The Trumpet-Major

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.