The Fiddler of the
Reels
"Talking of
Exhibitions, World's Fairs, and what not," said the old gentleman, "I
would not go round the corner to see a dozen of them nowadays. The only
exhibition that ever made, or ever will make, any impression upon my
imagination was the first of the series, the parent of them all, and now a
thing of old times—the Great Exhibition of 1851, in Hyde Park, London. None of
the younger generation can realize the sense of novelty it produced in us who
were then in our prime. A noun substantive went so far as to become an
adjective in honor of the occasion. It was "exhibition" hat,
"exhibition" razor-strop, "exhibition" watch; nay, even
"exhibition" weather, "exhibition" spirits, sweethearts,
babies, wives—for the time.
"For
These observations
led us onward to talk of the different personages, gentle and simple, who lived
and moved within our narrow and peaceful horizon at that time; and of three
people in particular, whose queer little history was oddly touched at points by
the Exhibition, more concerned with it than that of anybody else who dwelt in
those outlying shades of the world, Stickleford, Mellstock, and Egdon. First prominence
among these three came Wat Ollamoor—if that were his real name—whom the seniors
in our party had known well.
He was a woman's
man, they said,—supremely so—externally little else. To men he was not
attractive; perhaps a little repulsive at times. Musician, dandy, and
company-man in practice; veterinary surgeon in theory, he lodged awhile in
Mellstock village, coming from nobody knew where; though some said his first
appearance in this neighborhood had been as fiddle-player in a show at
Greenhill Fair. Many a worthy villager envied him his power over
unsophisticated maidenhood power which seemed sometimes to have a touch of the
weird and wizardly in it. Personally he was not ill-favored, though rather
un-English, his complexion being a rich olive, his rank hair dark and rather
clammy—made still clammier by secret ointments, which, when he came fresh to a
party, caused him to smell like "boys'-love"(southern-wood) steeped
in lamp-oil. On occasion he wore curls—a double row—running almost horizontally
around his head. But as these were sometimes noticeably absent, it was
concluded that they were not altogether of Nature's making. By girls whose love
for him had turned to hatred he had been nicknamed "Mop," from this
abundance of hair, which was long enough to rest upon his shoulders; as time
passed the name more and more prevailed.
His fiddling
possibly had the most to do with the fascination he exercised, for, to speak
fairly, it could claim for itself a most peculiar and personal quality, like
that in a moving preacher. There were tones in it which bred the immediate
conviction that indolence and averseness to systematic application were all
that lay between "Mop" and the career of a second Paganini.
While playing he
invariably closed his eyes; using no notes, and, as it were, allowing the
violin to wander on at will into the most plaintive passages ever heard by
rustic man. There was a certain lingual character in the supplicatory
expressions he produced, which would well-nigh have drawn an ache from the
heart of a gatepost. He could make any child in the parish, who was at all
sensitive to music, burst into tears in a few minutes by simply fiddling one of
the old dance-tunes he almost entirely affected—country jigs, reels, and
"Favorite Quick Steps" of the last century—some mutilated remains of
which even now reappear as nameless phantoms in new quadrilles and gallops,
where they are recognized only by the curious, or by such old-fashioned and
far—between people as have been thrown with men like Wat Ollamoor in their
early life.
His date was a
little later than that of the old Mellstock quire-band which comprised the
Dewys, Mail, and the rest—in fact, he did not rise above the horizon thereabout
till those well-known musicians were disbanded as ecclesiastical functionaries.
In their honest love of thoroughness they despised the new man's style.
Theophilus Dewy (Reuben the tranter's younger brother) used to say there was no
"plumness" in it—no bowing, no solidity—it was all fantastical. And
probably this was true. Anyhow, Mop had, very obviously, never bowed a note of
church-music from his birth; he never once sat in the gallery of Mellstock
church where the others had tuned their venerable psalmody so many hundreds of
times; had never, in all likelihood, entered a church at all. All were devil's
tunes in his repertory. "He could no more play the Wold Hundredth to his
true time than he could play the brazen serpent," the tranter would say.
(The brazen serpent was supposed in Mellstock to be a musical instrument
particularly hard to blow.)
Occasionally Mop
could produce the aforesaid moving effect upon the souls of grown-up persons,
especially young women of fragile and responsive organization. Such an one was
Car'line Aspent. Though she was already engaged to be married before she met
him, Car'line, of them all, was the most influenced by Mop Ollamoor's
heart-stealing melodies, to her discomfort, nay, positive pain and ultimate
injury. She was a pretty, invocating, weak-mouthed girl, whose chief defect as
a companion with her sex was a tendency to peevishness now and then. At this
time she was not a resident in Mellstock parish where Mop lodged, but lived
some miles off at Stickleford, further down the river.
How and where she
first made acquaintance with him and his fiddling is not truly known, but the
story was that it either began or was developed on one spring evening, when, in
passing through
After that day,
whenever there was to be in the neighborhood 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 toward 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 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 further
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.
"O—O—O—!" 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 mold. 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 love makings 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 atone 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
The railway to
In
The fourth year of
his residence as a mechanic in
She informed her
old lover, in an uncertain penmanship, which suggested a trembling hand, of the
trouble she had been put to in ascertaining his address, and then broached the
subject which had prompted her to write. Four years ago, she said with the
greatest delicacy of which she was capable, she had been so foolish as to
refuse him. Her willful wrong headedness had since been a grief to her many
times, and of late particularly. As for Mr. Ollamoor, he had been absent almost
as long as Ned—she did not know where. She would gladly marry Ned now if he
were to ask her again, and be a tender little wife to him till her life's end.
A tide of warm
feeling must have surged through Ned Hipcroft's frame on receipt of this news,
if we may judge by the issue. Unquestionably he loved her still, even if not to
the exclusion of every other happiness. This from his Car'line, she who had
seen dead to him these many years, alive to him again as of old, was in itself
a pleasant, gratifying thing. Ned had grown so resigned to, or satisfied with,
his lonely lot, that he probably would not have shown much jubilation at
anything. Still, a certain ardor of preoccupation, after his first surprise,
revealed how deeply her confession of faith in him had stirred him. Measured
and methodical in his ways, he did not answer the letter that day, nor the
next, nor the next. He was having "a good ink." When he did answer
it, there was a great deal of sound reasoning mixed in with the unmistakable
tenderness of his reply; but the tenderness itself was sufficient to reveal
that he was pleased with her straight forward frankness; that the anchorage she
had once obtained in his heart was renewable, if it had not been continuously
firm.
He told her—and as
he wrote his lips twitched humorously over the few gentle words of raillery he
indited among the rest of his sentences—that it was all very well for her to
come round at this time of day. Why wouldn't she have him when he wanted her?
She had no doubt learned that he was not married, but suppose his affections
had since been fixed on another? She ought to beg his pardon. Still, he was not
the man to forget her. But considering how he had been used, and what he had
suffered, she could not quite expect him to go down to Stickleford and fetch
her. But if she would come to him, and say she was sorry, as was only fair;
why, yes, he would marry her, knowing what a good little woman she was at the
core. He added that the request for her to come to him was a less one to make
than it would have been when he first left Stickleford, or even a few months
ago; for the new railway into South Wessex was now open, and there had just
begun to be run wonderfully contrived special trains, called excursion-trains,
on account of the Great Exhibition; so that she could come up easily alone.
She said in her
reply how good it was of him to treat her so generously, after her hot and cold
treatment of him; that though she felt frightened at the magnitude of the
journey, and was never as yet in a railway-train, having only seen one pass at
a distance, she embraced his offer with all her heart; and would, indeed, own
to him how sorry she was, and beg his pardon, and try to be a good wife always,
and make up for lost time.
The remaining
details of when and where were soon settled, Car'line informing him, for her
ready identification in the crowd, that she would be wearing "my new
sprigged-layback cotton gown," and Ned gaily responding that, having
married her the morning after her arrival, he would make a day of it by taking
her to the Exhibition. One early summer afternoon, accordingly, he came from his
place of work, and fastened toward Waterloo Station to meet her. It was as wet
and chilly as an English June day can occasionally be, but as he waited on the
platform in the drizzle he glowed inwardly, and seemed to have something to
live for again.
The "excursion-train"—an
absolutely new departure in the history of travel—was still a novelty on the
Wessex line, and probably everywhere. Crowds of people had flocked to all the
stations on the way up to witness the unwonted sight of so long a train's
passage, even where they did not take advantage of the opportunity it offered.
The seats for the humbler class of travelers in these early experiments in
steam-locomotion, were open trucks, without any protection whatever from the
wind and rain; and damp weather having set in with the afternoon, the
unfortunate occupants of these vehicles were, on the train drawing up at the
London terminus, found to be in a pitiable condition from their long journey;
blue-faced, stiff-necked, sneezing, rain-beaten, chilled to the marrow, many of
the men being hatless; in fact, they resembled people who had been out all
night in an open boat on a rough sea, rather than inland excursionists for
pleasure. The women had in some degree protected themselves by turning up the
skirts of their gowns over their heads, but as by this arrangement they were
additionally exposed about the hips, they were all more or less in a sorry
plight.
In the bustle and
crush of alighting forms of both sexes which followed the entry of the huge
concatenation into the station, Ned Hipcroft soon discerned the slim little
figure his eye was in search of, in the sprigged lilac, as described. She came
up to him with a frightened smile—still pretty, though so damp, weather-beaten,
and shivering from long exposure to the wind.
"O, Ned!
" she sputtered, "I—I—" He clasped her in his arms and kissed
her, whereupon she burst into a flood of tears.
"You are wet,
my poor dear! I hope you'll not get cold," he said. And surveying her and
her multifarious surrounding packages, he noticed that by the hand she led a
toddling child—a little girl of three or so—whose hood was as clammy and tender
face as blue as those of the other travelers.
"Who is
this—somebody you know?" asked Ned curiously.
"Yes, Ned.
She's mine."
"Yours?"
"Yes—my
own."
"Your own
child?"
"Yes!"
"But who's
the father?"
"The young
man I had after you courted me."
"Well—as
God's in—"
"Ned, I
didn't name it in my letter, because, you see, it would have been so hard to
explain! I thought that when we met I could tell you how she happened to be
born, so much better than in writing! I hope you'll excuse it this once, dear
Ned, and scold me, now I've come so many, many miles!"
"This means
Mr. Mop Ollamoor, I reckon!" said Hipcroft, gazing palely at them from the
distance of the yard or two to which he had withdrawn with a start.
Car'line gasped.
"But he's been gone away for years!" she supplicated. "And I
never had a young man before! And I was so onlucky to be catched the first time
he took advantage o' me, though some of the girls down there go on like
anything!"
Ned remained in
silence, pondering.
"You'll
forgive me, dear Ned?" she added, beginning to sob outright. "I
haven't taken 'ee in after all, because—because you can pack us back again, if
you want to; though 'tis hundreds o' miles, and so wet, and night a-coming on,
and I with no money!
"What the
devil can I do!" Hipcroft groaned.
A more pitiable
picture than the pair of helpless creatures presented was never seen on a rainy
day, as they stood on the great, gaunt, puddled platform, a whiff of drizzle
blowing under the roof upon them now and then; the pretty attire in which they
had started from Stickleford in the early morning bemuddled and sodden,
weariness on their faces, and fear of him in their eyes; for the child began to
look as if she thought she too had done some wrong, remaining in an appalled
silence till the tears rolled down her chubby cheeks.
"What's the
matter, my little maid?" said Ned mechanically.
"I do want to
go home!" she let out, in tones that told of a bursting heart. "And
my totties be cold, an' I shan't have no bread an' butter no more!"
"I don't know
what to say to it all!" declared Ned, his own eye moist as he turned and
walked a few steps with his head down; then regarded them again point-blank.
From the child escaped troubled breaths and silently welling tears.
"Want some
bread and butter, do 'ee?" he said, with factitious hardness.
"Ye—e—s!"
"Well, I dare
say I can get 'ee a bit! Naturally, you must want some. And you, too, for that
matter, Car'line."
"I do feel a
little hungered. But I can keep it off," she murmured.
"Folk
shouldn't do that," he said gruffly. . . . "There, come along!"
He caught up the child, as he added, "You must bide here tonight, anyhow,
I s'pose! What can you do otherwise? I'll get 'ee some tea and victuals; and as
for this job, I'm sure I don't know what to say! This is the way out."
They pursued their
way, without speaking, to Ned's lodgings, which were not far off. There he
dried them and made them comfortable, and prepared tea; they thankfully sat
down. The ready-made household of which he suddenly found himself the head
imparted a cosy aspect to his room, and a paternal one to himself. Presently he
turned to the child and kissed her now blooming cheeks; and, looking wistfully
at Car'line, kissed her also.
"I don't see
how I can send you back all them miles," he growled, "now you've come
all the way o' purpose to join me. But you must trust me, Car'line, and show
you've real faith in me, Well, do you feel better now, my little woman?"
The child nodded
beamingly, her mouth being otherwise occupied.
"I did trust
you, Ned, in coming; and I shall always!"
Thus, without any
definite agreement to forgive her, he tacitly acquiesced in the fate that
Heaven had sent him; and on the day of their marriage (which was not quite so
soon as he had expected it could be, on account of the time necessary for
banns) he took her to the Exhibition when they came back from church, as he had
promised. While standing near a large mirror in one of the courts devoted to
furniture, Car'line started, for in the glass appeared the reflection of a form
exactly resembling Mop Ollamoor's—so exactly, that it seemed impossible to
believe anybody but that artist in person to be the original. On passing round
the objects which hemmed in Ned, her, and the child from a direct view, no Mop
was to be seen. Whether he were really in London or not at that time was never
known; and Car'line always stoutly denied that her readiness to go and meet Ned
in town arose from any rumor that Mop had also gone thither; which denial there
was no reasonable ground for doubting.
And then the year
glided away, and the Exhibition folded itself up and became a thing of the
past. The park trees that had been enclosed for six months were again exposed
to the winds and storms, and the sod grew green anew. Ned found that Car'line resolved
herself into a very good wife and companion, though she had made herself what
is called cheap to him; but in that she was like another domestic article, a
cheap tea-pot, which often brews better tea than a dear one. One autumn
Hipcroft found himself with but little work to do, and a prospect of less for
the winter. Both being country born and bred, they fancied they would like to
live again in their natural atmosphere. It was accordingly decided between them
that they should leave the pent-up London lodging, and that Ned should seek out
employment near his native place, his wife and her daughter staying with
Car'line's father during the search for occupation and an abode of their own.
Tinglings of pride
pervaded Car'line's spasmodic little frame as she journeyed down with Ned to
the place she had left two or three years before, in silence and under a cloud.
To return to where she had once been despised, a smiling London wife with a
distinct London accent, was a triumph which the world did not witness every
day.
The train did not
stop at the petty roadside station that lay nearest to Stickleford, and the
trio went on to Casterbridge. Ned thought it a good opportunity to make a few
preliminary inquiries for employment at workshops in the borough where he had
been known; and feeling cold from her journey, and it being dry underfoot and
only dusk as yet, with a moon on the point of rising, Car'line and her little
girl walked on toward Stickleford, leaving Ned to follow at a quicker pace, and
pick her up at a certain halfway house, widely known as an inn.
"The woman
and child pursued the well-remembered way comfortably enough, though they were
both becoming wearied. In the course of three miles they had passed
Heedless-William's Pond, the familiar landmark by Bloom's End, and were drawing
near the Quiet Woman, a lone roadside hostel on the lower verge of the Egdon
Heath, since and for many years abolished. In stepping up toward it Car'line
heard more voices within than had formerly been customary at such an hour, and
she learned that an auction of fat stock had been held near the spot that
afternoon. The child would be the better for a rest as well as herself, she
thought, and she entered.
The guests and
customers overflowed into the passage, and Car'line had no sooner crossed the
threshold than a man whom she remembered by sight came forward with a glass and
mug in his hands toward a friend leaning against the wall; but, seeing her,
very gallantly offered her a drink of the liquor, which was gin-and-beer hot,
pouring her out a tumblerful and saying, in a moment or two: "Surely, 'tis
little Car'line Aspent that was down at Stickleford?"
She assented, and,
though she did not exactly want this beverage, she drank it since it was
offered, and her entertainer begged her to come in further and sit down. Once
within the room she found that all the persons present were seated close
against the walls, and there being a chair vacant she did the same. An
explanation of their position occurred the next moment. In the opposite corner
stood Mop, rosining his bow and looking just the same as ever. The company had
cleared the middle of the room for dancing, and they were about to dance again.
As she wore a veil to keep off the wind she did not think he had recognized
her, or could possibly guess the identity of the child; and to her satisfied
surprise she found that she could confront him quite calmly—mistress of herself
in the dignity her London life had given her. Before she had quite emptied her
glass the dance was called, the dancers formed in two lines, the music sounded,
and the figure began.
Then matters
changed for Car'line. A tremor quickened itself to life in her, and her hand so
shook that she could hardly set down her glass. It was not the dance nor the
dancers, but the notes of that old violin which thrilled the London wife, these
having still all the witchery that she had so well known of yore, and under
which she had used to lose her power of independent will. How it all came back!
There was the fiddling figure against the wall; the large, oily, mop-like head
of him, and beneath the mop the face with closed eyes.
After the first
moments of paralyzed reverie the familiar tune in the familiar rendering made
her laugh and shed tears simultaneously. Then a man at the bottom of the dance,
whose partner had dropped away, stretched out his hand and beckoned to her to
take the place. She did not want to dance; she entreated by signs to be left
where she was, but she was entreating of the tune and its player rather than of
the dancing man. The salutatory tendency which the fiddler and his cunning
instrument had ever been able to start in her was seizing Car'line just as it
had done in earlier years, possibly assisted by the gin-and-beer hot. Tired as
she was she grasped her little girl by the hand, and plunging in at the bottom
of the figure, whirled about with the rest. She found that her companions were
mostly people of the neighboring hamlets and farms—Bloom's End, Mellstock,
Lewgate, and elsewhere; and by degrees she was recognized as she convulsively
danced on, wishing that Mop would cease and let her heart rest from the aching
he caused, and her feet also.
After long and
many minutes the dance ended, when she was urged to fortify herself with more
gin-and-beer; which she did, feeling very weak and overpowered with hysteric
emotion. She refrained from unveiling, to keep Mop in ignorance of her
presence, if possible. Several of the guests having left, Car'line hastily
wiped her lips and also turned to go; but, according to the account of some who
remained, at that very moment a five-handed reel was proposed, in which two or
three begged her to join.
She declined on
the plea of being tired and having to walk to Stickleford, when Mop began
aggressively tweedling "My Fancy-Lad," in D major, as the air to
which the reel was to be footed. He must have recognized her, though she did
not know it, for it was the strain of all seductive strains which she was least
able to resist—the one he had played when she was leaning over the bridge at
the date of their first acquaintance. Car'line stepped despairingly into the
middle of the room with the other four.
Reels were
resorted to hereabouts at this time by the more robust spirits, for the
reduction of superfluous energy which the ordinary figure-dances were not
powerful enough to exhaust. As everybody knows, or does not know, the five
reelers stood in the form of a cross, the reel being performed by each line of
three alternately, the persons who successively came to the middle place
dancing in both directions. Car'line soon found herself in this place, the axis
of the whole performance, and could not get out of it, the tune turning into
the first part without giving her opportunity. And now she began to suspect
that Mop did know her, and was doing this on purpose, though whenever she stole
a glance at him his closed eyes betokened obliviousness to everything outside
his own brain. She continued to wend her way through the figure of eight that
was formed by her course, the fiddler introducing into his notes the wild and
agonizing sweetness of a living voice in one too highly wrought; its pathos
running high and running low in endless variation, projecting through her nerves
excruciating spasms, a sort of blissful torture. The room swam, the tune was
endless; and in about a quarter of an hour the only other woman in the figure
dropped out exhausted, and sank panting on a bench.
The reel instantly
resolved itself into a four-handed one. Car'line would have given anything to
leave off; but she had, or fancied she had, no power, while Mop played such
tunes; and thus another ten minutes slipped by, a haze of dust now clouding the
candles, the floor being of stone, sanded. Then another dancer fell out—one of
the men—and went into the passage in a frantic search for liquor. To turn the
figure into a three-handed reel was the work of a second, Mop modulating at the
same time into "The Fairy Dance," as better suited to the contracted
movement, and no less one of those foods of love which, as manufactured by his
bow, had always intoxicated her.
In a reel for
three there was no rest whatever, and four or five minutes were enough to make
her remaining two partners, now thoroughly blown, stamp their last bar, and,
like their predecessors, limp off into the next room to get something to drink.
Car'line, half-stifled inside her veil, was left dancing alone, the apartment
now being empty of everybody save herself, Mop, and their little girl.
She flung up the
veil, and cast her eyes upon him, as if imploring him to withdraw himself and
his acoustic magnetism from the atmosphere. Mop opened one of his own orbs, as
though for the first time, fixed it peeringly upon her, and smiling dreamily,
threw into his strains the reserve of expression which he could not afford to
waste on a big and noisy dance. Crowds of little chromatic subtleties, capable
drawing tears from a statue, proceeded straightway from the ancient fiddle, as
if it were dying of the emotion which had been pent up within it ever since its
banishment from some Italian or German city where it first took shape and
sound. There was that in the look of Mop's one dark eye which said: "You
cannot leave off, dear, whether you would or no!" and it bred in her a
paroxysm of desperation that defied him to tire her down.
She thus continued
to dance alone, defiantly as she thought, but in truth slavishly and abjectly,
subject to every wave of the melody, and probed by the gimlet-like gaze of her
fascinator's open eye; keeping up at the same time a feeble smile in his face,
as feint to signify it was still her own pleasure which led her on. A terrified
embarrassment as to what she could say to him if she were to leave off, had its
unrecognized share in keeping her going. The child, who was beginning to be
distressed by the strange situation, came up and whimpered: "Stop, mother,
stop, and let's go home!" as she seized Car'line's hand.
Suddenly Car'line
sank staggering to the floor, and rolling over on her face, prone she remained.
Mop's fiddle thereupon emitted an elfin shriek of finality; stepping quickly
down from the nine-gallon beer-cask which had formed his rostrum, he went to
the little girl, who disconsolately bent over her mother.
The guests who had
gone into the backroom for liquor and change of air, hearing something unusual,
trooped back hitherward, where they endeavored to revive poor, weak Car'line by
blowing her with the bellows and opening the window. Ned, her husband, who had
been detained in Casterbridge, as aforesaid, came along the road at this
juncture, and hearing excited voices through the open casement, and to his
great surprise, the mention of his wife's name, he entered amid the rest upon
the scene. Car'line was now in convulsions, weeping violently, and for a long
time nothing could be done with her. While he was sending for a cart to take
her onward to Stickleford Hipcroft anxiously inquired, how it had all happened;
and then the assembly explained that a fiddler formerly known in the locality
had lately visited his old haunts, and had taken upon himself without
invitation to play that evening at the inn and raise a dance. Ned demanded the fiddler's name, and
they said Ollamoor.
"Ah!"
exclaimed Ned, looking round him. "Where is he, and where—where's my
little girl?"
Ollamoor had
disappeared, and so had the child. Hipcroft was in ordinary a quiet and
tractable fellow, but a determination which was to be feared settled in his
face now. "Blast him!" he cried. "I'll beat his skull in for'n,
if I swing for it tomorrow!"
He had rushed to
the poker which lay on the hearth, and has tened down the passage, the people
following. Outside the house, on the other side of the highway, a mass of dark
heath-land rose sullenly upward to its not easily accessible interior, a
ravined plateau, whereon jutted into the sky, at the distance of a couple of
miles, the fir-woods of Mistover backed by the Yalbury coppices—a place of
Dantesque gloom at this hour, which would have afforded secure hiding for a
battery of artillery, much less a man and a child.
Some other men
plunged thitherward with him, and more went along the road. They were gone
about twenty minutes altogether, returning without result to the inn. Ned sat
down in the settle, and clasped his forehead with his hands.
"Well—what a
fool the man is, and hev been all these years, if he thinks the child his, as
a' do seem to!" they whispered. "And everybody else knowing
otherwise!"
"No, I don't
think 'tis mine!" cried Ned hoarsely, as he looked up from his hands.
"But she is mine, all the same! Ha'n't I nussed her? Ha'n't I fed her and
teached her? Ha'n't I played wi' her? O, little Carry—gone with that
rogue—gone!"
"You ha'n't
lost your mis'ess, anyhow," they said to console him. "She's throwed
up the sperrits, and she is feeling better, and she's more to 'ee than a child
that isn't yours."
"She isn't!
She's not so particular much to me, especially now she's lost the little maid!
But Carry's the whole world to me!"
"Well, ver'
like you'll find her tomorrow."
"Ah—but shall
I? Yet he can't hurt her—surely he can't! Well—how's Car'line now? I am ready.
Is the cart here?"
She was lifted
into the vehicle, and they sadly lumbered on toward Stickleford. Next day she
was calmer; but the fits were still upon her; and her will seemed shattered.
For the child she appeared to show singularly little anxiety, though Ned was
nearly distracted by his passionate paternal love for a child not his own. It
was nevertheless quite expected that the impish Mop would restore the lost one
after a freak of a day or two; but time went on, and neither he nor she could
be heard of, and Hipcroft murmured that perhaps he was exercising upon her some
unholy musical charm, as he had done upon Car'line herself. Weeks passed, and
still they could obtain no clue either to the fiddler's whereabouts or to the
girl's; and how he induced her to go with him remained a mystery.
Then Ned, who had
obtained only temporary employment in the neighborhood, took a sudden hatred
toward his native district, and a rumor reaching his ears through the police
that a somewhat similar man and child had been seen at a fair near London, he
playing a violin, she dancing on stilts, a new interest in the capital took
possession of Hipcroft with an intensity which would scarcely allow him time to
pack before returning thither. He did not, however find the lost one, though he
made it the entire business of his over-hours to stand about in by-streets in
the hope of discovering her, and would start up in the night, saying,
"That rascal's torturing her to maintain him!" To which his wife
would answer peevishly, "Don't 'ee raft yourself so, Ned! You prevent my
getting a bit o' rest! He won't hurt her!" and fall asleep again.
That Carry and her
father had emigrated to
May 1893.