第47章 THE MELANCHOLY HUSSAR OF THE GERMAN LEGION(9)

After that day,whenever there was to be in the neighbourhood a dance to which she could get an invitation,and where Mop Ollamoor was to be the musician,Car'line contrived to be present,though it sometimes involved a walk of several miles;for he did not play so often in Stickleford as elsewhere.

The next evidences of his influence over her were singular enough,and it would require a neurologist to fully explain them.She would be sitting quietly,any evening after dark,in the house of her father,the parish clerk,which stood in the middle of Stickleford village street,this being the highroad between Lower Mellstock and Moreford,five miles eastward.Here,without a moment's warning,and in the midst of a general conversation between her father,sister,and the young man before alluded to,who devotedly wooed her in ignorance of her infatuation,she would start from her seat in the chimney-corner as if she had received a galvanic shock,and spring convulsively towards the ceiling;then she would burst into tears,and it was not till some half-hour had passed that she grew calm as usual.Her father,knowing her hysterical tendencies,was always excessively anxious about this trait in his youngest girl,and feared the attack to be a species of epileptic fit.Not so her sister Julia.Julia had found Out what was the cause.At the moment before the jumping,only an exceptionally sensitive ear situated in the chimney-nook could have caught from down the flue the beat of a man's footstep along the highway without.But it was in that footfall,for which she had been waiting,that the origin of Car'line's involuntary springing lay.The pedestrian was Mop Ollamoor,as the girl well knew;but his business that way was not to visit her;he sought another woman whom he spoke of as his Intended,and who lived at Moreford,two miles farther on.On one,and only one,occasion did it happen that Car'line could not control her utterance;it was when her sister alone chanced to be present.'Oh--oh--oh--!'she cried.

'He's going to HER,and not coming to ME!'

To do the fiddler justice he had not at first thought greatly of,or spoken much to,this girl of impressionable mould.But he had soon found out her secret,and could not resist a little by-play with her too easily hurt heart,as an interlude between his more serious performances at Moreford.The two became well acquainted,though only by stealth,hardly a soul in Stickleford except her sister,and her lover Ned Hipcroft,being aware of the attachment.Her father disapproved of her coldness to Ned;her sister,too,hoped she might get over this nervous passion for a man of whom so little was known.

The ultimate result was that Car'line's manly and simple wooer Edward found his suit becoming practically hopeless.He was a respectable mechanic,in a far sounder position than Mop the nominal horse-doctor;but when,before leaving her,Ned put his flat and final question,would she marry him,then and there,now or never,it was with little expectation of obtaining more than the negative she gave him.Though her father supported him and her sister supported him,he could not play the fiddle so as to draw your soul out of your body like a spider's thread,as Mop did,till you felt as limp as withy-wind and yearned for something to cling to.Indeed,Hipcroft had not the slightest ear for music;could not sing two notes in tune,much less play them.

The No he had expected and got from her,in spite of a preliminary encouragement,gave Ned a new start in life.It had been uttered in such a tone of sad entreaty that he resolved to persecute her no more;she should not even be distressed by a sight of his form in the distant perspective of the street and lane.He left the place,and his natural course was to London.

The railway to South Wessex was in process of construction,but it was not as yet opened for traffic;and Hipcroft reached the capital by a six days'trudge on foot,as many a better man had done before him.He was one of the last of the artisan class who used that now extinct method of travel to the great centres of labour,so customary then from time immemorial.

In London he lived and worked regularly at his trade.More fortunate than many,his disinterested willingness recommended him from the first.During the ensuing four years he was never out of employment.

He neither advanced nor receded in the modern sense;he improved as a workman,but he did not shift one jot in social position.About his love for Car'line he maintained a rigid silence.No doubt he often thought of her;but being always occupied,and having no relations at Stickleford,he held no communication with that part of the country,and showed no desire to return.In his quiet lodging in Lambeth he moved about after working-hours with the facility of a woman,doing his own cooking,attending to his stocking-heels,and shaping himself by degrees to a life-long bachelorhood.For this conduct one is bound to advance the canonical reason that time could not efface from his heart the image of little Car'line Aspent--and it may be in part true;but there was also the inference that his was a nature not greatly dependent upon the ministrations of the other sex for its comforts.

The fourth year of his residence as a mechanic in London was the year of the Hyde-Park Exhibition already mentioned,and at the construction of this huge glass-house,then unexampled in the world's history,he worked daily.It was an era of great hope and activity among the nations and industries.Though Hipcroft was,in his small way,a central man in the movement,he plodded on with his usual outward placidity.Yet for him,too,the year was destined to have its surprises,for when the bustle of getting the building ready for the opening day was past,the ceremonies had been witnessed,and people were flocking thither from all parts of the globe,he received a letter from Car'line.Till that day the silence of four years between himself and Stickleford had never been broken.