Adam Bede
“Why, she’s got lamed.”
“Lamed, confound you! What do you mean?”
“Why, th’ lad took her too close to Dalton’s hosses, an’ one on ’em
flung out at her, an’ she’s got her shank bruised o’ the near foreleg.”
The judicious historian abstains from narrating precisely what ensued.
You understand that there was a great deal of strong language, mingled
with soothing “who-ho’s” while the leg was examined; that John stood by
with quite as much emotion as if he had been a cunningly carved
crab-tree walking-stick, and that Arthur Donnithorne presently repassed
the iron gates of the pleasure-ground without singing as he went.
He considered himself thoroughly disappointed and annoyed. There was
not another mount in the stable for himself and his servant besides Meg
and Rattler. It was vexatious; just when he wanted to get out of the
way for a week or two. It seemed culpable in Providence to allow such a
combination of circumstances. To be shut up at the Chase with a broken
arm when every other fellow in his regiment was enjoying himself at
Windsor—shut up with his grandfather, who had the same sort of
affection for him as for his parchment deeds! And to be disgusted at
every turn with the management of the house and the estate! In such
circumstances a man necessarily gets in an ill humour, and works off
the irritation by some excess or other. “Salkeld would have drunk a
bottle of port every day,” he muttered to himself, “but I’m not well
seasoned enough for that. Well, since I can’t go to Eagledale, I’ll
have a gallop on Rattler to Norburne this morning, and lunch with
Gawaine.”
Behind this explicit resolution there lay an implicit one. If he
lunched with Gawaine and lingered chatting, he should not reach the
Chase again till nearly five, when Hetty would be safe out of his sight
in the housekeeper’s room; and when she set out to go home, it would be
his lazy time after dinner, so he should keep out of her way
altogether. There really would have been no harm in being kind to the
little thing, and it was worth dancing with a dozen ballroom belles
only to look at Hetty for half an hour. But perhaps he had better not
take any more notice of her; it might put notions into her head, as
Irwine had hinted; though Arthur, for his part, thought girls were not
by any means so soft and easily bruised; indeed, he had generally found
them twice as cool and cunning as he was himself. As for any real harm
in Hetty’s case, it was out of the question: Arthur Donnithorne
accepted his own bond for himself with perfect confidence.
So the twelve o’clock sun saw him galloping towards Norburne; and by
good fortune Halsell Common lay in his road and gave him some fine
leaps for Rattler. Nothing like “taking” a few bushes and ditches for
exorcising a demon; and it is really astonishing that the Centaurs,
with their immense advantages in this way, have left so bad a
reputation in history.
After this, you will perhaps be surprised to hear that although Gawaine
was at home, the hand of the dial in the courtyard had scarcely cleared
the last stroke of three when Arthur returned through the
entrance-gates, got down from the panting Rattler, and went into the
house to take a hasty luncheon. But I believe there have been men since
his day who have ridden a long way to avoid a rencontre, and then
galloped hastily back lest they should miss it. It is the favourite
stratagem of our passions to sham a retreat, and to turn sharp round
upon us at the moment we have made up our minds that the day is our
own.
“The cap’n’s been ridin’ the devil’s own pace,” said Dalton the
coachman, whose person stood out in high relief as he smoked his pipe
against the stable wall, when John brought up Rattler.
“An’ I wish he’d get the devil to do’s grooming for’n,” growled John.
“Aye; he’d hev a deal haimabler groom nor what he has now,” observed
Dalton—and the joke appeared to him so good that, being left alone upon
the scene, he continued at intervals to take his pipe from his mouth in
order to wink at an imaginary audience and shake luxuriously with a
silent, ventral laughter, mentally rehearsing the dialogue from the
beginning, that he might recite it with effect in the servants’ hall.
When Arthur went up to his dressing-room again after luncheon, it was
inevitable that the debate he had had with himself there earlier in the
day should flash across his mind; but it was impossible for him now to
dwell on the remembrance—impossible to recall the feelings and
reflections which had been decisive with him then, any more than to
recall the peculiar scent of the air that had freshened him when he
first opened his window. The desire to see Hetty had rushed back like
an ill-stemmed current; he was amazed himself at the force with which
this trivial fancy seemed to grasp him: he was even rather tremulous as
he brushed his hair—pooh! it was riding in that break-neck way. It was
because he had made a serious affair of an idle matter, by thinking of
it as if it were of any consequence. He would amuse himself by seeing
Hetty to-day, and get rid of the whole thing from his mind. It was all
Irwine’s fault. “If Irwine had said nothing, I shouldn’t have thought
half so much of Hetty as of Meg’s lameness.” However, it was just the
sort of day for lolling in the Hermitage, and he would go and finish
Dr. Moore’s _Zeluco_ there before dinner. The Hermitage stood in
Fir-tree Grove—the way Hetty was sure to come in walking from the Hall
Farm. So nothing could be simpler and more natural: meeting Hetty was a
mere circumstance of his walk, not its object.
Arthur’s shadow flitted rather faster among the sturdy oaks of the
Chase than might have been expected from the shadow of a tired man on a
warm afternoon, and it was still scarcely four o’clock when he stood
before the tall narrow gate leading into the delicious labyrinthine
wood which skirted one side of the Chase, and which was called Fir-tree
Grove, not because the firs were many, but because they were few. It
was a wood of beeches and limes, with here and there a light
silver-stemmed birch—just the sort of wood most haunted by the nymphs:
you see their white sunlit limbs gleaming athwart the boughs, or
peeping from behind the smooth-sweeping outline of a tall lime; you
hear their soft liquid laughter—but if you look with a too curious
sacrilegious eye, they vanish behind the silvery beeches, they make you
believe that their voice was only a running brooklet, perhaps they
metamorphose themselves into a tawny squirrel that scampers away and
mocks you from the topmost bough. It was not a grove with measured
grass or rolled gravel for you to tread upon, but with narrow,
hollow-shaped, earthy paths, edged with faint dashes of delicate
moss—paths which look as if they were made by the free will of the
trees and underwood, moving reverently aside to look at the tall queen
of the white-footed nymphs.
It was along the broadest of these paths that Arthur Donnithorne
passed, under an avenue of limes and beeches. It was a still
afternoon—the golden light was lingering languidly among the upper
boughs, only glancing down here and there on the purple pathway and its
edge of faintly sprinkled moss: an afternoon in which destiny disguises
her cold awful face behind a hazy radiant veil, encloses us in warm
downy wings, and poisons us with violet-scented breath. Arthur strolled
along carelessly, with a book under his arm, but not looking on the
ground as meditative men are apt to do; his eyes _would_ fix themselves
on the distant bend in the road round which a little figure must surely
appear before long. Ah! There she comes. First a bright patch of
colour, like a tropic bird among the boughs; then a tripping figure,
with a round hat on, and a small basket under her arm; then a
deep-blushing, almost frightened, but bright-smiling girl, making her
curtsy with a fluttered yet happy glance, as Arthur came up to her. If
Arthur had had time to think at all, he would have thought it strange
that he should feel fluttered too, be conscious of blushing too—in
fact, look and feel as foolish as if he had been taken by surprise
instead of meeting just what he expected. Poor things! It was a pity
they were not in that golden age of childhood when they would have
stood face to face, eyeing each other with timid liking, then given
each other a little butterfly kiss, and toddled off to play together.
Arthur would have gone home to his silk-curtained cot, and Hetty to her
home-spun pillow, and both would have slept without dreams, and
to-morrow would have been a life hardly conscious of a yesterday.
Arthur turned round and walked by Hetty’s side without giving a reason.
They were alone together for the first time. What an overpowering
presence that first privacy is! He actually dared not look at this
little butter-maker for the first minute or two. As for Hetty, her feet
rested on a cloud, and she was borne along by warm zephyrs; she had
forgotten her rose-coloured ribbons; she was no more conscious of her
limbs than if her childish soul had passed into a water-lily, resting
on a liquid bed and warmed by the midsummer sun-beams. It may seem a
contradiction, but Arthur gathered a certain carelessness and
confidence from his timidity: it was an entirely different state of
mind from what he had expected in such a meeting with Hetty; and full
as he was of vague feeling, there was room, in those moments of
silence, for the thought that his previous debates and scruples were
needless.
“You are quite right to choose this way of coming to the Chase,” he
said at last, looking down at Hetty; “it is so much prettier as well as
shorter than coming by either of the lodges.”
“Yes, sir,” Hetty answered, with a tremulous, almost whispering voice.
She didn’t know one bit how to speak to a gentleman like Mr. Arthur,
and her very vanity made her more coy of speech.
“Do you come every week to see Mrs. Pomfret?”
“Yes, sir, every Thursday, only when she’s got to go out with Miss
Donnithorne.”
“And she’s teaching you something, is she?”
“Yes, sir, the lace-mending as she learnt abroad, and the
stocking-mending—it looks just like the stocking, you can’t tell it’s
been mended; and she teaches me cutting-out too.”
“What! are _you_ going to be a lady’s maid?”
“I should like to be one very much indeed.” Hetty spoke more audibly
now, but still rather tremulously; she thought, perhaps she seemed as
stupid to Captain Donnithorne as Luke Britton did to her.
“I suppose Mrs. Pomfret always expects you at this time?”
“She expects me at four o’clock. I’m rather late to-day, because my
aunt couldn’t spare me; but the regular time is four, because that
gives us time before Miss Donnithorne’s bell rings.”
“Ah, then, I must not keep you now, else I should like to show you the
Hermitage. Did you ever see it?”
“No, sir.”
“This is the walk where we turn up to it. But we must not go now. I’ll
show it you some other time, if you’d like to see it.”
“Yes, please, sir.”
“Do you always come back this way in the evening, or are you afraid to
come so lonely a road?”
“Oh no, sir, it’s never late; I always set out by eight o’clock, and
it’s so light now in the evening. My aunt would be angry with me if I
didn’t get home before nine.”
“Perhaps Craig, the gardener, comes to take care of you?”
A deep blush overspread Hetty’s face and neck. “I’m sure he doesn’t;
I’m sure he never did; I wouldn’t let him; I don’t like him,” she said
hastily, and the tears of vexation had come so fast that before she had
done speaking a bright drop rolled down her hot cheek. Then she felt
ashamed to death that she was crying, and for one long instant her
happiness was all gone. But in the next she felt an arm steal round