CHAPTER III

At a manor not far away there lived a queer and primitive couple who had lately been blessed with a son and heir.  The christening took place during the week under notice, and this had been followed by a feast to the parishioners.  Christine’s father, one of the same generation and kind, had been asked to drive over and assist in the entertainment, and Christine, as a matter of course, accompanied him.

When they reached Athelhall, as the house was called, they found the usually quiet nook a lively spectacle.  Tables had been spread in the apartment which lent its name to the whole building—the hall proper—covered with a fine open-timbered roof, whose braces, purlins, and rafters made a brown thicket of oak overhead.  Here tenantry of all ages sat with their wives and families, and the servants were assisted in their ministrations by the sons and daughters of the owner’s friends and neighbours.  Christine lent a hand among the rest.

She was holding a plate in each hand towards a huge brown platter of baked rice-pudding, from which a footman was scooping a large spoonful, when a voice reached her ear over her shoulder: ‘Allow me to hold them for you.’

Christine turned, and recognized in the speaker the nephew of the entertainer, a young man from London, whom she had already met on two or three occasions.

She accepted the proffered help, and from that moment, whenever he passed her in their marchings to and fro during the remainder of the serving, he smiled acquaintance.  When their work was done, he improved the few words into a conversation.  He plainly had been attracted by her fairness.

Bellston was a self-assured young man, not particularly good-looking, with more colour in his skin than even Nicholas had.  He had flushed a little in attracting her notice, though the flush had nothing of nervousness in it—the air with which it was accompanied making it curiously suggestive of a flush of anger; and even when he laughed it was difficult to banish that fancy.

The late autumn sunlight streamed in through the window panes upon the heads and shoulders of the venerable patriarchs of the hamlet, and upon the middle-aged, and upon the young; upon men and women who had played out, or were to play, tragedies or tragi-comedies in that nook of civilization not less great, essentially, than those which, enacted on more central arenas, fix the attention of the world.  One of the party was a cousin of Nicholas Long’s, who sat with her husband and children.

To make himself as locally harmonious as possible, Mr. Bellston remarked to his companion on the scene—‘It does one’s heart good,’ he said, ‘to see these simple peasants enjoying themselves.’

‘O Mr. Bellston!’ exclaimed Christine; ‘don’t be too sure about that word “simple”!  You little think what they see and meditate!  Their reasonings and emotions are as complicated as ours.’

She spoke with a vehemence which would have been hardly present in her words but for her own relation to Nicholas.  The sense of that produced in her a nameless depression thenceforward.  The young man, however, still followed her up.

‘I am glad to hear you say it,’ he returned warmly.  ‘I was merely attuning myself to your mood, as I thought.  The real truth is that I know more of the Parthians, and Medes, and dwellers in Mesopotamia—almost of any people, indeed—than of the English rustics.  Travel and exploration are my profession, not the study of the British peasantry.’

Travel.  There was sufficient coincidence between his declaration and the course she had urged upon her lover, to lend Bellston’s account of himself a certain interest in Christine’s ears.  He might perhaps be able to tell her something that would be useful to Nicholas, if their dream were carried out.  A door opened from the hall into the garden, and she somehow found herself outside, chatting with Mr. Bellston on this topic, till she thought that upon the whole she liked the young man.  The garden being his uncle’s, he took her round it with an air of proprietorship; and they went on amongst the Michaelmas daisies and chrysanthemums, and through a door to the fruit-garden.  A green-house was open, and he went in and cut her a bunch of grapes.

‘How daring of you!  They are your uncle’s.’

‘O, he don’t mind—I do anything here.  A rough old buffer, isn’t he?’

She was thinking of her Nic, and felt that, by comparison with her present acquaintance, the farmer more than held his own as a fine and intelligent fellow; but the harmony with her own existence in little things, which she found here, imparted an alien tinge to Nicholas just now.  The latter, idealized by moonlight, or a thousand miles of distance, was altogether a more romantic object for a woman’s dream than this smart new-lacquered man; but in the sun of afternoon, and amid a surrounding company, Mr. Bellston was a very tolerable companion.

When they re-entered the hall, Bellston entreated her to come with him up a spiral stair in the thickness of the wall, leading to a passage and gallery whence they could look down upon the scene below.  The people had finished their feast, the newly-christened baby had been exhibited, and a few words having been spoken to them they began, amid a racketing of forms, to make for the greensward without, Nicholas’s cousin and cousin’s wife and cousin’s children among the rest.  While they were filing out, a voice was heard calling—‘Hullo!—here, Jim; where are you?’ said Bellston’s uncle.  The young man descended, Christine following at leisure.

‘Now will ye be a good fellow,’ the Squire continued, ‘and set them going outside in some dance or other that they know?  I’m dog-tired, and I want to have a yew words with Mr. Everard before we join ’em—hey, Everard?  They are shy till somebody starts ’em; afterwards they’ll keep gwine brisk enough.’

‘Ay, that they wool,’ said Squire Everard.

They followed to the lawn; and here it proved that James Bellston was as shy, or rather as averse, as any of the tenantry themselves, to acting the part of fugleman.  Only the parish people had been at the feast, but outlying neighbours had now strolled in for a dance.

‘They want “Speed the Plough,”’ said Bellston, coming up breathless.  ‘It must be a country dance, I suppose?  Now, Miss Everard, do have pity upon me.  I am supposed to lead off; but really I know no more about speeding the plough than a child just born!  Would you take one of the villagers?—just to start them, my uncle says.  Suppose you take that handsome young farmer over there—I don’t know his name, but I dare say you do—and I’ll come on with one of the dairyman’s daughters as a second couple.’

Christine turned in the direction signified, and changed colour—though in the shade nobody noticed it, ‘Oh, yes—I know him,’ she said coolly.  ‘He is from near our own place—Mr. Nicholas Long.’

‘That’s capital—then you can easily make him stand as first couple with you.  Now I must pick up mine.’

‘I—I think I’ll dance with you, Mr. Bellston,’ she said with some trepidation.  ‘Because, you see,’ she explained eagerly, ‘I know the figure and you don’t—so that I can help you; while Nicholas Long, I know, is familiar with the figure, and that will make two couples who know it—which is necessary, at least.’

Bellston showed his gratification by one of his angry-pleasant flushes—he had hardly dared to ask for what she proffered freely; and having requested Nicholas to take the dairyman’s daughter, led Christine to her place, Long promptly stepping up second with his charge.  There were grim silent depths in Nic’s character; a small deedy spark in his eye, as it caught Christine’s, was all that showed his consciousness of her.  Then the fiddlers began—the celebrated Mellstock fiddlers who, given free stripping, could play from sunset to dawn without turning a hair.  The couples wheeled and swung, Nicholas taking Christine’s hand in the course of business with the figure, when she waited for him to give it a little squeeze; but he did not.

Christine had the greatest difficulty in steering her partner through the maze, on account of his self-will, and when at last they reached the bottom of the long line, she was breathless with her hard labour..  Resting here, she watched Nic and his lady; and, though she had decidedly cooled off in these later months, began to admire him anew.  Nobody knew these dances like him, after all, or could do anything of this sort so well.  His performance with the dairyman’s daughter so won upon her, that when ‘Speed the Plough’ was over she contrived to speak to him.

‘Nic, you are to dance with me next time.’

He said he would, and presently asked her in a formal public manner, lifting his hat gallantly.  She showed a little backwardness, which he quite understood, and allowed him to lead her to the top, a row of enormous length appearing below them as if by magic as soon as they had taken their places.  Truly the Squire was right when he said that they only wanted starting.

‘What is it to be?’ whispered Nicholas.

She turned to the band.  ‘The Honeymoon,’ she said.

And then they trod the delightful last-century measure of that name, which if it had been ever danced better, was never danced with more zest.  The perfect responsiveness which their tender acquaintance threw into the motions of Nicholas and his partner lent to their gyrations the fine adjustment of two interacting parts of a single machine.  The excitement of the movement carried Christine back to the time—the unreflecting passionate time, about two years before—when she and Nic had been incipient lovers only; and it made her forget the carking anxieties, the vision of social breakers ahead, that had begun to take the gilding off her position now.  Nicholas, on his part, had never ceased to be a lover; no personal worries had as yet made him conscious of any staleness, flatness, or unprofitableness in his admiration of Christine.

‘Not quite so wildly, Nic,’ she whispered.  ‘I don’t object personally; but they’ll notice us.  How came you here?’

‘I heard that you had driven over; and I set out—on purpose for this.’

‘What—you have walked?’

‘Yes.  If I had waited for one of uncle’s horses I should have been too late.’

‘Five miles here and five back—ten miles on foot—merely to dance!’

‘With you.  What made you think of this old “Honeymoon” thing?’

‘O! it came into my head when I saw you, as what would have been a reality with us if you had not been stupid about that licence, and had got it for a distant church.’

‘Shall we try again?’

‘No—I don’t know.  I’ll think it over.’

The villagers admired their grace and skill, as the dancers themselves perceived; but they did not know what accompanied that admiration in one spot, at least.

‘People who wonder they can foot it so featly together should know what some others think,’ a waterman was saying to his neighbour.  ‘Then their wonder would be less.’

His comrade asked for information.

‘Well—really I hardly believe it—but ’tis said they be man and wife.  Yes, sure—went to church and did the job a’most afore ’twas light one morning.  But mind, not a word of this; for ’twould be the loss of a winter’s work to me if I had spread such a report and it were not true.’

When the dance had ended she rejoined her own section of the company.  Her father and Mr. Bellston the elder had now come out from the house, and were smoking in the background.  Presently she found that her father was at her elbow.

‘Christine, don’t dance too often with young Long—as a mere matter of prudence, I mean, as volk might think it odd, he being one of our own neighbouring farmers.  I should not mention this to ’ee if he were an ordinary young fellow; but being superior to the rest it behoves you to be careful.’

‘Exactly, papa,’ said Christine.

But the revived sense that she was deceiving him threw a damp over her spirits.  ‘But, after all,’ she said to herself, ‘he is a young man of Elsenford, handsome, able, and the soul of honour; and I am a young woman of the adjoining parish, who have been constantly thrown into communication with him.  Is it not, by nature’s rule, the most proper thing in the world that I should marry him, and is it not an absurd conventional regulation which says that such a union would be wrong?’

It may be concluded that the strength of Christine’s large-minded argument was rather an evidence of weakness than of strength in the passion it concerned, which had required neither argument nor reasoning of any kind for its maintenance when full and flush in its early days.

When driving home in the dark with her father she sank into pensive silence.  She was thinking of Nicholas having to trudge on foot all those miles back after his exertions on the sward.  Mr. Everard, arousing himself from a nap, said suddenly, ‘I have something to mention to ’ee, by George—so I have, Chris!  You probably know what it is?’

She expressed ignorance, wondering if her father had discovered anything of her secret.

‘Well, according to him you know it.  But I will tell ’ee.  Perhaps you noticed young Jim Bellston walking me off down the lawn with him?—whether or no, we walked together a good while; and he informed me that he wanted to pay his addresses to ’ee.  I naturally said that it depended upon yourself; and he replied that you were willing enough; you had given him particular encouragement—showing your preference for him by specially choosing him for your partner—hey?  “In that case,” says I, “go on and conquer—settle it with her—I have no objection.”  The poor fellow was very grateful, and in short, there we left the matter.  He’ll propose to-morrow.’

She saw now to her dismay what James Bellston had read as encouragement.  ‘He has mistaken me altogether,’ she said.  ‘I had no idea of such a thing.’

‘What, you won’t have him?’

‘Indeed, I cannot!’

‘Chrissy,’ said Mr. Everard with emphasis, ‘there’s noo body whom I should so like you to marry as that young man.  He’s a thoroughly clever fellow, and fairly well provided for.  He’s travelled all over the temperate zone; but he says that directly he marries he’s going to give up all that, and be a regular stay-at-home.  You would be nowhere safer than in his hands.’

‘It is true,’ she answered.  ‘He is a highly desirable match, and I should be well provided for, and probably very safe in his hands.’

‘Then don’t be skittish, and stand-to.’

She had spoken from her conscience and understanding, and not to please her father.  As a reflecting woman she believed that such a marriage would be a wise one.  In great things Nicholas was closest to her nature; in little things Bellston seemed immeasurably nearer than Nic; and life was made up of little things.

Altogether the firmament looked black for Nicholas Long, notwithstanding her half-hour’s ardour for him when she saw him dancing with the dairyman’s daughter.  Most great passions, movements, and beliefs—individual and national—burst during their decline into a temporary irradiation, which rivals their original splendour; and then they speedily become extinct.  Perhaps the dance had given the last flare-up to Christine’s love.  It seemed to have improvidently consumed for its immediate purpose all her ardour forwards, so that for the future there was nothing left but frigidity.

Nicholas had certainly been very foolish about that licence! uZIYcj9NYTx0FqPdeejRVau66IADGDKIznsneVFbCj15JWaMIlh/4s40TGIG+N0M