第42章 ALICIA'S DIARY(17)

He left the churchyard and made inquiries.The honourable and reverend old rector was dead,and so were many of the choir;but by degrees the sergeant-major learnt that his father still lay at the cross-roads in Long Ash Lane.

Luke pursued his way moodily homewards,to do which,in the natural course,he would be compelled to repass the spot,there being no other road between the two villages.But he could not now go by that place,vociferous with reproaches in his father's tones;and he got over the hedge and wandered deviously through the ploughed fields to avoid the scene.Through many a fight and fatigue Luke had been sustained by the thought that he was restoring the family honour and making noble amends.Yet his father lay still in degradation.It was rather a sentiment than a fact that his father's body had been made to suffer for his own misdeeds;but to his super-sensitiveness it seemed that his efforts to retrieve his character and to propitiate the shade of the insulted one had ended in failure.

He endeavoured,however,to shake off his lethargy,and,not liking the associations of Sidlinch,hired a small cottage at Chalk-Newton which had long been empty.Here he lived alone,becoming quite a hermit,and allowing no woman to enter the house.

The Christmas after taking up his abode herein he was sitting in the chimney corner by himself,when he heard faint notes in the distance,and soon a melody burst forth immediately outside his own window,it came from the carol-singers,as usual;and though many of the old hands,Ezra and Lot included,had gone to their rest,the same old carols were still played out of the same old books.There resounded through the sergeant-major's window-shutters the familiar lines that the deceased choir had rendered over his father's grave:-He comes'the pri'-soners to're-lease',In Sa'-tan's bon'-dage held'.

When they had finished they went on to another house,leaving him to silence and loneliness as before.

The candle wanted snuffing,but he did not snuff it,and he sat on till it had burnt down into the socket and made waves of shadow on the ceiling.

The Christmas cheerfulness of next morning was broken at breakfast-time by tragic intelligence which went down the village like wind.

Sergeant-Major Holway had been found shot through the head by his own hand at the cross-roads in Long Ash Lane where his father lay buried.

On the table in the cottage he had left a piece of paper,on which he had written his wish that he might be buried at the Cross beside his father.But the paper was accidentally swept to the floor,and overlooked till after his funeral,which took place in the ordinary way in the churchyard.

Christmas 1897.

ENTER A DRAGOON

I lately had a melancholy experience (said the gentleman who is answerable for the truth of this story).It was that of going over a doomed house with whose outside aspect I had long been familiar--a house,that is,which by reason of age and dilapidation was to be pulled down during the following week.Some of the thatch,brown and rotten as the gills of old mushrooms,had,indeed,been removed before I walked over the building.Seeing that it was only a very small house--which is usually called a 'cottage-residence'--situated in a remote hamlet,and that it was not more than a hundred years old,if so much,I was led to think in my progress through the hollow rooms,with their cracked walls and sloping floors,what an exceptional number of abrupt family incidents had taken place therein--to reckon only those which had come to my own knowledge.

And no doubt there were many more of which I had never heard.

It stood at the top of a garden stretching down to the lane or street that ran through a hermit-group of dwellings in Mellstock parish.

From a green gate at the lower entrance,over which the thorn hedge had been shaped to an arch by constant clippings,a gravel path ascended between the box edges of once trim raspberry,strawberry,and vegetable plots,towards the front door.This was in colour an ancient and bleached green that could be rubbed off with the finger,and it bore a small long-featured brass knocker covered with verdigris in its crevices.For some years before this eve of demolition the homestead had degenerated,and been divided into two tenements to serve as cottages for farm labourers;but in its prime it had indisputable claim to be considered neat,pretty,and genteel.

The variety of incidents above alluded to was mainly owing to the nature of the tenure,whereby the place had been occupied by families not quite of the kind customary in such spots--people whose circumstances,position,or antecedents were more or less of a critical happy-go-lucky cast.And of these residents the family whose term comprised the story I wish to relate was that of Mr.Jacob Paddock the market-gardener,who dwelt there for some years with his wife and grown-up daughter.

I

An evident commotion was agitating the premises,which jerked busy sounds across the front plot,resembling those of a disturbed hive.

If a member of the household appeared at the door it was with a countenance of abstraction and concern.

Evening began to bend over the scene;and the other inhabitants of the hamlet came out to draw water,their common well being in the public road opposite the garden and house of the Paddocks.Having wound up their bucketsfull respectively they lingered,and spoke significantly together.From their words any casual listener might have gathered information of what had occurred.

The woodman who lived nearest the site of the story told most of the tale.Selina,the daughter of the Paddocks opposite,had been surprised that afternoon by receiving a letter from her once intended husband,then a corporal,but now a sergeant-major of dragoons,whom she had hitherto supposed to be one of the slain in the Battle of the Alma two or three years before.