'So shall I. Now is there anything else we want, Mr Dewy?'
'I really think there's nothing else, Miss Day.'
She prepared to sit down, looking musingly out of the window at Smart's enjoyment of the rich grass. 'Nobody seems to care about me,' she murmured, with large lost eyes fixed upon the sky beyond Smart.
'Perhaps Mr. Shiner does,' said Dick, in the tone of a slightly injured man.
'Yes, I forgot--he does, I know.' Dick precipitately regretted that he had suggested Shiner, since it had produced such a miserable result as this.
'I'll warrant you'll care for somebody very much indeed another day, won't you, Mr.
Dewy?' she continued, looking very feelingly into the mathematical centre of his eyes.
'Ah, I'll warrant I shall,' said Dick, feelingly too, and looking back into her dark pupils, whereupon they were turned aside.
'I meant,' she went on, preventing him from speaking just as he was going to narrate a forcible story about his feelings; 'I meant that nobody comes to see if I have returned--
not even the vicar.'
'If you want to see him, I'll call at the vicarage directly we have had some tea.'
'No, no! Don't let him come down here, whatever you do, whilst I am in such a state of disarrangement. Parsons look so miserable and awkward when one's house is in a muddle; walking about, and making impossible suggestions in quaint academic phrases till your flesh creeps and you wish them dead. Do you take sugar?'
Mr. Maybold was at this instant seen coming up the path.
'There! That's he coming! How I wish you were not here I--that is, how awkward--dear, dear!' she exclaimed, with a quick ascent of blood to her face, and irritated with Dick rather than the vicar, as it seemed.
'Pray don't be alarmed on my account, Miss Day--good-afternoon!' said Dick in a huff, putting on his hat, and leaving the room hastily by the back-door.
The horse was caught and put in, and on mounting the shafts to start he saw through the window the vicar, standing upon some books piled in a chair, and driving a nail into the wall; Fancy, with a demure glance, holding the canary-cage up to him, as if she had never in her life thought of anything but vicars and canaries.
PART II: 8. Dick Meets His Father
For several minutes Dick drove along homeward, with the inner eye of reflection so anxiously set on his passages at arms with Fancy, that the road and scenery were as a thin mist over the real pictures of his mind. Was she a coquette? The balance between the evidence that she did love him and that she did not was so nicely struck, that his opinion had no stability. She had let him put his hand upon hers; she had allowed her gaze to drop plumb into the depths of his--his into hers--three or four times; her manner had been very free with regard to the basin and towel; she had appeared vexed at the mention of Shiner.
On the other hand, she had driven him about the house like a quiet dog or cat, said Shiner cared for her, and seemed anxious that Mr. Maybold should do the same.
Thinking thus as he neared the handpost at Mellstock Cross, sitting on the front board of the spring cart--his legs on the outside, and his whole frame jigging up and down like a candle-flame to the time of Smart's trotting-- who should he see coming down the hill but his father in the light wagon, quivering up and down on a smaller scale of shakes, those merely caused by the stones in the road. They were soon crossing each other's front.
'Weh-hey!' said the tranter to Smiler.
'Weh-hey!' said Dick to Smart, in an echo of the same voice.
'Th'st hauled her back, I suppose?' Reuben inquired peaceably.
'Yes,' said Dick, with such a clinching period at the end that it seemed he was never going to add another word. Smiler, thinking this the close of the conversation, prepared to move on.
'Weh-hey!' said the tranter. 'I tell thee what it is, Dick. That there maid is taking up thy thoughts more than's good for thee, my sonny. Thou'rt never happy now unless th'rt making thyself miserable about her in one way or another.'
'I don't know about that, father,' said Dick rather stupidly.
'But I do--Wey, Smiler!--'Od rot the women, 'tis nothing else wi' 'em nowadays but getting young men and leading 'em astray.'
'Pooh, father! you just repeat what all the common world says; that's all you do.'
'The world's a very sensible feller on things in jineral, Dick; very sensible indeed.'
Dick looked into the distance at a vast expanse of mortgaged estate. 'I wish I was as rich as a squire when he's as poor as a crow,' he murmured; 'I'd soon ask Fancy something.'
'I wish so too, wi' all my heart, sonny; that I do. Well, mind what beest about, that's all.'
Smart moved on a step or two. 'Supposing now, father,--We-hey, Smart!--I did think a little about her, and I had a chance, which I ha'n't; don't you think she's a very good sort of--of--one?'
'Ay, good; she's good enough. When you've made up your mind to marry, take the first respectable body that comes to hand--she's as good as any other; they be all alike in the groundwork; 'tis only in the flourishes there's a difference. She's good enough; but I can't see what the nation a young feller like you--wi a comfortable house and home, and father and mother to take care o' thee, and who sent 'ee to a school so good that 'twas hardly fair to the other children--should want to go hollering after a young woman for, when she's quietly making a husband in her pocket, and not troubled by chick nor chiel, to make a poverty-stric' wife and family of her, and neither hat, cap, wig, nor waistcoat to set 'em up with: be drowned if I can see it, and that's the long and the short o't, my sonny.'
Dick looked at Smart's ears, then up the hill; but no reason was suggested by any object that met his
