceptional
occasions; the reason is, that mild people are most liable to be
under the yoke of traditional impressions.

"I'm willing to pay any money as is wanted towards trying to bring
her off," said Martin the younger when Mr. Irwine was gone, while
the old grandfather was crying in the opposite chair, "but I'll
not go nigh her, nor ever see her again, by my own will. She's
made our bread bitter to us for all our lives to come, an' we
shall ne'er hold up our heads i' this parish nor i' any other.
The parson talks o' folks pitying us: it's poor amends pity 'ull
make us."

"Pity?" said the grandfather, sharply. "I ne'er wanted folks's
pity i' MY life afore...an' I mun begin to be looked down on now,
an' me turned seventy-two last St. Thomas's, an' all th'
underbearers and pall-bearers as I'n picked for my funeral are i'
this parish and the next to 't....It's o' no use now...I mun be
ta'en to the grave by strangers."

"Don't fret so, father," said Mrs. Poyser, who had spoken very
little, being almost overawed by her husband's unusual hardness
and decision. "You'll have your children wi' you; an' there's the
lads and the little un 'ull grow up in a new parish as well as i'
th' old un."

"Ah, there's no staying i' this country for us now," said Mr.
Poyser, and the hard tears trickled slowly down his round cheeks.
"We thought it 'ud be bad luck if the old squire gave us notice
this Lady day, but I must gi' notice myself now, an' see if there
can anybody be got to come an' take to the crops as I'n put i' the
ground; for I wonna stay upo' that man's land a day longer nor I'm
forced to't. An' me, as thought him such a good upright young
man, as I should be glad when he come to be our landlord. I'll
ne'er lift my hat to him again, nor sit i' the same church wi'
him...a man as has brought shame on respectable folks...an'
pretended to be such a friend t' everybody....Poor Adam there...a
fine friend he's been t' Adam, making speeches an' talking so
fine, an' all the while poisoning the lad's life, as it's much if
he can stay i' this country any more nor we can."

"An' you t' ha' to go into court, and own you're akin t' her,"
said the old man. "Why, they'll cast it up to the little un, as
isn't four 'ear old, some day--they'll cast it up t' her as she'd
a cousin tried at the 'sizes for murder."

"It'll be their own wickedness, then," said Mrs. Poyser, with a
sob in her voice. "But there's One above 'ull take care o' the
innicent child, else it's but little truth they tell us at church.
It'll be harder nor ever to die an' leave the little uns, an'
nobody to be a mother to 'em."

"We'd better ha' sent for Dinah, if we'd known where she is," said
Mr. Poyser; "but Adam said she'd left no direction where she'd be
at Leeds."

"Why, she'd be wi' that woman as was a friend t' her Aunt Judith,"
said Mrs. Poyser, comforted a little by this suggestion of her
husbands. "I've often heard Dinah talk of her, but I can't
remember what name she called her by. But there's Seth Bede; he's
like enough to know, for she's a preaching woman as the Methodists
think a deal on."

"I'll send to Seth," said Mr. Poyser. "I'll send Alick to tell
him to come, or else to send up word o' the woman's name, an' thee
canst write a letter ready to send off to Treddles'on as soon as
we can make out a direction."

"It's poor work writing letters when you want folks to come to you
i' trouble," said Mrs. Poyser. "Happen it'll be ever so long on
the road, an' never reach her at last."

Before Alick arrived with the message, Lisbeth's thoughts too had
already flown to Dinah, and she had said to Seth, "Eh, there's no
comfort for us i' this world any more, wi'out thee couldst get
Dinah Morris to come to us, as she did when my old man died. I'd
like her to come in an' take me by th' hand again, an' talk to me.
She'd tell me the rights on't, belike--she'd happen know some good
i' all this trouble an' heart-break comin' upo' that poor lad, as
ne'er done a bit o' wrong in's life, but war better nor anybody
else's son, pick the country round. Eh, my lad...Adam, my poor
lad!"

"Thee wouldstna like me to leave thee, to go and fetch Dinah?"
said Seth, as his mother sobbed and rocked herself to and fro.

"Fetch her?" said Lisbeth, looking up and pausing from her grief,
like a crying child who hears some promise of consolation. "Why,
what place is't she's at, do they say?"

"It's a good way off, mother--Leeds, a big town. But I could be
back in three days, if thee couldst spare me."

"Nay, nay, I canna spare thee. Thee must go an' see thy brother,
an' bring me word what he's a-doin'. Mester Irwine said he'd come
an' tell me, but I canna make out so well what it means when he
tells me. Thee must go thysen, sin' Adam wonna let me go to him.
Write a letter to Dinah canstna? Thee't fond enough o' writin'
when nobody wants thee."

"I'm not sure where she'd be i' that big town," said Seth. "If
I'd gone myself, I could ha' found out by asking the members o'
the Society. But perhaps if I put Sarah Williamson, Methodist
preacher, Leeds, o' th' outside, it might get to her; for most
like she'd be wi' Sarah Williamson."

Alick came now with the message, and Seth, finding that Mrs.
Poyser was writing to Dinah, gave up the intention of writing
himself; but he went to the Hall Farm to tell them all he could
suggest about the address of the letter, and warn them that there
might be some delay in the delivery, from his not knowing an exact
direction.

On leaving Lisbeth, Mr. Irwine had gone to Jonathan Burge, who had
also a claim to be acquainted with what was likely to keep Adam
away from business for some time; and before six o'clock that
evening there were few people in Broxton and Hayslope who had not
heard the sad news. Mr. Irwine had not mentioned Arthur's name to
Burge, and yet the story of his conduct towards Hetty, with all
the dark shadows cast upon it by its terrible consequences, was
presently as well known as that his grandfather was dead, and that
he was come into the estate. For Martin Poyser felt no motive to
keep silence towards the one or two neighbours who ventured to
come and shake him sorrowfully by the hand on the first day of his
trouble; and Carroll, who kept his ears open to all that passed at
the rectory, had framed an inferential version of the story, and
found early opportunities of communicating it.

One of those neighbours who came to Martin Poyser and shook him by
the hand without speaking for some minutes was Bartle Massey. He
had shut up his school, and was on his way to the rectory, where
he arrived about half-past seven in the evening, and, sending his
duty to Mr. Irwine, begged pardon for troubling him at that hour,
but had something particular on his mind. He was shown into the
study, where Mr. Irwine soon joined him.

"Well, Bartle?" said Mr. Irwine, putting out his hand. That was
not his usual way of saluting the schoolmaster, but trouble makes
us treat all who feel with us very much alike. "Sit down."

"You know what I'm come about as well as I do, sir, I daresay,"
said Bartle.

"You wish to know the truth about the sad news that has reached
you...about Hetty Sorrel?"

"Nay, sir, what I wish to know is about Adam Bede. I understand
you left him at Stoniton, and I beg the favour of you to tell me
what's the state of the poor lad's mind, and what he means to do.
For as for that bit o' pink-and-white they've taken the trouble to
put in jail, I don't value her a rotten nut--not a rotten nut--
only for the harm or good that may come out of her to an honest
man--a lad I've set such store by--trusted to, that he'd make my
bit o' knowledge go a good way in the world....Why, sir, he's the
only scholar I've had in this stupid country that ever had the
will or the head-piece for mathematics. If he hadn't had so much
hard work to do, poor fellow, he might have gone into the higher
branches, and then this might never have happened--might never
have happened."

Bartle was heated by the exertion of walking fast in an agitated
frame of mind, and was not able to check himself on this first
occasion of venting his feelings. But he paused now to rub his
moist forehead, and probably his moist eyes also.

"You'll excuse me, sir," he said, when this pause had given him
time to reflect, "for running on in this way about my own
feelings, like that foolish dog of mine howling in a storm, when
there's nobody wants to listen to me. I came to hear you speak,
not to talk myself--if you'll take the trouble to tell me what the
poor lad's doing."

"Don't put yourself under any restraint, Bartle," said Mr. Irwine.
"The fact is, I'm very much in the same condition as you just now;
I've a great deal that's painful on my mind, and I find it hard
work to be quite silent about my own feelings and only attend to
others. I share your concern for Adam, though he is not the only
one whose sufferings I care for in this affair. He intends to
remain at Stoniton till after the trial: it will come on probably
a week to-morrow. He has taken a room there, and I encouraged him
to do so, because I think it better he should be away from his own
home at present; and, poor fellow, he still believes Hetty is
innocent--he wants to summon up courage to see her if he can; he
is unwilling to leave the spot where she is."

"Do you think the creatur's guilty, then?" said Bartle. "Do you
think they'll hang her?"

"I'm afraid it will go hard with her. The evidence is very
strong. And one bad symptom is that she denies everything--denies
that she has had a child in the face of the most positive
evidence. I saw her myself, and she was obstinately silent to me;
she shrank up like a frightened animal when she saw me. I was
never so shocked in my life as at the change in her. But I trust
that, in the worst case, we may obtain a pardon for the sake of
the innocent who are involved."

"Stuff and nonsense!" said Bartle, forgetting in his irritation to
whom he was speaking. "I beg your pardon, sir, I mean it's stuff
and nonsense for the innocent to care about her being hanged. For
my own part, I think the sooner such women are put out o' the
world the better; and the men that help 'em to do mischief had
better go along with 'em for that matter. What good will you do
by keeping such vermin alive, eating the victual that 'ud feed
rational beings? But if Adam's fool enough to care about it, I
don't want him to suffer more than's needful....Is he very much
cut up, poor fellow?" Bartle added, taking out his spectacles and
putting them on, as if they would assist his imagination.

"Yes, I'm afraid the grief cuts very deep," said Mr. Irwine. "He
looks terribly shattered, and a certain violence came over him now
and then yesterday, which made me wish I could have remained near
him. But I shall go to Stoniton again to-morrow, and I have
confidence enough in the strength of Adam's principle to trust
that he will be able to endure the worst without being driven to
anything rash."

Mr. Irwine, who was involuntarily uttering his own thoughts rather
than addressing Bartle Massey in the last sentence, had in his
mind the possibility that the spirit of vengeance to-wards Arthur,
which was the form Adam's anguish was continually taking, might
make him seek an encounter that was likely to end more fatally
than the one in the Grove. This possibility heightened the
anxiety with which he looked forward to Arthur's arrival. But
Bartle thought Mr. Irwine was referring to suicide, and his face
wore a new alarm.

"I'll tell you what I have in my head, sir," he said, "and I hope
you'll approve of it. I'm going to shut up my school--if the
scholars come, they must go back again, that's all--and I shall go
to Stoniton and look after Adam till this business is over. I'll
pretend I'm come to look on at the assizes; he can't object to
that. What do you think about it, sir?"

"Well," said Mr. Irwine, rather hesitatingly, "there would be some
real advantages in that...and I honour you for your friendship
towards him, Bartle. But...you must be careful what you say to
him, you know. I'm afraid you have too little fellow-feeling in
what you consider his weakness about Hetty."

"Trust to me, sir--trust to me. I know what you mean. I've been
a fool myself in my time, but that's between you and me. I shan't
thrust myself on him only keep my eye on him, and see that he gets
some good food, and put in a word here and there."

"Then," said Mr. Irwine, reassured a little as to Bartle's
discretion, "I think you'll be doing a good deed; and it will be
well for you to let Adam's mother and brother know that you're
going."

"Yes, sir, yes," said Bartle, rising, and taking off his
spectacles, "I'll do that, I'll do that; though the mother's a
whimpering thing--I don't like to come within earshot of her;
however, she's a straight-backed, clean woman, none of your
slatterns. I wish you good-bye, sir, and thank you for the time
you've spared me. You're everybody's friend in this business--
everybody's friend. It's a heavy weight you've got on your
shoulders."

"Good-bye, Bartle, till we meet at Stoniton, as I daresay we
shall."

Bartle hurried away from the rectory, evading Carroll's
conversational advances, and saying in an exasperated tone to
Vixen, whose short legs pattered beside him on the gravel, "Now, I
shall be obliged to take you with me, you good-for-nothing woman.
You'd go fretting yourself to death if I left you--you know you
would, and perhaps get snapped up by some tramp. And you'll be
running into bad company, I expect, putting your nose in every
hole and corner where you've no business! But if you do anything
disgraceful, I'll disown you--mind that, madam, mind that!"

Chapter XLI

The Eve of the Trial

AN upper room in a dull Stoniton street, with two beds in it--one
laid on the floor. It is ten o'clock on Thursday night, and the
dark wall opposite the window shuts out the moonlight that might
have struggled with the light of the one dip candle by which
Bartle Massey is pretending to read, while he is really looking
over his spectacles at Adam Bede, seated near the dark window.

You would hardly have known it was Adam without being told. His
face has got thinner this last week: he has the sunken eyes, the
neglected beard of a man just risen from a sick-bed. His heavy
black hair hangs over his forehead, and there is no active impulse
in him which inclines him to push it off, that he may be more
awake to what is around him. He has one arm over the back of the
chair, and he seems to be looking down at his clasped hands. He
is roused by a knock at the door.

"There he is," said Bartle Massey, rising hastily and unfastening
the door. It was Mr. Irwine.

Adam rose from his chair with instinctive respect, as Mr. Irwine
approached him and took his hand.

"I'm late, Adam," he said, sitting down on the chair which Bartle
placed for him, "but I was later in setting off from Broxton than
I intended to be, and I have been incessantly occupied since I
arrived. I have done everything now, however--everything that can
be done to-night, at least. Let us all sit down."

Adam took his chair again mechanically, and Bartle, for whom there
was no chair remaining, sat on the bed in the background.

"Have you seen her, sir?" said Adam tremulously.

"Yes, Adam; I and the chaplain have both been with her this
evening."

"Did you ask her, sir...did you say anything about me?"

"Yes," said Mr. Irwine, with some hesitation, "I spoke of you. I
said you wished to see her before the trial, if she consented."

As Mr. Irwine paused, Adam looked at him with eager, questioning
eyes.

"You know she shrinks from seeing any one, Adam. It is not only
you--some fatal influence seems to have shut up her heart against
her fellow-creatures. She has scarcely said anything more than
'No' either to me or the chaplain. Three or four days ago, before
you were mentioned to her, when I asked her if there was any one
of her family whom she would like to see--to whom she could open
her mind--she said, with a violent shudder, 'Tell them not to come
near me--I won't see any of them.'"

Adam's head was hanging down again, and he did not speak. There
was silence for a few minutes, and then Mr. Irwine said, "I don't
like to advise you against your own feelings, Adam, if they now
urge you strongly to go and see her to-morrow morning, even
without her consent. It is just possible, notwithstanding
appearances to the contrary, that the interview might affect her
favourably. But I grieve to say I have scarcely any hope of that.
She didn't seem agitated when I mentioned your name; she only said
'No,' in the same cold, obstinate way as usual. And if the
meeting had no good effect on her, it would be pure, useless
suffering to you--severe suffering, I fear. She is very much
changed..."

Adam started up from his chair and seized his hat, which lay on
the table. But he stood still then, and looked at Mr. Irwine, as
if he had a question to ask which it was yet difficult to utter.
Bartle Massey rose quietly, turned the key in the door, and put it
in his pocket.

"Is he come back?" said Adam at last.

"No, he is not," said Mr. Irwine, quietly. "Lay down your hat,
Adam, unless you like to walk out with me for a little fresh air.
I fear you have not been out again to-day."

"You needn't deceive me, sir," said Adam, looking hard at Mr.
Irwine and speaking in a tone of angry suspicion. "You needn't be
afraid of me. I only want justice. I want him to feel what she
feels. It's his work...she was a child as it 'ud ha' gone t'
anybody's heart to look at...I don't care what she's done...it was
him brought her to it. And he shall know it...he shall feel
it...if there's a just God, he shall feel what it is t' ha'
brought a child like her to sin and misery."

"I'm not deceiving you, Adam," said Mr. Irwine. "Arthur
Donnithorne is not come back--was not come back when I left. I
have left a letter for him: he will know all as soon as he
arrives."

"But you don't mind about it," said Adam indignantly. "You think
it doesn't matter as she lies there in shame and misery, and he
knows nothing about it--he suffers nothing."

"Adam, he WILL know--he WILL suffer, long and bitterly. He has a
heart and a conscience: I can't be entirely deceived in his
character. I am convinced--I am sure he didn't fall under
temptation without a struggle. He may be weak, but he is not
callous, not coldly selfish. I am persuaded that this will be a
shock of which he will feel the effects all his life. Why do you
crave vengeance in this way? No amount of torture that you could
inflict on him could benefit her."

"No--O God, no," Adam groaned out, sinking on his chair again;
"but then, that's the deepest curse of all...that's what makes the
blackness of it...IT CAN NEVER BE UNDONE. My poor Hetty...she can
never be my sweet Hetty again...the prettiest thing God had made--
smiling up at me...I thought she loved me...and was good..."

Adam's voice had been gradually sinking into a hoarse undertone,
as if he were only talking to himself; but now he said abruptly,
looking at Mr. Irwine, "But she isn't as guilty as they say? You
don't think she is, sir? She can't ha' done it."

"That perhaps can never be known with certainty, Adam," Mr. Irwine
answered gently. "In these cases we sometimes form our judgment
on what seems to us strong evidence, and yet, for want of knowing
some small fact, our judgment is wrong. But suppose the worst:
you have no right to say that the guilt of her crime lies with
him, and that he ought to bear the punishment. It is not for us
men to apportion the shares of moral guilt and retribution. We
find it impossible to avoid mistakes even in determining who has
committed a single criminal act, and the problem how far a man is
to be held responsible for the unforeseen consequences of his own
deed is one that might well make us tremble to look into it. The
evil consequences that may lie folded in a single act of selfish
indulgence is a thought so awful that it ought surely to awaken
some feeling less presumptuous than a rash desire to punish. You
have a mind that can understand this fully, Adam, when you are
calm. Don't suppose I can't enter into the anguish that drives
you into this state of revengeful hatred. But think of this: if
you were to obey your passion--for it IS passion, and you deceive
yourself in calling it justice--it might be with you precisely as
it has been with Arthur; nay, worse; your passion might lead you
yourself into a horrible crime."

"No--not worse," said Adam, bitterly; "I don't believe it's worse--
I'd sooner do it--I'd sooner do a wickedness as I could suffer
for by myself than ha' brought HER to do wickedness and then stand
by and see 'em punish her while they let me alone; and all for a
bit o' pleasure, as, if he'd had a man's heart in him, he'd ha'
cut his hand off sooner than he'd ha' taken it. What if he didn't
foresee what's happened? He foresaw enough; he'd no right to
expect anything but harm and shame to her. And then he wanted to
smooth it off wi' lies. No--there's plenty o' things folks are
hanged for not half so hateful as that. Let a man do what he
will, if he knows he's to bear the punishment himself, he isn't
half so bad as a mean selfish coward as makes things easy t'
himself and knows all the while the punishment 'll fall on
somebody else."

"There again you partly deceive yourself, Adam. There is no sort
of wrong deed of which a man can bear the punishment alone; you
can't isolate yourself and say that the evil which is in you shall
not spread. Men's lives are as thoroughly blended with each other
as the air they breathe: evil spreads as necessarily as disease.
I know, I feel the terrible extent of suffering this sin of
Arthur's has caused to others; but so does every sin cause
suffering to others besides those who commit it. An act of
vengeance on your part against Arthur would simply be another evil
added to those we are suffering under: you could not bear the
punishment alone; you would entail the worst sorrows on every one
who loves you. You would have committed an act of blind fury that
would leave all the present evils just as they were and add worse
evils to them. You may tell me that you meditate no fatal act of
vengeance, but the feeling in your mind is what gives birth to
such actions, and as long as you indulge it, as long as you do not
see that to fix your mind on Arthur's punishment is revenge, and
not justice, you are in danger of being led on to the commission
of some great wrong. Remember what you told me about your
feelings after you had given that blow to Arthur in the Grove."

Adam was silent: the last words had called up a vivid image of the
past, and Mr. Irwine left him to his thoughts, while he spoke to
Bartle Massey about old Mr. Donnithorne's funeral and other
matters of an indifferent kind. But at length Adam turned round
and said, in a more subdued tone, "I've not asked about 'em at th'
Hall Farm, sir. Is Mr. Poyser coming?"

"He is come; he is in Stoniton to-night. But I could not advise
him to see you, Adam. His own mind is in a very perturbed state,
and it is best he should not see you till you are calmer."

"Is Dinah Morris come to 'em, sir? Seth said they'd sent for
her."

"No. Mr. Poyser tells me she was not come when he left. They're
afraid the letter has not reached her. It seems they had no exact
address."

Adam sat ruminating a little while, and then said, "I wonder if
Dinah 'ud ha' gone to