Christopher Coney, from the background, with the tone of a man who preferred the original subject. “Faith, it wasn’t worth your while on our account, for as Maister Billy Wills says, we be bruckle folk here—the best o’ us hardly honest sometimes, what with hard winters, and so many mouths to fill, and Goda’mighty sending his little taties so terrible small to fill ‘em with. We don’t think about flowers and fair faces, not we—except in the shape o’ cauliflowers and pigs’ chaps.”
“But, no!” said Donald Farfrae, gazing round into their faces with earnest concern; “the best of ye hardly honest— not that surely? None of ye has been stealing what didn’t belong to him?”
“Lord! no, no!” said Solomon Longways, smiling grimly. “That’s only his random way o’ speaking. ‘A was always such a man of underthoughts.” (And reprovingly towards Christopher): “Don’t ye be so over-familiar with a gentleman that ye know nothing of—and that’s travelled a’most from the North Pole.”
Christopher Coney was silenced, and as he could get no public sympathy, he mumbled his feelings to himself: “Be dazed, if I loved my country half as well as the young feller do, I’d live by claning my neighbour’s pigsties afore I’d go away! For my part I’ve no more love for my country than I have for Botany Bay!”
“Come,” said Longways; “let the young man draw onward with his ballet, or we shall be here all night.”
“That’s all of it,” said the singer apologetically.
“Soul of my body, then we’ll have another!” said the general dealer.
“Can you turn a strain to the ladies, sir?” inquired a fat woman with a figured purple apron, the waiststring of which was overhung so far by her sides as to be invisible.
“Let him breathe—let him breathe, Mother Cuxsom. He hain’t got his second wind yet,” said the master glazier.
“Oh yes, but I have!” exclaimed the young man; and he at once rendered “O Nannie” with faultless modulations, and another or two of the like sentiment, winding up at their earnest request with “Auld Lang Syne.”
By this time he had completely taken possession of the hearts of the Three Mariners’ inmates, including even old Coney. Notwithstanding an occasional odd gravity which awoke their sense of the ludicrous for the moment, they began to view him through a golden haze which the tone of his mind seemed to raise around him. Casterbridge had sentiment—Casterbridge had romance; but this stranger’s sentiment was of differing quality. Or rather, perhaps, the difference was mainly superficial; he was to them like the poet of a new school who takes his contemporaries by storm; who is not really new, but is the first to articulate what all his listeners have felt, though but dumbly till then.
The silent landlord came and leant over the settle while the young man sang; and even Mrs. Stannidge managed to unstick herself from the framework of her chair in the bar and get as far as the doorpost, which movement she accomplished by rolling herself round, as a cask is trundled on the chine by a drayman without losing much of its perpendicular.
“And are you going to bide in Casterbridge, sir?” she asked.
“Ah—no!” said the Scotchman, with melancholy fatality in his voice, “I’m only passing thirrough! I am on my way to Bristol, and on frae there to foreign parts.”
“We be truly sorry to hear it,” said Solomon Longways. “We can ill afford to lose tuneful wynd-pipes like yours when they fall among us. And verily, to mak’ acquaintance with a man a-come from so far, from the land o’ perpetual snow, as we may say, where wolves and wild boars and other dangerous animalcules be as common as blackbirds hereabout—why, ‘tis a thing we can’t do every day; and there’s good sound information for bide-at- homes like we when such a man opens his mouth.”
“Nay, but ye mistake my country,” said the young man, looking round upon them with tragic fixity, till his eye lighted up and his cheek kindled with a sudden enthusiasm to right their errors. “There are not perpetual snow and wolves at all in it!—except snow in winter, and—well—a little in summer just sometimes, and a ‘gaberlunzie’ or two stalking about here and there, if ye may call them dangerous. Eh, but you should take a summer jarreny to Edinboro’, and Arthur’s Seat, and all round there, and then go on to the lochs, and all the Highland scenery—in May and June—and you would never say ‘tis the land of wolves and perpetual snow!”
“Of course not—it stands to reason,” said Buzzford. “‘Tis barren ignorance that leads to such words. He’s a simple home-spun man, that never was fit for good company—think nothing of him, sir.”
“And do ye carry your flock bed, and your quilt, and your crock, and your bit of chiney? or do ye go in bare bones, as I may say?” inquired Christopher Coney.
“I’ve sent on my luggage—though it isn’t much; for the voyage is long.” Donald’s eyes dropped into a remote gaze as he added: “But I said to myself, ‘Never a one of the prizes of life will I come by unless I undertake it!’ and I decided to go.”
A general sense of regret, in which Elizabeth-Jane shared not least, made itself apparent in the company. As she looked at Farfrae from the back of the settle she decided that his statements showed him to be no less thoughtful than his fascinating melodies revealed him to be cordial and impassioned. She admired the serious light in which he looked at serious things. He had seen no jest in ambiguities and roguery, as the Casterbridge toss-pots had done; and rightly not—there was none. She disliked those wretched humours of Christopher Coney and his tribe; and he did not appreciate them. He seemed to feel exactly as she felt about life and its surroundings—that they were a tragical rather than a comical thing; that though one could be gay on occasion, moments of gaiety were interludes, and no part of the actual drama. It was extraordinary how similar their views were.
Though it was still early the young Scotchman expressed his wish to retire, whereupon the landlady whispered to Elizabeth to run upstairs and turn down his bed. She took a candlestick and proceeded on her mission, which was the act of a few moments only. When, candle in hand, she reached the top of the stairs on her way down again, Mr. Farfrae was at the foot coming up. She could not very well retreat; they met and passed in the turn of the staircase.
She must have appeared interesting in some way—notwithstanding her plain dress—or rather, possibly, in consequence of it, for she was a girl characterized by earnestness and soberness of mien, with which simple drapery accorded well. Her face flushed, too, at the slight awkwardness of the meeting, and she passed him with her eyes bent on the candle-flame that she carried just below her nose. Thus it happened that when confronting her he smiled; and then, with the manner of a temporarily light-hearted man, who has started himself on a flight of song whose momentum he cannot readily check, he softly tuned an old ditty that she seemed to suggest—
“As I came in by my bower door, As day was waxin’ wearie, Oh wha came tripping down the stair But bonnie Peg my dearie.”
Elizabeth-Jane, rather disconcerted, hastened on; and the Scotchman’s voice died away, humming more of the same within the closed door of his room.
