The Romantic Adventures of a Milkmaid

CHAPTER XIII

On going out into the garden next morning, with a strange sense of being another person than herself, she beheld Jim leaning mutely over the gate.

He nodded. ‘Good morning, Margery,’ he said civilly.

‘Good morning,’ said Margery in the same tone.

‘I beg your pardon,’ he continued. ‘But which way was you going this morning?’

‘I am not going anywhere just now, thank you. But I shall go to my father’s by-and-by with Edy.’ She went on with a sigh, ‘I have done what he has all along wished, that is, married you; and there’s no longer reason for enmity atween him and me.’

‘Trew – trew. Well, as I am going the same way, I can give you a lift in the trap, for the distance is long.’

‘No thank you – I am used to walking,’ she said.

They remained in silence, the gate between them, till Jim’s convictions would apparently allow him to hold his peace no longer. ‘This is a bad job!’ he murmured.

‘It is,’ she said, as one whose thoughts have only too readily been identified. ‘How I came to agree to it is more than I can tell!’ And tears began rolling down her cheeks.

‘The blame is more mine than yours, I suppose,’ he returned. ‘I ought to have said No, and not backed up the gentleman in carrying out this scheme. ’Twas his own notion entirely, as perhaps you know. I should never have thought of such a plan; but he said you’d be willing, and that it would be all right; and I was too ready to believe him.’

‘The thing is, how to remedy it,’ said she bitterly. ‘I believe, of course, in your promise to keep this private, and not to trouble me by calling.’

‘Certainly,’ said Jim. ‘I don’t want to trouble you. As for that, why, my dear Mrs. Hayward – ’

‘Don’t Mrs. Hayward me!’ said Margery sharply. ‘I won’t be Mrs. Hayward!’

Jim paused. ‘Well, you are she by law, and that was all I meant,’ he said mildly.

‘I said I would acknowledge no such thing, and I won’t. A thing can’t be legal when it’s against the wishes of the persons the laws are made to protect. So I beg you not to call me that anymore.’

‘Very well, Miss Tucker,’ said Jim deferentially. ‘We can live on exactly as before. We can’t marry anybody else, that’s true; but beyond that there’s no difference, and no harm done. Your father ought to be told, I suppose, even if nobody else is? It will partly reconcile him to you, and make your life smoother.’

Instead of directly replying, Margery exclaimed in a low voice:

‘O, it is a mistake – I didn’t see it all, owing to not having time to reflect! I agreed, thinking that at least I should get reconciled to father by the step. But perhaps he would as soon have me not married at all as married and parted. I must ha’ been enchanted – bewitched – when I gave my consent to this! I only did it to please that dear good dying nobleman – though why he should have wished it so much I can’t tell!’

‘Nor I neither,’ said Jim. ‘Yes, we’ve been fooled into it, Margery,’ he said, with extraordinary gravity. ‘He’s had his way wi’ us, and now we’ve got to suffer for it. Being a gentleman of patronage, and having bought several loads of lime o’ me, and having given me all that splendid furniture, I could hardly refuse – ’

‘What, did he give you that?’

‘Ay sure – to help me win ye.’

Margery covered her face with her hands; whereupon Jim stood up from the gate and looked critically at her. ‘’Tis a footy plot between you two men to – snare me!’ she exclaimed. ‘Why should you have done it – why should he have done it – when I’ve not deserved to be treated so. He bought the furniture – did he! O, I’ve been taken in – I’ve been wronged!’ The grief and vexation of finding that long ago, when fondly believing the Baron to have lover-like feelings himself for her, he was still conspiring to favour Jim’s suit, was more than she could endure.

Jim with distant courtesy waited, nibbling a straw, till her paroxysm was over. ‘One word, Miss Tuck – Mrs. – Margery,’ he then recommenced gravely. ‘You’ll find me man enough to respect your wish, and to leave you to yourself – for ever and ever, if that’s all. But I’ve just one word of advice to render ’ee. That is, that before you go to Silverthorn Dairy yourself you let me drive ahead and call on your father. He’s friends with me, and he’s not friends with you. I can break the news, a little at a time, and I think I can gain his good will for you now, even though the wedding be no natural wedding at all. At any count, I can hear what he’s got to say about ’ee, and come back here and tell ’ee.’

She nodded a cool assent to this, and he left her strolling about the garden in the sunlight while he went on to reconnoitre as agreed. It must not be supposed that Jim’s dutiful echoes of Margery’s regret at her precipitate marriage were all gospel; and there is no doubt that his private intention, after telling the dairy-farmer what had happened, was to ask his temporary assent to her caprice, till, in the course of time, she should be reasoned out of her whims and induced to settle down with Jim in a natural manner. He had, it is true, been somewhat nettled by her firm objection to him, and her keen sorrow for what she had done to please another; but he hoped for the best.

But, alas for the astute Jim’s calculations! He drove on to the dairy, whose white walls now gleamed in the morning sun; made fast the horse to a ring in the wall, and entered the barton. Before knocking, he perceived the dairyman walking across from a gate in the other direction, as if he had just come in. Jim went over to him. Since the unfortunate incident on the morning of the intended wedding they had merely been on nodding terms, from a sense of awkwardness in their relations.

‘What – is that thee?’ said Dairyman Tucker, in a voice which unmistakably startled Jim by its abrupt fierceness. ‘A pretty fellow thou be’st!’

It was a bad beginning for the young man’s life as a son-in-law, and augured ill for the delicate consultation he desired.

‘What’s the matter?’ said Jim.

‘Matter! I wish some folks would burn their lime without burning other folks’ property along wi’ it. You ought to be ashamed of yourself. You call yourself a man, Jim Hayward, and an honest lime-burner, and a respectable, market-keeping Christen, and yet at six o’clock this morning, instead o’ being where you ought to ha’ been – at your work, there was neither vell or mark o’ thee to be seen!’

‘Faith, I don’t know what you are raving at,’ said Jim.

‘Why – the sparks from thy couch-heap blew over upon my hay-rick, and the rick’s burnt to ashes; and all to come out o’ my well-squeezed pocket. I’ll tell thee what it is, young man. There’s no business in thee. I’ve known Silverthorn folk, quick and dead, for the last couple-o’-score year, and I’ve never knew one so three-cunning for harm as thee, my gentleman lime-burner; and I reckon it one o’ the luckiest days o’ my life when I ’scaped having thee in my family. That maid of mine was right; I was wrong. She seed thee to be a drawlacheting rogue, and ’twas her wisdom to go off that morning and get rid o’ thee. I commend her for’t, and I’m going to fetch her home to-morrow.’

‘You needn’t take the trouble. She’s coming home-along to-night of her own accord. I have seen her this morning, and she told me so.’

‘So much the better. I’ll welcome her warm. Nation! I’d sooner see her married to the parish fool than thee. Not you – you don’t care for my hay. Tarrying about where you shouldn’t be, in bed, no doubt; that’s what you was a-doing. Now, don’t you darken my doors again, and the sooner you be off my bit o’ ground the better I shall be pleased.’

Jim looked, as he felt, stultified. If the rick had been really destroyed, a little blame certainly attached to him, but he could not understand how it had happened. However, blame or none, it was clear he could not, with any self-respect, declare himself to be this peppery old gaffer’s son-in-law in the face of such an attack as this.

For months – almost years – the one transaction that had seemed necessary to compose these two families satisfactorily was Jim’s union with Margery. No sooner had it been completed than it appeared on all sides as the gravest mishap for both. Stating coldly that he would discover how much of the accident was to be attributed to his negligence, and pay the damage, he went out of the barton, and returned the way he had come.

Margery had been keeping a look-out for him, particularly wishing him not to enter the house, lest others should see the seriousness of their interview; and as soon as she heard wheels she went to the gate, which was out of view.

‘Surely father has been speaking roughly to you!’ she said, on seeing his face.

‘Not the least doubt that he have,’ said Jim.

‘But is he still angry with me?’

‘Not in the least. He’s waiting to welcome ’ee.’

‘Ah! because I’ve married you.’

‘Because he thinks you have not married me! He’s jawed me up hill and down. He hates me; and for your sake I have not explained a word.’

Margery looked towards home with a sad, severe gaze. ‘Mr. Hayward,’ she said, ‘we have made a great mistake, and we are in a strange position.’

‘True, but I’ll tell you what, mistress – I won’t stand – ’ He stopped suddenly. ‘Well, well; I’ve promised!’ he quietly added.

‘We must suffer for our mistake,’ she went on. ‘The way to suffer least is to keep our own counsel on what happened last evening, and not to meet. I must now return to my father.’

He inclined his head in indifferent assent, and she went indoors, leaving him there.

CHAPTER XIV

Margery returned home, as she had decided, and resumed her old life at Silverthorn. And seeing her father’s animosity towards Jim, she told him not a word of the marriage.

Her inner life, however, was not what it once had been. She had suffered a mental and emotional displacement – a shock, which had set a shade of astonishment on her face as a permanent thing.

Her indignation with the Baron for collusion with Jim, at first bitter, lessened with the lapse of a few weeks, and at length vanished in the interest of some tidings she received one day.

The Baron was not dead, but he was no longer at the Lodge. To the surprise of the physicians, a sufficient improvement had taken place in his condition to permit of his removal before the cold weather came. His desire for removal had been such, indeed, that it was advisable to carry it out at almost any risk. The plan adopted had been to have him borne on men’s shoulders in a sort of palanquin to the shore near Idmouth, a distance of several miles, where a yacht lay awaiting him. By this means the noise and jolting of a carriage, along irregular bye-roads, were avoided. The singular procession over the fields took place at night, and was witnessed by but few people, one being a labouring man, who described the scene to Margery. When the seaside was reached a long, narrow gangway was laid from the deck of the yacht to the shore, which was so steep as to allow the yacht to lie quite near. The men, with their burden, ascended by the light of lanterns, the sick man was laid in the cabin, and, as soon as his bearers had returned to the shore, the gangway was removed, a rope was heard skirring over wood in the darkness, the yacht quivered, spread her woven wings to the air, and moved away. Soon she was but a small, shapeless phantom upon the wide breast of the sea.

It was said that the yacht was bound for Algiers.

When the inimical autumn and winter weather came on, Margery wondered if he were still alive. The house being shut up, and the servants gone, she had no means of knowing, till, on a particular Saturday, her father drove her to Exonbury market. Here, in attending to his business, he left her to herself for awhile. Walking in a quiet street in the professional quarter of the town, she saw coming towards her the solicitor who had been present at the wedding, and who had acted for the Baron in various small local matters during his brief residence at the Lodge.

She reddened to peony hues, averted her eyes, and would have passed him. But he crossed over and barred the pavement, and when she met his glance he was looking with friendly severity at her. The street was quiet, and he said in a low voice, ‘How’s the husband?’

‘I don’t know, sir,’ said she.

‘What – and are your stipulations about secrecy and separate living still in force?’

‘They will always be,’ she replied decisively. ‘Mr. Hayward and I agreed on the point, and we have not the slightest wish to change the arrangement.’

‘H’m. Then ’tis Miss Tucker to the world; Mrs. Hayward to me and one or two others only?’

Margery nodded. Then she nerved herself by an effort, and, though blushing painfully, asked, ‘May I put one question, sir? Is the Baron dead?’

‘He is dead to you and to all of us. Why should you ask?’

‘Because, if he’s alive, I am sorry I married James Hayward. If he is dead I do not much mind my marriage.’

‘I repeat, he is dead to you,’ said the lawyer emphatically. ‘I’ll tell you all I know. My professional services for him ended with his departure from this country; but I think I should have heard from him if he had been alive still. I have not heard at all: and this, taken in connection with the nature of his illness, leaves no doubt in my mind that he is dead.’

Margery sighed, and thanking the lawyer she left him with a tear for the Baron in her eye. After this incident she became more restful; and the time drew on for her periodical visit to her grandmother.

A few days subsequent to her arrival her aged relative asked her to go with a message to the gardener at Mount Lodge (who still lived on there, keeping the grounds in order for the landlord). Margery hated that direction now, but she went. The Lodge, which she saw over the trees, was to her like a skull from which the warm and living flesh had vanished. It was twilight by the time she reached the cottage at the bottom of the Lodge garden, and, the room being illuminated within, she saw through the window a woman she had never seen before. She was dark, and rather handsome, and when Margery knocked she opened the door. It was the gardener’s widowed daughter, who had been advised to make friends with Margery.

She now found her opportunity. Margery’s errand was soon completed, the young widow, to her surprise, treating her with preternatural respect, and afterwards offering to accompany her home. Margery was not sorry to have a companion in the gloom, and they walked on together. The widow, Mrs. Peach, was demonstrative and confidential; and told Margery all about herself. She had come quite recently to live with her father – during the Baron’s illness, in fact – and her husband had been captain of a ketch.

‘I saw you one morning, ma’am,’ she said. ‘But you didn’t see me. It was when you were crossing the hill in sight of the Lodge. You looked at it, and sighed. ’Tis the lot of widows to sigh, ma’am, is it not?’

‘Widows – yes, I suppose; but what do you mean?’

Mrs. Peach lowered her voice. ‘I can’t say more, ma’am, with proper respect. But there seems to be no question of the poor Baron’s death; and though these foreign princes can take (as my poor husband used to tell me) what they call left-handed wives, and leave them behind when they go abroad, widowhood is widowhood, left-handed or right. And really, to be the left-handed wife of a foreign baron is nobler than to be married all round to a common man. You’ll excuse my freedom, ma’am; but being a widow myself, I have pitied you from my heart; so young as you are, and having to keep it a secret, and (excusing me) having no money out of his vast riches because ’tis swallowed up by Baroness Number One.’

Now Margery did not understand a word more of this than the bare fact that Mrs. Peach suspected her to be the Baron’s undowered widow, and such was the milkmaid’s nature that she did not deny the widow’s impeachment. The latter continued —

‘But ah, ma’am, all your troubles are straight backward in your memory – while I have troubles before as well as grief behind.’

‘What may they be, Mrs. Peach?’ inquired Margery with an air of the Baroness.

The other dropped her voice to revelation tones: ‘I have been forgetful enough of my first man to lose my heart to a second!’

‘You shouldn’t do that – it is wrong. You should control your feelings.’

‘But how am I to control my feelings?’

‘By going to your dead husband’s grave, and things of that sort.’

‘Do you go to your dead husband’s grave?’

‘How can I go to Algiers?’

‘Ah – too true! Well, I’ve tried everything to cure myself – read the words against it, gone to the Table the first Sunday of every month, and all sorts. But, avast, my shipmate! – as my poor man used to say – there ’tis just the same. In short, I’ve made up my mind to encourage the new one. ’Tis flattering that I, a new-comer, should have been found out by a young man so soon.’

‘Who is he?’ said Margery listlessly.

‘A master lime-burner.’

‘A master lime-burner?’

‘That’s his profession. He’s a partner-in-co., doing very well indeed.’

‘But what’s his name?’

‘I don’t like to tell you his name, for, though ’tis night, that covers all shame-facedness, my face is as hot as a ’Talian iron, I declare! Do you just feel it.’

Margery put her hand on Mrs. Peach’s face, and, sure enough, hot it was. ‘Does he come courting?’ she asked quickly.

‘Well only in the way of business. He never comes unless lime is wanted in the neighbourhood. He’s in the Yeomanry, too, and will look very fine when he comes out in regimentals for drill in May.’

‘Oh – in the Yeomanry,’ Margery said, with a slight relief. ‘Then it can’t – is he a young man?’

‘Yes, junior partner-in-co.’

The description had an odd resemblance to Jim, of whom Margery had not heard a word for months. He had promised silence and absence, and had fulfilled his promise literally, with a gratuitous addition that was rather amazing, if indeed it were Jim whom the widow loved. One point in the description puzzled Margery: Jim was not in the Yeomanry, unless, by a surprising development of enterprise, he had entered it recently.

At parting Margery said, with an interest quite tender, ‘I should like to see you again, Mrs. Peach, and hear of your attachment. When can you call?’

‘Oh – any time, dear Baroness, I’m sure – if you think I am good enough.’

‘Indeed, I do, Mrs. Peach. Come as soon as you’ve seen the lime-burner again.’

CHAPTER XV

Seeing that Jim lived several miles from the widow, Margery was rather surprised, and even felt a slight sinking of the heart, when her new acquaintance appeared at her door so soon as the evening of the following Monday. She asked Margery to walk out with her, which the young woman readily did.

‘I am come at once,’ said the widow breathlessly, as soon as they were in the lane, ‘for it is so exciting that I can’t keep it. I must tell it to somebody, if only a bird, or a cat, or a garden snail.’

‘What is it?’ asked her companion.

‘I’ve pulled grass from my husband’s grave to cure it – wove the blades into true lover’s knots; took off my shoes upon the sod; but, avast, my shipmate, – ’

‘Upon the sod – why?’

‘To feel the damp earth he’s in, and make the sense of it enter my soul. But no. It has swelled to a head; he is going to meet me at the Yeomanry Review.’

‘The master lime-burner?’

The widow nodded.

‘When is it to be?’

‘To-morrow. He looks so lovely in his accoutrements! He’s such a splendid soldier; that was the last straw that kindled my soul to say yes. He’s home from Exonbury for a night between the drills,’ continued Mrs. Peach. ‘He goes back to-morrow morning for the Review, and when it’s over he’s going to meet me. But, guide my heart, there he is!’

Her exclamation had rise in the sudden appearance of a brilliant red uniform through the trees, and the tramp of a horse carrying the wearer thereof. In another half-minute the military gentleman would have turned the corner, and faced them.

‘He’d better not see me; he’ll think I know too much,’ said Margery precipitately. ‘I’ll go up here.’

The widow, whose thoughts had been of the same cast, seemed much relieved to see Margery disappear in the plantation, in the midst of a spring chorus of birds. Once among the trees, Margery turned her head, and, before she could see the rider’s person she recognized the horse as Tony, the lightest of three that Jim and his partner owned, for the purpose of carting out lime to their customers.

Jim, then, had joined the Yeomanry since his estrangement from Margery. A man who had worn the young Queen Victoria’s uniform for seven days only could not be expected to look as if it were part of his person, in the manner of long-trained soldiers; but he was a well-formed young fellow, and of an age when few positions came amiss to one who has the capacity to adapt himself to circumstances.

Meeting the blushing Mrs. Peach (to whom Margery in her mind sternly denied the right to blush at all), Jim alighted and moved on with her, probably at Mrs. Peach’s own suggestion; so that what they said, how long they remained together, and how they parted, Margery knew not. She might have known some of these things by waiting; but the presence of Jim had bred in her heart a sudden disgust for the widow, and a general sense of discomfiture. She went away in an opposite direction, turning her head and saying to the unconscious Jim, ‘There’s a fine rod in pickle for you, my gentleman, if you carry out that pretty scheme!’

Jim’s military

coup

 had decidedly astonished her. What he might do next she could not conjecture. The idea of his doing anything sufficiently brilliant to arrest her attention would have seemed ludicrous, had not Jim, by entering the Yeomanry, revealed a capacity for dazzling exploits which made it unsafe to predict any limitation to his powers.

Margery was now excited. The daring of the wretched Jim in bursting into scarlet amazed her as much as his doubtful acquaintanceship with the demonstrative Mrs. Peach. To go to that Review, to watch the pair, to eclipse Mrs. Peach in brilliancy, to meet and pass them in withering contempt – if she only could do it! But, alas! she was a forsaken woman.

‘If the Baron were alive, or in England,’ she said to herself (for sometimes she thought he might possibly be alive), ‘and he were to take me to this Review, wouldn’t I show that forward Mrs. Peach what a lady is like, and keep among the select company, and not mix with the common people at all!’

It might at first sight be thought that the best course for Margery at this juncture would have been to go to Jim, and nip the intrigue in the bud without further scruple. But her own declaration in after days was that whoever could say that was far from realizing her situation. It was hard to break such ice as divided their two lives now, and to attempt it at that moment was a too humiliating proclamation of defeat. The only plan she could think of – perhaps not a wise one in the circumstances – was to go to the Review herself; and be the gayest there.

A method of doing this with some propriety soon occurred to her. She dared not ask her father, who scorned to waste time in sight-seeing, and whose animosity towards Jim knew no abatement; but she might call on her old acquaintance, Mr. Vine, Jim’s partner, who would probably be going with the rest of the holiday-folk, and ask if she might accompany him in his spring-trap. She had no sooner perceived the feasibility of this, through her being at her grandmother’s, than she decided to meet with the old man early the next morning.

In the meantime Jim and Mrs. Peach had walked slowly along the road together, Jim leading the horse, and Mrs. Peach informing him that her father, the gardener, was at Jim’s village further on, and that she had come to meet him. Jim, for reasons of his own, was going to sleep at his partner’s that night, and thus their route was the same. The shades of eve closed in upon them as they walked, and by the time they reached the lime-kiln, which it was necessary to pass to get to the village, it was quite dark. Jim stopped at the kiln, to see if matters had progressed rightly in his seven days’ absence, and Mrs. Peach, who stuck to him like a teazle, stopped also, saying she would wait for her father there.

She held the horse while he ascended to the top of the kiln. Then rejoining her, and not quite knowing what to do, he stood beside her looking at the flames, which to-night burnt up brightly, shining a long way into the dark air, even up to the ramparts of the earthwork above them, and overhead into the bosoms of the clouds.

It was during this proceeding that a carriage, drawn by a pair of dark horses, came along the turnpike road. The light of the kiln caused the horses to swerve a little, and the occupant of the carriage looked out. He saw the bluish, lightning-like flames from the limestone, rising from the top of the furnace, and hard by the figures of Jim Hayward, the widow, and the horse, standing out with spectral distinctness against the mass of night behind. The scene wore the aspect of some unholy assignation in Pandaemonium, and it was all the more impressive from the fact that both Jim and the woman were quite unconscious of the striking spectacle they presented. The gentleman in the carriage watched them till he was borne out of sight.

Having seen to the kiln, Jim and the widow walked on again, and soon Mrs. Peach’s father met them, and relieved Jim of the lady. When they had parted, Jim, with an expiration not unlike a breath of relief; went on to Mr. Vine’s, and, having put the horse into the stable, entered the house. His partner was seated at the table, solacing himself after the labours of the day by luxurious alternations between a long clay pipe and a mug of perry.

‘Well,’ said Jim eagerly, ‘what’s the news – how do she take it?’

‘Sit down – sit down,’ said Vine. ‘’Tis working well; not but that I deserve something o’ thee for the trouble I’ve had in watching her. The soldiering was a fine move; but the woman is a better! – who invented it?’

‘I myself,’ said Jim modestly.

‘Well; jealousy is making her rise like a thunderstorm, and in a day or two you’ll have her for the asking, my sonny. What’s the next step?’

‘The widow is getting rather a weight upon a feller, worse luck,’ said Jim. ‘But I must keep it up until to-morrow, at any rate. I have promised to see her at the Review, and now the great thing is that Margery should see we a-smiling together – I in my full-dres