The Trumpet-Major

Anne innocently inquired what it could be.

‘Jack and you in the garden together,’ he continued laying his hand gently on her shoulder and stroking it. ‘It would so please me, my dear little girl, if you could get to like him better than that weathercock, Master Bob.’

Anne shook her head; not in forcible negation, but to imply a kind of neutrality.

‘Can’t you? Come now,’ said the miller.

She threw back her head with a little laugh of grievance. ‘How you all beset me!’ she expostulated. ‘It makes me feel very wicked in not obeying you, and being faithful – faithful to – ’ But she could not trust that side of the subject to words. ‘Why would it please you so much?’ she asked.

‘John is as steady and staunch a fellow as ever blowed a trumpet. I’ve always thought you might do better with him than with Bob. Now I’ve a plan for taking him into the mill, and letting him have a comfortable time o’t after his long knocking about; but so much depends upon you that I must bide a bit till I see what your pleasure is about the poor fellow. Mind, my dear, I don’t want to force ye; I only just ask ye.’

Anne meditatively regarded the miller from under her shady eyelids, the fingers of one hand playing a silent tattoo on her bosom. ‘I don’t know what to say to you,’ she answered brusquely, and went away.

But these discourses were not without their effect upon the extremely conscientious mind of Anne. They were, moreover, much helped by an incident which took place one evening in the autumn of this year, when John came to tea. Anne was sitting on a low stool in front of the fire, her hands clasped across her knee. John Loveday had just seated himself on a chair close behind her, and Mrs. Loveday was in the act of filling the teapot from the kettle which hung in the chimney exactly above Anne. The kettle slipped forward suddenly, whereupon John jumped from the chair and put his own two hands over Anne’s just in time to shield them, and the precious knee she clasped, from the jet of scalding water which had directed itself upon that point. The accidental overflow was instantly checked by Mrs. Loveday; but what had come was received by the devoted trumpet-major on the back of his hands.

Anne, who had hardly been aware that he was behind her, started up like a person awakened from a trance. ‘What have you done to yourself, poor John, to keep it off me!’ she cried, looking at his hands.

John reddened emotionally at her words, ‘It is a bit of a scald, that’s all,’ he replied, drawing a finger across the back of one hand, and bringing off the skin by the touch.

‘You are scalded painfully, and I not at all!’ She gazed into his kind face as she had never gazed there before, and when Mrs. Loveday came back with oil and other liniments for the wound Anne would let nobody dress it but herself. It seemed as if her coyness had all gone, and when she had done all that lay in her power she still sat by him. At his departure she said what she had never said to him in her life before: ‘Come again soon!’

In short, that impulsive act of devotion, the last of a series of the same tenor, had been the added drop which finally turned the wheel. John’s character deeply impressed her. His determined steadfastness to his lode star won her admiration, the more especially as that star was herself. She began to wonder more and more how she could have so persistently held out against his advances before Bob came home to renew girlish memories which had by that time got considerably weakened. Could she not, after all, please the miller, and try to listen to John? By so doing she would make a worthy man happy, the only sacrifice being at worst that of her unworthy self, whose future was no longer valuable. ‘As for Bob, the woman is to be pitied who loves him,’ she reflected indignantly, and persuaded herself that, whoever the woman might be, she was not Anne Garland.

After this there was something of recklessness and something of pleasantry in the young girl’s manner of making herself an example of the triumph of pride and common sense over memory and sentiment. Her attitude had been epitomized in her defiant singing at the time she learnt that Bob was not leal and true. John, as was inevitable, came again almost immediately, drawn thither by the sun of her first smile on him, and the words which had accompanied it. And now instead of going off to her little pursuits upstairs, downstairs, across the room, in the corner, or to any place except where he happened to be, as had been her custom hitherto, she remained seated near him, returning interesting answers to his general remarks, and at every opportunity letting him know that at last he had found favour in her eyes.

The day was fine, and they went out of doors, where Anne endeavoured to seat herself on the sloping stone of the window-sill.

‘How good you have become lately,’ said John, standing over her and smiling in the sunlight which blazed against the wall. ‘I fancy you have stayed at home this afternoon on my account.’

‘Perhaps I have,’ she said gaily —

‘“Do whatever we may for him, dame, we cannot do too much!

For he’s one that has guarded our land.”

‘And he has done more than that: he has saved me from a dreadful scalding. The back of your hand will not be well for a long time, John, will it?’

He held out his hand to regard its condition, and the next natural thing was to take hers. There was a glow upon his face when he did it: his star was at last on a fair way towards the zenith after its long and weary declination. The least penetrating eye could have perceived that Anne had resolved to let him woo, possibly in her temerity to let him win. Whatever silent sorrow might be locked up in her, it was by this time thrust a long way down from the light.

‘I want you to go somewhere with me if you will,’ he said, still holding her hand.

‘Yes? Where is it?’

He pointed to a distant hill-side which, hitherto green, had within the last few days begun to show scratches of white on its face. ‘Up there,’ he said.

‘I see little figures of men moving about. What are they doing?’

‘Cutting out a huge picture of the king on horseback in the earth of the hill. The king’s head is to be as big as our mill-pond and his body as big as this garden; he and the horse will cover more than an acre. When shall we go?’

‘Whenever you please,’ said she.

‘John!’ cried Mrs. Loveday from the front door. ‘Here’s a friend come for you.’

John went round, and found his trusty lieutenant, Trumpeter Buck, waiting for him. A letter had come to the barracks for John in his absence, and the trumpeter, who was going for a walk, had brought it along with him. Buck then entered the mill to discuss, if possible, a mug of last year’s mead with the miller; and John proceeded to read his letter, Anne being still round the corner where he had left her. When he had read a few words he turned as pale as a sheet, but he did not move, and perused the writing to the end.

Afterwards he laid his elbow against the wall, and put his palm to his head, thinking with painful intentness. Then he took himself vigorously in hand, as it were, and gradually became natural again. When he parted from Anne to go home with Buck she noticed nothing different in him.

In barracks that evening he read the letter again. It was from Bob; and the agitating contents were these: —

‘Dear John, – I have drifted off from writing till the present time because I have not been clear about my feelings; but I have discovered them at last, and can say beyond doubt that I mean to be faithful to my dearest Anne after all. The fact is, John, I’ve got into a bit of a scrape, and I’ve a secret to tell you about it (which must go no further on any account). On landing last autumn I fell in with a young woman, and we got rather warm as folks do; in short, we liked one another well enough for a while. But I have got into shoal water with her, and have found her to be a terrible take-in. Nothing in her at all – no sense, no niceness, all tantrums and empty noise, John, though she seemed monstrous clever at first. So my heart comes back to its old anchorage. I hope my return to faithfulness will make no difference to you. But as you showed by your looks at our parting that you should not accept my offer to give her up – made in too much haste, as I have since found – I feel that you won’t mind that I have returned to the path of honour. I dare not write to Anne as yet, and please do not let her know a word about the other young woman, or there will be the devil to pay. I shall come home and make all things right, please God. In the meantime I should take it as a kindness, John, if you would keep a brotherly eye upon Anne, and guide her mind back to me. I shall die of sorrow if anybody sets her against me, for my hopes are getting bound up in her again quite strong. Hoping you are jovial, as times go, I am, – Your affectionate brother,

    Robert.’

When the cold daylight fell upon John’s face, as he dressed himself next morning, the incipient yesterday’s wrinkle in his forehead had become permanently graven there. He had resolved, for the sake of that only brother whom he had nursed as a baby, instructed as a child, and protected and loved always, to pause in his procedure for the present, and at least do nothing to hinder Bob’s restoration to favour, if a genuine, even though temporarily smothered, love for Anne should still hold possession of him. But having arranged to take her to see the excavated figure of the king, he started for Overcombe during the day, as if nothing had occurred to check the smooth course of his love.

XXXVIII. A DELICATE SITUATION

‘I am ready to go,’ said Anne, as soon as he arrived.

He paused as if taken aback by her readiness, and replied with much uncertainty, ‘Would it – wouldn’t it be better to put it off till there is less sun?’

The very slightest symptom of surprise arose in her as she rejoined, ‘But the weather may change; or had we better not go at all?’

‘O no! – it was only a thought. We will start at once.’

And along the vale they went, John keeping himself about a yard from her right hand. When the third field had been crossed they came upon half-a-dozen little boys at play.

‘Why don’t he clasp her to his side, like a man?’ said the biggest and rudest boy.

‘Why don’t he clasp her to his side, like a man?’ echoed all the rude smaller boys in a chorus.

The trumpet-major turned, and, after some running, succeeded in smacking two of them with his switch, returning to Anne breathless. ‘I am ashamed they should have insulted you so,’ he said, blushing for her.

‘They said no harm, poor boys,’ she replied reproachfully.

Poor John was dumb with perception. The gentle hint upon which he would have eagerly spoken only one short day ago was now like fire to his wound.

They presently came to some stepping-stones across a brook. John crossed first without turning his head, and Anne, just lifting the skirt of her dress, crossed behind him. When they had reached the other side a village girl and a young shepherd approached the brink to cross. Anne stopped and watched them. The shepherd took a hand of the young girl in each of his own, and walked backward over the stones, facing her, and keeping her upright by his grasp, both of them laughing as they went.

‘What are you staying for, Miss Garland?’ asked John.

‘I was only thinking how happy they are,’ she said quietly; and withdrawing her eyes from the tender pair, she turned and followed him, not knowing that the seeming sound of a passing bumble-bee was a suppressed groan from John.

When they reached the hill they found forty navvies at work removing the dark sod so as to lay bare the chalk beneath. The equestrian figure that their shovels were forming was scarcely intelligible to John and Anne now they were close, and after pacing from the horse’s head down his breast to his hoof, back by way of the king’s bridle-arm, past the bridge of his nose, and into his cocked-hat, Anne said that she had had enough of it, and stepped out of the chalk clearing upon the grass. The trumpet-major had remained all the time in a melancholy attitude within the rowel of his Majesty’s right spur.

‘My shoes are caked with chalk,’ she said as they walked downwards again; and she drew back her dress to look at them. ‘How can I get some of it cleared off?’

‘If you was to wipe them in the long grass there,’ said John, pointing to a spot where the blades were rank and dense, ‘some of it would come off.’ Having said this, he walked on with religious firmness.