CHAPTER VI.

YALBURY WOOD AND THE KEEPER’S HOUSE

A mood of blitheness rarely experienced even by young men was Dick’s on

the following Monday morning. It was the week after the Easter

holidays, and he was journeying along with Smart the mare and the light

spring-cart, watching the damp slopes of the hill-sides as they

streamed in the warmth of the sun, which at this unsettled season shone

on the grass with the freshness of an occasional inspector rather than

as an accustomed proprietor. His errand was to fetch Fancy, and some

additional household goods, from her father’s house in the neighbouring

parish to her dwelling at Mellstock. The distant view was darkly shaded

with clouds; but the nearer parts of the landscape were whitely

illumined by the visible rays of the sun streaming down across the

heavy gray shade behind.

The tranter had not yet told his son of the state of Shiner’s heart

that had been suggested to him by Shiner’s movements. He preferred to

let such delicate affairs right themselves; experience having taught

him that the uncertain phenomenon of love, as it existed in other

people, was not a groundwork upon which a single action of his own life

could be founded.

Geoffrey Day lived in the depths of Yalbury Wood, which formed portion

of one of the outlying estates of the Earl of Wessex, to whom Day was

head game-keeper, timber-steward, and general overlooker for this

district. The wood was intersected by the highway from Casterbridge to

London at a place not far from the house, and some trees had of late

years been felled between its windows and the ascent of Yalbury Hill,

to give the solitary cottager a glimpse of the passers-by.

It was a satisfaction to walk into the keeper’s house, even as a

stranger, on a fine spring morning like the present. A curl of

wood-smoke came from the chimney, and drooped over the roof like a blue

feather in a lady’s hat; and the sun shone obliquely upon the patch of

grass in front, which reflected its brightness through the open doorway

and up the staircase opposite, lighting up each riser with a shiny

green radiance, and leaving the top of each step in shade.

The window-sill of the front room was between four and five feet from

the floor, dropping inwardly to a broad low bench, over which, as well

as over the whole surface of the wall beneath, there always hung a deep

shade, which was considered objectionable on every ground save one,

namely, that the perpetual sprinkling of seeds and water by the caged

canary above was not noticed as an eyesore by visitors. The window was

set with thickly-leaded diamond glazing, formed, especially in the

lower panes, of knotty glass of various shades of green. Nothing was

better known to Fancy than the extravagant manner in which these

circular knots or eyes distorted everything seen through them from the

outside—lifting hats from heads, shoulders from bodies; scattering the

spokes of cart-wheels, and bending the straight fir-trunks into

semicircles. The ceiling was carried by a beam traversing its midst,

from the side of which projected a large nail, used solely and

constantly as a peg for Geoffrey’s hat; the nail was arched by a

rainbow-shaped stain, imprinted by the brim of the said hat when it was

hung there dripping wet.

The most striking point about the room was the furniture. This was a

repetition upon inanimate objects of the old principle introduced by

Noah, consisting for the most part of two articles of every sort. The

duplicate system of furnishing owed its existence to the forethought of

Fancy’s mother, exercised from the date of Fancy’s birthday onwards.

The arrangement spoke for itself: nobody who knew the tone of the

household could look at the goods without being aware that the second

set was a provision for Fancy, when she should marry and have a house

of her own. The most noticeable instance was a pair of green-faced

eight-day clocks, ticking alternately, which were severally two and

half minutes and three minutes striking the hour of twelve, one

proclaiming, in Italian flourishes, Thomas Wood as the name of its

maker, and the other—arched at the top, and altogether of more cynical

appearance—that of Ezekiel Saunders. They were two departed clockmakers

of Casterbridge, whose desperate rivalry throughout their lives was

nowhere more emphatically perpetuated than here at Geoffrey’s. These

chief specimens of the marriage provision were supported on the right

by a couple of kitchen dressers, each fitted complete with their cups,

dishes, and plates, in their turn followed by two dumb-waiters, two

family Bibles, two warming-pans, and two intermixed sets of chairs.

But the position last reached—the chimney-corner—was, after all, the

most attractive side of the parallelogram. It was large enough to

admit, in addition to Geoffrey himself, Geoffrey’s wife, her chair, and

her work-table, entirely within the line of the mantel, without danger

or even inconvenience from the heat of the fire; and was spacious

enough overhead to allow of the insertion of wood poles for the hanging

of bacon, which were cloaked with long shreds of soot, floating on the

draught like the tattered banners on the walls of ancient aisles.

These points were common to most chimney corners of the neighbourhood;

but one feature there was which made Geoffrey’s fireside not only an

object of interest to casual aristocratic visitors—to whom every

cottage fireside was more or less a curiosity—but the admiration of

friends who were accustomed to fireplaces of the ordinary hamlet model.

This peculiarity was a little window in the chimney-back, almost over

the fire, around which the smoke crept caressingly when it left the

perpendicular course. The window-board was curiously stamped with black

circles, burnt thereon by the heated bottoms of drinking-cups, which

had rested there after previously standing on the hot ashes of the

hearth for the purpose of warming their contents, the result giving to

the ledge the look of an envelope which has passed through innumerable

post-offices.

Fancy was gliding about the room preparing dinner, her head inclining

now to the right, now to the left, and singing the tips and ends of

tunes that sprang up in her mind like mushrooms. The footsteps of Mrs.

Day could be heard in the room overhead. Fancy went finally to the

door.

“Father! Dinner.”

A tall spare figure was seen advancing by the window with periodical

steps, and the keeper entered from the garden. He appeared to be a man

who was always looking down, as if trying to recollect something he

said yesterday. The surface of his face was fissured rather than

wrinkled, and over and under his eyes were folds which seemed as a kind

of exterior eyelids. His nose had been thrown backwards by a blow in a

poaching fray, so that when the sun was low and shining in his face,

people could see far into his head. There was in him a quiet grimness,

which would in his moments of displeasure have become surliness, had it

not been tempered by honesty of soul, and which was often

wrongheadedness because not allied with subtlety.

Although not an extraordinarily taciturn man among friends slightly

richer than himself, he never wasted words upon outsiders, and to his

trapper Enoch his ideas were seldom conveyed by any other means than

nods and shakes of the head. Their long acquaintance with each other’s

ways, and the nature of their labours, rendered words between them

almost superfluous as vehicles of thought, whilst the coincidence of

their horizons, and the astonishing equality of their social views, by

startling the keeper from time to time as very damaging to the theory

of master and man, strictly forbade any indulgence in words as

courtesies.

Behind the keeper came Enoch (who had been assisting in the garden) at

the well-considered chronological distance of three minutes—an interval

of non-appearance on the trapper’s part not arrived at without some

reflection. Four minutes had been found to express indifference to

indoor arrangements, and simultaneousness had implied too great an

anxiety about meals.

“A little earlier than usual, Fancy,” the keeper said, as he sat down

and looked at the clocks. “That Ezekiel Saunders o’ thine is tearing on

afore Thomas Wood again.”

“I kept in the middle between them,” said Fancy, also looking at the

two clocks.

“Better stick to Thomas,” said her father. “There’s a healthy beat in

Thomas that would lead a man to swear by en offhand. He is as true as

the town time. How is it your stap-mother isn’t here?”

As Fancy was about to reply, the rattle of wheels was heard, and

“Weh-hey, Smart!” in Mr. Richard Dewy’s voice rolled into the cottage

from round the corner of the house.

“Hullo! there’s Dewy’s cart come for thee, Fancy—Dick driving—afore

time, too. Well, ask the lad to have pot-luck with us.”

Dick on entering made a point of implying by his general bearing that

he took an interest in Fancy simply as in one of the same race and

country as himself; and they all sat down. Dick could have wished her

manner had not been so entirely free from all apparent consciousness of

those accidental meetings of theirs: but he let the thought pass. Enoch

sat diagonally at a table afar off, under the corner cupboard, and

drank his cider from a long perpendicular pint cup, having tall

fir-trees done in brown on its sides. He threw occasional remarks into

the general tide of conversation, and with this advantage to himself,

that he participated in the pleasures of a talk (slight as it was) at

meal-times, without saddling himself with the responsibility of

sustaining it.

“Why don’t your stap-mother come down, Fancy?” said Geoffrey. “You’ll

excuse her, Mister Dick, she’s a little queer sometimes.”

“O yes,—quite,” said Richard, as if he were in the habit of excusing

people every day.

“She d’belong to that class of womankind that become second wives: a

rum class rather.”

“Indeed,” said Dick, with sympathy for an indefinite something.

“Yes; and ’tis trying to a female, especially if you’ve been a first

wife, as she hev.”

“Very trying it must be.”

“Yes: you see her first husband was a young man, who let her go too

far; in fact, she used to kick up Bob’s-a-dying at the least thing in

the world. And when I’d married her and found it out, I thought, thinks

I, ‘’Tis too late now to begin to cure ’e;’ and so I let her bide. But

she’s queer,—very queer, at times!”

“I’m sorry to hear that.”

“Yes: there; wives be such a provoking class o’ society, because though

they be never right, they be never more than half wrong.”

Fancy seemed uneasy under the infliction of this household moralizing,

which might tend to damage the airy-fairy nature that Dick, as maiden

shrewdness told her, had accredited her with. Her dead silence

impressed Geoffrey with the notion that something in his words did not

agree with her educated ideas, and he changed the conversation.

“Did Fred Shiner send the cask o’ drink, Fancy?”

“I think he did: O yes, he did.”

“Nice solid feller, Fred Shiner!” said Geoffrey to Dick as he helped

himself to gravy, bringing the spoon round to his plate by way of the

potato-dish, to obviate a stain on the cloth in the event of a spill.

Now Geoffrey’s eyes had been fixed upon his plate for the previous four

or five minutes, and in removing them he had only carried them to the

spoon, which, from its fulness and the distance of its transit,

necessitated a steady watching through the whole of the route. Just as

intently as the keeper’s eyes had been fixed on the spoon, Fancy’s had

been fixed on her father’s, without premeditation or the slightest

phase of furtiveness; but there they were fastened. This was the reason

why:

Dick was sitting next to her on the right side, and on the side of the

table opposite to her father. Fancy had laid her right hand lightly

down upon the table-cloth for an instant, and to her alarm Dick, after

dropping his fork and brushing his forehead as a reason, flung down his

own left hand, overlapping a third of Fancy’s with it, and keeping it

there. So the innocent Fancy, instead of pulling her hand from the

trap, settled her eyes on her father’s, to guard against his discovery

of this perilous game of Dick’s. Dick finished his mouthful; Fancy

finished her crumb, and nothing was done beyond watching Geoffrey’s

eyes. Then the hands slid apart; Fancy’s going over six inches of

cloth, Dick’s over one. Geoffrey’s eye had risen.

“I said Fred Shiner is a nice solid feller,” he repeated, more

emphatically.

“He is; yes, he is,” stammered Dick; “but to me he is little more than

a stranger.”

“O, sure. Now I know en as well as any man can be known. And you know

en very well too, don’t ye, Fancy?”

Geoffrey put on a tone expressing that these words signified at present

about one hundred times the amount of meaning they conveyed literally.

Dick looked anxious.

“Will you pass me some bread?” said Fancy in a flurry, the red of her

face becoming slightly disordered, and looking as solicitous as a human

being could look about a piece of bread.

“Ay, that I will,” replied the unconscious Geoffrey. “Ay,” he

continued, returning to the displaced idea, “we are likely to remain

friendly wi’ Mr. Shiner if the wheels d’run smooth.”

“An excellent thing—a very capital thing, as I should say,” the youth

answered with exceeding relevance, considering that his thoughts,

instead of following Geoffrey’s remark, were nestling at a distance of

about two feet on his left the whole time.

“A young woman’s face will turn the north wind, Master Richard: my

heart if ’twon’t.” Dick looked more anxious and was attentive in

earnest at these words. “Yes; turn the north wind,” added Geoffrey

after an impressive pause. “And though she’s one of my own flesh and

blood . . . ”

“Will you fetch down a bit of raw-mil’ cheese from pantry-shelf?” Fancy

interrupted, as if she were famishing.

“Ay, that I will, chiel; chiel, says I, and Mr. Shiner only asking last

Saturday night . . . cheese you said, Fancy?”

Dick controlled his emotion at these mysterious allusions to Mr.

Shiner,—the better enabled to do so by perceiving that Fancy’s heart

went not with her father’s—and spoke like a stranger to the affairs of

the neighbourhood. “Yes, there’s a great deal to be said upon the power

of maiden faces in settling your courses,” he ventured, as the keeper

retreated for the cheese.

“The conversation is taking a very strange turn: nothing that _I_ have

ever done warrants such things being said!” murmured Fancy with

emphasis, just loud enough to reach Dick’s ears.

“You think to yourself, ’twas to be,” cried Enoch from his distant

corner, by way of filling up the vacancy caused by Geoffrey’s momentary

absence. “And so you marry her, Master Dewy, and there’s an end o’t.”

“Pray don’t say such things, Enoch,” came from Fancy severely, upon

which Enoch relapsed into servitude.

“If we be doomed to marry, we marry; if we be doomed to remain single,

we do,” replied Dick.

Geoffrey had by this time sat down again, and he now made his lips thin

by severely straining them across his gums, and looked out of the

window along the vista to the distant highway up Yalbury Hill. “That’s

not the case with some folk,” he said at length, as if he read the

words on a board at the further end of the vista.

Fancy looked interested, and Dick said, “No?”

“There’s that wife o’ mine. It was her doom to be nobody’s wife at all

in the wide universe. But she made up her mind that she would, and did

it twice over. Doom? Doom is nothing beside a elderly woman—quite a

chiel in her hands!”

A movement was now heard along the upstairs passage, and footsteps

descending. The door at the foot of the stairs opened, and the second

Mrs. Day appeared in view, looking fixedly at the table as she advanced

towards it, with apparent obliviousness of the presence of any other

human being than herself. In short, if the table had been the

personages, and the persons the table, her glance would have been the

most natural imaginable.

She showed herself to possess an ordinary woman’s face, iron-grey hair,

hardly any hips, and a great deal of cleanliness in a broad white

apron-string, as it appeared upon the waist of her dark stuff dress.

“People will run away with a story now, I suppose,” she began saying,

“that Jane Day’s tablecloths are as poor and ragged as any union

beggar’s!”

Dick now perceived that the tablecloth was a little the worse for wear,

and reflecting for a moment, concluded that ‘people’ in step-mother

language probably meant himself. On lifting his eyes he found that Mrs.

Day had vanished again upstairs, and presently returned with an armful

of new damask-linen tablecloths, folded square and hard as boards by

long compression. These she flounced down into a chair; then took one,

shook it out from its folds, and spread it on the table by instalments,

transferring the plates and dishes one by one from the old to the new

cloth.

“And I suppose they’ll say, too, that she ha’n’t a decent knife and

fork in her house!”

“I shouldn’t say any such ill-natured thing, I am sure—” began Dick.

But Mrs. Day had vanished into the next room. Fancy appeared

distressed.

“Very strange woman, isn’t she?” said Geoffrey, quietly going on with

his dinner. “But ’tis too late to attempt curing. My heart! ’tis so

growed into her that ’twould kill her to take it out. Ay, she’s very

queer: you’d be amazed to see what valuable goods we’ve got stowed away

upstairs.”

Back again came Mrs. Day with a box of bright steel horn-handled

knives, silver-plated forks, carver, and all complete. These were wiped

of the preservative oil which coated them, and then a knife and fork

were laid down to each individual with a bang, the carving knife and

fork thrust into the meat dish, and the old ones they had hitherto used

tossed away.

Geoffrey placidly cut a slice with the new knife and fork, and asked

Dick if he wanted any more.

The table had been spread for the mixed midday meal of dinner and tea,

which was common among frugal countryfolk. “The parishioners about

here,” continued Mrs. Day, not looking at any living being, but

snatching up the brown delf tea-things, “are the laziest, gossipest,

poachest, jailest set of any ever I came among. And they’ll talk about

my teapot and tea-things next, I suppose!” She vanished with the

teapot, cups, and saucers, and reappeared with a tea-service in white

china, and a packet wrapped in brown paper. This was removed, together

with folds of tissue-paper underneath; and a brilliant silver teapot

appeared.

“I’ll help to put the things right,” said Fancy soothingly, and rising

from her seat. “I ought to have laid out better things, I suppose. But”

(here she enlarged her looks so as to include Dick) “I have been away

from home a good deal, and I make shocking blunders in my

housekeeping.” Smiles and suavity were then dispensed all around by

this bright little bird.

After a little more preparation and modification, Mrs. Day took her

seat at the head of the table, and during the latter or tea division of

the meal, presided with much composure. It may cause some surprise to

learn that, now her vagary was over, she showed herself to be an

excellent person with much common sense, and even a religious

seriousness of tone on matters pertaining to her afflictions.