Adam Bede
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 held 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 Fifth
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