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The Trumpet-Major

by Thomas Hardy · English · Gutenberg #2864 · 654,669 chars · public domain (US)

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Title: The Trumpet-Major

Author: Thomas Hardy


        
Release date: October 1, 2001 [eBook #2864]
                Most recently updated: October 18, 2007

Language: English

Other information and formats: www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/2864

Credits: This etext was prepared by Les Bowler


*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK THE TRUMPET-MAJOR ***



This etext was prepared by Les Bowler.





THE TRUMPET-MAJOR
JOHN LOVEDAY


A SOLDIER IN THE WAR WITH BUONAPARTE
AND
ROBERT HIS BROTHER
FIRST MATE IN THE MERCHANT SERVICE

A TALE

BY
THOMAS HARDY

WITH A MAP OF WESSEX

MACMILLAN AND CO., LIMITED
ST. MARTIN'S STREET, LONDON
1920

COPYRIGHT

_First Edition_ (3 _vols._) 1880.  _New Edition_ (1 _vol._) _and
reprints_ 1881-1893
_New Edition and reprints_ 1896-1900
_First published by Macmillan and Co._, _Crown_ 8_vo_, 1903.  _Reprinted_
1906, 1910, 1914
_Pocket Edition_ 1907.  _Reprinted_ 1909, 1912, 1915, 1917, 1919, 1920




PREFACE


The present tale is founded more largely on testimony--oral and
written--than any other in this series.  The external incidents which
direct its course are mostly an unexaggerated reproduction of the
recollections of old persons well known to the author in childhood, but
now long dead, who were eye-witnesses of those scenes.  If wholly
transcribed their recollections would have filled a volume thrice the
length of 'The Trumpet-Major.'

Down to the middle of this century, and later, there were not wanting, in
the neighbourhood of the places more or less clearly indicated herein,
casual relics of the circumstances amid which the action moves--our
preparations for defence against the threatened invasion of England by
Buonaparte.  An outhouse door riddled with bullet-holes, which had been
extemporized by a solitary man as a target for firelock practice when the
landing was hourly expected, a heap of bricks and clods on a beacon-hill,
which had formed the chimney and walls of the hut occupied by the beacon-
keeper, worm-eaten shafts and iron heads of pikes for the use of those
who had no better weapons, ridges on the down thrown up during the
encampment, fragments of volunteer uniform, and other such lingering
remains, brought to my imagination in early childhood the state of
affairs at the date of the war more vividly than volumes of history could
have done.

Those who have attempted to construct a coherent narrative of past times
from the fragmentary information furnished by survivors, are aware of the
difficulty of ascertaining the true sequence of events indiscriminately
recalled.  For this purpose the newspapers of the date were
indispensable.  Of other documents consulted I may mention, for the
satisfaction of those who love a true story, that the 'Address to all
Ranks and Descriptions of Englishmen' was transcribed from an original
copy in a local museum; that the hieroglyphic portrait of Napoleon
existed as a print down to the present day in an old woman's cottage near
'Overcombe;' that the particulars of the King's doings at his favourite
watering-place were augmented by details from records of the time.  The
drilling scene of the local militia received some additions from an
account given in so grave a work as Gifford's 'History of the Wars of the
French Revolution' (London, 1817).  But on reference to the History I
find I was mistaken in supposing the account to be advanced as authentic,
or to refer to rural England.  However, it does in a large degree accord
with the local traditions of such scenes that I have heard recounted,
times without number, and the system of drill was tested by reference to
the Army Regulations of 1801, and other military handbooks.  Almost the
whole narrative of the supposed landing of the French in the Bay is from
oral relation as aforesaid.  Other proofs of the veracity of this
chronicle have escaped my recollection.

T. H.

_October_ 1895.




I.  WHAT WAS SEEN FROM THE WINDOW OVERLOOKING THE DOWN


In the days of high-waisted and muslin-gowned women, when the vast amount
of soldiering going on in the country was a cause of much trembling to
the sex, there lived in a village near the Wessex coast two ladies of
good report, though unfortunately of limited means.  The elder was a Mrs.
Martha Garland, a landscape-painter's widow, and the other was her only
daughter Anne.

Anne was fair, very fair, in a poetical sense; but in complexion she was
of that particular tint between blonde and brunette which is
inconveniently left without a name.  Her eyes were honest and inquiring,
her mouth cleanly cut and yet not classical, the middle point of her
upper lip scarcely descending so far as it should have done by rights, so
that at the merest pleasant thought, not to mention a smile, portions of
two or three white teeth were uncovered whether she would or not.  Some
people said that this was very attractive.  She was graceful and slender,
and, though but little above five feet in height, could draw herself up
to look tall.  In her manner, in her comings and goings, in her 'I'll do
this,' or 'I'll do that,' she combined dignity with sweetness as no other
girl could do; and any impressionable stranger youths who passed by were
led to yearn for a windfall of speech from her, and to see at the same
time that they would not get it.  In short, beneath all that was charming
and simple in this young woman there lurked a real firmness, unperceived
at first, as the speck of colour lurks unperceived in the heart of the
palest parsley flower.

She wore a white handkerchief to cover her white neck, and a cap on her
head with a pink ribbon round it, tied in a bow at the front.  She had a
great variety of these cap-ribbons, the young men being fond of sending
them to her as presents until they fell definitely in love with a special
sweetheart elsewhere, when they left off doing so.  Between the border of
her cap and her forehead were ranged a row of round brown curls, like
swallows' nests under eaves.

She lived with her widowed mother in a portion of an ancient building
formerly a manor-house, but now a mill, which, being too large for his
own requirements, the miller had found it convenient to divide and
appropriate in part to these highly respectable tenants.  In this
dwelling Mrs. Garland's and Anne's ears were soothed morning, noon, and
night by the music of the mill, the wheels and cogs of which, being of
wood, produced notes that might have borne in their minds a remote
resemblance to the wooden tones of the stopped diapason in an organ.
Occasionally, when the miller was bolting, there was added to these
continuous sounds the cheerful clicking of the hopper, which did not
deprive them of rest except when it was kept going all night; and over
and above all this they had the pleasure of knowing that there crept in
through every crevice, door, and window of their dwelling, however
tightly closed, a subtle mist of superfine flour from the grinding room,
quite invisible, but making its presence known in the course of time by
giving a pallid and ghostly look to the best furniture.  The miller
frequently apologized to his tenants for the intrusion of this insidious
dry fog; but the widow was of a friendly and thankful nature, and she
said that she did not mind it at all, being as it was, not nasty dirt,
but the blessed staff of life.

By good-humour of this sort, and in other ways, Mrs. Garland acknowledged
her friendship for her neighbour, with whom Anne and herself associated
to an extent which she never could have anticipated when, tempted by the
lowness of the rent, they first removed thither after her husband's death
from a larger house at the other end of the village.  Those who have
lived in remote places where there is what is called no society will
comprehend the gradual levelling of distinctions that went on in this
case at some sacrifice of gentility on the part of one household.  The
widow was sometimes sorry to find with what readiness Anne caught up some
dialect-word or accent from the miller and his friends; but he was so
good and true-hearted a man, and she so easy-minded, unambitious a woman,
that she would not make life a solitude for fastidious reasons.  More
than all, she had good ground for thinking that the miller secretly
admired her, and this added a piquancy to the situation.

* * * * *

On a fine summer morning, when the leaves were warm under the sun, and
the more industrious bees abroad, diving into every blue and red cup that
could possibly be considered a flower, Anne was sitting at the back
window of her mother's portion of the house, measuring out lengths of
worsted for a fringed rug that she was making, which lay, about three-
quarters finished, beside her.  The work, though chromatically brilliant,
was tedious: a hearth-rug was a thing which nobody worked at from morning
to night; it was taken up and put down; it was in the chair, on the
floor, across the hand-rail, under the bed, kicked here, kicked there,
rolled away in the closet, brought out again, and so on more capriciously
perhaps than any other home-made article.  Nobody was expected to finish
a rug within a calculable period, and the wools of the beginning became
faded and historical before the end was reached.  A sense of this
inherent nature of worsted-work rather than idleness led Anne to look
rather frequently from the open casement.

Immediately before her was the large, smooth millpond, over-full, and
intruding into the hedge and into the road.  The water, with its flowing
leaves and spots of froth, was stealing away, like Time, under the dark
arch, to tumble over the great slimy wheel within.  On the other side of
the mill-pond was an open place called the Cross, because it was three-
quarters of one, two lanes and a cattle-drive meeting there.  It was the
general rendezvous and arena of the surrounding village.  Behind this a
steep slope rose high into the sky, merging in a wide and open down, now
littered with sheep newly shorn.  The upland by its height completely
sheltered the mill and village from north winds, making summers of
springs, reducing winters to autumn temperatures, and permitting myrtle
to flourish in the open air.

The heaviness of noon pervaded the scene, and under its influence the
sheep had ceased to feed.  Nobody was standing at the Cross, the few
inhabitants being indoors at their dinner.  No human being was on the
down, and no human eye or interest but Anne's seemed to be concerned with
it.  The bees still worked on, and the butterflies did not rest from
roving, their smallness seeming to shield them from the stagnating effect
that this turning moment of day had on larger creatures.  Otherwise all
was still.

The girl glanced at the down and the sheep for no particular reason; the
steep margin of turf and daisies rising above the roofs, chimneys, apple-
trees, and church tower of the hamlet around her, bounded the view from
her position, and it was necessary to look somewhere when she raised her
head.  While thus engaged in working and stopping her attention was
attracted by the sudden rising and running away of the sheep squatted on
the down; and there succeeded sounds of a heavy tramping over the hard
sod which the sheep had quitted, the tramp being accompanied by a
metallic jingle.  Turning her eyes further she beheld two cavalry
soldiers on bulky grey chargers, armed and accoutred throughout,
ascending the down at a point to the left where the incline was
comparatively easy.  The burnished chains, buckles, and plates of their
trappings shone like little looking-glasses, and the blue, red, and white
about them was unsubdued by weather or wear.

The two troopers rode proudly on, as if nothing less than crowns and
empires ever concerned their magnificent minds.  They reached that part
of the down which lay just in front of her, where they came to a halt.  In
another minute there appeared behind them a group containing some half-
dozen more of the same sort.  These came on, halted, and dismounted
likewise.

Two of the soldiers then walked some distance onward together, when one
stood still, the other advancing further, and stretching a white line of
tape between them.  Two more of the men marched to another outlying
point, where they made marks in the ground.  Thus they walked about and
took distances, obviously according to some preconcerted scheme.

At the end of this systematic proceeding one solitary horseman--a
commissioned officer, if his uniform could be judged rightly at that
distance--rode up the down, went over the ground, looked at what the
others had done, and seemed to think that it was good.  And then the girl
heard yet louder tramps and clankings, and she beheld rising from where
the others had risen a whole column of cavalry in marching order.  At a
distance behind these came a cloud of dust enveloping more and more
troops, their arms and accoutrements reflecting the sun through the haze
in faint flashes, stars, and streaks of light.  The whole body approached
slowly towards the plateau at the top of the down.

Anne threw down her work, and letting her eyes remain on the nearing
masses of cavalry, the worsteds getting entangled as they would, said,
'Mother, mother; come here!  Here's such a fine sight!  What does it
mean?  What can they be going to do up there?'

The mother thus invoked ran upstairs and came forward to the window.  She
was a woman of sanguine mouth and eye, unheroic manner, and pleasant
general appearance; a little more tarnished as to surface, but not much
worse in contour than the girl herself.

Widow Garland's thoughts were those of the period. 'Can it be the
French,' she said, arranging herself for the extremest form of
consternation.  'Can that arch-enemy of mankind have landed at last?'  It
should be stated that at this time there were two arch-enemies of
mankind--Satan as usual, and Buonaparte, who had sprung up and eclipsed
his elder rival altogether.  Mrs. Garland alluded, of course, to the
junior gentleman.

'It cannot be he,' said Anne.  'Ah! there's Simon Burden, the man who
watches at the beacon.  He'll know!'

She waved her hand to an aged form of the same colour as the road, who
had just appeared beyond the mill-pond, and who, though active, was bowed
to that degree which almost reproaches a feeling observer for standing
upright.  The arrival of the soldiery had drawn him out from his drop of
drink at the 'Duke of York' as it had attracted Anne.  At her call he
crossed the mill-bridge, and came towards the window.

Anne inquired of him what it all meant; but Simon Burden, without
answering, continued to move on with parted gums, staring at the cavalry
on his own private account with a concern that people often show about
temporal phenomena when such matters can affect them but a short time
longer.  'You'll walk into the millpond!' said Anne.  'What are they
doing?  You were a soldier many years ago, and ought to know.'

'Don't ask me, Mis'ess Anne,' said the military relic, depositing his
body against the wall one limb at a time.  'I were only in the foot, ye
know, and never had a clear understanding of horses.  Ay, I be a old man,
and of no judgment now.'  Some additional pressure, however, caused him
to search further in his worm-eaten magazine of ideas, and he found that
he did know in a dim irresponsible way.  The soldiers must have come
there to camp: those men they had seen first were the markers: they had
come on before the rest to measure out the ground.  He who had
accompanied them was the quartermaster.  'And so you see they have got
all the lines marked out by the time the regiment have come up,' he
added.  'And then they will--well-a-deary! who'd ha' supposed that
Overcombe would see such a day as this!'

'And then they will--'

'Then-- Ah, it's gone from me again!' said Simon.  'O, and then they will
raise their tents, you know, and picket their horses.  That was it; so it
was.'

By this time the column of horse had ascended into full view, and they
formed a lively spectacle as they rode along the high ground in marching
order, backed by the pale blue sky, and lit by the southerly sun.  Their
uniform was bright and attractive; white buckskin pantaloons,
three-quarter boots, scarlet shakos set off with lace, mustachios waxed
to a needle point; and above all, those richly ornamented blue jackets
mantled with the historic pelisse--that fascination to women, and
encumbrance to the wearers themselves.

''Tis the York Hussars!' said Simon Burden, brightening like a dying
ember fanned.  'Foreigners to a man, and enrolled long since my time.  But
as good hearty comrades, they say, as you'll find in the King's service.'

'Here are more and different ones,' said Mrs. Garland.

Other troops had, during the last few minutes, been ascending the down at
a remoter point, and now drew near.  These were of different weight and
build from the others; lighter men, in helmet hats, with white plumes.

'I don't know which I like best,' said Anne.  'These, I think, after
all.'

Simon, who had been looking hard at the latter, now said that they were
the --th Dragoons.

'All Englishmen they,' said the old man.  'They lay at Budmouth barracks
a few years ago.'

'They did.  I remember it,' said Mrs. Garland.

'And lots of the chaps about here 'listed at the time,' said Simon.  'I
can call to mind that there was--ah, 'tis gone from me again!  However,
all that's of little account now.'

The dragoons passed in front of the lookers-on as the others had done,
and their gay plumes, which had hung lazily during the ascent, swung to
northward as they reached the top, showing that on the summit a fresh
breeze blew.  'But look across there,' said Anne.  There had entered upon
the down from another direction several battalions of foot, in white
kerseymere breeches and cloth gaiters.  They seemed to be weary from a
long march, the original black of their gaiters and boots being whity-
brown with dust.  Presently came regimental waggons, and the private
canteen carts which followed at the end of a convoy.

The space in front of the mill-pond was now occupied by nearly all the
inhabitants of the village, who had turned out in alarm, and remained for
pleasure, their eyes lighted up with interest in what they saw; for
trappings and regimentals, war horses and men, in towns an attraction,
were here almost a sublimity.

The troops filed to their lines, dismounted, and in quick time took off
their accoutrements, rolled up their sheep-skins, picketed and unbitted
their horses, and made ready to erect the tents as soon as they could be
taken from the waggons and brought forward.  When this was done, at a
given signal the canvases flew up from the sod; and thenceforth every man
had a place in which to lay his head.

Though nobody seemed to be looking on but the few at the window and in
the village street, there were, as a matter of fact, many eyes converging
upon that military arrival in its high and conspicuous position, not to
mention the glances of birds and other wild creatures.  Men in distant
gardens, women in orchards and at cottage-doors, shepherds on remote
hills, turnip-hoers in blue-green enclosures miles away, captains with
spy-glasses out at sea, were regarding the picture keenly.  Those three
or four thousand men of one machine-like movement, some of them
swashbucklers by nature; others, doubtless, of a quiet shop-keeping
disposition who had inadvertently got into uniform--all of them had
arrived from nobody knew where, and hence were matter of great curiosity.
They seemed to the mere eye to belong to a different order of beings from
those who inhabited the valleys below.  Apparently unconscious and
careless of what all the world was doing elsewhere, they remained
picturesquely engrossed in the business of making themselves a habitation
on the isolated spot which they had chosen.

Mrs. Garland was of a festive and sanguine turn of mind, a woman soon set
up and soon set down, and the coming of the regiments quite excited her.
She thought there was reason for putting on her best cap, thought that
perhaps there was not; that she would hurry on the dinner and go out in
the afternoon; then that she would, after all, do nothing unusual, nor
show any silly excitements whatever, since they were unbecoming in a
mother and a widow.  Thus circumscribing her intentions till she was
toned down to an ordinary person of forty, Mrs. Garland accompanied her
daughter downstairs to dine, saying, 'Presently we will call on Miller
Loveday, and hear what he thinks of it all.'




II.  SOMEBODY KNOCKS AND COMES IN


Miller Loveday was the representative of an ancient family of
corn-grinders whose history is lost in the mists of antiquity.  His
ancestral line was contemporaneous with that of De Ros, Howard, and De La
Zouche; but, owing to some trifling deficiency in the possessions of the
house of Loveday, the individual names and intermarriages of its members
were not recorded during the Middle Ages, and thus their private lives in
any given century were uncertain.  But it was known that the family had
formed matrimonial alliances with farmers not so very small, and once
with a gentleman-tanner, who had for many years purchased after their
death the horses of the most aristocratic persons in the county--fiery
steeds that earlier in their career had been valued at many hundred
guineas.

It was also ascertained that Mr. Loveday's great-grandparents had been
eight in number, and his great-great-grandparents sixteen, every one of
whom reached to years of discretion: at every stage backwards his sires
and gammers thus doubled and doubled till they became a vast body of
Gothic ladies and gentlemen of the rank known as ceorls or villeins, full
of importance to the country at large, and ramifying throughout the
unwritten history of England.  His immediate father had greatly improved
the value of their residence by building a new chimney, and setting up an
additional pair of millstones.

Overcombe Mill presented at one end the appearance of a hard-worked house
slipping into the river, and at the other of an idle, genteel place, half-
cloaked with creepers at this time of the year, and having no visible
connexion with flour.  It had hips instead of gables, giving it a round-
shouldered look, four chimneys with no smoke coming out of them, two
zigzag cracks in the wall, several open windows, with a looking-glass
here and there inside, showing its warped back to the passer-by; snowy
dimity curtains waving in the draught; two mill doors, one above the
other, the upper enabling a person to step out upon nothing at a height
of ten feet from the ground; a gaping arch vomiting the river, and a
lean, long-nosed fellow looking out from the mill doorway, who was the
hired grinder, except when a bulging fifteen stone man occupied the same
place, namely, the miller himself.

Behind the mill door, and invisible to the mere wayfarer who did not
visit the family, were chalked addition and subtraction sums, many of
them originally done wrong, and the figures half rubbed out and
corrected, noughts being turned into nines, and ones into twos.  These
were the miller's private calculations.  There were also chalked in the
same place rows and rows of strokes like open palings, representing the
calculations of the grinder, who in his youthful ciphering studies had
not gone so far as Arabic figures.

In the court in front were two worn-out millstones, made useful again by
being let in level with the ground.  Here people stood to smoke and
consider things in muddy weather; and cats slept on the clean surfaces
when it was hot.  In the large stubbard-tree at the corner of the garden
was erected a pole of larch fir, which the miller had bought with others
at a sale of small timber in Damer's Wood one Christmas week.  It rose
from the upper boughs of the tree to about the height of a fisherman's
mast, and on the top was a vane in the form of a sailor with his arm
stretched out.  When the sun shone upon this figure it could be seen that
the greater part of his countenance was gone, and the paint washed from
his body so far as to reveal that he had been a soldier in red before he
became a sailor in blue.  The image had, in fact, been John, one of our
coming characters, and was then turned into Robert, another of them.  This
revolving piece of statuary could not, however, be relied on as a vane,
owing to the neighbouring hill, which formed variable currents in the
wind.

The leafy and quieter wing of the mill-house was the part occupied by
Mrs. Garland and her daughter, who made up in summer-time for the
narrowness of their quarters by overflowing into the garden on stools and
chairs.  The parlour or dining-room had a stone floor--a fact which the
widow sought to disguise by double carpeting, lest the standing of Anne
and herself should be lowered in the public eye.  Here now the mid-day
meal went lightly and mincingly on, as it does where there is no greedy
carnivorous man to keep the dishes about, and was hanging on the close
when somebody entered the passage as far as the chink of the parlour
door, and tapped.  This proceeding was probably adopted to kindly avoid
giving trouble to Susan, the neighbour's pink daughter, who helped at
Mrs. Garland's in the mornings, but was at that moment particularly
occupied in standing on the water-butt and gazing at the soldiers, with
an inhaling position of the mouth and circular eyes.

There was a flutter in the little dining-room--the sensitiveness of
habitual solitude makes hearts beat for preternaturally small reasons--and
a guessing as to who the visitor might be.  It was some military
gentleman from the camp perhaps?  No; that was impossible.  It was the
parson?  No; he would not come at dinner-time.  It was the well-informed
man who travelled with drapery and the best Birmingham earrings?  Not at
all; his time was not till Thursday at three.  Before they could think
further the visitor moved forward another step, and the diners got a
glimpse of him through the same friendly chink that had afforded him a
view of the Garland dinner-table.

'O!  It is only Loveday.'

This approximation to nobody was the miller above mentioned, a hale man
of fifty-five or sixty--hale all through, as many were in those days, and
not merely veneered with purple by exhilarating victuals and drinks,
though the latter were not at all despised by him.  His face was indeed
rather pale than otherwise, for he had just come from the mill.  It was
capable of immense changes of expression: mobility was its essence, a
roll of flesh forming a buttress to his nose on each side, and a deep
ravine lying between his lower lip and the tumulus represented by his
chin.  These fleshy lumps moved stealthily, as if of their own accord,
whenever his fancy was tickled.

His eyes having lighted on the table-cloth, plates, and viands, he found
himself in a position which had a sensible awkwardness for a modest man
who always liked to enter only at seasonable times the presence of a girl
of such pleasantly soft ways as Anne Garland, she who could make apples
seem like peaches, and throw over her shillings the glamour of guineas
when she paid him for flour.

'Dinner is over, neighbour Loveday; please come in,' said the widow,
seeing his case.  The miller said something about coming in presently;
but Anne pressed him to stay, with a tender motion of her lip as it
played on the verge of a solicitous smile without quite lapsing into
one--her habitual manner when speaking.

Loveday took off his low-crowned hat and advanced.  He had not come about
pigs or fowls this time.  'You have been looking out, like the rest o'
us, no doubt, Mrs. Garland, at the mampus of soldiers that have come upon
the down?  Well, one of the horse regiments is the --th Dragoons, my son
John's regiment, you know.'

The announcement, though it interested them, did not create such an
effect as the father of John had seemed to anticipate; but Anne, who
liked to say pleasant things, replied, 'The dragoons looked nicer than
the foot, or the German cavalry either.'

'They are a handsome body of men,' said the miller in a disinterested
voice.  'Faith! I didn't know they were coming, though it may be in the
newspaper all the time.  But old Derriman keeps it so long that we never
know things till they be in everybody's mouth.'

This Derriman was a squireen living near, who was chiefly distinguished
in the present warlike time by having a nephew in the yeomanry.

'We were told that the yeomanry went along the turnpike road yesterday,'
said Anne; 'and they say that they were a pretty sight, and quite
soldierly.'

'Ah! well--they be not regulars,' said Miller Loveday, keeping back
harsher criticism as uncalled for.  But inflamed by the arrival of the
dragoons, which had been the exciting cause of his call, his mind would
not go to yeomanry.  'John has not been home these five years,' he said.

'And what rank does he hold now?' said the widow.

'He's trumpet-major, ma'am; and a good musician.'  The miller, who was a
good father, went on to explain that John had seen some service, too.  He
had enlisted when the regiment was lying in this neighbourhood, more than
eleven years before, which put his father out of temper with him, as he
had wished him to follow on at the mill.  But as the lad had enlisted
seriously, and as he had often said that he would be a soldier, the
miller had thought that he would let Jack take his chance in the
profession of his choice.

Loveday had two sons, and the second was now brought into the
conversation by a remark of Anne's that neither of them seemed to care
for the miller's business.

'No,' said Loveday in a less buoyant tone.  'Robert, you see, must needs
go to sea.'

'He is much younger than his brother?' said Mrs. Garland.

About four years, the miller told her.  His soldier son was
two-and-thirty, and Bob was twenty-eight.  When Bob returned from his
present voyage, he was to be persuaded to stay and assist as grinder in
the mill, and go to sea no more.

'A sailor-miller!' said Anne.

'O, he knows as much about mill business as I do,' said Loveday; 'he was
intended for it, you know, like John.  But, bless me!' he continued, 'I
am before my story.  I'm come more particularly to ask you, ma'am, and
you, Anne my honey, if you will join me and a few friends at a leetle
homely supper that I shall gi'e to please the chap now he's come?  I can
do no less than have a bit of a randy, as the saying is, now that he's
here safe and sound.'

Mrs. Garland wanted to catch her daughter's eye; she was in some doubt
about her answer.  But Anne's eye was not to be caught, for she hated
hints, nods, and calculations of any kind in matters which should be
regulated by impulse; and the matron replied, 'If so be 'tis possible,
we'll be there.  You will tell us the day?'

He would, as soon as he had seen son John.  ''Twill be rather untidy, you
know, owing to my having no womenfolks in the house; and my man David is
a poor dunder-headed feller for getting up a feast.  Poor chap! his sight
is bad, that's true, and he's very good at making the beds, and oiling
the legs of the chairs and other furniture, or I should have got rid of
him years ago.'

'You should have a woman to attend to the house, Loveday,' said the
widow.

'Yes, I should, but--.  Well, 'tis a fine day, neighbours.  Hark!  I
fancy I hear the noise of pots and pans up at the camp, or my ears
deceive me.  Poor fellows, they must be hungry!  Good day t'ye, ma'am.'
And the miller went away.

All that afternoon Overcombe continued in a ferment of interest in the
military investment, which brought the excitement of an invasion without
the strife.  There were great discussions on the merits and appearance of
the soldiery.  The event opened up, to the girls unbounded possibilities
of adoring and being adored, and to the young men an embarrassment of
dashing acquaintances which quite superseded falling in love.  Thirteen
of these lads incontinently stated within the space of a quarter of an
hour that there was nothing in the world like going for a soldier.  The
young women stated little, but perhaps thought the more; though, in
justice, they glanced round towards the encampment from the corners of
their blue and brown eyes in the most demure and modest manner that could
be desired.

In the evening the village was lively with soldiers' wives; a tree full
of starlings would not have rivalled the chatter that was going on.  These
ladies were very brilliantly dressed, with more regard for colour than
for material.  Purple, red, and blue bonnets were numerous, with bunches
of cocks' feathers; and one had on an Arcadian hat of green sarcenet,
turned up in front to show her cap underneath.  It had once belonged to
an officer's lady, and was not so much stained, except where the
occasional storms of rain, incidental to a military life, had caused the
green to run and stagnate in curious watermarks like peninsulas and
islands.  Some of the prettiest of these butterfly wives had been
fortunate enough to get lodgings in the cottages, and were thus spared
the necessity of living in huts and tents on the down.  Those who had not
been so fortunate were not rendered more amiable by the success of their
sisters-in-arms, and called them names which brought forth retorts and
rejoinders; till the end of these alternative remarks seemed dependent
upon the close of the day.

One of these new arrivals, who had a rosy nose and a slight thickness of
voice, which, as Anne said, she couldn't help, poor thing, seemed to have
seen so much of the world, and to have been in so many campaigns, that
Anne would have liked to take her into their own house, so as to acquire
some of that practical knowledge of the history of England which the lady
possessed, and which could not be got from books.  But the narrowness of
Mrs. Garland's rooms absolutely forbade this, and the houseless treasury
of experience was obliged to look for quarters elsewhere.

That night Anne retired early to bed.  The events of the day, cheerful as
they were in themselves, had been unusual enough to give her a slight
headache.  Before getting into bed she went to the window, and lifted the
white curtains that hung across it.  The moon was shining, though not as
yet into the valley, but just peeping above the ridge of the down, where
the white cones of the encampment were softly touched by its light.  The
quarter-guard and foremost tents showed themselves prominently; but the
body of the camp, the officers' tents, kitchens, canteen, and
appurtenances in the rear were blotted out by the ground, because of its
height above her.  She could discern the forms of one or two sentries
moving to and fro across the disc of the moon at intervals.  She could
hear the frequent shuffling and tossing of the horses tied to the
pickets; and in the other direction the miles-long voice of the sea,
whispering a louder note at those points of its length where hampered in
its ebb and flow by some jutting promontory or group of boulders.  Louder
sounds suddenly broke this approach to silence; they came from the camp
of dragoons, were taken up further to the right by the camp of the
Hanoverians, and further on still by the body of infantry.  It was
tattoo.  Feeling no desire to sleep, she listened yet longer, looked at
Charles's Wain swinging over the church tower, and the moon ascending
higher and higher over the right-hand streets of tents, where, instead of
parade and bustle, there was nothing going on but snores and dreams, the
tired soldiers lying by this time under their proper canvases, radiating
like spokes from the pole of each tent.

At last Anne gave up thinking, and retired like the rest.  The night wore
on, and, except the occasional 'All's well' of the sentries, no voice was
heard in the camp or in the village below.




III.  THE MILL BECOMES AN IMPORTANT CENTRE OF OPERATIONS


The next morning Miss Garland awoke with an impression that something
more than usual was going on, and she recognized as soon as she could
clearly reason that the proceedings, whatever they might be, lay not far
away from her bedroom window.  The sounds were chiefly those of pickaxes
and shovels.  Anne got up, and, lifting the corner of the curtain about
an inch, peeped out.

A number of soldiers were busily engaged in making a zigzag path down the
incline from the camp to the river-head at the back of the house, and
judging from the quantity of work already got through they must have
begun very early.  Squads of men were working at several equidistant
points in the proposed pathway, and by the time that Anne had dressed
herself each section of the length had been connected with those above
and below it, so that a continuous and easy track was formed from the
crest of the down to the bottom of the steep.

The down rested on a bed of solid chalk, and the surface exposed by the
roadmakers formed a white ribbon, serpenting from top to bottom.

Then the relays of working soldiers all disappeared, and, not long after,
a troop of dragoons in watering order rode forward at the top and began
to wind down the new path.  They came lower and closer, and at last were
immediately beneath her window, gathering themselves up on the space by
the mill-pond.  A number of the horses entered it at the shallow part,
drinking and splashing and tossing about.  Perhaps as many as thirty,
half of them with riders on their backs, were in the water at one time;
the thirsty animals drank, stamped, flounced, and drank again, letting
the clear, cool water dribble luxuriously from their mouths.  Miller
Loveday was looking on from over his garden hedge, and many admiring
villagers were gathered around.

Gazing up higher, Anne saw other troops descending by the new road from
the camp, those which had already been to the pond making room for these
by withdrawing along the village lane and returning to the top by a
circuitous route.

Suddenly the miller exclaimed, as in fulfilment of expectation, 'Ah,
John, my boy; good morning!'  And the reply of 'Morning, father,' came
from a well-mounted soldier near him, who did not, however, form one of
the watering party.  Anne could not see his face very clearly, but she
had no doubt that this was John Loveday.

There were tones in the voice which reminded her of old times, those of
her very infancy, when Johnny Loveday had been top boy in the village
school, and had wanted to learn painting of her father.  The deeps and
shallows of the mill-pond being better known to him than to any other man
in the camp, he had apparently come down on that account, and was
cautioning some of the horsemen against riding too far in towards the
mill-head.

Since her childhood and his enlistment Anne had seen him only once, and
then but casually, when he was home on a short furlough.  His figure was
not much changed from what it had been; but the many sunrises and sunsets
which had passed since that day, developing her from a comparative child
to womanhood, had abstracted some of his angularities, reddened his skin,
and given him a foreign look.  It was interesting to see what years of
training and service had done for this man.  Few would have supposed that
the white and the blue coats of miller and soldier covered the forms of
father and son.

Before the last troop of dragoons rode off they were welcomed in a body
by Miller Loveday, who still stood in his outer garden, this being a plot
lying below the mill-tail, and stretching to the water-side.  It was just
the time of year when cherries are ripe, and hang in clusters under their
dark leaves.  While the troopers loitered on their horses, and chatted to
the miller across the stream, he gathered bunches of the fruit, and held
them up over the garden hedge for the acceptance of anybody who would
have them; whereupon the soldiers rode into the water to where it had
washed holes in the garden bank, and, reining their horses there, caught
the cherries in their forage-caps, or received bunches of them on the
ends of their switches, with the dignified laugh that became martial men
when stooping to slightly boyish amusement.  It was a cheerful, careless,
unpremeditated half-hour, which returned like the scent of a flower to
the memories of some of those who enjoyed it, even at a distance of many
years after, when they lay wounded and weak in foreign lands.

Then dragoons and horses wheeled off as the others had done; and troops
of the German Legion next came down and entered in panoramic procession
the space below Anne's eyes, as if on purpose to gratify her.  These were
notable by their mustachios, and queues wound tightly with brown ribbon
to the level of their broad shoulder-blades.  They were charmed, as the
others had been, by the head and neck of Miss Garland in the little
square window overlooking the scene of operations, and saluted her with
devoted foreign civility, and in such overwhelming numbers that the
modest girl suddenly withdrew herself into the room, and had a private
blush between the chest of drawers and the washing-stand.

When she came downstairs her mother said, 'I have been thinking what I
ought to wear to Miller Loveday's to-night.'

'To Miller Loveday's?' said Anne.

'Yes.  The party is to-night.  He has been in here this morning to tell
me that he has seen his son, and they have fixed this evening.'

'Do you think we ought to go, mother?' said Anne slowly, and looking at
the smaller features of the window-flowers.

'Why not?' said Mrs. Garland.

'He will only have men there except ourselves, will he?  And shall we be
right to go alone among 'em?'

Anne had not recovered from the ardent gaze of the gallant York Hussars,
whose voices reached her even now in converse with Loveday.

'La, Anne, how proud you are!' said Widow Garland.  'Why, isn't he our
nearest neighbour and our landlord? and don't he always fetch our faggots
from the wood, and keep us in vegetables for next to nothing?'

'That's true,' said Anne.

'Well, we can't be distant with the man.  And if the enemy land next
autumn, as everybody says they will, we shall have quite to depend upon
the miller's waggon and horses.  He's our only friend.'

'Yes, so he is,' said Anne.  'And you had better go, mother; and I'll
stay at home.  They will be all men; and I don't like going.'

Mrs. Garland reflected.  'Well, if you don't want to go, I don't,' she
said.  'Perhaps, as you are growing up, it would be better to stay at
home this time.  Your father was a professional man, certainly.'  Having
spoken as a mother, she sighed as a woman.

'Why do you sigh, mother?'

'You are so prim and stiff about everything.'

'Very well--we'll go.'

'O no--I am not sure that we ought.  I did not promise, and there will be
no trouble in keeping away.'

Anne apparently did not feel certain of her own opinion, and, instead of
supporting or contradicting, looked thoughtfully down, and abstractedly
brought her hands together on her bosom, till her fingers met tip to tip.

As the day advanced the young woman and her mother became aware that
great preparations were in progress in the miller's wing of the house.
The partitioning between the Lovedays and the Garlands was not very
thorough, consisting in many cases of a simple screwing up of the doors
in the dividing walls; and thus when the mill began any new performances
they proclaimed themselves at once in the more private dwelling.  The
smell of Miller Loveday's pipe came down Mrs. Garland's chimney of an
evening with the greatest regularity.  Every time that he poked his fire
they knew from the vehemence or deliberateness of the blows the precise
state of his mind; and when he wound his clock on Sunday nights the whirr
of that monitor reminded the widow to wind hers.  This transit of noises
was most perfect where Loveday's lobby adjoined Mrs. Garland's pantry;
and Anne, who was occupied for some time in the latter apartment, enjoyed
the privilege of hearing the visitors arrive and of catching stray sounds
and words without the connecting phrases that made them entertaining, to
judge from the laughter they evoked.  The arrivals passed through the
house and went into the garden, where they had tea in a large
summer-house, an occasional blink of bright colour, through the foliage,
being all that was visible of the assembly from Mrs. Garland's windows.
When it grew dusk they all could be heard coming indoors to finish the
evening in the parlour.

Then there was an intensified continuation of the above-mentioned signs
of enjoyment, talkings and haw-haws, runnings upstairs and runnings down,
a slamming of doors and a clinking of cups and glasses; till the proudest
adjoining tenant without friends on his own side of the partition might
have been tempted to wish for entrance to that merry dwelling, if only to
know the cause of these fluctuations of hilarity, and to see if the
guests were really so numerous, and the observations so very amusing as
they seemed.

The stagnation of life on the Garland side of the party-wall began to
have a very gloomy effect by the contrast.  When, about half-past nine
o'clock, one of these tantalizing bursts of gaiety had resounded for a
longer time than usual, Anne said, 'I believe, mother, that you are
wishing you had gone.'

'I own to feeling that it would have been very cheerful if we had joined
in,' said Mrs. Garland, in a hankering tone.  'I was rather too nice in
listening to you and not going.  The parson never calls upon us except in
his spiritual capacity.  Old Derriman is hardly genteel; and there's
nobody left to speak to.  Lonely people must accept what company they can
get.'

'Or do without it altogether.'

'That's not natural, Anne; and I am surprised to hear a young woman like
you say such a thing.  Nature will not be stifled in that way. . . .'
(Song and powerful chorus heard through partition.)  'I declare the room
on the other side of the wall seems quite a paradise compared with this.'

'Mother, you are quite a girl,' said Anne in slightly superior accents.
'Go in and join them by all means.'

'O no--not now,' said her mother, resignedly shaking her head.  'It is
too late now.  We ought to have taken advantage of the invitation.  They
would look hard at me as a poor mortal who had no real business there,
and the miller would say, with his broad smile, "Ah, you be obliged to
come round."'

While the sociable and unaspiring Mrs. Garland continued thus to pass the
evening in two places, her body in her own house and her mind in the
miller's, somebody knocked at the door, and directly after the elder
Loveday himself was admitted to the room.  He was dressed in a suit
between grand and gay, which he used for such occasions as the present,
and his blue coat, yellow and red waistcoat with the three lower buttons
unfastened, steel-buckled shoes and speckled stockings, became him very
well in Mrs. Martha Garland's eyes.

'Your servant, ma'am,' said the miller, adopting as a matter of propriety
the raised standard of politeness required by his higher costume.  'Now,
begging your pardon, I can't hae this.  'Tis unnatural that you two
ladies should be biding here and we under the same roof making merry
without ye.  Your husband, poor man--lovely picters that a' would make to
be sure--would have been in with us long ago if he had been in your
place.  I can take no nay from ye, upon my honour.  You and maidy Anne
must come in, if it be only for half-an-hour.  John and his friends have
got passes till twelve o'clock to-night, and, saving a few of our own
village folk, the lowest visitor present is a very genteel German
corporal.  If you should hae any misgivings on the score of
respectability, ma'am, we'll pack off the underbred ones into the back
kitchen.'

Widow Garland and Anne looked yes at each other after this appeal.

'We'll follow you in a few minutes,' said the elder, smiling; and she
rose with Anne to go upstairs.

'No, I'll wait for ye,' said the miller doggedly; 'or perhaps you'll
alter your mind again.'

While the mother and daughter were upstairs dressing, and saying
laughingly to each other, 'Well, we must go now,' as if they hadn't
wished to go all the evening, other steps were heard in the passage; and
the miller cried from below, 'Your pardon, Mrs. Garland; but my son John
has come to help fetch ye.  Shall I ask him in till ye be ready?'

'Certainly; I shall be down in a minute,' screamed Anne's mother in a
slanting voice towards the staircase.

When she descended, the outline of the trumpet-major appeared half-way
down the passage.  'This is John,' said the miller simply.  'John, you
can mind Mrs. Martha Garland very well?'

'Very well, indeed,' said the dragoon, coming in a little further.  'I
should have called to see her last time, but I was only home a week.  How
is your little girl, ma'am?'

Mrs. Garland said Anne was quite well.  'She is grown-up now.  She will
be down in a moment.'

There was a slight noise of military heels without the door, at which the
trumpet-major went and put his head outside, and said, 'All right--coming
in a minute,' when voices in the darkness replied, 'No hurry.'

'More friends?' said Mrs. Garland.

'O, it is only Buck and Jones come to fetch me,' said the soldier.  'Shall
I ask 'em in a minute, Mrs Garland, ma'am?'

'O yes,' said the lady; and the two interesting forms of Trumpeter Buck
and Saddler-sergeant Jones then came forward in the most friendly manner;
whereupon other steps were heard without, and it was discovered that
Sergeant-master-tailor Brett and Farrier-extraordinary Johnson were
outside, having come to fetch Messrs. Buck and Jones, as Buck and Jones
had come to fetch the trumpet-major.

As there seemed a possibility of Mrs. Garland's small passage being
choked up with human figures personally unknown to her, she was relieved
to hear Anne coming downstairs.

'Here's my little girl,' said Mrs. Garland, and the trumpet-major looked
with a sort of awe upon the muslin apparition who came forward, and stood
quite dumb before her.  Anne recognized him as the trooper she had seen
from her window, and welcomed him kindly.  There was something in his
honest face which made her feel instantly at home with him.

At this frankness of manner Loveday--who was not a ladies' man--blushed,
and made some alteration in his bodily posture, began a sentence which
had no end, and showed quite a boy's embarrassment.  Recovering himself,
he politely offered his arm, which Anne took with a very pretty grace.  He
conducted her through his comrades, who glued themselves perpendicularly
to the wall to let her pass, and then they went out of the door, her
mother following with the miller, and supported by the body of troopers,
the latter walking with the usual cavalry gait, as if their thighs were
rather too long for them.  Thus they crossed the threshold of the mill-
house and up the passage, the paving of which was worn into a gutter by
the ebb and flow of feet that had been going on there ever since Tudor
times.




IV.  WHO WERE PRESENT AT THE MILLER'S LITTLE ENTERTAINMENT


When the group entered the presence of the company a lull in the
conversation was caused by the sight of new visitors, and (of course) by
the charm of Anne's appearance; until the old men, who had daughters of
their own, perceiving that she was only a half-formed girl, resumed their
tales and toss-potting with unconcern.

Miller Loveday had fraternized with half the soldiers in the camp since
their arrival, and the effect of this upon his party was striking--both
chromatically and otherwise.  Those among the guests who first attracted
the eye were the sergeants and sergeant-majors of Loveday's regiment,
fine hearty men, who sat facing the candles, entirely resigned to
physical comfort.  Then there were other non-commissioned officers, a
German, two Hungarians, and a Swede, from the foreign hussars--young men
with a look of sadness on their faces, as if they did not much like
serving so far from home.  All of them spoke English fairly well.  Old
age was represented by Simon Burden the pensioner, and the shady side of
fifty by Corporal Tullidge, his friend and neighbour, who was hard of
hearing, and sat with his hat on over a red cotton handkerchief that was
wound several times round his head.  These two veterans were employed as
watchers at the neighbouring beacon, which had lately been erected by the
Lord-Lieutenant for firing whenever the descent on the coast should be
made.  They lived in a little hut on the hill, close by the heap of
faggots; but to-night they had found deputies to watch in their stead.

On a lower plane of experience and qualifications came neighbour James
Comfort, of the Volunteers, a soldier by courtesy, but a blacksmith by
rights; also William Tremlett and Anthony Cripplestraw, of the local
forces.  The two latter men of war were dressed merely as villagers, and
looked upon the regulars from a humble position in the background.  The
remainder of the party was made up of a neighbouring dairyman or two, and
their wives, invited by the miller, as Anne was glad to see, that she and
her mother should not be the only women there.

The elder Loveday apologized in a whisper to Mrs. Garland for the
presence of the inferior villagers.  'But as they are learning to be
brave defenders of their home and country, ma'am, as fast as they can
master the drill, and have worked for me off and on these many years,
I've asked 'em in, and thought you'd excuse it.'

'Certainly, Miller Loveday,' said the widow.

'And the same of old Burden and Tullidge.  They have served well and long
in the Foot, and even now have a hard time of it up at the beacon in wet
weather.  So after giving them a meal in the kitchen I just asked 'em in
to hear the singing.  They faithfully promise that as soon as ever the
gunboats appear in view, and they have fired the beacon, to run down here
first, in case we shouldn't see it.  'Tis worth while to be friendly with
'em, you see, though their tempers be queer.'

'Quite worth while, miller,' said she.

Anne was rather embarrassed by the presence of the regular military in
such force, and at first confined her words to the dairymen's wives she
was acquainted with, and to the two old soldiers of the parish.

'Why didn't ye speak to me afore, chiel?' said one of these, Corporal
Tullidge, the elderly man with the hat, while she was talking to old
Simon Burden.  'I met ye in the lane yesterday,' he added reproachfully,
'but ye didn't notice me at all.'

'I am very sorry for it,' she said; but, being afraid to shout in such a
company, the effect of her remark upon the corporal was as if she had not
spoken at all.

'You was coming along with yer head full of some high notions or other no
doubt,' continued the uncompromising corporal in the same loud voice.
'Ah, 'tis the young bucks that get all the notice nowadays, and old folks
are quite forgot!  I can mind well enough how young Bob Loveday used to
lie in wait for ye.'

Anne blushed deeply, and stopped his too excursive discourse by hastily
saying that she always respected old folks like him.  The corporal
thought she inquired why he always kept his hat on, and answered that it
was because his head was injured at Valenciennes, in July, Ninety-three.
'We were trying to bomb down the tower, and a piece of the shell struck
me.  I was no more nor less than a dead man for two days.  If it hadn't a
been for that and my smashed arm I should have come home none the worse
for my five-and-twenty years' service.'

'You have got a silver plate let into yer head, haven't ye, corpel?' said
Anthony Cripplestraw, who had drawn near.  'I have heard that the way
they morticed yer skull was a beautiful piece of workmanship.  Perhaps
the young woman would like to see the place?  'Tis a curious sight,
Mis'ess Anne; you don't see such a wownd every day.'

'No, thank you,' said Anne hurriedly, dreading, as did all the young
people of Overcombe, the spectacle of the corporal uncovered.  He had
never been seen in public without the hat and the handkerchief since his
return in Ninety-four; and strange stories were told of the ghastliness
of his appearance bare-headed, a little boy who had accidentally beheld
him going to bed in that state having been frightened into fits.

'Well, if the young woman don't want to see yer head, maybe she'd like to
hear yer arm?' continued Cripplestraw, earnest to please her.

'Hey?' said the corporal.

'Your arm hurt too?' cried Anne.

'Knocked to a pummy at the same time as my head,' said Tullidge
dispassionately.

'Rattle yer arm, corpel, and show her,' said Cripplestraw.

'Yes, sure,' said the corporal, raising the limb slowly, as if the glory
of exhibition had lost some of its novelty, though he was willing to
oblige.  Twisting it mercilessly about with his right hand he produced a
crunching among the bones at every motion, Cripplestraw seeming to derive
great satisfaction from the ghastly sound.

'How very shocking!' said Anne, painfully anxious for him to leave off.

'O, it don't hurt him, bless ye.  Do it, corpel?' said Cripplestraw.

'Not a bit,' said the corporal, still working his arm with great energy.

'There's no life in the bones at all.  No life in 'em, I tell her,
corpel!'

'None at all.'

'They be as loose as a bag of ninepins,' explained Cripplestraw in
continuation.  'You can feel 'em quite plain, Mis'ess Anne.  If ye would
like to, he'll undo his sleeve in a minute to oblege ye?'

'O no, no, please not!  I quite understand,' said the young woman.

'Do she want to hear or see any more, or don't she?' the corporal
inquired, with a sense that his time was getting wasted.

Anne explained that she did not on any account; and managed to escape
from the corner.




V.  THE SONG AND THE STRANGER


The trumpet-major now contrived to place himself near her, Anne's
presence having evidently been a great pleasure to him since the moment
of his first seeing her.  She was quite at her ease with him, and asked
him if he thought that Buonaparte would really come during the summer,
and many other questions which the gallant dragoon could not answer, but
which he nevertheless liked to be asked.  William Tremlett, who had not
enjoyed a sound night's rest since the First Consul's menace had become
known, pricked up his ears at sound of this subject, and inquired if
anybody had seen the terrible flat-bottomed boats that the enemy were to
cross in.

'My brother Robert saw several of them paddling about the shore the last
time he passed the Straits of Dover,' said the trumpet-major; and he
further startled the company by informing them that there were supposed
to be more than fifteen hundred of these boats, and that they would carry
a hundred men apiece.  So that a descent of one hundred and fifty
thousand men might be expected any day as soon as Boney had brought his
plans to bear.

'Lord ha' mercy upon us!' said William Tremlett.

'The night-time is when they will try it, if they try it at all,' said
old Tullidge, in the tone of one whose watch at the beacon must, in the
nature of things, have given him comprehensive views of the situation.
'It is my belief that the point they will choose for making the shore is
just over there,' and he nodded with indifference towards a section of
the coast at a hideous nearness to the house in which they were
assembled, whereupon Fencible Tremlett, and Cripplestraw of the Locals,
tried to show no signs of trepidation.

'When d'ye think 'twill be?' said Volunteer Comfort, the blacksmith.

'I can't answer to a day,' said the corporal, 'but it will certainly be
in a down-channel tide; and instead of pulling hard against it, he'll let
his boats drift, and that will bring 'em right into Budmouth Bay.  'Twill
be a beautiful stroke of war, if so be 'tis quietly done!'

'Beautiful,' said Cripplestraw, moving inside his clothes.  'But how if
we should be all abed, corpel?  You can't expect a man to be brave in his
shirt, especially we Locals, that have only got so far as shoulder fire-
locks.'

'He's not coming this summer.  He'll never come at all,' said a tall
sergeant-major decisively.

Loveday the soldier was too much engaged in attending upon Anne and her
mother to join in these surmises, bestirring himself to get the ladies
some of the best liquor the house afforded, which had, as a matter of
fact, crossed the Channel as privately as Buonaparte wished his army to
do, and had been landed on a dark night over the cliff.  After this he
asked Anne to sing, but though she had a very pretty voice in private
performances of that nature, she declined to oblige him; turning the
subject by making a hesitating inquiry about his brother Robert, whom he
had mentioned just before.

'Robert is as well as ever, thank you, Miss Garland,' he said.  'He is
now mate of the brig Pewit--rather young for such a command; but the
owner puts great trust in him.'  The trumpet-major added, deepening his
thoughts to a profounder view of the person discussed, 'Bob is in love.'

Anne looked conscious, and listened attentively; but Loveday did not go
on.

'Much?' she asked.

'I can't exactly say.  And the strange part of it is that he never tells
us who the woman is.  Nobody knows at all.'

'He will tell, of course?' said Anne, in the remote tone of a person with
whose sex such matters had no connexion whatever.

Loveday shook his head, and the tete-a-tete was put an end to by a burst
of singing from one of the sergeants, who was followed at the end of his
song by others, each giving a ditty in his turn; the singer standing up
in front of the table, stretching his chin well into the air, as though
to abstract every possible wrinkle from his throat, and then plunging
into the melody.  When this was over one of the foreign hussars--the
genteel German of Miller Loveday's description, who called himself a
Hungarian, and in reality belonged to no definite country--performed at
Trumpet-major Loveday's request the series of wild motions that he
denominated his national dance, that Anne might see what it was like.
Miss Garland was the flower of the whole company; the soldiers one and
all, foreign and English, seemed to be quite charmed by her presence, as
indeed they well might be, considering how seldom they came into the
society of such as she.

Anne and her mother were just thinking of retiring to their own dwelling
when Sergeant Stanner of the --th Foot, who was recruiting at Budmouth,
began a satirical song:--

   When law'-yers strive' to heal' a breach',
   And par-sons prac'-tise what' they preach';
   Then lit'-tle Bo-ney he'll pounce down',
   And march' his men' on Lon'-don town'!

   Chorus.--Rol'-li-cum ro'-rum, tol'-lol-lo'-rum,
         Rol'-li-cum ro'-rum, tol'-lol-lay.

   When jus'-ti-ces' hold e'qual scales',
   And rogues' are on'-ly found' in jails';
   Then lit'tle Bo'-ney he'll pounce down',
   And march' his men' on Lon'-don town'!

   Chorus.--Rol'-li-cum ro'-rum, tol'-lol-lo'-rum,
        Rol'-li-cum ro'-rum, tol'-lol-lay.

   When rich' men find' their wealth' a curse',
   And fill' there-with' the poor' man's purse';
   Then lit'-tle Bo'-ney he'll pounce down',
   And march' his men' on Lon'-don town'!

   Chorus.--Rol'-li-cum ro'-rum, tol'-lol-lo'-rum,
        Rol'-li-cum ro'-rum, tol'-lol-lay.

Poor Stanner! In spite of his satire, he fell at the bloody battle of
Albuera a few years after this pleasantly spent summer at the Georgian
watering-place, being mortally wounded and trampled down by a French
hussar when the brigade was deploying into line under Beresford.

While Miller Loveday was saying 'Well done, Mr. Stanner!' at the close of
the thirteenth stanza, which seemed to be the last, and Mr. Stanner was
modestly expressing his regret that he could do no better, a stentorian
voice was heard outside the window shutter repeating,

   Rol'-li-cum ro'-rum, tol'-lol-lo'-rum,
   Rol'-li-cum ro'-rum, tol'-lol-lay.

The company was silent in a moment at this reinforcement, and only the
military tried not to look surprised.  While all wondered who the singer
could be somebody entered the porch; the door opened, and in came a young
man, about the size and weight of the Farnese Hercules, in the uniform of
the yeomanry cavalry.

''Tis young Squire Derriman, old Mr. Derriman's nephew,' murmured voices
in the background.

Without waiting to address anybody, or apparently seeing who were
gathered there, the colossal man waved his cap above his head and went on
in tones that shook the window-panes:--

   When hus'-bands with' their wives' agree'.
   And maids' won't wed' from mod'-es-ty',
   Then lit'-tle Bo'-ney he'll pounce down',
   And march' his men' on Lon'-don town'!

   Chorus.--Rol'-li-cum ro'-rum, tol'-lol-lo'-rum,
         Rol'-li-cum ro'-rum, tol'-lol-lay.

It was a verse which had been omitted by the gallant Stanner, out of
respect to the ladies.

The new-comer was red-haired and of florid complexion, and seemed full of
a conviction that his whim of entering must be their pleasure, which for
the moment it was.

'No ceremony, good men all,' he said; 'I was passing by, and my ear was
caught by the singing.  I like singing; 'tis warming and cheering, and
shall not be put down.  I should like to hear anybody say otherwise.'

'Welcome, Master Derriman,' said the miller, filling a glass and handing
it to the yeoman.  'Come all the way from quarters, then?  I hardly
knowed ye in your soldier's clothes.  You'd look more natural with a spud
in your hand, sir.  I shouldn't ha' known ye at all if I hadn't heard
that you were called out.'

'More natural with a spud!--have a care, miller,' said the young giant,
the fire of his complexion increasing to scarlet.  'I don't mean anger,
but--but--a soldier's honour, you know!'

The military in the background laughed a little, and the yeoman then for
the first time discovered that there were more regulars present than one.
He looked momentarily disconcerted, but expanded again to full assurance.

'Right, right, Master Derriman, no offence--'twas only my joke,' said the
genial miller.  'Everybody's a soldier nowadays.  Drink a drap o' this
cordial, and don't mind words.'

The young man drank without the least reluctance, and said, 'Yes, miller,
I am called out.  'Tis ticklish times for us soldiers now; we hold our
lives in our hands--What are those fellows grinning at behind the
table?--I say, we do!'

'Staying with your uncle at the farm for a day or two, Mr. Derriman?'

'No, no; as I told you, six mile off.  Billeted at Casterbridge.  But I
have to call and see the old, old--'

'Gentleman?'

'Gentleman!--no, skinflint.  He lives upon the sweepings of the barton;
ha, ha!'  And the speaker's regular white teeth showed themselves like
snow in a Dutch cabbage.  'Well, well, the profession of arms makes a man
proof against all that.  I take things as I find 'em.'

'Quite right, Master Derriman.  Another drop?'

'No, no.  I'll take no more than is good for me--no man should; so don't
tempt me.'

The yeoman then saw Anne, and by an unconscious gravitation went towards
her and the other women, flinging a remark to John Loveday in passing.
'Ah, Loveday!  I heard you were come; in short, I come o' purpose to see
you.  Glad to see you enjoying yourself at home again.'

The trumpet-major replied civilly, though not without grimness, for he
seemed hardly to like Derriman's motion towards Anne.

'Widow Garland's daughter!--yes, 'tis! surely.  You remember me?  I have
been here before.  Festus Derriman, Yeomanry Cavalry.'

Anne gave a little curtsey.  'I know your name is Festus--that's all.'

'Yes, 'tis well known--especially latterly.'  He dropped his voice to
confidence pitch.  'I suppose your friends here are disturbed by my
coming in, as they don't seem to talk much?  I don't mean to interrupt
the party; but I often find that people are put out by my coming among
'em, especially when I've got my regimentals on.'

'La! and are they?'

'Yes; 'tis the way I have.'  He further lowered his tone, as if they had
been old friends, though in reality he had only seen her three or four
times.  'And how did you come to be here?  Dash my wig, I don't like to
see a nice young lady like you in this company.  You should come to some
of our yeomanry sprees in Casterbridge or Shottsford-Forum.  O, but the
girls do come!  The yeomanry are respected men, men of good substantial
families, many farming their own land; and every one among us rides his
own charger, which is more than these cussed fellows do.'  He nodded
towards the dragoons.

'Hush, hush!  Why, these are friends and neighbours of Miller Loveday,
and he is a great friend of ours--our best friend,' said Anne with great
emphasis, and reddening at the sense of injustice to their host.  'What
are you thinking of, talking like that?  It is ungenerous in you.'

'Ha, ha!  I've affronted you.  Isn't that it, fair angel, fair--what do
you call it?--fair vestal?  Ah, well! would you was safe in my own house!
But honour must be minded now, not courting.  Rollicum-rorum, tol-lol-
lorum.  Pardon me, my sweet, I like ye!  It may be a come down for me,
owning land; but I do like ye.'

'Sir, please be quiet,' said Anne, distressed.

'I will, I will.  Well, Corporal Tullidge, how's your head?' he said,
going towards the other end of the room, and leaving Anne to herself.

The company had again recovered its liveliness, and it was a long time
before the bouncing Rufus who had joined them could find heart to tear
himself away from their society and good liquors, although he had had
quite enough of the latter before he entered.  The natives received him
at his own valuation, and the soldiers of the camp, who sat beyond the
table, smiled behind their pipes at his remarks, with a pleasant twinkle
of the eye which approached the satirical, John Loveday being not the
least conspicuous in this bearing.  But he and his friends were too
courteous on such an occasion as the present to challenge the young man's
large remarks, and readily permitted him to set them right on the details
of camping and other military routine, about which the troopers seemed
willing to let persons hold any opinion whatever, provided that they
themselves were not obliged to give attention to it; showing, strangely
enough, that if there was one subject more than another which never
interested their minds, it was the art of war.  To them the art of
enjoying good company in Overcombe Mill, the details of the miller's
household, the swarming of his bees, the number of his chickens, and the
fatness of his pigs, were matters of infinitely greater concern.

The present writer, to whom this party has been described times out of
number by members of the Loveday family and other aged people now passed
away, can never enter the old living-room of Overcombe Mill without
beholding the genial scene through the mists of the seventy or eighty
years that intervene between then and now.  First and brightest to the
eye are the dozen candles, scattered about regardless of expense, and
kept well snuffed by the miller, who walks round the room at intervals of
five minutes, snuffers in hand, and nips each wick with great precision,
and with something of an executioner's grim look upon his face as he
closes the snuffers upon the neck of the candle.  Next to the
candle-light show the red and blue coats and white breeches of the
soldiers--nearly twenty of them in all besides the ponderous Derriman--the
head of the latter, and, indeed, the heads of all who are standing up,
being in dangerous proximity to the black beams of the ceiling.  There is
not one among them who would attach any meaning to 'Vittoria,' or gather
from the syllables 'Waterloo' the remotest idea of his own glory or
death.  Next appears the correct and innocent Anne, little thinking what
things Time has in store for her at no great distance off.  She looks at
Derriman with a half-uneasy smile as he clanks hither and thither, and
hopes he will not single her out again to hold a private dialogue
with--which, however, he does, irresistibly attracted by the white muslin
figure.  She must, of course, look a little gracious again now, lest his
mood should turn from sentimental to quarrelsome--no impossible
contingency with the yeoman-soldier, as her quick perception had noted.

'Well, well; this idling won't do for me, folks,' he at last said, to
Anne's relief.  'I ought not to have come in, by rights; but I heard you
enjoying yourselves, and thought it might be worth while to see what you
were up to; I have several miles to go before bedtime;' and stretching
his arms, lifting his chin, and shaking his head, to eradicate any
unseemly curve or wrinkle from his person, the yeoman wished them an off-
hand good-night, and departed.

'You should have teased him a little more, father,' said the
trumpet-major drily.  'You could soon have made him as crabbed as a
bear.'

'I didn't want to provoke the chap--'twasn't worth while.  He came in
friendly enough,' said the gentle miller without looking up.

'I don't think he was overmuch friendly,' said John.

''Tis as well to be neighbourly with folks, if they be not quite
onbearable,' his father genially replied, as he took off his coat to go
and draw more ale--this periodical stripping to the shirt-sleeves being
necessitated by the narrowness of the cellar and the smeary effect of its
numerous cobwebs upon best clothes.

Some of the guests then spoke of Fess Derriman as not such a bad young
man if you took him right and humoured him; others said that he was
nobody's enemy but his own; and the elder ladies mentioned in a tone of
interest that he was likely to come into a deal of money at his uncle's
death.  The person who did not praise was the one who knew him best, who
had known him as a boy years ago, when he had lived nearer to Overcombe
than he did at present.  This unappreciative person was the
trumpet-major.




VI.  OLD MR. DERRIMAN OF OXWELL HALL


At this time in the history of Overcombe one solitary newspaper
occasionally found its way into the village.  It was lent by the
postmaster at Budmouth (who, in some mysterious way, got it for nothing
through his connexion with the mail) to Mr. Derriman at the Hall, by whom
it was handed on to Mrs. Garland when it was not more than a fortnight
old.  Whoever remembers anything about the old farmer-squire will, of
course, know well enough that this delightful privilege of reading
history in long columns was not accorded to the Widow Garland for
nothing.  It was by such ingenuous means that he paid her for her
daughter's occasional services in reading aloud to him and making out his
accounts, in which matters the farmer, whose guineas were reported to
touch five figures--some said more--was not expert.

Mrs. Martha Garland, as a respectable widow, occupied a twilight rank
between the benighted villagers and the well-informed gentry, and kindly
made herself useful to the former as letter-writer and reader, and
general translator from the printing tongue.  It was not without
satisfaction that she stood at her door of an evening, newspaper in hand,
with three or four cottagers standing round, and poured down their open
throats any paragraph that she might choose to select from the stirring
ones of the period.  When she had done with the sheet Mrs. Garland passed
it on to the miller, the miller to the grinder, and the grinder to the
grinder's boy, in whose hands it became subdivided into half pages,
quarter pages, and irregular triangles, and ended its career as a paper
cap, a flagon bung, or a wrapper for his bread and cheese.

Notwithstanding his compact with Mrs. Garland, old Mr. Derriman kept the
paper so long, and was so chary of wasting his man's time on a merely
intellectual errand, that unless she sent for the journal it seldom
reached her hands.  Anne was always her messenger.  The arrival of the
soldiers led Mrs. Garland to despatch her daughter for it the day after
the party; and away she went in her hat and pelisse, in a direction at
right angles to that of the encampment on the hill.

Walking across the fields for the distance of a mile or two, she came out
upon the high-road by a wicket-gate.  On the other side of the way was
the entrance to what at first sight looked like a neglected meadow, the
gate being a rotten one, without a bottom rail, and broken-down palings
lying on each side.  The dry hard mud of the opening was marked with
several horse and cow tracks, that had been half obliterated by fifty
score sheep tracks, surcharged with the tracks of a man and a dog.  Beyond
this geological record appeared a carriage-road, nearly grown over with
grass, which Anne followed.  It descended by a gentle slope, dived under
dark-rinded elm and chestnut trees, and conducted her on till the hiss of
a waterfall and the sound of the sea became audible, when it took a bend
round a swamp of fresh watercress and brooklime that had once been a fish
pond.  Here the grey, weather-worn front of a building edged from behind
the trees.  It was Oxwell Hall, once the seat of a family now extinct,
and of late years used as a farmhouse.

Benjamin Derriman, who owned the crumbling place, had originally been
only the occupier and tenant-farmer of the fields around.  His wife had
brought him a small fortune, and during the growth of their only son
there had been a partition of the Oxwell estate, giving the farmer, now a
widower, the opportunity of acquiring the building and a small portion of
the land attached on exceptionally low terms.  But two years after the
purchase the boy died, and Derriman's existence was paralyzed forthwith.
It was said that since that event he had devised the house and fields to
a distant female relative, to keep them out of the hands of his detested
nephew; but this was not certainly known.

The hall was as interesting as mansions in a state of declension usually
are, as the excellent county history showed.  That popular work in folio
contained an old plate dedicated to the last scion of the original
owners, from which drawing it appeared that in 1750, the date of
publication, the windows were covered with little scratches like black
flashes of lightning; that a horn of hard smoke came out of each of the
twelve chimneys; that a lady and a lap-dog stood on the lawn in a
strenuously walking position; and a substantial cloud and nine flying
birds of no known species hung over the trees to the north-east.

The rambling and neglected dwelling had all the romantic excellencies and
practical drawbacks which such mildewed places share in common with
caves, mountains, wildernesses, glens, and other homes of poesy that
people of taste wish to live and die in.  Mustard and cress could have
been raised on the inner plaster of the dewy walls at any height not
exceeding three feet from the floor; and mushrooms of the most refined
and thin-stemmed kinds grew up through the chinks of the larder paving.
As for the outside, Nature, in the ample time that had been given her,
had so mingled her filings and effacements with the marks of human wear
and tear upon the house, that it was often hard to say in which of the
two or if in both, any particular obliteration had its origin.  The
keenness was gone from the mouldings of the doorways, but whether worn
out by the rubbing past of innumerable people's shoulders, and the moving
of their heavy furniture, or by Time in a grander and more abstract form,
did not appear.  The iron stanchions inside the window-panes were eaten
away to the size of wires at the bottom where they entered the stone, the
condensed breathings of generations having settled there in pools and
rusted them.  The panes themselves had either lost their shine altogether
or become iridescent as a peacock's tail.  In the middle of the porch was
a vertical sun-dial, whose gnomon swayed loosely about when the wind
blew, and cast its shadow hither and thither, as much as to say, 'Here's
your fine model dial; here's any time for any man; I am an old dial; and
shiftiness is the best policy.'

Anne passed under the arched gateway which screened the main front; over
it was the porter's lodge, reached by a spiral staircase.  Across the
archway was fixed a row of wooden hurdles, one of which Anne opened and
closed behind her.  Their necessity was apparent as soon as she got
inside.  The quadrangle of the ancient pile was a bed of mud and manure,
inhabited by calves, geese, ducks, and sow pigs surprisingly large, with
young ones surprisingly small.  In the groined porch some heifers were
amusing themselves by stretching up their necks and licking the carved
stone capitals that supported the vaulting.  Anne went on to a second and
open door, across which was another hurdle to keep the live stock from
absolute community with the inmates.  There being no knocker, she knocked
by means of a short stick which was laid against the post for that
purpose; but nobody attending, she entered the passage, and tried an
inner door.

A slight noise was heard inside, the door opened about an inch, and a
strip of decayed face, including the eye and some forehead wrinkles,
appeared within the crevice.

'Please I have come for the paper,' said Anne.

'O, is it you, dear Anne?' whined the inmate, opening the door a little
further.  'I could hardly get to the door to open it, I am so weak.'

The speaker was a wizened old gentleman, in a coat the colour of his
farmyard, breeches of the same hue, unbuttoned at the knees, revealing a
bit of leg above his stocking and a dazzlingly white shirt-frill to
compensate for this untidiness below.  The edge of his skull round his
eye-sockets was visible through the skin, and he had a mouth whose
corners made towards the back of his head on the slightest provocation.
He walked with great apparent difficulty back into the room, Anne
following him.

'Well, you can have the paper if you want it; but you never give me much
time to see what's in en!  Here's the paper.'  He held it out, but before
she could take it he drew it back again, saying, 'I have not had my share
o' the paper by a good deal, what with my weak sight, and people coming
so soon for en.  I am a poor put-upon soul; but my "Duty of Man" will be
left to me when the newspaper is gone.'  And he sank into his chair with
an air of exhaustion.

Anne said that she did not wish to take the paper if he had not done with
it, and that she was really later in the week than usual, owing to the
soldiers.

'Soldiers, yes--rot the soldiers!  And now hedges will be broke, and
hens' nests robbed, and sucking-pigs stole, and I don't know what all.
Who's to pay for't, sure?  I reckon that because the soldiers be come you
don't mean to be kind enough to read to me what I hadn't time to read
myself.'

She would read if he wished, she said; she was in no hurry.  And sitting
herself down she unfolded the paper.

'"Dinner at Carlton House"?'

'No, faith.  'Tis nothing to I.'

'"Defence of the country"?'

'Ye may read that if ye will.  I hope there will be no billeting in this
parish, or any wild work of that sort; for what would a poor old lamiger
like myself do with soldiers in his house, and nothing to feed 'em with?'

Anne began reading, and continued at her task nearly ten minutes, when
she was interrupted by the appearance in the quadrangular slough without
of a large figure in the uniform of the yeomanry cavalry.

'What do you see out there?' said the farmer with a start, as she paused
and slowly blushed.

'A soldier--one of the yeomanry,' said Anne, not quite at her ease.

'Scrounch it all--'tis my nephew!' exclaimed the old man, his face
turning to a phosphoric pallor, and his body twitching with innumerable
alarms as he formed upon his face a gasping smile of joy, with which to
welcome the new-coming relative.  'Read on, prithee, Miss Garland.'

Before she had read far the visitor straddled over the door-hurdle into
the passage and entered the room.

'Well, nunc, how do you feel?' said the giant, shaking hands with the
farmer in the manner of one violently ringing a hand-bell.  'Glad to see
you.'

'Bad and weakish, Festus,' replied the other, his person responding
passively to the rapid vibrations imparted.  'O, be tender, please--a
little softer, there's a dear nephew!  My arm is no more than a cobweb.'

'Ah, poor soul!'

'Yes, I am not much more than a skeleton, and can't bear rough usage.'

'Sorry to hear that; but I'll bear your affliction in mind.  Why, you are
all in a tremble, Uncle Benjy!'

''Tis because I am so gratified,' said the old man.  'I always get all in
a tremble when I am taken by surprise by a beloved relation.'

'Ah, that's it!' said the yeoman, bringing his hand down on the back of
his uncle's chair with a loud smack, at which Uncle Benjy nervously
sprang three inches from his seat and dropped into it again.  'Ask your
pardon for frightening ye, uncle.  'Tis how we do in the army, and I
forgot your nerves.  You have scarcely expected to see me, I dare say,
but here I am.'

'I am glad to see ye.  You are not going to stay long, perhaps?'

'Quite the contrary.  I am going to stay ever so long!'

'O I see!  I am so glad, dear Festus.  Ever so long, did ye say?'

'Yes, _ever_ so long,' said the young gentleman, sitting on the slope of
the bureau and stretching out his legs as props.  'I am going to make
this quite my own home whenever I am off duty, as long as we stay out.
And after that, when the campaign is over in the autumn, I shall come
here, and live with you like your own son, and help manage your land and
your farm, you know, and make you a comfortable old man.'

'Ah!  How you do please me!' said the farmer, with a horrified smile, and
grasping the arms of his chair to sustain himself.

'Yes; I have been meaning to come a long time, as I knew you'd like to
have me, Uncle Benjy; and 'tisn't in my heart to refuse you.'

'You always was kind that way!'

'Yes; I always was.  But I ought to tell you at once, not to disappoint
you, that I shan't be here always--all day, that is, because of my
military duties as a cavalry man.'

'O, not always?  That's a pity!' exclaimed the farmer with a cheerful
eye.

'I knew you'd say so.  And I shan't be able to sleep here at night
sometimes, for the same reason.'

'Not sleep here o' nights?' said the old gentleman, still more relieved.
'You ought to sleep here--you certainly ought; in short, you must.  But
you can't!'

'Not while we are with the colours.  But directly that's over--the very
next day--I'll stay here all day, and all night too, to oblige you, since
you ask me so very kindly.'

'Th-thank ye, that will be very nice!' said Uncle Benjy.

'Yes, I knew 'twould relieve ye.'  And he kindly stroked his uncle's
head, the old man expressing his enjoyment at the affectionate token by a
death's-head grimace.  'I should have called to see you the other night
when I passed through here,' Festus continued; 'but it was so late that I
couldn't come so far out of my way.  You won't think it unkind?'

'Not at all, if you _couldn't_.  I never shall think it unkind if you
really _can't_ come, you know, Festy.'  There was a few minutes' pause,
and as the nephew said nothing Uncle Benjy went on: 'I wish I had a
little present for ye.  But as ill-luck would have it we have lost a deal
of stock this year, and I have had to pay away so much.'

'Poor old man--I know you have.  Shall I lend you a seven-shilling piece,
Uncle Benjy?'

'Ha, ha!--you must have your joke; well, I'll think o' that.  And so they
expect Buonaparty to choose this very part of the coast for his landing,
hey?  And that the yeomanry be to stand in front as the forlorn hope?'

'Who says so?' asked the florid son of Mars, losing a little redness.

'The newspaper-man.'

'O, there's nothing in that,' said Festus bravely.  'The gover'ment
thought it possible at one time; but they don't know.'

Festus turned himself as he talked, and now said abruptly: 'Ah, who's
this?  Why, 'tis our little Anne!'  He had not noticed her till this
moment, the young woman having at his entry kept her face over the
newspaper, and then got away to the back part of the room.  'And are you
and your mother always going to stay down there in the mill-house
watching the little fishes, Miss Anne?'

She said that it was uncertain, in a tone of truthful precision which the
question was hardly worth, looking forcedly at him as she spoke.  But she
blushed fitfully, in her arms and hands as much as in her face.  Not that
she was overpowered by the great boots, formidable spurs, and other
fierce appliances of his person, as he imagined; simply she had not been
prepared to meet him there.

'I hope you will, I am sure, for my own good,' said he, letting his eyes
linger on the round of her cheek.

Anne became a little more dignified, and her look showed reserve.  But
the yeoman on perceiving this went on talking to her in so civil a way
that he irresistibly amused her, though she tried to conceal all feeling.
At a brighter remark of his than usual her mouth moved, her upper lip
playing uncertainly over her white teeth; it would stay still--no, it
would withdraw a little way in a smile; then it would flutter down again;
and so it wavered like a butterfly in a tender desire to be pleased and
smiling, and yet to be also sedate and composed; to show him that she did
not want compliments, and yet that she was not so cold as to wish to
repress any genuine feeling he might be anxious to utter.

'Shall you want any more reading, Mr. Derriman?' said she, interrupting
the younger man in his remarks.  'If not, I'll go homeward.'

'Don't let me hinder you longer,' said Festus.  'I'm off in a minute or
two, when your man has cleaned my boots.'

'Ye don't hinder us, nephew.  She must have the paper: 'tis the day for
her to have 'n.  She might read a little more, as I have had so little
profit out o' en hitherto.  Well, why don't ye speak?  Will ye, or won't
ye, my dear?'

'Not to two,' she said.

'Ho, ho! damn it, I must go then, I suppose,' said Festus, laughing; and
unable to get a further glance from her he left the room and clanked into
the back yard, where he saw a man; holding up his hand he cried, 'Anthony
Cripplestraw!'

Cripplestraw came up in a trot, moved a lock of his hair and replaced it,
and said, 'Yes, Maister Derriman.'  He was old Mr. Derriman's odd hand in
the yard and garden, and like his employer had no great pretensions to
manly beauty, owing to a limpness of backbone and speciality of mouth,
which opened on one side only, giving him a triangular smile.

'Well, Cripplestraw, how is it to-day?' said Festus, with
socially-superior heartiness.

'Middlin', considering, Maister Derriman.  And how's yerself?'

'Fairish.  Well, now, see and clean these military boots of mine.  I'll
cock my foot up on this bench.  This pigsty of my uncle's is not fit for
a soldier to come into.'

'Yes, Maister Derriman, I will.  No, 'tis not fit, Maister Derriman.'

'What stock has uncle lost this year, Cripplestraw?'

'Well, let's see, sir.  I can call to mind that we've lost three
chickens, a tom-pigeon, and a weakly sucking-pig, one of a fare of ten.  I
can't think of no more, Maister Derriman.'

'H'm, not a large quantity of cattle.  The old rascal!'

'No, 'tis not a large quantity.  Old what did you say, sir?'

'O nothing.  He's within there.'  Festus flung his forehead in the
direction of a right line towards the inner apartment.  'He's a regular
sniche one.'

'Hee, hee; fie, fie, Master Derriman!' said Cripplestraw, shaking his
head in delighted censure.  'Gentlefolks shouldn't talk so.  And an
officer, Mr. Derriman!  'Tis the duty of all cavalry gentlemen to bear in
mind that their blood is a knowed thing in the country, and not to speak
ill o't.'

'He's close-fisted.'

'Well, maister, he is--I own he is a little.  'Tis the nater of some old
venerable gentlemen to be so.  We'll hope he'll treat ye well in yer
fortune, sir.'

'Hope he will.  Do people talk about me here, Cripplestraw?' asked the
yeoman, as the other continued busy with his boots.

'Well, yes, sir; they do off and on, you know.  They says you be as fine
a piece of calvery flesh and bones as was ever growed on fallow-ground;
in short, all owns that you be a fine fellow, sir.  I wish I wasn't no
more afraid of the French than you be; but being in the Locals, Maister
Derriman, I assure ye I dream of having to defend my country every night;
and I don't like the dream at all.'

'You should take it careless, Cripplestraw, as I do; and 'twould soon
come natural to you not to mind it at all.  Well, a fine fellow is not
everything, you know.  O no.  There's as good as I in the army, and even
better.'

'And they say that when you fall this summer, you'll die like a man.'

'When I fall?'

'Yes, sure, Maister Derriman.  Poor soul o' thee!  I shan't forget 'ee as
you lie mouldering in yer soldier's grave.'

'Hey?' said the warrior uneasily.  'What makes 'em think I am going to
fall?'

'Well, sir, by all accounts the yeomanry will be put in front.'

'Front!  That's what my uncle has been saying.'

'Yes, and by all accounts 'tis true.  And naterelly they'll be mowed down
like grass; and you among 'em, poor young galliant officer!'

'Look here, Cripplestraw.  This is a reg'lar foolish report.  How can
yeomanry be put in front?  Nobody's put in front.  We yeomanry have
nothing to do with Buonaparte's landing.  We shall be away in a safe
place, guarding the possessions and jewels.  Now, can you see,
Cripplestraw, any way at all that the yeomanry can be put in front?  Do
you think they really can?'

'Well, maister, I am afraid I do,' said the cheering Cripplestraw.  'And
I know a great warrior like you is only too glad o' the chance.  'Twill
be a great thing for ye, death and glory!  In short, I hope from my heart
you will be, and I say so very often to folk--in fact, I pray at night
for't.'

'O! cuss you! you needn't pray about it.'

'No, Maister Derriman, I won't.'

'Of course my sword will do its duty.  That's enough.  And now be off
with ye.'

Festus gloomily returned to his uncle's room and found that Anne was just
leaving.  He was inclined to follow her at once, but as she gave him no
opportunity for doing this he went to the window, and remained tapping
his fingers against the shutter while she crossed the yard.

'Well, nephy, you are not gone yet?' said the farmer, looking dubiously
at Festus from under one eyelid.  'You see how I am.  Not by any means
better, you see; so I can't entertain 'ee as well as I would.'

'You can't, nunc, you can't.  I don't think you are worse--if I do, dash
my wig.  But you'll have plenty of opportunities to make me welcome when
you are better.  If you are not so brisk inwardly as you was, why not try
change of air?  This is a dull, damp hole.'

''Tis, Festus; and I am thinking of moving.'

'Ah, where to?' said Festus, with surprise and interest.

'Up into the garret in the north corner.  There is no fireplace in the
room; but I shan't want that, poor soul o' me.'

''Tis not moving far.'

''Tis not.  But I have not a soul belonging to me within ten mile; and
you know very well that I couldn't afford to go to lodgings that I had to
pay for.'

'I know it--I know it, Uncle Benjy!  Well, don't be disturbed.  I'll come
and manage for you as soon as ever this Boney alarm is over; but when a
man's country calls he must obey, if he is a man.'

'A splendid spirit!' said Uncle Benjy, with much admiration on the
surface of his countenance.  'I never had it.  How could it have got into
the boy?'

'From my mother's side, perhaps.'

'Perhaps so.  Well, take care of yourself, nephy,' said the farmer,
waving his hand impressively.  'Take care!  In these warlike times your
spirit may carry ye into the arms of the enemy; and you are the last of
the family.  You should think of this, and not let your bravery carry ye
away.'

'Don't be disturbed, uncle; I'll control myself,' said Festus, betrayed
into self-complacency against his will.  'At least I'll do what I can,
but nature will out sometimes.  Well, I'm off.'  He began humming
'Brighton Camp,' and, promising to come again soon, retired with
assurance, each yard of his retreat adding private joyousness to his
uncle's form.

When the bulky young man had disappeared through the porter's lodge,
Uncle Benjy showed preternatural activity for one in his invalid state,
jumping up quickly without his stick, at the same time opening and
shutting his mouth quite silently like a thirsty frog, which was his way
of expressing mirth.  He ran upstairs as quick as an old squirrel, and
went to a dormer window which commanded a view of the grounds beyond the
gate, and the footpath that stretched across them to the village.

'Yes, yes!' he said in a suppressed scream, dancing up and down, 'he's
after her: she've hit en!'  For there appeared upon the path the figure
of Anne Garland, and, hastening on at some little distance behind her,
the swaggering shape of Festus.  She became conscious of his approach,
and moved more quickly.  He moved more quickly still, and overtook her.
She turned as if in answer to a call from him, and he walked on beside
her, till they were out of sight.  The old man then played upon an
imaginary fiddle for about half a minute; and, suddenly discontinuing
these signs of pleasure, went downstairs again.




VII.  HOW THEY TALKED IN THE PASTURES


'You often come this way?' said Festus to Anne rather before he had
overtaken her.

'I come for the newspaper and other things,' she said, perplexed by a
doubt whether he were there by accident or design.

They moved on in silence, Festus beating the grass with his switch in a
masterful way.  'Did you speak, Mis'ess Anne?' he asked.

'No,' said Anne.

'Ten thousand pardons.  I thought you did.  Now don't let me drive you
out of the path.  I can walk among the high grass and giltycups--they
will not yellow my stockings as they will yours.  Well, what do you think
of a lot of soldiers coming to the neighbourhood in this way?'

'I think it is very lively, and a great change,' she said with demure
seriousness.

'Perhaps you don't like us warriors as a body?'

Anne smiled without replying.

'Why, you are laughing!' said the yeoman, looking searchingly at her and
blushing like a little fire.  'What do you see to laugh at?'

'Did I laugh?' said Anne, a little scared at his sudden mortification.

'Why, yes; you know you did, you young sneerer,' he said like a cross
baby.  'You are laughing at me--that's who you are laughing at!  I should
like to know what you would do without such as me if the French were to
drop in upon ye any night?'

'Would you help to beat them off?' said she.

'Can you ask such a question?  What are we for?  But you don't think
anything of soldiers.'

O yes, she liked soldiers, she said, especially when they came home from
the wars, covered with glory; though when she thought what doings had won
them that glory she did not like them quite so well.  The gallant and
appeased yeoman said he supposed her to mean chopping off heads, blowing
out brains, and that kind of business, and thought it quite right that a
tender-hearted thing like her should feel a little horrified.  But as for
him, he should not mind such another Blenheim this summer as the army had
fought a hundred years ago, or whenever it was--dash his wig if he should
mind it at all.  'Hullo! now you are laughing again; yes, I saw you!'  And
the choleric Festus turned his blue eyes and flushed face upon her as
though he would read her through.  Anne strove valiantly to look calmly
back; but her eyes could not face his, and they fell.  'You did laugh!'
he repeated.

'It was only a tiny little one,' she murmured.

'Ah--I knew you did!' thundered he.  'Now what was it you laughed at?'

'I only--thought that you were--merely in the yeomanry,' she murmured
slily.

'And what of that?'

'And the yeomanry only seem farmers that have lost their senses.'

'Yes, yes!  I knew you meant some jeering o' that sort, Mistress Anne.
But I suppose 'tis the way of women, and I take no notice.  I'll confess
that some of us are no great things: but I know how to draw a sword,
don't I?--say I don't just to provoke me.'

'I am sure you do,' said Anne sweetly.  'If a Frenchman came up to you,
Mr. Derriman, would you take him on the hip, or on the thigh?'

'Now you are flattering!' he said, his white teeth uncovering themselves
in a smile.  'Well, of course I should draw my sword--no, I mean my sword
would be already drawn; and I should put spurs to my horse--charger, as
we call it in the army; and I should ride up to him and say--no, I
shouldn't say anything, of course--men never waste words in battle; I
should take him with the third guard, low point, and then coming back to
the second guard--'

'But that would be taking care of yourself--not hitting at him.'

'How can you say that!' he cried, the beams upon his face turning to a
lurid cloud in a moment.  'How can you understand military terms who've
never had a sword in your life?  I shouldn't take him with the sword at
all.'  He went on with eager sulkiness, 'I should take him with my
pistol.  I should pull off my right glove, and throw back my goat-skin;
then I should open my priming-pan, prime, and cast about--no, I
shouldn't, that's wrong; I should draw my right pistol, and as soon as
loaded, seize the weapon by the butt; then at the word "Cock your pistol"
I should--'

'Then there is plenty of time to give such words of command in the heat
of battle?' said Anne innocently.

'No!' said the yeoman, his face again in flames.  'Why, of course I am
only telling you what _would_ be the word of command _if_--there now! you
la--'

'I didn't; 'pon my word I didn't!'

'No, I don't think you did; it was my mistake.  Well, then I come smartly
to Present, looking well along the barrel--along the barrel--and fire.  Of
course I know well enough how to engage the enemy!  But I expect my old
uncle has been setting you against me.'

'He has not said a word,' replied Anne; 'though I have heard of you, of
course.'

'What have you heard?  Nothing good, I dare say.  It makes my blood boil
within me!'

'O, nothing bad,' said she assuringly.  'Just a word now and then.'

'Now, come, tell me, there's a dear.  I don't like to be crossed.  It
shall be a sacred secret between us.  Come, now!'

Anne was embarrassed, and her smile was uncomfortable.  'I shall not tell
you,' she said at last.

'There it is again!' said the yeoman, throwing himself into a despair.  'I
shall soon begin to believe that my name is not worth sixpence about
here!'

'I tell you 'twas nothing against you,' repeated Anne.

'That means it might have been for me,' said Festus, in a mollified tone.
'Well, though, to speak the truth, I have a good many faults, some people
will praise me, I suppose.  'Twas praise?'

'It was.'

'Well, I am not much at farming, and I am not much in company, and I am
not much at figures, but perhaps I must own, since it is forced upon me,
that I can show as fine a soldier's figure on the Esplanade as any man of
the cavalry.'

'You can,' said Anne; for though her flesh crept in mortal terror of his
irascibility, she could not resist the fearful pleasure of leading him
on.  'You look very well; and some say, you are--'

'What?  Well, they say I am good-looking.  I don't make myself, so 'tis
no praise.  Hullo! what are you looking across there for?'

'Only at a bird that I saw fly out of that tree,' said Anne.

'What?  Only at a bird, do you say?' he heaved out in a voice of thunder.
'I see your shoulders a-shaking, young madam.  Now don't you provoke me
with that laughing!  By God, it won't do!'

'Then go away!' said Anne, changed from mirthfulness to irritation by his
rough manner.  'I don't want your company, you great bragging thing!  You
are so touchy there's no bearing with you.  Go away!'

'No, no, Anne; I am wrong to speak to you so.  I give you free liberty to
say what you will to me.  Say I am not a bit of a soldier, or anything!
Abuse me--do now, there's a dear.  I'm scum, I'm froth, I'm dirt before
the besom--yes!'

'I have nothing to say, sir.  Stay where you are till I am out of this
field.'

'Well, there's such command in your looks that I ha'n't heart to go
against you.  You will come this way to-morrow at the same time?  Now,
don't be uncivil.'

She was too generous not to forgive him, but the short little lip
murmured that she did not think it at all likely she should come that way
to-morrow.

'Then Sunday?' he said.

'Not Sunday,' said she.

'Then Monday--Tuesday--Wednesday, surely?' he went on experimentally.

She answered that she should probably not see him on either day, and,
cutting short the argument, went through the wicket into the other field.
Festus paused, looking after her; and when he could no longer see her
slight figure he swept away his deliberations, began singing, and turned
off in the other direction.




VIII.  ANNE MAKES A CIRCUIT OF THE CAMP


When Anne was crossing the last field, she saw approaching her an old
woman with wrinkled cheeks, who surveyed the earth and its inhabitants
through the medium of brass-rimmed spectacles.  Shaking her head at Anne
till the glasses shone like two moons, she said, 'Ah, ah; I zeed ye!  If
I had only kept on my short ones that I use for reading the Collect and
Gospel I shouldn't have zeed ye; but thinks I, I be going out o' doors,
and I'll put on my long ones, little thinking what they'd show me.  Ay, I
can tell folk at any distance with these--'tis a beautiful pair for out
o' doors; though my short ones be best for close work, such as darning,
and catching fleas, that's true.'

'What have you seen, Granny Seamore?' said Anne.

'Fie, fie, Miss Nancy! you know,' said Granny Seamore, shaking her head
still.  'But he's a fine young feller, and will have all his uncle's
money when 'a's gone.'  Anne said nothing to this, and looking ahead with
a smile passed Granny Seamore by.

Festus, the subject of the remark, was at this time about
three-and-twenty, a fine fellow as to feet and inches, and of a
remarkably warm tone in skin and hair.  Symptoms of beard and whiskers
had appeared upon him at a very early age, owing to his persistent use of
the razor before there was any necessity for its operation.  The brave
boy had scraped unseen in the out-house, in the cellar, in the wood-shed,
in the stable, in the unused parlour, in the cow-stalls, in the barn, and
wherever he could set up his triangular bit of looking-glass without
observation, or extemporize a mirror by sticking up his hat on the
outside of a window-pane.  The result now was that, did he neglect to use
the instrument he once had trifled with, a fine rust broke out upon his
countenance on the first day, a golden lichen on the second, and a fiery
stubble on the third to a degree which admitted of no further
postponement.

His disposition divided naturally into two, the boastful and the
cantankerous.  When Festus put on the big pot, as it is classically
called, he was quite blinded ipso facto to the diverting effect of that
mood and manner upon others; but when disposed to be envious or
quarrelsome he was rather shrewd than otherwise, and could do some pretty
strokes of satire.  He was both liked and abused by the girls who knew
him, and though they were pleased by his attentions, they never failed to
ridicule him behind his back.  In his cups (he knew those vessels, though
only twenty-three) he first became noisy, then excessively friendly, and
then invariably nagging.  During childhood he had made himself renowned
for his pleasant habit of pouncing down upon boys smaller and poorer than
himself, and knocking their birds' nests out of their hands, or
overturning their little carts of apples, or pouring water down their
backs; but his conduct became singularly the reverse of aggressive the
moment the little boys' mothers ran out to him, brandishing brooms,
frying-pans, skimmers, and whatever else they could lay hands on by way
of weapons.  He then fled and hid behind bushes, under faggots, or in
pits till they had gone away; and on one such occasion was known to creep
into a badger's hole quite out of sight, maintaining that post with great
firmness and resolution for two or three hours.  He had brought more
vulgar exclamations upon the tongues of respectable parents in his native
parish than any other boy of his time.  When other youngsters snowballed
him he ran into a place of shelter, where he kneaded snowballs of his
own, with a stone inside, and used these formidable missiles in returning
their pleasantry.  Sometimes he got fearfully beaten by boys his own age,
when he would roar most lustily, but fight on in the midst of his tears,
blood, and cries.

He was early in love, and had at the time of the story suffered from the
ravages of that passion thirteen distinct times.  He could not love
lightly and gaily; his love was earnest, cross-tempered, and even savage.
It was a positive agony to him to be ridiculed by the object of his
affections, and such conduct drove him into a frenzy if persisted in.  He
was a torment to those who behaved humbly towards him, cynical with those
who denied his superiority, and a very nice fellow towards those who had
the courage to ill-use him.

This stalwart gentleman and Anne Garland did not cross each other's paths
again for a week.  Then her mother began as before about the newspaper,
and, though Anne did not much like the errand, she agreed to go for it on
Mrs. Garland pressing her with unusual anxiety.  Why her mother was so
persistent on so small a matter quite puzzled the girl; but she put on
her hat and started.

As she had expected, Festus appeared at a stile over which she sometimes
went for shortness' sake, and showed by his manner that he awaited her.
When she saw this she kept straight on, as if she would not enter the
park at all.

'Surely this is your way?' said Festus.

'I was thinking of going round by the road,' she said.

'Why is that?'

She paused, as if she were not inclined to say.  'I go that way when the
grass is wet,' she returned at last.

'It is not wet now,' he persisted; 'the sun has been shining on it these
nine hours.'  The fact was that the way by the path was less open than by
the road, and Festus wished to walk with her uninterrupted.  'But, of
course, it is nothing to me what you do.'  He flung himself from the
stile and walked away towards the house.

Anne, supposing him really indifferent, took the same way, upon which he
turned his head and waited for her with a proud smile.

'I cannot go with you,' she said decisively.

'Nonsense, you foolish girl!  I must walk along with you down to the
corner.'

'No, please, Mr. Derriman; we might be seen.'

'Now, now--that's shyness!' he said jocosely.

'No; you know I cannot let you.'

'But I must.'

'But I do not allow it.'

'Allow it or not, I will.'

'Then you are unkind, and I must submit,' she said, her eyes brimming
with tears.

'Ho, ho; what a shame of me!  My wig, I won't do any such thing for the
world,' said the repentant yeoman.  'Haw, haw; why, I thought your "go
away" meant "come on," as it does with so many of the women I meet,
especially in these clothes.  Who was to know you were so confoundedly
serious?'

As he did not go Anne stood still and said nothing.

'I see you have a deal more caution and a deal less good-nature than I
ever thought you had,' he continued emphatically.

'No, sir; it is not any planned manner of mine at all,' she said
earnestly.  'But you will see, I am sure, that I could not go down to the
hall with you without putting myself in a wrong light.'

'Yes; that's it, that's it.  I am only a fellow in the yeomanry cavalry--a
plain soldier, I may say; and we know what women think of such: that they
are a bad lot--men you mustn't speak to for fear of losing your
character--chaps you avoid in the roads--chaps that come into a house
like oxen, daub the stairs wi' their boots, stain the furniture wi' their
drink, talk rubbish to the servants, abuse all that's holy and righteous,
and are only saved from being carried off by Old Nick because they are
wanted for Boney.'

'Indeed, I didn't know you were thought so bad of as that,' said she
simply.

'What! don't my uncle complain to you of me?  You are a favourite of that
handsome, nice old gaffer's, I know.'

'Never.'

'Well, what do we think of our nice trumpet-major, hey?'

Anne closed her mouth up tight, built it up, in fact, to show that no
answer was coming to that question.

'O now, come, seriously, Loveday is a good fellow, and so is his father.'

'I don't know.'

'What a close little rogue you are!  There is no getting anything out of
you.  I believe you would say "I don't know," to every mortal question,
so very discreet as you are.  Upon my heart, there are some women who
would say "I don't know," to "Will ye marry me?"'

The brightness upon Anne's cheek and in her eyes during this remark
showed that there was a fair quantity of life and warmth beneath the
discretion he complained of.  Having spoken thus, he drew aside that she
might pass, and bowed very low.  Anne formally inclined herself and went
on.

She had been at vexation point all the time that he was present, from a
haunting sense that he would not have spoken to her so freely had she
been a young woman with thriving male relatives to keep forward admirers
in check.  But she had been struck, now as at their previous meeting,
with the power she possessed of working him up either to irritation or to
complacency at will; and this consciousness of being able to play upon
him as upon an instrument disposed her to a humorous considerateness, and
made her tolerate even while she rebuffed him.

When Anne got to the hall the farmer, as usual, insisted upon her reading
what he had been unable to get through, and held the paper tightly in his
skinny hand till she had agreed.  He sent her to a hard chair that she
could not possibly injure to the extent of a pennyworth by sitting in it
a twelvemonth, and watched her from the outer angle of his near eye while
she bent over the paper.  His look might have been suggested by the sight
that he had witnessed from his window on the last occasion of her visit,
for it partook of the nature of concern.  The old man was afraid of his
nephew, physically and morally, and he began to regard Anne as a fellow-
sufferer under the same despot.  After this sly and curious gaze at her
he withdrew his eye again, so that when she casually lifted her own there
was nothing visible but his keen bluish profile as before.

When the reading was about half-way through, the door behind them opened,
and footsteps crossed the threshold.  The farmer diminished perceptibly
in his chair, and looked fearful, but pretended to be absorbed in the
reading, and quite unconscious of an intruder.  Anne felt the presence of
the swashing Festus, and stopped her reading.

'Please go on, Miss Anne,' he said, 'I am not going to speak a word.'  He
withdrew to the mantelpiece and leaned against it at his ease.

'Go on, do ye, maidy Anne,' said Uncle Benjy, keeping down his tremblings
by a great effort to half their natural extent.

Anne's voice became much lower now that there were two listeners, and her
modesty shrank somewhat from exposing to Festus the appreciative
modulations which an intelligent interest in the subject drew from her
when unembarrassed.  But she still went on that he might not suppose her
to be disconcerted, though the ensuing ten minutes was one of
disquietude.  She knew that the bothering yeoman's eyes were travelling
over her from his position behind, creeping over her shoulders, up to her
head, and across her arms and hands.  Old Benjy on his part knew the same
thing, and after sundry endeavours to peep at his nephew from the corner
of his eye, he could bear the situation no longer.

'Do ye want to say anything to me, nephew?' he quaked.

'No, uncle, thank ye,' said Festus heartily.  'I like to stay here,
thinking of you and looking at your back hair.'

The nervous old man writhed under this vivisection, and Anne read on;
till, to the relief of both, the gallant fellow grew tired of his
amusement and went out of the room.  Anne soon finished her paragraph and
rose to go, determined never to come again as long as Festus haunted the
precincts.  Her face grew warmer as she thought that he would be sure to
waylay her on her journey home to-day.

On this account, when she left the house, instead of going in the
customary direction, she bolted round to the further side, through the
bushes, along under the kitchen-garden wall, and through a door leading
into a rutted cart-track, which had been a pleasant gravelled drive when
the fine old hall was in its prosperity.  Once out of sight of the
windows she ran with all her might till she had quitted the park by a
route directly opposite to that towards her home.  Why she was so
seriously bent upon doing this she could hardly tell but the instinct to
run was irresistible.

It was necessary now to clamber over the down to the left of the camp,
and make a complete circuit round the latter--infantry, cavalry, sutlers,
and all--descending to her house on the other side.  This tremendous walk
she performed at a rapid rate, never once turning her head, and avoiding
every beaten track to keep clear of the knots of soldiers taking a walk.
When she at last got down to the levels again she paused to fetch breath,
and murmured, 'Why did I take so much trouble?  He would not, after all,
have hurt me.'

As she neared the mill an erect figure with a blue body and white thighs
descended before her from the down towards the village, and went past the
mill to a stile beyond, over which she usually returned to her house.
Here he lingered.  On coming nearer Anne discovered this person to be
Trumpet-major Loveday; and not wishing to meet anybody just now Anne
passed quickly on, and entered the house by the garden door.

'My dear Anne, what a time you have been gone!' said her mother.

'Yes, I have been round by another road.'

'Why did you do that?'

Anne looked thoughtful and reticent, for her reason was almost too silly
a one to confess.  'Well, I wanted to avoid a person who is very busy
trying to meet me--that's all,' she said.

Her mother glanced out of the window.  'And there he is, I suppose,' she
said, as John Loveday, tired of looking for Anne at the stile, passed the
house on his way to his father's door.  He could not help casting his
eyes towards their window, and, seeing them, he smiled.

Anne's reluctance to mention Festus was such that she did not correct her
mother's error, and the dame went on: 'Well, you are quite right, my
dear.  Be friendly with him, but no more at present.  I have heard of
your other affair, and think it is a very wise choice.  I am sure you
have my best wishes in it, and I only hope it will come to a point.'

'What's that?' said the astonished Anne.

'You and Mr. Festus Derriman, dear.  You need not mind me; I have known
it for several days.  Old Granny Seamore called here Saturday, and told
me she saw him coming home with you across Park Close last week, when you
went for the newspaper; so I thought I'd send you again to-day, and give
you another chance.'

'Then you didn't want the paper--and it was only for that!'

'He's a very fine young fellow; he looks a thorough woman's protector.'

'He may look it,' said Anne.

'He has given up the freehold farm his father held at Pitstock, and lives
in independence on what the land brings him.  And when Farmer Derriman
dies, he'll have all the old man's, for certain.  He'll be worth ten
thousand pounds, if a penny, in money, besides sixteen horses, cart and
hack, a fifty-cow dairy, and at least five hundred sheep.'

Anne turned away, and instead of informing her mother that she had been
running like a doe to escape the interesting heir-presumptive alluded to,
merely said 'Mother, I don't like this at all.'




IX.  ANNE IS KINDLY FETCHED BY THE TRUMPET-MAJOR


After this, Anne would on no account walk in the direction of the hall
for fear of another encounter with young Derriman.  In the course of a
few days it was told in the village that the old farmer had actually gone
for a week's holiday and change of air to the Royal watering-place near
at hand, at the instance of his nephew Festus.  This was a wonderful
thing to hear of Uncle Benjy, who had not slept outside the walls of
Oxwell Hall for many a long year before; and Anne well imagined what
extraordinary pressure must have been put upon him to induce him to take
such a step.  She pictured his unhappiness at the bustling
watering-place, and hoped no harm would come to him.

She spent much of her time indoors or in the garden, hearing little of
the camp movements beyond the periodical Ta-ta-ta-taa of the trumpeters
sounding their various ingenious calls for watch-setting, stables, feed,
boot-and-saddle, parade, and so on, which made her think how clever her
friend the trumpet-major must be to teach his pupils to play those pretty
little tunes so well.

On the third morning after Uncle Benjy's departure, she was disturbed as
usual while dressing by the tramp of the troops down the slope to the
mill-pond, and during the now familiar stamping and splashing which
followed there sounded upon the glass of the window a slight smack, which
might have been caused by a whip or switch.  She listened more
particularly, and it was repeated.

As John Loveday was the only dragoon likely to be aware that she slept in
that particular apartment, she imagined the signal to come from him,
though wondering that he should venture upon such a freak of familiarity.

Wrapping herself up in a red cloak, she went to the window, gently drew
up a corner of the curtain, and peeped out, as she had done many times
before.  Nobody who was not quite close beneath her window could see her
face; but as it happened, somebody was close.  The soldiers whose
floundering Anne had heard were not Loveday's dragoons, but a troop of
the York Hussars, quite oblivious of her existence.  They had passed on
out of the water, and instead of them there sat Festus Derriman alone on
his horse, and in plain clothes, the water reaching up to the animal's
belly, and Festus' heels elevated over the saddle to keep them out of the
stream, which threatened to wash rider and horse into the deep mill-head
just below.  It was plainly he who had struck her lattice, for in a
moment he looked up, and their eyes met.  Festus laughed loudly, and
slapped her window again; and just at that moment the dragoons began
prancing down the slope in review order.  She could not but wait a minute
or two to see them pass.  While doing so she was suddenly led to draw
back, drop the corner of the curtain, and blush privately in her room.
She had not only been seen by Festus Derriman, but by John Loveday, who,
riding along with his trumpet slung up behind him, had looked over his
shoulder at the phenomenon of Derriman beneath Anne's bedroom window and
seemed quite astounded at the sight.

She was quite vexed at the conjunction of incidents, and went no more to
the window till the dragoons had ridden far away and she had heard
Festus's horse laboriously wade on to dry land.  When she looked out
there was nobody left but Miller Loveday, who usually stood in the garden
at this time of the morning to say a word or two to the soldiers, of whom
he already knew so many, and was in a fair way of knowing many more, from
the liberality with which he handed round mugs of cheering liquor
whenever parties of them walked that way.

In the afternoon of this day Anne walked to a christening party at a
neighbour's in the adjoining parish of Springham, intending to walk home
again before it got dark; but there was a slight fall of rain towards
evening, and she was pressed by the people of the house to stay over the
night.  With some hesitation she accepted their hospitality; but at ten
o'clock, when they were thinking of going to bed, they were startled by a
smart rap at the door, and on it being unbolted a man's form was seen in
the shadows outside.

'Is Miss Garland here?' the visitor inquired, at which Anne suspended her
breath.

'Yes,' said Anne's entertainer, warily.

'Her mother is very anxious to know what's become of her.  She promised
to come home.'  To her great relief Anne recognized the voice as John
Loveday's, and not Festus Derriman's.

'Yes, I did, Mr. Loveday,' said she, coming forward; 'but it rained, and
I thought my mother would guess where I was.'

Loveday said with diffidence that it had not rained anything to speak of
at the camp, or at the mill, so that her mother was rather alarmed.

'And she asked you to come for me?' Anne inquired.

This was a question which the trumpet-major had been dreading during the
whole of his walk thither.  'Well, she didn't exactly ask me,' he said
rather lamely, but still in a manner to show that Mrs. Garland had
indirectly signified such to be her wish.  In reality Mrs. Garland had
not addressed him at all on the subject.  She had merely spoken to his
father on finding that her daughter did not return, and received an
assurance from the miller that the precious girl was doubtless quite
safe.  John heard of this inquiry, and, having a pass that evening,
resolved to relieve Mrs. Garland's mind on his own responsibility.  Ever
since his morning view of Festus under her window he had been on thorns
of anxiety, and his thrilling hope now was that she would walk back with
him.

He shifted his foot nervously as he made the bold request.  Anne felt at
once that she would go.  There was nobody in the world whose care she
would more readily be under than the trumpet-major's in a case like the
present.  He was their nearest neighbour's son, and she had liked his
single-minded ingenuousness from the first moment of his return home.

When they had started on their walk, Anne said in a practical way, to
show that there was no sentiment whatever in her acceptance of his
company, 'Mother was much alarmed about me, perhaps?'

'Yes; she was uneasy,' he said; and then was compelled by conscience to
make a clean breast of it.  'I know she was uneasy, because my father
said so.  But I did not see her myself.  The truth is, she doesn't know I
am come.'

Anne now saw how the matter stood; but she was not offended with him.
What woman could have been?  They walked on in silence, the respectful
trumpet-major keeping a yard off on her right as precisely as if that
measure had been fixed between them.  She had a great feeling of civility
toward him this evening, and spoke again.  'I often hear your trumpeters
blowing the calls.  They do it beautifully, I think.'

'Pretty fair; they might do better,' said he, as one too well-mannered to
make much of an accomplishment in which he had a hand.

'And you taught them how to do it?'

'Yes, I taught them.'

'It must require wonderful practice to get them into the way of beginning
and finishing so exactly at one time.  It is like one throat doing it
all.  How came you to be a trumpeter, Mr. Loveday?'

'Well, I took to it naturally when I was a little boy,' said he, betrayed
into quite a gushing state by her delightful interest.  'I used to make
trumpets of paper, eldersticks, eltrot stems, and even stinging-nettle
stalks, you know.  Then father set me to keep the birds off that little
barley-ground of his, and gave me an old horn to frighten 'em with.  I
learnt to blow that horn so that you could hear me for miles and miles.
Then he bought me a clarionet, and when I could play that I borrowed a
serpent, and I learned to play a tolerable bass.  So when I 'listed I was
picked out for training as trumpeter at once.'

'Of course you were.'

'Sometimes, however, I wish I had never joined the army.  My father gave
me a very fair education, and your father showed me how to draw horses--on
a slate, I mean.  Yes, I ought to have done more than I have.'

'What, did you know my father?' she asked with new interest.

'O yes, for years.  You were a little mite of a thing then; and you used
to cry when we big boys looked at you, and made pig's eyes at you, which
we did sometimes.  Many and many a time have I stood by your poor father
while he worked.  Ah, you don't remember much about him; but I do!'

Anne remained thoughtful; and the moon broke from behind the clouds,
lighting up the wet foliage with a twinkling brightness, and lending to
each of the trumpet-major's buttons and spurs a little ray of its own.
They had come to Oxwell park gate, and he said, 'Do you like going
across, or round by the lane?'

'We may as well go by the nearest road,' said Anne.

They entered the park, following the half-obliterated drive till they
came almost opposite the hall, when they entered a footpath leading on to
the village.  While hereabout they heard a shout, or chorus of
exclamation, apparently from within the walls of the dark buildings near
them.

'What was that?' said Anne.

'I don't know,' said her companion.  'I'll go and see.'

He went round the intervening swamp of watercress and brooklime which had
once been the fish-pond, crossed by a culvert the trickling brook that
still flowed that way, and advanced to the wall of the house.  Boisterous
noises were resounding from within, and he was tempted to go round the
corner, where the low windows were, and look through a chink into the
room whence the sounds proceeded.

It was the room in which the owner dined--traditionally called the great
parlour--and within it sat about a dozen young men of the yeomanry
cavalry, one of them being Festus.  They were drinking, laughing,
singing, thumping their fists on the tables, and enjoying themselves in
the very perfection of confusion.  The candles, blown by the breeze from
the partly opened window, had guttered into coffin handles and shrouds,
and, choked by their long black wicks for want of snuffing, gave out a
smoky yellow light.  One of the young men might possibly have been in a
maudlin state, for he had his arm round the neck of his next neighbour.
Another was making an incoherent speech to which nobody was listening.
Some of their faces were red, some were sallow; some were sleepy, some
wide awake.  The only one among them who appeared in his usual frame of
mind was Festus, whose huge, burly form rose at the head of the table,
enjoying with a serene and triumphant aspect the difference between his
own condition and that of his neighbours.  While the trumpet-major
looked, a young woman, niece of Anthony Cripplestraw, and one of Uncle
Benjy's servants, was called in by one of the crew, and much against her
will a fiddle was placed in her hands, from which they made her produce
discordant screeches.

The absence of Uncle Benjy had, in fact, been contrived by young Derriman
that he might make use of the hall on his own account.  Cripplestraw had
been left in charge, and Festus had found no difficulty in forcing from
that dependent the keys of whatever he required.  John Loveday turned his
eyes from the scene to the neighbouring moonlit path, where Anne still
stood waiting.  Then he looked into the room, then at Anne again.  It was
an opportunity of advancing his own cause with her by exposing Festus,
for whom he began to entertain hostile feelings of no mean force.

'No; I can't do it,' he said.  ''Tis underhand.  Let things take their
chance.'

He moved away, and then perceived that Anne, tired of waiting, had
crossed the stream, and almost come up with him.

'What is the noise about?' she said.

'There's company in the house,' said Loveday.

'Company?  Farmer Derriman is not at home,' said Anne, and went on to the
window whence the rays of light leaked out, the trumpet-major standing
where he was.  He saw her face enter the beam of candlelight, stay there
for a moment, and quickly withdraw.  She came back to him at once.  'Let
us go on,' she said.

Loveday imagined from her tone that she must have an interest in
Derriman, and said sadly, 'You blame me for going across to the window,
and leading you to follow me.'

'Not a bit,' said Anne, seeing his mistake as to the state of her heart,
and being rather angry with him for it.  'I think it was most natural,
considering the noise.'

Silence again.  'Derriman is sober as a judge,' said Loveday, as they
turned to go.  'It was only the others who were noisy.'

'Whether he is sober or not is nothing whatever to me,' said Anne.

'Of course not.  I know it,' said the trumpet-major, in accents
expressing unhappiness at her somewhat curt tone, and some doubt of her
assurance.

Before they had emerged from the shadow of the hall some persons were
seen moving along the road.  Loveday was for going on just the same; but
Anne, from a shy feeling that it was as well not to be seen walking alone
with a man who was not her lover, said--

'Mr. Loveday, let us wait here a minute till they have passed.'

On nearer view the group was seen to comprise a man on a piebald horse,
and another man walking beside him.  When they were opposite the house
they halted, and the rider dismounted, whereupon a dispute between him
and the other man ensued, apparently on a question of money.

''Tis old Mr. Derriman come home!' said Anne.  'He has hired that horse
from the bathing-machine to bring him.  Only fancy!'

Before they had gone many steps further the farmer and his companion had
ended their dispute, and the latter mounted the horse and cantered away,
Uncle Benjy coming on to the house at a nimble pace.  As soon as he
observed Loveday and Anne, he fell into a feebler gait; when they came up
he recognized Anne.

'And you have torn yourself away from King George's Esplanade so soon,
Farmer Derriman?' said she.

'Yes, faith!  I couldn't bide at such a ruination place,' said the
farmer.  'Your hand in your pocket every minute of the day.  'Tis a
shilling for this, half-a-crown for that; if you only eat one egg, or
even a poor windfall of an apple, you've got to pay; and a bunch o'
radishes is a halfpenny, and a quart o' cider a good tuppence
three-farthings at lowest reckoning.  Nothing without paying!  I couldn't
even get a ride homeward upon that screw without the man wanting a
shilling for it, when my weight didn't take a penny out of the beast.
I've saved a penn'orth or so of shoeleather to be sure; but the saddle
was so rough wi' patches that 'a took twopence out of the seat of my best
breeches.  King George hev' ruined the town for other folks.  More than
that, my nephew promised to come there to-morrow to see me, and if I had
stayed I must have treated en.  Hey--what's that?'

It was a shout from within the walls of the building, and Loveday said--

'Your nephew is here, and has company.'

'My nephew _here_?' gasped the old man.  'Good folks, will you come up to
the door with me?  I mean--hee--hee--just for company!  Dear me, I
thought my house was as quiet as a church?'

They went back to the window, and the farmer looked in, his mouth falling
apart to a greater width at the corners than in the middle, and his
fingers assuming a state of radiation.

''Tis my best silver tankards they've got, that I've never used!  O! 'tis
my strong beer!  'Tis eight candles guttering away, when I've used
nothing but twenties myself for the last half-year!'

'You didn't know he was here, then?' said Loveday.

'O no!' said the farmer, shaking his head half-way.  'Nothing's known to
poor I!  There's my best rummers jingling as careless as if 'twas tin
cups; and my table scratched, and my chairs wrenched out of joint.  See
how they tilt 'em on the two back legs--and that's ruin to a chair!  Ah!
when I be gone he won't find another old man to make such work with, and
provide goods for his breaking, and house-room and drink for his tear-
brass set!'

'Comrades and fellow-soldiers,' said Festus to the hot farmers and yeomen
he entertained within, 'as we have vowed to brave danger and death
together, so we'll share the couch of peace.  You shall sleep here to-
night, for it is getting late.  My scram blue-vinnied gallicrow of an
uncle takes care that there shan't be much comfort in the house, but you
can curl up on the furniture if beds run short.  As for my sleep, it
won't be much.  I'm melancholy!  A woman has, I may say, got my heart in
her pocket, and I have hers in mine.  She's not much--to other folk, I
mean--but she is to me.  The little thing came in my way, and conquered
me.  I fancy that simple girl!  I ought to have looked higher--I know it;
what of that?  'Tis a fate that may happen to the greatest men.'

'Whash her name?' said one of the warriors, whose head occasionally
drooped upon his epaulettes, and whose eyes fell together in the casual
manner characteristic of the tired soldier.  (It was really Farmer Stubb,
of Duddle Hole.)

'Her name?  Well, 'tis spelt, A, N--but, by gad, I won't give ye her name
here in company.  She don't live a hundred miles off, however, and she
wears the prettiest cap-ribbons you ever saw.  Well, well, 'tis weakness!
She has little, and I have much; but I do adore that girl, in spite of
myself!'

'Let's go on,' said Anne.

'Prithee stand by an old man till he's got into his house!' implored
Uncle Benjy.  'I only ask ye to bide within call.  Stand back under the
trees, and I'll do my poor best to give no trouble.'

'I'll stand by you for half-an-hour, sir,' said Loveday.  'After that I
must bolt to camp.'

'Very well; bide back there under the trees,' said Uncle Benjy.  'I don't
want to spite 'em?'

'You'll wait a few minutes, just to see if he gets in?' said the trumpet-
major to Anne as they retired from the old man.

'I want to get home,' said Anne anxiously.

When they had quite receded behind the tree-trunks and he stood alone,
Uncle Benjy, to their surprise, set up a loud shout, altogether beyond
the imagined power of his lungs.

'Man a-lost! man a-lost!' he cried, repeating the exclamation several
times; and then ran and hid himself behind a corner of the building.  Soon
the door opened, and Festus and his guests came tumbling out upon the
green.

''Tis our duty to help folks in distress,' said Festus.  'Man a-lost,
where are you?'

''Twas across there,' said one of his friends.

'No! 'twas here,' said another.

Meanwhile Uncle Benjy, coming from his hiding-place, had scampered with
the quickness of a boy up to the door they had quitted, and slipped in.
In a moment the door flew together, and Anne heard him bolting and
barring it inside.  The revellers, however, did not notice this, and came
on towards the spot where the trumpet-major and Anne were standing.

'Here's succour at hand, friends,' said Festus.  'We are all king's men;
do not fear us.'

'Thank you,' said Loveday; 'so are we.'  He explained in two words that
they were not the distressed traveller who had cried out, and turned to
go on.

''Tis she! my life, 'tis she said Festus, now first recognizing Anne.
'Fair Anne, I will not part from you till I see you safe at your own dear
door.'

'She's in my hands,' said Loveday civilly, though not without firmness,
'so it is not required, thank you.'

'Man, had I but my sword--'

'Come,' said Loveday, 'I don't want to quarrel.  Let's put it to her.
Whichever of us she likes best, he shall take her home.  Miss Anne,
which?'

Anne would much rather have gone home alone, but seeing the remainder of
the yeomanry party staggering up she thought it best to secure a
protector of some kind.  How to choose one without offending the other
and provoking a quarrel was the difficulty.

'You must both walk home with me,' she adroitly said, 'one on one side,
and one on the other.  And if you are not quite civil to one another all
the time, I'll never speak to either of you again.'

They agreed to the terms, and the other yeomen arriving at this time said
they would go also as rearguard.

'Very well,' said Anne.  'Now go and get your hats, and don't be long.'

'Ah, yes; our hats,' said the yeomanry, whose heads were so hot that they
had forgotten their nakedness till then.

'You'll wait till we've got 'em--we won't be a moment,' said Festus
eagerly.

Anne and Loveday said yes, and Festus ran back to the house, followed by
all his band.

'Now let's run and leave 'em,' said Anne, when they were out of hearing.

'But we've promised to wait!' said the trumpet-major in surprise.

'Promised to wait!' said Anne indignantly.  'As if one ought to keep such
a promise to drunken men as that.  You can do as you like, I shall go.'

'It is hardly fair to leave the chaps,' said Loveday reluctantly, and
looking back at them.  But she heard no more, and flitting off under the
trees, was soon lost to his sight.

Festus and the rest had by this time reached Uncle Benjy's door, which
they were discomfited and astonished to find closed.  They began to
knock, and then to kick at the venerable timber, till the old man's head,
crowned with a tasselled nightcap, appeared at an upper window, followed
by his shoulders, with apparently nothing on but his shirt, though it was
in truth a sheet thrown over his coat.

'Fie, fie upon ye all for making such a hullaballoo at a weak old man's
door,' he said, yawning.  'What's in ye to rouse honest folks at this
time o' night?'

'Hang me--why--it's Uncle Benjy!  Haw--haw--haw?' said Festus.  'Nunc,
why how the devil's this?  'Tis I--Festus--wanting to come in.'

'O no, no, my clever man, whoever you be!' said Uncle Benjy in a tone of
incredulous integrity.  'My nephew, dear boy, is miles away at quarters,
and sound asleep by this time, as becomes a good soldier.  That story
won't do to-night, my man, not at all.'

'Upon my soul 'tis I,' said Festus.

'Not to-night, my man; not to-night!  Anthony, bring my blunderbuss,'
said the farmer, turning and addressing nobody inside the room.

'Let's break in the window-shutters,' said one of the others.

'My wig, and we will!' said Festus.  'What a trick of the old man!'

'Get some big stones,' said the yeomen, searching under the wall.

'No; forbear, forbear,' said Festus, beginning to be frightened at the
spirit he had raised.  'I forget; we should drive him into fits, for he's
subject to 'em, and then perhaps 'twould be manslaughter.  Comrades, we
must march!  No, we'll lie in the barn.  I'll see into this, take my word
for 't.  Our honour is at stake.  Now let's back to see my beauty home.'

'We can't, as we hav'n't got our hats,' said one of his
fellow-troopers--in domestic life Jacob Noakes, of Muckleford Farm.

'No more we can,' said Festus, in a melancholy tone.  'But I must go to
her and tell her the reason.  She pulls me in spite of all.'

'She's gone.  I saw her flee across park while we were knocking at the
door,' said another of the yeomanry.

'Gone!' said Festus, grinding his teeth and putting himself into a rigid
shape.  'Then 'tis my enemy--he has tempted her away with him!  But I am
a rich man, and he's poor, and rides the King's horse while I ride my
own.  Could I but find that fellow, that regular, that common man, I
would--'

'Yes?' said the trumpet-major, coming up behind him.

'I,'--said Festus, starting round,--'I would seize him by the hand and
say, "Guard her; if you are my friend, guard her from all harm!"'

'A good speech.  And I will, too,' said Loveday heartily.

'And now for shelter,' said Festus to his companions.

They then unceremoniously left Loveday, without wishing him good-night,
and proceeded towards the barn.  He crossed the park and ascended the
down to the camp, grieved that he had given Anne cause of complaint, and
fancying that she held him of slight account beside his wealthier rival.




X. THE MATCH-MAKING VIRTUES OF A DOUBLE GARDEN


Anne was so flurried by the military incidents attending her return home
that she was almost afraid to venture alone outside her mother's
premises.  Moreover, the numerous soldiers, regular and otherwise, that
haunted Overcombe and its neighbourhood, were getting better acquainted
with the villagers, and the result was that they were always standing at
garden gates, walking in the orchards, or sitting gossiping just within
cottage doors, with the bowls of their tobacco-pipes thrust outside for
politeness' sake, that they might not defile the air of the household.
Being gentlemen of a gallant and most affectionate nature, they naturally
turned their heads and smiled if a pretty girl passed by, which was
rather disconcerting to the latter if she were unused to society.  Every
belle in the village soon had a lover, and when the belles were all
allotted those who scarcely deserved that title had their turn, many of
the soldiers being not at all particular about half-an-inch of nose more
or less, a trifling deficiency of teeth, or a larger crop of freckles
than is customary in the Saxon race.  Thus, with one and another,
courtship began to be practised in Overcombe on rather a large scale, and
the dispossessed young men who had been born in the place were left to
take their walks alone, where, instead of studying the works of nature,
they meditated gross outrages on the brave men who had been so good as to
visit their village.

Anne watched these romantic proceedings from her window with much
interest, and when she saw how triumphantly other handsome girls of the
neighbourhood walked by on the gorgeous arms of Lieutenant Knockheelmann,
Cornet Flitzenhart, and Captain Klaspenkissen, of the thrilling York
Hussars, who swore the most picturesque foreign oaths, and had a
wonderful sort of estate or property called the Vaterland in their
country across the sea, she was filled with a sense of her own
loneliness.  It made her think of things which she tried to forget, and
to look into a little drawer at something soft and brown that lay in a
curl there, wrapped in paper.  At last she could bear it no longer, and
went downstairs.

'Where are you going?' said Mrs. Garland.

'To see the folks, because I am so gloomy!'

'Certainly not at present, Anne.'

'Why not, mother?' said Anne, blushing with an indefinite sense of being
very wicked.

'Because you must not.  I have been going to tell you several times not
to go into the street at this time of day.  Why not walk in the morning?
There's young Mr. Derriman would be glad to--'

'Don't mention him, mother, don't!'

'Well then, dear, walk in the garden.'

So poor Anne, who really had not the slightest wish to throw her heart
away upon a soldier, but merely wanted to displace old thoughts by new,
turned into the inner garden from day to day, and passed a good many
hours there, the pleasant birds singing to her, and the delightful
butterflies alighting on her hat, and the horrid ants running up her
stockings.

This garden was undivided from Loveday's, the two having originally been
the single garden of the whole house.  It was a quaint old place,
enclosed by a thorn hedge so shapely and dense from incessant clipping
that the mill-boy could walk along the top without sinking in--a feat
which he often performed as a means of filling out his day's work.  The
soil within was of that intense fat blackness which is only seen after a
century of constant cultivation.  The paths were grassed over, so that
people came and went upon them without being heard.  The grass harboured
slugs, and on this account the miller was going to replace it by gravel
as soon as he had time; but as he had said this for thirty years without
doing it, the grass and the slugs seemed likely to remain.

The miller's man attended to Mrs. Garland's piece of the garden as well
as to the larger portion, digging, planting, and weeding indifferently in
both, the miller observing with reason that it was not worth while for a
helpless widow lady to hire a man for her little plot when his man,
working alongside, could tend it without much addition to his labour.  The
two households were on this account even more closely united in the
garden than within the mill.  Out there they were almost one family, and
they talked from plot to plot with a zest and animation which Mrs.
Garland could never have anticipated when she first removed thither after
her husband's death.

The lower half of the garden, farthest from the road, was the most snug
and sheltered part of this snug and sheltered enclosure, and it was well
watered as the land of Lot.  Three small brooks, about a yard wide, ran
with a tinkling sound from side to side between the plots, crossing the
path under wood slabs laid as bridges, and passing out of the garden
through little tunnels in the hedge.  The brooks were so far overhung at
their brinks by grass and garden produce that, had it not been for their
perpetual babbling, few would have noticed that they were there.  This
was where Anne liked best to linger when her excursions became restricted
to her own premises; and in a spot of the garden not far removed the
trumpet-major loved to linger also.

Having by virtue of his office no stable duty to perform, he came down
from the camp to the mill almost every day; and Anne, finding that he
adroitly walked and sat in his father's portion of the garden whenever
she did so in the other half, could not help smiling and speaking to him.
So his epaulettes and blue jacket, and Anne's yellow gipsy hat, were
often seen in different parts of the garden at the same time; but he
never intruded into her part of the enclosure, nor did she into
Loveday's.  She always spoke to him when she saw him there, and he
replied in deep, firm accents across the gooseberry bushes, or through
the tall rows of flowering peas, as the case might be.  He thus gave her
accounts at fifteen paces of his experiences in camp, in quarters, in
Flanders, and elsewhere; of the difference between line and column, of
forced marches, billeting, and such-like, together with his hopes of
promotion.  Anne listened at first indifferently; but knowing no one else
so good-natured and experienced, she grew interested in him as in a
brother.  By degrees his gold lace, buckles, and spurs lost all their
strangeness and were as familiar to her as her own clothes.

At last Mrs. Garland noticed this growing friendship, and began to
despair of her motherly scheme of uniting Anne to the moneyed Festus.  Why
she could not take prompt steps to check interference with her plans
arose partly from her nature, which was the reverse of managing, and
partly from a new emotional circumstance with which she found it
difficult to reckon.  The near neighbourhood that had produced the
friendship of Anne for John Loveday was slowly effecting a warmer liking
between her mother and his father.

Thus the month of July passed.  The troop horses came with the regularity
of clockwork twice a day down to drink under her window, and, as the
weather grew hotter, kicked up their heels and shook their heads
furiously under the maddening sting of the dun-fly.  The green leaves in
the garden became of a darker dye, the gooseberries ripened, and the
three brooks were reduced to half their winter volume.

At length the earnest trumpet-major obtained Mrs. Garland's consent to
take her and her daughter to the camp, which they had not yet viewed from
any closer point than their own windows.  So one afternoon they went, the
miller being one of the party.  The villagers were by this time driving a
roaring trade with the soldiers, who purchased of them every description
of garden produce, milk, butter, and eggs at liberal prices.  The figures
of these rural sutlers could be seen creeping up the slopes, laden like
bees, to a spot in the rear of the camp, where there was a kind of market-
place on the greensward.

Mrs. Garland, Anne, and the miller were conducted from one place to
another, and on to the quarter where the soldiers' wives lived who had
not been able to get lodgings in the cottages near.  The most sheltered
place had been chosen for them, and snug huts had been built for their
use by their husbands, of clods, hurdles, a little thatch, or whatever
they could lay hands on.  The trumpet-major conducted his friends thence
to the large barn which had been appropriated as a hospital, and to the
cottage with its windows bricked up, that was used as the magazine; then
they inspected the lines of shining dark horses (each representing the
then high figure of two-and-twenty guineas purchase money), standing
patiently at the ropes which stretched from one picket-post to another, a
bank being thrown up in front of them as a protection at night.

They passed on to the tents of the German Legion, a well-grown and rather
dandy set of men, with a poetical look about their faces which rendered
them interesting to feminine eyes.  Hanoverians, Saxons, Prussians,
Swedes, Hungarians, and other foreigners were numbered in their ranks.
They were cleaning arms, which they leant carefully against a rail when
the work was complete.

On their return they passed the mess-house, a temporary wooden building
with a brick chimney.  As Anne and her companions went by, a group of
three or four of the hussars were standing at the door talking to a
dashing young man, who was expatiating on the qualities of a horse that
one was inclined to buy.  Anne recognized Festus Derriman in the seller,
and Cripplestraw was trotting the animal up and down.  As soon as she
caught the yeoman's eye he came forward, making some friendly remark to
the miller, and then turning to Miss Garland, who kept her eyes steadily
fixed on the distant landscape till he got so near that it was impossible
to do so longer.  Festus looked from Anne to the trumpet-major, and from
the trumpet-major back to Anne, with a dark expression of face, as if he
suspected that there might be a tender understanding between them.

'Are you offended with me?' he said to her in a low voice of repressed
resentment.

'No,' said Anne.

'When are you coming to the hall again?'

'Never, perhaps.'

'Nonsense, Anne,' said Mrs. Garland, who had come near, and smiled
pleasantly on Festus.  'You can go at any time, as usual.'

'Let her come with me now, Mrs. Garland; I should be pleased to walk
along with her.  My man can lead home the horse.'

'Thank you, but I shall not come,' said Miss Anne coldly.

The widow looked unhappily in her daughter's face, distressed between her
desire that Anne should encourage Festus, and her wish to consult Anne's
own feelings.

'Leave her alone, leave her alone,' said Festus, his gaze blackening.
'Now I think of it I am glad she can't come with me, for I am engaged;'
and he stalked away.

Anne moved on with her mother, young Loveday silently following, and they
began to descend the hill.

'Well, where's Mr. Loveday?' asked Mrs. Garland.

'Father's behind,' said John.

Mrs. Garland looked behind her solicitously; and the miller, who had been
waiting for the event, beckoned to her.

'I'll overtake you in a minute,' she said to the younger pair, and went
back, her colour, for some unaccountable reason, rising as she did so.
The miller and she then came on slowly together, conversing in very low
tones, and when they got to the bottom they stood still.  Loveday and
Anne waited for them, saying but little to each other, for the rencounter
with Festus had damped the spirits of both.  At last the widow's private
talk with Miller Loveday came to an end, and she hastened onward, the
miller going in another direction to meet a man on business.  When she
reached the trumpet-major and Anne she was looking very bright and rather
flurried, and seemed sorry when Loveday said that he must leave them and
return to the camp.  They parted in their usual friendly manner, and Anne
and her mother were left to walk the few remaining yards alone.

'There, I've settled it,' said Mrs. Garland.  'Anne, what are you
thinking about?  I have settled in my mind that it is all right.'

'What's all right?' said Anne.

'That you do not care for Derriman, and mean to encourage John Loveday.
What's all the world so long as folks are happy!  Child, don't take any
notice of what I have said about Festus, and don't meet him any more.'

'What a weathercock you are, mother!  Why should you say that just now?'

'It is easy to call me a weathercock,' said the matron, putting on the
look of a good woman; 'but I have reasoned it out, and at last, thank
God, I have got over my ambition.  The Lovedays are our true and only
friends, and Mr. Festus Derriman, with all his money, is nothing to us at
all.'

'But,' said Anne, 'what has made you change all of a sudden from what you
have said before?'

'My feelings and my reason, which I am thankful for!'

Anne knew that her mother's sentiments were naturally so versatile that
they could not be depended on for two days together; but it did not occur
to her for the moment that a change had been helped on in the present
case by a romantic talk between Mrs. Garland and the miller.  But Mrs.
Garland could not keep the secret long.  She chatted gaily as she walked,
and before they had entered the house she said, 'What do you think Mr
Loveday has been saying to me, dear Anne?'

Anne did not know at all.

'Why, he has asked me to marry him.'




XI.  OUR PEOPLE ARE AFFECTED BY THE PRESENCE OF ROYALTY


To explain the miller's sudden proposal it is only necessary to go back
to that moment when Anne, Festus, and Mrs. Garland were talking together
on the down.  John Loveday had fallen behind so as not to interfere with
a meeting in which he was decidedly superfluous; and his father, who
guessed the trumpet-major's secret, watched his face as he stood.  John's
face was sad, and his eyes followed Mrs. Garland's encouraging manner to
Festus in a way which plainly said that every parting of her lips was
tribulation to him.  The miller loved his son as much as any miller or
private gentleman could do, and he was pained to see John's gloom at such
a trivial circumstance.  So what did he resolve but to help John there
and then by precipitating a matter which, had he himself been the only
person concerned, he would have delayed for another six months.

He had long liked the society of his impulsive, tractable neighbour, Mrs.
Garland; had mentally taken her up and pondered her in connexion with the
question whether it would not be for the happiness of both if she were to
share his home, even though she was a little his superior in antecedents
and knowledge.  In fact he loved her; not tragically, but to a very
creditable extent for his years; that is, next to his sons, Bob and John,
though he knew very well of that ploughed-ground appearance near the
corners of her once handsome eyes, and that the little depression in her
right cheek was not the lingering dimple it was poetically assumed to be,
but a result of the abstraction of some worn-out nether millstones within
the cheek by Rootle, the Budmouth man, who lived by such practices on the
heads of the elderly.  But what of that, when he had lost two to each one
of hers, and exceeded her in age by some eight years!  To do John a
service, then, he quickened his designs, and put the question to her
while they were standing under the eyes of the younger pair.

Mrs. Garland, though she had been interested in the miller for a long
time, and had for a moment now and then thought on this question as far
as, 'Suppose he should, 'If he were to,' and so on, had never thought
much further; and she was really taken by surprise when the question
came.  She answered without affectation that she would think over the
proposal; and thus they parted.

Her mother's infirmity of purpose set Anne thinking, and she was suddenly
filled with a conviction that in such a case she ought to have some
purpose herself.  Mrs. Garland's complacency at the miller's offer had,
in truth, amazed her.  While her mother had held up her head, and
recommended Festus, it had seemed a very pretty thing to rebel; but the
pressure being removed an awful sense of her own responsibility took
possession of her mind.  As there was no longer anybody to be wise or
ambitious for her, surely she should be wise and ambitious for herself,
discountenance her mother's attachment, and encourage Festus in his
addresses, for her own and her mother's good.  There had been a time when
a Loveday thrilled her own heart; but that was long ago, before she had
thought of position or differences.  To wake into cold daylight like
this, when and because her mother had gone into the land of romance, was
dreadful and new to her, and like an increase of years without living
them.

But it was easier to think that she ought to marry the yeoman than to
take steps for doing it; and she went on living just as before, only with
a little more thoughtfulness in her eyes.

Two days after the visit to the camp, when she was again in the garden,
Soldier Loveday said to her, at a distance of five rows of beans and a
parsley-bed--

'You have heard the news, Miss Garland?'

'No,' said Anne, without looking up from a book she was reading.

'The King is coming to-morrow.'

'The King?' She looked up then.

'Yes; to Gloucester Lodge; and he will pass this way.  He can't arrive
till long past the middle of the night, if what they say is true, that he
is timed to change horses at Woodyates Inn--between Mid and South
Wessex--at twelve o'clock,' continued Loveday, encouraged by her interest
to cut off the parsley-bed from the distance between them.

Miller Loveday came round the corner of the house.

'Have ye heard about the King coming, Miss Maidy Anne?' he said.

Anne said that she had just heard of it; and the trumpet-major, who
hardly welcomed his father at such a moment, explained what he knew of
the matter.

'And you will go with your regiment to meet 'en, I suppose?' said old
Loveday.

Young Loveday said that the men of the German Legion were to perform that
duty.  And turning half from his father, and half towards Anne, he added,
in a tentative tone, that he thought he might get leave for the night, if
anybody would like to be taken to the top of the Ridgeway over which the
royal party must pass.

Anne, knowing by this time of the budding hope in the gallant dragoon's
mind, and not wishing to encourage it, said, 'I don't want to go.'

The miller looked disappointed as well as John.

'Your mother might like to?'

'Yes, I am going indoors, and I'll ask her if you wish me to,' said she.

She went indoors and rather coldly told her mother of the proposal.  Mrs.
Garland, though she had determined not to answer the miller's question on
matrimony just yet, was quite ready for this jaunt, and in spite of Anne
she sailed off at once to the garden to hear more about it.  When she re-
entered, she said--

'Anne, I have not seen the King or the King's horses for these many
years; and I am going.'

'Ah, it is well to be you, mother,' said Anne, in an elderly tone.

'Then you won't come with us?' said Mrs. Garland, rather rebuffed.

'I have very different things to think of,' said her daughter with
virtuous emphasis, 'than going to see sights at that time of night.'

Mrs. Garland was sorry, but resolved to adhere to the arrangement.  The
night came on; and it having gone abroad that the King would pass by the
road, many of the villagers went out to see the procession.  When the two
Lovedays and Mrs. Garland were gone, Anne bolted the door for security,
and sat down to think again on her grave responsibilities in the choice
of a husband, now that her natural guardian could no longer be trusted.

A knock came to the door.

Anne's instinct was at once to be silent, that the comer might think the
family had retired.

The knocking person, however, was not to be easily persuaded.  He had in
fact seen rays of light over the top of the shutter, and, unable to get
an answer, went on to the door of the mill, which was still going, the
miller sometimes grinding all night when busy.  The grinder accompanied
the stranger to Mrs. Garland's door.

'The daughter is certainly at home, sir,' said the grinder.  'I'll go
round to t'other side, and see if she's there, Master Derriman.'

'I want to take her out to see the King,' said Festus.

Anne had started at the sound of the voice.  No opportunity could have
been better for carrying out her new convictions on the disposal of her
hand.  But in her mortal dislike of Festus, Anne forgot her principles,
and her idea of keeping herself above the Lovedays.  Tossing on her hat
and blowing out the candle, she slipped out at the back door, and hastily
followed in the direction that her mother and the rest had taken.  She
overtook them as they were beginning to climb the hill.

'What! you have altered your mind after all?' said the widow.  'How came
you to do that, my dear?'

'I thought I might as well come,' said Anne.

'To be sure you did,' said the miller heartily.  'A good deal better than
biding at home there.'

John said nothing, though she could almost see through the gloom how glad
he was that she had altered her mind.  When they reached the ridge over
which the highway stretched they found many of their neighbours who had
got there before them idling on the grass border between the roadway and
the hedge, enjoying a sort of midnight picnic, which it was easy to do,
the air being still and dry.  Some carriages were also standing near,
though most people of the district who possessed four wheels, or even
two, had driven into the town to await the King there.  From this height
could be seen in the distance the position of the watering-place, an
additional number of lanterns, lamps, and candles having been lighted to-
night by the loyal burghers to grace the royal entry, if it should occur
before dawn.

Mrs. Garland touched Anne's elbow several times as they walked, and the
young woman at last understood that this was meant as a hint to her to
take the trumpet-major's arm, which its owner was rather suggesting than
offering to her.  Anne wondered what infatuation was possessing her
mother, declined to take the arm, and contrived to get in front with the
miller, who mostly kept in the van to guide the others' footsteps.  The
trumpet-major was left with Mrs. Garland, and Anne's encouraging pursuit
of them induced him to say a few words to the former.

'By your leave, ma'am, I'll speak to you on something that concerns my
mind very much indeed?'

'Certainly.'

'It is my wish to be allowed to pay my addresses to your daughter.'

'I thought you meant that,' said Mrs. Garland simply.

'And you'll not object?'

'I shall leave it to her.  I don't think she will agree, even if I do.'

The soldier sighed, and seemed helpless.  'Well, I can but ask her,' he
said.

The spot on which they had finally chosen to wait for the King was by a
field gate, whence the white road could be seen for a long distance
northwards by day, and some little distance now.  They lingered and
lingered, but no King came to break the silence of that beautiful summer
night.  As half-hour after half-hour glided by, and nobody came, Anne
began to get weary; she knew why her mother did not propose to go back,
and regretted the reason.  She would have proposed it herself, but that
Mrs. Garland seemed so cheerful, and as wide awake as at noonday, so that
it was almost a cruelty to disturb her.

The trumpet-major at last made up his mind, and tried to draw Anne into a
private conversation.  The feeling which a week ago had been a vague and
piquant aspiration, was to-day altogether too lively for the reasoning of
this warm-hearted soldier to regulate.  So he persevered in his intention
to catch her alone, and at last, in spite of her manoeuvres to the
contrary, he succeeded.  The miller and Mrs. Garland had walked about
fifty yards further on, and Anne and himself were left standing by the
gate.

But the gallant musician's soul was so much disturbed by tender
vibrations and by the sense of his presumption that he could not begin;
and it may be questioned if he would ever have broached the subject at
all, had not a distant church clock opportunely assisted him by striking
the hour of three.  The trumpet-major heaved a breath of relief.

'That clock strikes in G sharp,' he said.

'Indeed--G sharp?' said Anne civilly.

'Yes.  'Tis a fine-toned bell.  I used to notice that note when I was a
boy.'

'Did you--the very same?'

'Yes; and since then I had a wager about that bell with the bandmaster of
the North Wessex Militia.  He said the note was G; I said it wasn't.  When
we found it G sharp we didn't know how to settle it.'

'It is not a deep note for a clock.'

'O no!  The finest tenor bell about here is the bell of Peter's,
Casterbridge--in E flat.  Tum-m-m-m--that's the note--tum-m-m-m.'  The
trumpet-major sounded from far down his throat what he considered to be E
flat, with a parenthetic sense of luxury unquenchable even by his present
distraction.

'Shall we go on to where my mother is?' said Anne, less impressed by the
beauty of the note than the trumpet-major himself was.

'In one minute,' he said tremulously.  'Talking of music--I fear you
don't think the rank of a trumpet-major much to compare with your own?'

'I do.  I think a trumpet-major a very respectable man.'

'I am glad to hear you say that.  It is given out by the King's command
that trumpet-majors are to be considered respectable.'

'Indeed!  Then I am, by chance, more loyal than I thought for.'

'I get a good deal a year extra to the trumpeters, because of my
position.'

'That's very nice.'

'And I am not supposed ever to drink with the trumpeters who serve
beneath me.'

'Naturally.'

'And, by the orders of the War Office, I am to exert over them (that's
the government word) exert over them full authority; and if any one
behaves towards me with the least impropriety, or neglects my orders, he
is to be confined and reported.'

'It is really a dignified post,' she said, with, however, a reserve of
enthusiasm which was not altogether encouraging.

'And of course some day I shall,' stammered the dragoon--'shall be in
rather a better position than I am at present.'

'I am glad to hear it, Mr. Loveday.'

'And in short, Mistress Anne,' continued John Loveday bravely and
desperately, 'may I pay court to you in the hope that--no, no, don't go
away!--you haven't heard yet--that you may make me the happiest of men;
not yet, but when peace is proclaimed and all is smooth and easy again?  I
can't put it any better, though there's more to be explained.'

'This is most awkward,' said Anne, evidently with pain.  'I cannot
possibly agree; believe me, Mr. Loveday, I cannot.'

'But there's more than this.  You would be surprised to see what snug
rooms the married trumpet- and sergeant-majors have in quarters.'

'Barracks are not all; consider camp and war.'

'That brings me to my strong point!' exclaimed the soldier hopefully.  'My
father is better off than most non-commissioned officers' fathers; and
there's always a home for you at his house in any emergency.  I can tell
you privately that he has enough to keep us both, and if you wouldn't
hear of barracks, well, peace once established, I'd live at home as a
miller and farmer--next door to your own mother.'

'My mother would be sure to object,' expostulated Anne.

'No; she leaves it all to you.'

'What! you have asked her?' said Anne, with surprise.

'Yes.  I thought it would not be honourable to act otherwise.'

'That's very good of you,' said Anne, her face warming with a generous
sense of his straightforwardness.  'But my mother is so entirely ignorant
of a soldier's life, and the life of a soldier's wife--she is so simple
in all such matters, that I cannot listen to you any more readily for
what she may say.'

'Then it is all over for me,' said the poor trumpet-major, wiping his
face and putting away his handkerchief with an air of finality.

Anne was silent.  Any woman who has ever tried will know without
explanation what an unpalatable task it is to dismiss, even when she does
not love him, a man who has all the natural and moral qualities she would
desire, and only fails in the social.  Would-be lovers are not so
numerous, even with the best women, that the sacrifice of one can be felt
as other than a good thing wasted, in a world where there are few good
things.

'You are not angry, Miss Garland?' said he, finding that she did not
speak.

'O no.  Don't let us say anything more about this now.'  And she moved
on.

When she drew near to the miller and her mother she perceived that they
were engaged in a conversation of that peculiar kind which is all the
more full and communicative from the fact of definitive words being few.
In short, here the game was succeeding which with herself had failed.  It
was pretty clear from the symptoms, marks, tokens, telegraphs, and
general byplay between widower and widow, that Miller Loveday must have
again said to Mrs. Garland some such thing as he had said before, with
what result this time she did not know.

As the situation was delicate, Anne halted awhile apart from them.  The
trumpet-major, quite ignorant of how his cause was entered into by the
white-coated man in the distance (for his father had not yet told him of
his designs upon Mrs. Garland), did not advance, but stood still by the
gate, as though he were attending a princess, waiting till he should be
called up.  Thus they lingered, and the day began to break.  Mrs. Garland
and the miller took no heed of the time, and what it was bringing to
earth and sky, so occupied were they with themselves; but Anne in her
place and the trumpet-major in his, each in private thought of no bright
kind, watched the gradual glory of the east through all its tones and
changes.  The world of birds and insects got lively, the blue and the
yellow and the gold of Loveday's uniform again became distinct; the sun
bored its way upward, the fields, the trees, and the distant landscape
kindled to flame, and the trumpet-major, backed by a lilac shadow as tall
as a steeple, blazed in the rays like a very god of war.

It was half-past three o'clock.  A short time after, a rattle of horses
and wheels reached their ears from the quarter in which they gazed, and
there appeared upon the white line of road a moving mass, which presently
ascended the hill and drew near.

Then there arose a huzza from the few knots of watchers gathered there,
and they cried, 'Long live King Jarge!'  The cortege passed abreast.  It
consisted of three travelling-carriages, escorted by a detachment of the
German Legion.  Anne was told to look in the first carriage--a
post-chariot drawn by four horses--for the King and Queen, and was
rewarded by seeing a profile reminding her of the current coin of the
realm; but as the party had been travelling all night, and the spectators
here gathered were few, none of the royal family looked out of the
carriage windows.  It was said that the two elder princesses were in the
same carriage, but they remained invisible.  The next vehicle, a coach
and four, contained more princesses, and the third some of their
attendants.

'Thank God, I have seen my King!' said Mrs. Garland, when they had all
gone by.

Nobody else expressed any thankfulness, for most of them had expected a
more pompous procession than the bucolic tastes of the King cared to
indulge in; and one old man said grimly that that sight of dusty old
leather coaches was not worth waiting for.  Anne looked hither and
thither in the bright rays of the day, each of her eyes having a little
sun in it, which gave her glance a peculiar golden fire, and kindled the
brown curls grouped over her forehead to a yellow brilliancy, and made
single hairs, blown astray by the night, look like lacquered wires.  She
was wondering if Festus were anywhere near, but she could not see him.

Before they left the ridge they turned their attention towards the Royal
watering-place, which was visible at this place only as a portion of the
sea-shore, from which the night-mist was rolling slowly back.  The sea
beyond was still wrapped in summer fog, the ships in the roads showing
through it as black spiders suspended in the air.  While they looked and
walked a white jet of smoke burst from a spot which the miller knew to be
the battery in front of the King's residence, and then the report of guns
reached their ears.  This announcement was answered by a salute from the
Castle of the adjoining Isle, and the ships in the neighbouring
anchorage.  All the bells in the town began ringing.  The King and his
family had arrived.




XII.  HOW EVERYBODY GREAT AND SMALL CLIMBED TO THE TOP OF THE DOWNS


As the days went on, echoes of the life and bustle of the town reached
the ears of the quiet people in Overcombe hollow--exciting and moving
those unimportant natives as a ground-swell moves the weeds in a cave.
Travelling-carriages of all kinds and colours climbed and descended the
road that led towards the seaside borough.  Some contained those
personages of the King's suite who had not kept pace with him in his
journey from Windsor; others were the coaches of aristocracy, big and
little, whom news of the King's arrival drew thither for their own
pleasure: so that the highway, as seen from the hills about Overcombe,
appeared like an ant-walk--a constant succession of dark spots creeping
along its surface at nearly uniform rates of progress, and all in one
direction.

The traffic and intelligence between camp and town passed in a measure
over the villagers' heads.  It being summer time the miller was much
occupied with business, and the trumpet-major was too constantly engaged
in marching between the camp and Gloucester Lodge with the rest of the
dragoons to bring his friends any news for some days.

At last he sent a message that there was to be a review on the downs by
the King, and that it was fixed for the day following.  This information
soon spread through the village and country round, and next morning the
whole population of Overcombe--except two or three very old men and
women, a few babies and their nurses, a cripple, and Corporal
Tullidge--ascended the slope with the crowds from afar, and awaited the
events of the day.

The miller wore his best coat on this occasion, which meant a good deal.
An Overcombe man in those days would have a best coat, and keep it as a
best coat half his life.  The miller's had seen five and twenty summers
chiefly through the chinks of a clothes-box, and was not at all shabby as
yet, though getting singular.  But that could not be helped; common coats
and best coats were distinct species, and never interchangeable.  Living
so near the scene of the review he walked up the hill, accompanied by
Mrs. Garland and Anne as usual.

It was a clear day, with little wind stirring, and the view from the
downs, one of the most extensive in the county, was unclouded.  The eye
of any observer who cared for such things swept over the wave-washed
town, and the bay beyond, and the Isle, with its pebble bank, lying on
the sea to the left of these, like a great crouching animal tethered to
the mainland.  On the extreme east of the marine horizon, St. Aldhelm's
Head closed the scene, the sea to the southward of that point glaring
like a mirror under the sun.  Inland could be seen Badbury Rings, where a
beacon had been recently erected; and nearer, Rainbarrow, on Egdon Heath,
where another stood: farther to the left Bulbarrow, where there was yet
another.  Not far from this came Nettlecombe Tout; to the west, Dogberry
Hill, and Black'on near to the foreground, the beacon thereon being built
of furze faggots thatched with straw, and standing on the spot where the
monument now raises its head.

At nine o'clock the troops marched upon the ground--some from the camps
in the vicinity, and some from quarters in the different towns round
about.  The approaches to the down were blocked with carriages of all
descriptions, ages, and colours, and with pedestrians of every class.  At
ten the royal personages were said to be drawing near, and soon after the
King, accompanied by the Dukes of Cambridge and Cumberland, and a couple
of generals, appeared on horseback, wearing a round hat turned up at the
side, with a cockade and military feather.  (Sensation among the crowd.)
Then the Queen and three of the princesses entered the field in a great
coach drawn by six beautiful cream-coloured horses.  Another coach, with
four horses of the same sort, brought the two remaining princesses.
(Confused acclamations, 'There's King Jarge!' 'That's Queen Sharlett!'
'Princess 'Lizabeth!' 'Princesses Sophiar and Meelyer!' etc., from the
surrounding spectators.)

Anne and her party were fortunate enough to secure a position on the top
of one of the barrows which rose here and there on the down; and the
miller having gallantly constructed a little cairn of flints, he placed
the two women thereon, by which means they were enabled to see over the
heads, horses, and coaches of the multitudes below and around.  At the
march-past the miller's eye, which had been wandering about for the
purpose, discovered his son in his place by the trumpeters, who had moved
forwards in two ranks, and were sounding the march.

'That's John!' he cried to the widow.  'His trumpet-sling is of two
colours, d'ye see; and the others be plain.'

Mrs. Garland too saw him now, and enthusiastically admired him from her
hands upwards, and Anne silently did the same.  But before the young
woman's eyes had quite left the trumpet-major they fell upon the figure
of Yeoman Festus riding with his troop, and keeping his face at a medium
between haughtiness and mere bravery.  He certainly looked as soldierly
as any of his own corps, and felt more soldierly than half-a-dozen, as
anybody could see by observing him.  Anne got behind the miller, in case
Festus should discover her, and, regardless of his monarch, rush upon her
in a rage with, 'Why the devil did you run away from me that night--hey,
madam?'  But she resolved to think no more of him just now, and to stick
to Loveday, who was her mother's friend.  In this she was helped by the
stirring tones which burst from the latter gentleman and his subordinates
from time to time.

'Well,' said the miller complacently, 'there's few of more consequence in
a regiment than a trumpeter.  He's the chap that tells 'em what to do,
after all.  Hey, Mrs. Garland?'

'So he is, miller,' said she.

'They could no more do without Jack and his men than they could without
generals.'

'Indeed they could not,' said Mrs. Garland again, in a tone of pleasant
agreement with any one in Great Britain or Ireland.

It was said that the line that day was three miles long, reaching from
the high ground on the right of where the people stood to the turnpike
road on the left.  After the review came a sham fight, during which
action the crowd dispersed more widely over the downs, enabling Widow
Garland to get still clearer glimpses of the King, and his handsome
charger, and the head of the Queen, and the elbows and shoulders of the
princesses in the carriages, and fractional parts of General Garth and
the Duke of Cumberland; which sights gave her great gratification.  She
tugged at her daughter at every opportunity, exclaiming, 'Now you can see
his feather!' 'There's her hat!' 'There's her Majesty's India muslin
shawl!' in a minor form of ecstasy, that made the miller think her more
girlish and animated than her daughter Anne.

In those military manoeuvres the miller followed the fortunes of one man;
Anne Garland of two.  The spectators, who, unlike our party, had no
personal interest in the soldiery, saw only troops and battalions in the
concrete, straight lines of red, straight lines of blue, white lines
formed of innumerable knee-breeches, black lines formed of many gaiters,
coming and going in kaleidoscopic change.  Who thought of every point in
the line as an isolated man, each dwelling all to himself in the
hermitage of his own mind?  One person did, a young man far removed from
the barrow where the Garlands and Miller Loveday stood.  The natural
expression of his face was somewhat obscured by the bronzing effects of
rough weather, but the lines of his mouth showed that affectionate
impulses were strong within him--perhaps stronger than judgment well
could regulate.  He wore a blue jacket with little brass buttons, and was
plainly a seafaring man.

Meanwhile, in the part of the plain where rose the tumulus on which the
miller had established himself, a broad-brimmed tradesman was elbowing
his way along.  He saw Mr. Loveday from the base of the barrow, and
beckoned to attract his attention.  Loveday went halfway down, and the
other came up as near as he could.

'Miller,' said the man, 'a letter has been lying at the post-office for
you for the last three days.  If I had known that I should see ye here
I'd have brought it along with me.'

The miller thanked him for the news, and they parted, Loveday returning
to the summit.  'What a very strange thing!' he said to Mrs. Garland, who
had looked inquiringly at his face, now very grave.  'That was Budmouth
postmaster, and he says there's a letter for me.  Ah, I now call to mind
that there _was_ a letter in the candle three days ago this very night--a
large red one; but foolish-like I thought nothing o't.  Who _can_ that
letter be from?'

A letter at this time was such an event for hamleteers, even of the
miller's respectable standing, that Loveday thenceforward was thrown into
a fit of abstraction which prevented his seeing any more of the sham
fight, or the people, or the King.  Mrs. Garland imbibed some of his
concern, and suggested that the letter might come from his son Robert.

'I should naturally have thought that,' said Miller Loveday; 'but he
wrote to me only two months ago, and his brother John heard from him
within the last four weeks, when he was just about starting on another
voyage.  If you'll pardon me, Mrs. Garland, ma'am, I'll see if there's
any Overcombe man here who is going to Budmouth to-day, so that I may get
the letter by night-time.  I cannot possibly go myself.'

So Mr. Loveday left them for awhile; and as they were so near home Mrs.
Garland did not wait on the barrow for him to come back, but walked about
with Anne a little time, until they should be disposed to trot down the
slope to their own door.  They listened to a man who was offering one
guinea to receive ten in case Buonaparte should be killed in three
months, and to other entertainments of that nature, which at this time
were not rare.  Once during their peregrination the eyes of the sailor
before-mentioned fell upon Anne; but he glanced over her and passed her
unheedingly by.  Loveday the elder was at this time on the other side of
the line, looking for a messenger to the town.  At twelve o'clock the
review was over, and the King and his family left the hill.  The troops
then cleared off the field, the spectators followed, and by one o'clock
the downs were again bare.

They still spread their grassy surface to the sun as on that beautiful
morning not, historically speaking, so very long ago; but the King and
his fifteen thousand armed men, the horses, the bands of music, the
princesses, the cream-coloured teams--the gorgeous centre-piece, in
short, to which the downs were but the mere mount or margin--how entirely
have they all passed and gone!--lying scattered about the world as
military and other dust, some at Talavera, Albuera, Salamanca, Vittoria,
Toulouse, and Waterloo; some in home churchyards; and a few small
handfuls in royal vaults.

In the afternoon John Loveday, lightened of his trumpet and trappings,
appeared at the old mill-house door, and beheld Anne standing at hers.

'I saw you, Miss Garland,' said the soldier gaily.

'Where was I?' said she, smiling.

'On the top of the big mound--to the right of the King.'

'And I saw you; lots of times,' she rejoined.

Loveday seemed pleased.  'Did you really take the trouble to find me?
That was very good of you.'

'Her eyes followed you everywhere,' said Mrs. Garland from an upper
window.

'Of course I looked at the dragoons most,' said Anne, disconcerted.  'And
when I looked at them my eyes naturally fell upon the trumpets.  I looked
at the dragoons generally, no more.'

She did not mean to show any vexation to the trumpet-major, but he
fancied otherwise, and stood repressed.  The situation was relieved by
the arrival of the miller, still looking serious.

'I am very much concerned, John; I did not go to the review for nothing.
There's a letter a-waiting for me at Budmouth, and I must get it before
bedtime, or I shan't sleep a wink.'

'I'll go, of course,' said John; 'and perhaps Miss Garland would like to
see what's doing there to-day?  Everybody is gone or going; the road is
like a fair.'

He spoke pleadingly, but Anne was not won to assent.

'You can drive in the gig; 'twill do Blossom good,' said the miller.

'Let David drive Miss Garland,' said the trumpet-major, not wishing to
coerce her; 'I would just as soon walk.'

Anne joyfully welcomed this arrangement, and a time was fixed for the
start.




XIII.  THE CONVERSATION IN THE CROWD


In the afternoon they drove off, John Loveday being nowhere visible.  All
along the road they passed and were overtaken by vehicles of all
descriptions going in the same direction; among them the extraordinary
machines which had been invented for the conveyance of troops to any
point of the coast on which the enemy should land; they consisted of four
boards placed across a sort of trolly, thirty men of the volunteer
companies riding on each.

The popular Georgian watering-place was in a paroxysm of gaiety.  The
town was quite overpowered by the country round, much to the town's
delight and profit.  The fear of invasion was such that six frigates lay
in the roads to ensure the safety of the royal family, and from the
regiments of horse and foot quartered at the barracks, or encamped on the
hills round about, a picket of a thousand men mounted guard every day in
front of Gloucester Lodge, where the King resided.  When Anne and her
attendant reached this point, which they did on foot, stabling the horse
on the outskirts of the town, it was about six o'clock.  The King was on
the Esplanade, and the soldiers were just marching past to mount guard.
The band formed in front of the King, and all the officers saluted as
they went by.

Anne now felt herself close to and looking into the stream of recorded
history, within whose banks the littlest things are great, and outside
which she and the general bulk of the human race were content to live on
as an unreckoned, unheeded superfluity.

When she turned from her interested gaze at this scene, there stood John
Loveday.  She had had a presentiment that he would turn up in this
mysterious way.  It was marvellous that he could have got there so
quickly; but there he was--not looking at the King, or at the crowd, but
waiting for the turn of her head.

'Trumpet-major, I didn't see you,' said Anne demurely.  'How is it that
your regiment is not marching past?'

'We take it by turns, and it is not our turn,' said Loveday.

She wanted to know then if they were afraid that the King would be
carried off by the First Consul.  Yes, Loveday told her; and his Majesty
was rather venturesome.  A day or two before he had gone so far to sea
that he was nearly caught by some of the enemy's cruisers.  'He is
anxious to fight Boney single-handed,' he said.

'What a good, brave King!' said Anne.

Loveday seemed anxious to come to more personal matters.  'Will you let
me take you round to the other side, where you can see better?' he asked.
'The Queen and the princesses are at the window.'

Anne passively assented.  'David, wait here for me,' she said; 'I shall
be back again in a few minutes.'

The trumpet-major then led her off triumphantly, and they skirted the
crowd and came round on the side towards the sands.  He told her
everything he could think of, military and civil, to which Anne returned
pretty syllables and parenthetic words about the colour of the sea and
the curl of the foam--a way of speaking that moved the soldier's heart
even more than long and direct speeches would have done.

'And that other thing I asked you?' he ventured to say at last.

'We won't speak of it.'

'You don't dislike me?'

'O no!' she said, gazing at the bathing-machines, digging children, and
other common objects of the seashore, as if her interest lay there rather
than with him.

'But I am not worthy of the daughter of a genteel professional man--that's
what you mean?'

'There's something more than worthiness required in such cases, you
know,' she said, still without calling her mind away from surrounding
scenes.  'Ah, there are the Queen and princesses at the window!'

'Something more?'

'Well, since you will make me speak, I mean the woman ought to love the
man.'

The trumpet-major seemed to be less concerned about this than about her
supposed superiority.  'If it were all right on that point, would you
mind the other?' he asked, like a man who knows he is too persistent, yet
who cannot be still.

'How can I say, when I don't know?  What a pretty chip hat the elder
princess wears?'

Her companion's general disappointment extended over him almost to his
lace and his plume.  'Your mother said, you know, Miss Anne--'

'Yes, that's the worst of it,' she said.  'Let us go back to David; I
have seen all I want to see, Mr. Loveday.'

The mass of the people had by this time noticed the Queen and princesses
at the window, and raised a cheer, to which the ladies waved their
embroidered handkerchiefs.  Anne went back towards the pavement with her
trumpet-major, whom all the girls envied her, so fine-looking a soldier
was he; and not only for that, but because it was well known that he was
not a soldier from necessity, but from patriotism, his father having
repeatedly offered to set him up in business: his artistic taste in
preferring a horse and uniform to a dirty, rumbling flour-mill was
admired by all.  She, too, had a very nice appearance in her best clothes
as she walked along--the sarcenet hat, muslin shawl, and tight-sleeved
gown being of the newest Overcombe fashion, that was only about a year
old in the adjoining town, and in London three or four.  She could not be
harsh to Loveday and dismiss him curtly, for his musical pursuits had
refined him, educated him, and made him quite poetical.  To-day he had
been particularly well-mannered and tender; so, instead of answering,
'Never speak to me like this again,' she merely put him off with a 'Let
us go back to David.'

When they reached the place where they had left him David was gone.

Anne was now positively vexed.  'What _shall_ I do?' she said.

'He's only gone to drink the King's health,' said Loveday, who had
privately given David the money for performing that operation.  'Depend
upon it, he'll be back soon.'

'Will you go and find him?' said she, with intense propriety in her looks
and tone.

'I will,' said Loveday reluctantly; and he went.

Anne stood still.  She could now escape her gallant friend, for, although
the distance was long, it was not impossible to walk home.  On the other
hand, Loveday was a good and sincere fellow, for whom she had almost a
brotherly feeling, and she shrank from such a trick.  While she stood and
mused, scarcely heeding the music, the marching of the soldiers, the
King, the dukes, the brilliant staff, the attendants, and the happy
groups of people, her eyes fell upon the ground.

Before her she saw a flower lying--a crimson sweet-william--fresh and
uninjured.  An instinctive wish to save it from destruction by the
passengers' feet led her to pick it up; and then, moved by a sudden self-
consciousness, she looked around.  She was standing before an inn, and
from an upper window Festus Derriman was leaning with two or three
kindred spirits of his cut and kind.  He nodded eagerly, and signified to
her that he had thrown the flower.

What should she do?  To throw it away would seem stupid, and to keep it
was awkward.  She held it between her finger and thumb, twirled it round
on its axis and twirled it back again, regarding and yet not examining
it.  Just then she saw the trumpet-major coming back.

'I can't find David anywhere,' he said; and his heart was not sorry as he
said it.

Anne was still holding out the sweet-william as if about to drop it, and,
scarcely knowing what she did under the distressing sense that she was
watched, she offered the flower to Loveday.

His face brightened with pleasure as he took it.  'Thank you, indeed,' he
said.

Then Anne saw what a misleading blunder she had committed towards Loveday
in playing to the yeoman.  Perhaps she had sown the seeds of a quarrel.

'It was not my sweet-william,' she said hastily; 'it was lying on the
ground.  I don't mean anything by giving it to you.'

'But I'll keep it all the same,' said the innocent soldier, as if he knew
a good deal about womankind; and he put the flower carefully inside his
jacket, between his white waistcoat and his heart.

Festus, seeing this, enlarged himself wrathfully, got hot in the face,
rose to his feet, and glared down upon them like a turnip-lantern.

'Let us go away,' said Anne timorously.

'I'll see you safe to your own door, depend upon me,' said Loveday.
'But--I had near forgot--there's father's letter, that he's so anxiously
waiting for!  Will you come with me to the post-office?  Then I'll take
you straight home.'

Anne, expecting Festus to pounce down every minute, was glad to be off
anywhere; so she accepted the suggestion, and they went along the parade
together.

Loveday set this down as a proof of Anne's relenting.  Thus in joyful
spirits he entered the office, paid the postage, and received the letter.

'It is from Bob, after all!' he said.  'Father told me to read it at
once, in case of bad news.  Ask your pardon for keeping you a moment.'  He
broke the seal and read, Anne standing silently by.

'He is coming home _to be married_,' said the trumpet-major, without
looking up.

Anne did not answer.  The blood swept impetuously up her face at his
words, and as suddenly went away again, leaving her rather paler than
before.  She disguised her agitation and then overcame it, Loveday
observing nothing of this emotional performance.

'As far as I can understand he will be here Saturday,' he said.

'Indeed!' said Anne quite calmly.  'And who is he going to marry?'

'That I don't know,' said John, turning the letter about.  'The woman is
a stranger.'

At this moment the miller entered the office hastily.

'Come, John,' he cried, 'I have been waiting and waiting for that there
letter till I was nigh crazy!'

John briefly explained the news, and when his father had recovered from
his astonishment, taken off his hat, and wiped the exact line where his
forehead joined his hair, he walked with Anne up the street, leaving John
to return alone.  The miller was so absorbed in his mental perspective of
Bob's marriage, that he saw nothing of the gaieties they passed through;
and Anne seemed also so much impressed by the same intelligence, that she
crossed before the inn occupied by Festus without showing a recollection
of his presence there.




XIV.  LATER IN THE EVENING OF THE SAME DAY


When they reached home the sun was going down.  It had already been
noised abroad that miller Loveday had received a letter, and, his cart
having been heard coming up the lane, the population of Overcombe drew
down towards the mill as soon as he had gone indoors--a sudden flash of
brightness 

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