Adam Bede by George Eliot (the little red hen read aloud TXT) 📕

a carrier's cart which carried her to Hinckley, and by the help of a return chaise, with a drunken postilion—who frightened her by driving like Jehu the son of Nimshi, and shouting hilarious remarks at her, twisting himself backwards on his saddle—she was before night in the heart of woody Warwickshire: but still almost a hundred miles from Windsor, they told her. Oh what a large world it was, and what hard work for her to find her way in it! She went by mistake to Stratford-on-Avon, finding Stratford set down in her list of places, and then she was told she had come a long way out of the right road. It was not till the fifth day that she got to Stony Stratford. That seems but a slight journey as you look at the map, or remember your own pleasant travels to and from the meadowy banks of the Avon. But how wearily long it was to Hetty! It seemed to her as if this country of flat fields, and hedgerows, and dotted houses, and villages, and market-towns—all so much alike to her indifferent eyes—must have no end, and she must go on wandering among them for ever, waiting tired at toll-gates for some cart to come, and then finding the cart went only a little way—a very little way—to the miller's a mile off perhaps; and she hated going into the public houses, where she must go to get food and ask questions, because there were always men lounging there, who stared at her and joked her rudely. Her body was very weary too with these days of new fatigue and anxiety; they had made her look more pale and worn than all the time of hidden dread she had gone through at home. When at last she reached Stony Stratford, her impatience and weariness had become too strong for her economical caution; she determined to take the coach for the rest of the way, though it should cost her all her remaining money. She would need nothing at Windsor but to find Arthur. When she had paid the fare for the last coach, she had only a shilling; and as she got down at the sign of the Green Man in Windsor at twelve o'clock in the middle of the seventh day, hungry and faint, the coachman came up, and begged her to “remember him.” She put her hand in her pocket and took out the shilling, but the tears came with the sense of exhaustion and the thought that she was giving away her last means of getting food, which she really required before she could go in search of Arthur. As she held out the shilling, she lifted up her dark tear-filled eyes to the coachman's face and said, “Can you give me back sixpence?”

“No, no,” he said, gruffly, “never mind—put the shilling up again.”

The landlord of the Green Man had stood near enough to witness this scene, and he was a man whose abundant feeding served to keep his good nature, as well as his person, in high condition. And that lovely tearful face of Hetty's would have found out the sensitive fibre in most men.

“Come, young woman, come in,” he said, “and have adrop o' something; you're pretty well knocked up, I can see that.”

He took her into the bar and said to his wife, “Here, missis, take this young woman into the parlour; she's a little overcome”—for Hetty's tears were falling fast. They were merely hysterical tears: she thought she had no reason for weeping now, and was vexed that she was too weak and tired to help it. She was at Windsor at last, not far from Arthur.

She looked with eager, hungry eyes at the bread and meat and beer that the landlady brought her, and for some minutes she forgot everything else in the delicious sensations of satisfying hunger and recovering from exhaustion. The landlady sat opposite to her as she ate, and looked at her earnestly. No wonder: Hetty had thrown off her bonnet, and her curls had fallen down. Her face was all the more touching in its youth and beauty because of its weary look, and the good woman's eyes presently wandered to her figure, which in her hurried dressing on her journey she had taken no pains to conceal; moreover, the stranger's eye detects what the familiar unsuspecting eye leaves unnoticed.

“Why, you're not very fit for travelling,” she said, glancing while she spoke at Hetty's ringless hand. “Have you come far?”

“Yes,” said Hetty, roused by this question to exert more self-command, and feeling the better for the food she had taken. “I've come a good long way, and it's very tiring. But I'm better now. Could you tell me which way to go to this place?” Here Hetty took from her pocket a bit of paper: it was the end of Arthur's letter on which he had written his address.

While she was speaking, the landlord had come in and had begun to look at her as earnestly as his wife had done. He took up the piece of paper which Hetty handed across the table, and read the address.

“Why, what do you want at this house?” he said. It is in the nature of innkeepers and all men who have no pressing business of their own to ask as many questions as possible before giving any information.

“I want to see a gentleman as is there,” said Hetty.

“But there's no gentleman there,” returned the landlord. “It's shut up—been shut up this fortnight. What gentleman is it you want? Perhaps I can let you know where to find him.”

“It's Captain Donnithorne,” said Hetty tremulously, her heart beginning to beat painfully at this disappointment of her hope that she should find Arthur at once.

“Captain Donnithorne? Stop a bit,” said the landlord, slowly. “Was he in the Loamshire Militia? A tall young officer with a fairish skin and reddish whiskers—and had a servant by the name o' Pym?”

“Oh yes,” said Hetty; “you know him—where is he?”

“A fine sight o' miles away from here. The Loamshire Militia's gone to Ireland; it's been gone this fortnight.”

“Look there! She's fainting,” said the landlady, hastening to support Hetty, who had lost her miserable consciousness and looked like a beautiful corpse. They carried her to the sofa and loosened her dress.

“Here's a bad business, I suspect,” said the landlord, as he brought in some water.

“Ah, it's plain enough what sort of business it is,” said the wife. “She's not a common flaunting dratchell, I can see that. She looks like a respectable country girl, and she comes from a good way off, to judge by her tongue. She talks something like that ostler we had that come from the north. He was as honest a fellow as we ever had about the house—they're all honest folks in the north.”

“I never saw a prettier young woman in my life,” said the husband. “She's like a pictur in a shop-winder. It goes to one's 'eart to look at her.”

“It 'ud have been a good deal better for her if she'd been uglier and had more conduct,” said the landlady, who on any charitable construction must have been supposed to have more “conduct” than beauty. “But she's coming to again. Fetch a drop more water.”