Life's Little Ironies by Thomas Hardy (best love novels of all time .txt) 📕

‘F. M.’

Millborne, in short, disappeared from that day forward.  But a searching inquiry would have revealed that, soon after the Millbornes went to Ivell, an Englishman, who did not give the name of Millborne, took up his residence in Brussels; a man who might have been recognized by Mrs. Millborne if she had met him.  One afternoon in the ensuing summer, when this gentleman was looking over the English papers, he saw the announcement of Miss Frances Frankland’s marriage.  She had become the Reverend Mrs. Cope.

‘Thank God!’ said the gentleman.

But his momentary satisfaction was far from being happiness.  As he formerly had been weighted with a bad conscience, so now was he burdened with the heavy thought which oppressed Antigone, that by honourable observance of a rite he had obtained for himself the reward of dishonourable laxity.  Occasionally he had to be helped to his lodgings by his servant from the Cercle he frequented, through having imbibed a little too much liquor to be able to take care of himself.  But he was harmless, and even when he had been drinking said little.

March 1891.

The shouts of the village-boys came in at the window, accompanied by broken laughter from loungers at the inn-door; but the brothers Halborough worked on.

They were sitting in a bedroom of the master-millwright’s house, engaged in the untutored reading of Greek and Latin.  It was no tale of Homeric blows and knocks, Argonautic voyaging, or Theban family woe that inflamed their imaginations and spurred them onward.  They were plodding away at the Greek Testament, immersed in a chapter of the idiomatic and difficult Epistle to the Hebrews.

The Dog-day sun in its decline reached the low ceiling with slanting sides, and the shadows of the great goat’s-willow swayed and interchanged upon the walls like a spectral army manoeuvring.  The open casement which admitted the remoter sounds now brought the voice of some one close at hand.  It was their sister, a pretty girl of fourteen, who stood in the court below.

‘I can see the tops of your heads!  What’s the use of staying up there?  I like you not to go out with the street-boys; but do come and play with me!’

They treated her as an inadequate interlocutor, and put her off with some slight word.  She went away disappointed.  Presently there was a dull noise of heavy footsteps at the side of the house, and one of the brothers sat up.  ‘I fancy I hear him coming,’ he murmured, his eyes on the window.

A man in the light drab clothes of an old-fashioned country tradesman approached from round the corner, reeling as he came.  The elder son flushed with anger, rose from his books, and descended the stairs.  The younger sat on, till, after the lapse of a few minutes, his brother re-entered the room.

‘Did Rosa see him?’

‘No.’

‘Nor anybody?’

‘No.’

‘What have you done with him?’

‘He’s in the straw-shed.  I got him in with some trouble, and he has fallen asleep.  I thought this would be the explanation of his absence!  No stones dressed for Miller Kench, the great wheel of the saw-mills waiting for new float-boards, even the poor folk not able to get their waggons wheeled.’

‘What is the use of poring over this!’ said the younger, shutting up Donnegan’s Lexicon with a slap.  ‘O if we had only been able to keep mother’s nine hundred pounds, what we could have done!’

‘How well she had estimated the sum necessary!  Four hundred and fifty each, she thought.  And I have no doubt that we could have done it on that, with care.’

This loss of the nine hundred pounds was the sharp thorn of their crown.  It was a sum which their mother had amassed with great exertion and self-denial, by adding to a chance legacy such other small amounts as she could lay hands on from time to time; and she had intended with the hoard to indulge the dear wish of her heart—that of sending her sons, Joshua and Cornelius, to one of the Universities, having been informed that from four hundred to four hundred and fifty each might carry them through their terms with such great economy as she knew she could trust them to practise.  But she had died a year or two before this time, worn out by too keen a strain towards these ends; and the money, coming unreservedly into the hands of their father, had been nearly dissipated.  With its exhaustion went all opportunity and hope of a university degree for the sons.

‘It drives me mad when I think of it,’ said Joshua, the elder.  ‘And here we work and work in our own bungling way, and the utmost we can hope for is a term of years as national schoolmasters, and possible admission to a Theological college, and ordination as despised licentiates.’

The anger of the elder was reflected as simple sadness in the face of the other.  ‘We can preach the Gospel as well without a hood on our surplices as with one,’ he said with feeble consolation.

‘Preach the Gospel—true,’ said Joshua with a slight pursing of mouth.  ‘But we can’t rise!’

‘Let us make the best of it, and grind on.’

The other was silent, and they drearily bent over their books again.

The cause of all this gloom, the millwright Halborough, now snoring in the shed, had been a thriving master-machinist, notwithstanding his free and careless disposition, till a taste for a more than adequate quantity of strong liquor took hold of him; since when his habits had interfered with his business sadly.  Already millers went elsewhere for their gear, and only one set of hands was now kept going, though there were formerly two.  Already he found a difficulty in meeting his men at the week’s end, and though they had been reduced in number there was barely enough work to do for those who remained.

The sun dropped lower and vanished, the shouts of the village children ceased to resound, darkness cloaked the students’ bedroom, and all the scene outwardly breathed peace.  None knew of the fevered youthful ambitions that throbbed in two breasts within the quiet creeper-covered walls of the millwright’s house.

In a few months the brothers left the village of their birth to enter themselves as students in a training college for schoolmasters; first having placed their young sister Rosa under as efficient a tuition at a fashionable watering-place as the means at their disposal could command.

A man in semi-clerical dress was walking along the road which led from the railway-station into a provincial town.  As he walked he read persistently, only looking up once now and then to see that he was keeping on the foot track and to avoid other passengers.  At those moments, whoever had known the former students at the millwright’s would have perceived that one of them, Joshua Halborough, was the peripatetic reader here.

What had been simple force in the youth’s face was energized judgment in the man’s.  His character was gradually writing itself out in his countenance.  That he was watching his own career with deeper and deeper interest, that he continually ‘heard his days before him,’ and cared to hear little else, might have been hazarded from what was seen there.  His ambitions were, in truth, passionate, yet controlled; so that the germs of many more plans than ever blossomed to maturity had place in him; and forward visions were kept purposely in twilight, to avoid distraction.

Events so far had been encouraging.  Shortly after assuming the mastership of his first school he had obtained an introduction to the Bishop of a diocese far from his native county, who had looked upon him as a promising young man and taken him in hand.  He was now in the second year of his residence at the theological college of the cathedral-town, and would soon be presented for ordination.

He entered the town, turned into a back street, and then into a yard, keeping his book before him till he set foot under the arch of the latter place.  Round the arch was written ‘National School,’ and the stonework of the jambs was worn away as nothing but boys and the waves of ocean will wear it.  He was soon amid the sing-song accents of the scholars.

His brother Cornelius, who was the schoolmaster here, laid down the pointer with which he was directing attention to the Capes of Europe, and came forward.

‘That’s his brother Jos!’ whispered one of the sixth standard boys.  ‘He’s going to be a pa’son, he’s now at college.’

‘Corney is going to be one too, when he’s saved enough money,’ said another.

After greeting his brother, whom he had not seen for several months, the junior began to explain his system of teaching geography.

But Halborough the elder took no interest in the subject.  ‘How about your own studies?’ he asked.  ‘Did you get the books I sent?’

Cornelius had received them, and he related what he was doing.

‘Mind you work in the morning.  What time do you get up?’

The younger replied: ‘Half-past five.’

‘Half-past four is not a minute too soon this time of the year.  There is no time like the morning for construing.  I don’t know why, but when I feel even too dreary to read a novel I can translate—there is something mechanical about it I suppose.  Now, Cornelius, you are rather behindhand, and have some heavy reading before you if you mean to get out of this next Christmas.’

‘I am afraid I have.’

‘We must soon sound the Bishop.  I am sure you will get a title without difficulty when he has heard all.  The sub-dean, the principal of my college, says that the best plan will be for you to come there when his lordship is present at an examination, and he’ll get you a personal interview with him.  Mind you make a good impression upon him.  I found in my case that that was everything and doctrine almost nothing.  You’ll do for a deacon, Corney, if not for a priest.’

The younger remained thoughtful.  ‘Have you heard from Rosa lately?’ he asked; ‘I had a letter this morning.’

‘Yes.  The little minx writes rather too often.  She is homesick—though Brussels must be an attractive place enough.  But she must make the most of her time over there.  I thought a year would be enough for her, after that high-class school at Sandbourne, but I have decided to give her two, and make a good job of it, expensive as the establishment is.’

Their two rather harsh faces had softened directly they began to speak of their sister, whom they loved more ambitiously than they loved themselves.

‘But where is the money to come from, Joshua?’

‘I have already got it.’  He looked round, and finding that some boys were near withdrew a few steps.  ‘I have borrowed it at five per cent. from the farmer who used to occupy the farm next our field.  You remember him.’

‘But about paying him?’

‘I shall pay him by degrees out of my stipend.  No, Cornelius, it was no use to do the thing by halves.  She promises to be a most attractive, not to say beautiful, girl.  I have seen that for years; and if her face is not her fortune, her face and her brains together will be, if I observe and contrive aright.  That she should be, every inch of her, an accomplished and refined woman, was indispensable for the fulfilment of her destiny, and for moving onwards and upwards with us; and she’ll do