Adam Bede
“Why, Mrs. Poyser, you wouldn’t like to live anywhere else but in a
farm-house, so well as you manage it,” said Adam, taking the basin;
“and there can be nothing to look at pleasanter nor a fine milch cow,
standing up to’ts knees in pasture, and the new milk frothing in the
pail, and the fresh butter ready for market, and the calves, and the
poultry. Here’s to your health, and may you allays have strength to
look after your own dairy, and set a pattern t’ all the farmers’ wives
in the country.”
Mrs. Poyser was not to be caught in the weakness of smiling at a
compliment, but a quiet complacency over-spread her face like a
stealing sunbeam, and gave a milder glance than usual to her blue-grey
eyes, as she looked at Adam drinking the whey. Ah! I think I taste that
whey now—with a flavour so delicate that one can hardly distinguish it
from an odour, and with that soft gliding warmth that fills one’s
imagination with a still, happy dreaminess. And the light music of the
dropping whey is in my ears, mingling with the twittering of a bird
outside the wire network window—the window overlooking the garden, and
shaded by tall Guelder roses.
“Have a little more, Mr. Bede?” said Mrs. Poyser, as Adam set down the
basin.
“No, thank you; I’ll go into the garden now, and send in the little
lass.”
“Aye, do; and tell her to come to her mother in the dairy.”
Adam walked round by the rick-yard, at present empty of ricks, to the
little wooden gate leading into the garden—once the well-tended
kitchen-garden of a manor-house; now, but for the handsome brick wall
with stone coping that ran along one side of it, a true farmhouse
garden, with hardy perennial flowers, unpruned fruit-trees, and kitchen
vegetables growing together in careless, half-neglected abundance. In
that leafy, flowery, bushy time, to look for any one in this garden was
like playing at “hide-and-seek.” There were the tall hollyhocks
beginning to flower and dazzle the eye with their pink, white, and
yellow; there were the syringas and Guelder roses, all large and
disorderly for want of trimming; there were leafy walls of scarlet
beans and late peas; there was a row of bushy filberts in one
direction, and in another a huge apple-tree making a barren circle
under its low-spreading boughs. But what signified a barren patch or
two? The garden was so large. There was always a superfluity of broad
beans—it took nine or ten of Adam’s strides to get to the end of the
uncut grass walk that ran by the side of them; and as for other
vegetables, there was so much more room than was necessary for them
that in the rotation of crops a large flourishing bed of groundsel was
of yearly occurrence on one spot or other. The very rose-trees at which
Adam stopped to pluck one looked as if they grew wild; they were all
huddled together in bushy masses, now flaunting with wide-open petals,
almost all of them of the streaked pink-and-white kind, which doubtless
dated from the union of the houses of York and Lancaster. Adam was wise
enough to choose a compact Provence rose that peeped out half-smothered
by its flaunting scentless neighbours, and held it in his hand—he
thought he should be more at ease holding something in his hand—as he
walked on to the far end of the garden, where he remembered there was
the largest row of currant-trees, not far off from the great yew-tree
arbour.
But he had not gone many steps beyond the roses, when he heard the
shaking of a bough, and a boy’s voice saying, “Now, then, Totty, hold
out your pinny—there’s a duck.”
The voice came from the boughs of a tall cherry-tree, where Adam had no
difficulty in discerning a small blue-pinafored figure perched in a
commodious position where the fruit was thickest. Doubtless Totty was
below, behind the screen of peas. Yes—with her bonnet hanging down her
back, and her fat face, dreadfully smeared with red juice, turned up
towards the cherry-tree, while she held her little round hole of a
mouth and her red-stained pinafore to receive the promised downfall. I
am sorry to say, more than half the cherries that fell were hard and
yellow instead of juicy and red; but Totty spent no time in useless
regrets, and she was already sucking the third juiciest when Adam said,
“There now, Totty, you’ve got your cherries. Run into the house with
’em to Mother—she wants you—she’s in the dairy. Run in this
minute—there’s a good little girl.”
He lifted her up in his strong arms and kissed her as he spoke, a
ceremony which Totty regarded as a tiresome interruption to
cherry-eating; and when he set her down she trotted off quite silently
towards the house, sucking her cherries as she went along.
“Tommy, my lad, take care you’re not shot for a little thieving bird,”
said Adam, as he walked on towards the currant-trees.
He could see there was a large basket at the end of the row: Hetty
would not be far off, and Adam already felt as if she were looking at
him. Yet when he turned the corner she was standing with her back
towards him, and stooping to gather the low-hanging fruit. Strange that
she had not heard him coming! Perhaps it was because she was making the
leaves rustle. She started when she became conscious that some one was
near—started so violently that she dropped the basin with the currants
in it, and then, when she saw it was Adam, she turned from pale to deep
red. That blush made his heart beat with a new happiness. Hetty had
never blushed at seeing him before.
“I frightened you,” he said, with a delicious sense that it didn’t
signify what he said, since Hetty seemed to feel as much as he did;
“let _me_ pick the currants up.”
That was soon done, for they had only fallen in a tangled mass on the
grass-plot, and Adam, as he rose and gave her the basin again, looked
straight into her eyes with the subdued tenderness that belongs to the
first moments of hopeful love.
Hetty did not turn away her eyes; her blush had subsided, and she met
his glance with a quiet sadness, which contented Adam because it was so
unlike anything he had seen in her before.
“There’s not many more currants to get,” she said; “I shall soon ha’
done now.”
“I’ll help you,” said Adam; and he fetched the large basket, which was
nearly full of currants, and set it close to them.
Not a word more was spoken as they gathered the currants. Adam’s heart
was too full to speak, and he thought Hetty knew all that was in it.
She was not indifferent to his presence after all; she had blushed when
she saw him, and then there was that touch of sadness about her which
must surely mean love, since it was the opposite of her usual manner,
which had often impressed him as indifference. And he could glance at
her continually as she bent over the fruit, while the level evening
sunbeams stole through the thick apple-tree boughs, and rested on her
round cheek and neck as if they too were in love with her. It was to
Adam the time that a man can least forget in after-life, the time when
he believes that the first woman he has ever loved betrays by a slight
something—a word, a tone, a glance, the quivering of a lip or an
eyelid—that she is at least beginning to love him in return. The sign
is so slight, it is scarcely perceptible to the ear or eye—he could
describe it to no one—it is a mere feather-touch, yet it seems to have
changed his whole being, to have merged an uneasy yearning into a
delicious unconsciousness of everything but the present moment. So much
of our early gladness vanishes utterly from our memory: we can never
recall the joy with which we laid our heads on our mother’s bosom or
rode on our father’s back in childhood. Doubtless that joy is wrought
up into our nature, as the sunlight of long-past mornings is wrought up
in the soft mellowness of the apricot, but it is gone for ever from our
imagination, and we can only _believe_ in the joy of childhood. But the
first glad moment in our first love is a vision which returns to us to
the last, and brings with it a thrill of feeling intense and special as
the recurrent sensation of a sweet odour breathed in a far-off hour of
happiness. It is a memory that gives a more exquisite touch to
tenderness, that feeds the madness of jealousy and adds the last
keenness to the agony of despair.
Hetty bending over the red bunches, the level rays piercing the screen
of apple-tree boughs, the length of bushy garden beyond, his own
emotion as he looked at her and believed that she was thinking of him,
and that there was no need for them to talk—Adam remembered it all to
the last moment of his life.
And Hetty? You know quite well that Adam was mistaken about her. Like
many other men, he thought the signs of love for another were signs of
love towards himself. When Adam was approaching unseen by her, she was
absorbed as usual in thinking and wondering about Arthur’s possible
return. The sound of any man’s footstep would have affected her just in
the same way—she would have _felt_ it might be Arthur before she had
time to see, and the blood that forsook her cheek in the agitation of
that momentary feeling would have rushed back again at the sight of any
one else just as much as at the sight of Adam. He was not wrong in
thinking that a change had come over Hetty: the anxieties and fears of
a first passion, with which she was trembling, had become stronger than
vanity, had given her for the first time that sense of helpless
dependence on another’s feeling which awakens the clinging deprecating
womanhood even in the shallowest girl that can ever experience it, and
creates in her a sensibility to kindness which found her quite hard
before. For the first time Hetty felt that there was something soothing
to her in Adam’s timid yet manly tenderness. She wanted to be treated
lovingly—oh, it was very hard to bear this blank of absence, silence,
apparent indifference, after those moments of glowing love! She was not
afraid that Adam would tease her with love-making and flattering
speeches like her other admirers; he had always been so reserved to
her; she could enjoy without any fear the sense that this strong brave
man loved her and was near her. It never entered into her mind that
Adam was pitiable too—that Adam too must suffer one day.
Hetty, we know, was not the first woman that had behaved more gently to
the man who loved her in vain because she had herself begun to love
another. It was a very old story, but Adam knew nothing about it, so he
drank in the sweet delusion.
“That’ll do,” said Hetty, after a little while. “Aunt wants me to leave
some on the trees. I’ll take ’em in now.”
“It’s very well I came to carry the basket,” said Adam “for it ’ud ha’
been too heavy for your little arms.”
“No; I could ha’ carried it with both hands.”
“Oh, I daresay,” said Adam, smiling, “and been as long getting into the
house as a little ant carrying a caterpillar. Have you ever seen those
tiny fellows carrying things four times as big as themselves?”
“No,” said Hetty, indifferently, not caring to know the difficulties of
ant life.
“Oh, I used to watch ’em often when I was a lad. But now, you see, I
can carry the basket with one arm, as if it was an empty nutshell, and
give you th’ other arm to lean on. Won’t you? Such big arms as mine
were made for little arms like yours to lean on.”
Hetty smiled faintly and put her arm within his. Adam looked down at
her, but her eyes were turned dreamily towards another corner of the
garden.
“Have you ever been to Eagledale?” she said, as they walked slowly
along.
“Yes,” said Adam, pleased to have her ask a question about himself.
“Ten years ago, when I was a lad, I went with father to see about some
work there. It’s a wonderful sight—rocks and caves such as you never
saw in your life. I never had a right notion o’ rocks till I went
there.”