The Trumpet Major

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This etext was prepared by Les Bowler, St. Ives, Dorset.

THE TRUMPET-MAJOR
being a tale of the Trumpet-Major, John Loveday, a soldier in the
war with Buonaparte, and Robert, his brother, first mate in the
Merchant Service.

by Thomas Hardy

PREFACE

The present tale is founded more largely on testimony--oral and
written--than any other in this series. The external incidents
which direct its course are mostly an unexaggerated reproduction of
the recollections of old persons well known to the author in
childhood, but now long dead, who were eye-witnesses of those
scenes. If wholly transcribed their recollections would have filled
a volume thrice the length of 'The Trumpet-Major.'

Down to the middle of this century, and later, there were not
wanting, in the neighbourhood of the places more or less clearly
indicated herein, casual relics of the circumstances amid which the
action moves--our preparations for defence against the threatened
invasion of England by Buonaparte. An outhouse door riddled with
bullet-holes, which had been extemporized by a solitary man as a
target for firelock practice when the landing was hourly expected, a
heap of bricks and clods on a beacon-hill, which had formed the
chimney and walls of the hut occupied by the beacon-keeper,
worm-eaten shafts and iron heads of pikes for the use of those who
had no better weapons, ridges on the down thrown up during the
encampment, fragments of volunteer uniform, and other such lingering
remains, brought to my imagination in early childhood the state of
affairs at the date of the war more vividly than volumes of history
could have done.

Those who have attempted to construct a coherent narrative of past
times from the fragmentary information furnished by survivors, are
aware of the difficulty of ascertaining the true sequence of events
indiscriminately recalled. For this purpose the newspapers of the
date were indispensable. Of other documents consulted I may
mention, for the satisfaction of those who love a true story, that
the 'Address to all Ranks and Descriptions of Englishmen' was
transcribed from an original copy in a local museum; that the
hieroglyphic portrait of Napoleon existed as a print down to the
present day in an old woman's cottage near 'Overcombe;' that the
particulars of the King's doings at his favourite watering-place
were augmented by details from records of the time. The drilling
scene of the local militia received some additions from an account
given in so grave a work as Gifford's 'History of the Wars of the
French Revolution' (London, 1817). But on reference to the History
I find I was mistaken in supposing the account to be advanced as
authentic, or to refer to rural England. However, it does in a
large degree accord with the local traditions of such scenes that I
have heard recounted, times without number, and the system of drill
was tested by reference to the Army Regulations of 1801, and other
military handbooks. Almost the whole narrative of the supposed
landing of the French in the Bay is from oral relation as aforesaid.
Other proofs of the veracity of this chronicle have escaped my
recollection.

T. H.

OCTOBER 1895.

CONTENTS

I. WHAT WAS SEEN FROM THE WINDOW OVERLOOKING THE DOWN
II. SOMEBODY KNOCKS AND COMES IN
III. THE MILL BECOMES AN IMPORTANT CENTRE OF OPERATIONS
IV. WHO WERE PRESENT AT THE MILLER'S LITTLE ENTERTAINMENT
V. THE SONG AND THE STRANGER
VI. OLD MR. DERRIMAN OF OXWELL HALL
VII. HOW THEY TALKED IN THE PASTURES
VIII. ANNE MAKES A CIRCUIT OF THE CAMP
IX. ANNE IS KINDLY FETCHED BY THE TRUMPET MAJOR
X. THE MATCH-MAKING VIRTUES OF A DOUBLE GARDEN
XI. OUR PEOPLE ARE AFFECTED BY THE PRESENCE OF ROYALTY
XII. HOW EVERYBODY, GREAT AND SMALL, CLIMBED TO THE TOP OF THE
DOWNS
XIII. THE CONVERSATION IN THE CROWD
XIV. LATER IN THE EVENING OF THE SAME DAY
XV. 'CAPTAIN' BOB LOVEDAY, OF THE MERCHANT SERVICE
XVI. THEY MAKE READY FOR THE ILLUSTRIOUS STRANGER
XVII. TWO FAINTING FITS AND A BEWILDERMENT
XVIII. THE NIGHT AFTER THE ARRIVAL
XIX. MISS JOHNSON'S BEHAVIOUR CAUSES NO LITTLE SURPRISE
XX. HOW THEY LESSENED THE EFFECT OF THE CALAMITY
XXI. 'UPON THE HILL HE TURNED'
XXII. THE TWO HOUSEHOLDS UNITED
XXIII. MILITARY PREPARATIONS ON AN EXTENDED SCALE
XXIV. A LETTER, A VISITOR, AND A TIN BOX
XXV. FESTUS SHOWS HIS LOVE
XXVI. THE ALARM
XXVII. DANGER TO ANNE
XXVIII. ANNIE DOES WONDERS
XXIX. A DISSEMBLER
XXX. AT THE THEATRE ROYAL
XXXI. MIDNIGHT VISITORS
XXXII. DELIVERANCE
XXXIII. A DISCOVERY TURNS THE SCALE
XXXIV. A SPECK ON THE SEA
XXXV. A SAILOR ENTERS
XXXVI. DERRIMAN SEES CHANCES
XXXVII. REACTION
XXXVIII. A DELICATE SITUATION
XXXIX. BOB LOVEDAY STRUTS UP AND DOWN
XL. A CALL ON BUSINESS
XLI. JOHN MARCHES INTO THE NIGHT

I. WHAT WAS SEEN FROM THE WINDOW OVERLOOKING THE DOWN

In the days of high-waisted and muslin-gowned women, when the vast
amount of soldiering going on in the country was a cause of much
trembling to the sex, there lived in a village near the Wessex coast
two ladies of good report, though unfortunately of limited means.
The elder was a Mrs. Martha Garland, a landscape-painter's widow,
and the other was her only daughter Anne.

Anne was fair, very fair, in a poetical sense; but in complexion she
was of that particular tint between blonde and brunette which is
inconveniently left without a name. Her eyes were honest and
inquiring, her mouth cleanly cut and yet not classical, the middle
point of her upper lip scarcely descending so far as it should have
done by rights, so that at the merest pleasant thought, not to
mention a smile, portions of two or three white teeth were uncovered
whether she would or not. Some people said that this was very
attractive. She was graceful and slender, and, though but little
above five feet in height, could draw herself up to look tall. In
her manner, in her comings and goings, in her 'I'll do this,' or
'I'll do that,' she combined dignity with sweetness as no other girl
could do; and any impressionable stranger youths who passed by were
led to yearn for a windfall of speech from her, and to see at the
same time that they would not get it. In short, beneath all that
was charming and simple in this young woman there lurked a real
firmness, unperceived at first, as the speck of colour lurks
unperceived in the heart of the palest parsley flower.

She wore a white handkerchief to cover her white neck, and a cap on
her head with a pink ribbon round it, tied in a bow at the front.
She had a great variety of these cap-ribbons, the young men being
fond of sending them to her as presents until they fell definitely
in love with a special sweetheart elsewhere, when they left off
doing so. Between the border of her cap and her forehead were
ranged a row of round brown curls, like swallows' nests under eaves.

She lived with her widowed mother in a portion of an ancient
building formerly a manor-house, but now a mill, which, being too
large for his own requirements, the miller had found it convenient
to divide and appropriate in part to these highly respectable
tenants. In this dwelling Mrs. Garland's and Anne's ears were
soothed morning, noon, and night by the music of the mill, the
wheels and cogs of which, being of wood, produced notes that might
have borne in their minds a remote resemblance to the wooden tones
of the stopped diapason in an organ. Occasionally, when the miller
was bolting, there was added to these continuous sounds the cheerful
clicking of the hopper, which did not deprive them of rest except
when it was kept going all night; and over and above all this they
had the pleasure of knowing that there crept in through every
crevice, door, and window of their dwelling, however tightly closed,
a subtle mist of superfine flour from the grinding room, quite
invisible, but making its presence known in the course of time by
giving a pallid and ghostly look to the best furniture. The miller
frequently apologized to his tenants for the intrusion of this
insidious dry fog; but the widow was of a friendly and thankful
nature, and she said that she did not mind it at all, being as it
was, not nasty dirt, but the blessed staff of life.

By good-humour of this sort, and in other ways, Mrs. Garland
acknowledged her friendship for her neighbour, with whom Anne and
herself associated to an extent which she never could have
anticipated when, tempted by the lowness of the rent, they first
removed thither after her husband's death from a larger house at the
other end of the village. Those who have lived in remote places
where there is what is called no society will comprehend the gradual
levelling of distinctions that went on in this case at some
sacrifice of gentility on the part of one household. The widow was
sometimes sorry to find with what readiness Anne caught up some
dialect-word or accent from the miller and his friends; but he was
so good and true-hearted a man, and she so easy-minded, unambitious
a woman, that she would not make life a solitude for fastidious
reasons. More than all, she had good ground for thinking that the
miller secretly admired her, and this added a piquancy to the
situation.

On a fine summer morning, when the leaves were warm under the sun,
and the more industrious bees abroad, diving into every blue and red
cup that could possibly be considered a flower, Anne was sitting at
the back window of her mother's portion of the house, measuring out
lengths of worsted for a fringed rug that she was making, which lay,
about three-quarters finished, beside her. The work, though
chromatically brilliant, was tedious: a hearth-rug was a thing
which nobody worked at from morning to night; it was taken up and
put down; it was in the chair, on the floor, across the hand-rail,
under the bed, kicked here, kicked there, rolled away in the closet,
brought out again, and so on more capriciously perhaps than any
other home-made article. Nobody was expected to finish a rug within
a calculable period, and the wools of the beginning became faded and
historical before the end was reached. A sense of this inherent
nature of worsted-work rather than idleness led Anne to look rather
frequently from the open casement.

Immediately before her was the large, smooth millpond, over-full,
and intruding into the hedge and into the road. The water, with its
flowing leaves and spots of froth, was stealing away, like Time,
under the dark arch, to tumble over the great slimy wheel within.
On the other side of the mill-pond was an open place called the
Cross, because it was three-quarters of one, two lanes and a
cattle-drive meeting there. It was the general rendezvous and arena
of the surrounding village. Behind this a steep slope rose high
into the sky, merging in a wide and open down, now littered with
sheep newly shorn. The upland by its height completely sheltered
the mill and village from north winds, making summers of springs,
reducing winters to autumn temperatures, and permitting myrtle to
flourish in the open air.

The heaviness of noon pervaded the scene, and under its influence
the sheep had ceased to feed. Nobody was standing at the Cross, the
few inhabitants being indoors at their dinner. No human being was
on the down, and no human eye or interest but Anne's seemed to be
concerned with it. The bees still worked on, and the butterflies
did not rest from roving, their smallness seeming to shield them
from the stagnating effect that this turning moment of day had on
larger creatures. Otherwise all was still.

The girl glanced at the down and the sheep for no particular reason;
the steep margin of turf and daisies rising above the roofs,
chimneys, apple-trees, and church tower of the hamlet around her,
bounded the view from her position, and it was necessary to look
somewhere when she raised her head. While thus engaged in working
and stopping her attention was attracted by the sudden rising and
running away of the sheep squatted on the down; and there succeeded
sounds of a heavy tramping over the hard sod which the sheep had
quitted, the tramp being accompanied by a metallic jingle. Turning
her eyes further she beheld two cavalry soldiers on bulky grey
chargers, armed and accoutred throughout, ascending the down at a
point to the left where the incline was comparatively easy. The
burnished chains, buckles, and plates of their trappings shone like
little looking-glasses, and the blue, red, and white about them was
unsubdued by weather or wear.

The two troopers rode proudly on, as if nothing less than crowns and
empires ever concerned their magnificent minds. They reached that
part of the down which lay just in front of her, where they came to
a halt. In another minute there appeared behind them a group
containing some half-dozen more of the same sort. These came on,
halted, and dismounted likewise.

Two of the soldiers then walked some distance onward together, when
one stood still, the other advancing further, and stretching a white
line of tape between them. Two more of the men marched to another
outlying point, where they made marks in the ground. Thus they
walked about and took distances, obviously according to some
preconcerted scheme.

At the end of this systematic proceeding one solitary horseman--a
commissioned officer, if his uniform could be judged rightly at that
distance--rode up the down, went over the ground, looked at what the
others had done, and seemed to think that it was good. And then the
girl heard yet louder tramps and clankings, and she beheld rising
from where the others had risen a whole column of cavalry in
marching order. At a distance behind these came a cloud of dust
enveloping more and more troops, their arms and accoutrements
reflecting the sun through the haze in faint flashes, stars, and
streaks of light. The whole body approached slowly towards the
plateau at the top of the down.

Anne threw down her work, and letting her eyes remain on the nearing
masses of cavalry, the worsteds getting entangled as they would,
said, 'Mother, mother; come here! Here's such a fine sight! What
does it mean? What can they be going to do up there?'

The mother thus invoked ran upstairs and came forward to the window.
She was a woman of sanguine mouth and eye, unheroic manner, and
pleasant general appearance; a little more tarnished as to surface,
but not much worse in contour than the girl herself.

Widow Garland's thoughts were those of the period. 'Can it be the
French,' she said, arranging herself for the extremest form of
consternation. 'Can that arch-enemy of mankind have landed at
last?' It should be stated that at this time there were two
arch-enemies of mankind--Satan as usual, and Buonaparte, who had
sprung up and eclipsed his elder rival altogether. Mrs. Garland
alluded, of course, to the junior gentleman.

'It cannot be he,' said Anne. 'Ah! there's Simon Burden, the man
who watches at the beacon. He'll know!'

She waved her hand to an aged form of the same colour as the road,
who had just appeared beyond the mill-pond, and who, though active,
was bowed to that degree which almost reproaches a feeling observer
for standing upright. The arrival of the soldiery had drawn him out
from his drop of drink at the 'Duke of York' as it had attracted
Anne. At her call he crossed the mill-bridge, and came towards the
window.

Anne inquired of him what it all meant; but Simon Burden, without
answering, continued to move on with parted gums, staring at the
cavalry on his own private account with a concern that people often
show about temporal phenomena when such matters can affect them but
a short time longer. 'You'll walk into the millpond!' said Anne.
'What are they doing? You were a soldier many years ago, and ought
to know.'

'Don't ask me, Mis'ess Anne,' said the military relic, depositing
his body against the wall one limb at a time. 'I were only in the
foot, ye know, and never had a clear understanding of horses. Ay, I
be a old man, and of no judgment now.' Some additional pressure,
however, caused him to search further in his worm-eaten magazine of
ideas, and he found that he did know in a dim irresponsible way.
The soldiers must have come there to camp: those men they had seen
first were the markers: they had come on before the rest to measure
out the ground. He who had accompanied them was the quartermaster.
'And so you see they have got all the lines marked out by the time
the regiment have come up,' he added. 'And then they will--
well-a-deary! who'd ha' supposed that Overcombe would see such a day
as this!'

'And then they will--'

'Then-- Ah, it's gone from me again!' said Simon. 'O, and then they
will raise their tents, you know, and picket their horses. That was
it; so it was.'

By this time the column of horse had ascended into full view, and
they formed a lively spectacle as they rode along the high ground in
marching order, backed by the pale blue sky, and lit by the
southerly sun. Their uniform was bright and attractive; white
buckskin pantaloons, three-quarter boots, scarlet shakos set off
with lace, mustachios waxed to a needle point; and above all, those
richly ornamented blue jackets mantled with the historic pelisse--
that fascination to women, and encumbrance to the wearers
themselves.

''Tis the York Hussars!' said Simon Burden, brightening like a dying
ember fanned. 'Foreigners to a man, and enrolled long since my
time. But as good hearty comrades, they say, as you'll find in the
King's service.'

'Here are more and different ones,' said Mrs. Garland.

Other troops had, during the last few minutes, been ascending the
down at a remoter point, and now drew near. These were of different
weight and build from the others; lighter men, in helmet hats, with
white plumes.

'I don't know which I like best,' said Anne. 'These, I think, after
all.'

Simon, who had been looking hard at the latter, now said that they
were the --th Dragoons.

'All Englishmen they,' said the old man. 'They lay at Budmouth
barracks a few years ago.'

'They did. I remember it,' said Mrs. Garland.

'And lots of the chaps about here 'listed at the time,' said Simon.
'I can call to mind that there was--ah, 'tis gone from me again!
However, all that's of little account now.'

The dragoons passed in front of the lookers-on as the others had
done, and their gay plumes, which had hung lazily during the ascent,
swung to northward as they reached the top, showing that on the
summit a fresh breeze blew. 'But look across there,' said Anne.
There had entered upon the down from another direction several
battalions of foot, in white kerseymere breeches and cloth gaiters.
They seemed to be weary from a long march, the original black of
their gaiters and boots being whity-brown with dust. Presently came
regimental waggons, and the private canteen carts which followed at
the end of a convoy.

The space in front of the mill-pond was now occupied by nearly all
the inhabitants of the village, who had turned out in alarm, and
remained for pleasure, their eyes lighted up with interest in what
they saw; for trappings and regimentals, war horses and men, in
towns an attraction, were here almost a sublimity.

The troops filed to their lines, dismounted, and in quick time took
off their accoutrements, rolled up their sheep-skins, picketed and
unbitted their horses, and made ready to erect the tents as soon as
they could be taken from the waggons and brought forward. When this
was done, at a given signal the canvases flew up from the sod; and
thenceforth every man had a place in which to lay his head.

Though nobody seemed to be looking on but the few at the window and
in the village street, there were, as a matter of fact, many eyes
converging upon that military arrival in its high and conspicuous
position, not to mention the glances of birds and other wild
creatures. Men in distant gardens, women in orchards and at
cottage-doors, shepherds on remote hills, turnip-hoers in blue-green
enclosures miles away, captains with spy-glasses out at sea, were
regarding the picture keenly. Those three or four thousand men of
one machine-like movement, some of them swashbucklers by nature;
others, doubtless, of a quiet shop-keeping disposition who had
inadvertently got into uniform--all of them had arrived from nobody
knew where, and hence were matter of great curiosity. They seemed
to the mere eye to belong to a different order of beings from those
who inhabited the valleys below. Apparently unconscious and
careless of what all the world was doing elsewhere, they remained
picturesquely engrossed in the business of making themselves a
habitation on the isolated spot which they had chosen.

Mrs. Garland was of a festive and sanguine turn of mind, a woman
soon set up and soon set down, and the coming of the regiments quite
excited her. She thought there was reason for putting on her best
cap, thought that perhaps there was not; that she would hurry on the
dinner and go out in the afternoon; then that she would, after all,
do nothing unusual, nor show any silly excitements whatever, since
they were unbecoming in a mother and a widow. Thus circumscribing
her intentions till she was toned down to an ordinary person of
forty, Mrs. Garland accompanied her daughter downstairs to dine,
saying, 'Presently we will call on Miller Loveday, and hear what he
thinks of it all.'

II. SOMEBODY KNOCKS AND COMES IN

Miller Loveday was the representative of an ancient family of
corn-grinders whose history is lost in the mists of antiquity. His
ancestral line was contemporaneous with that of De Ros, Howard, and
De La Zouche; but, owing to some trifling deficiency in the
possessions of the house of Loveday, the individual names and
intermarriages of its members were not recorded during the Middle
Ages, and thus their private lives in any given century were
uncertain. But it was known that the family had formed matrimonial
alliances with farmers not so very small, and once with a gentleman-
tanner, who had for many years purchased after their death the
horses of the most aristocratic persons in the county--fiery steeds
that earlier in their career had been valued at many hundred
guineas.

It was also ascertained that Mr. Loveday's great-grandparents had
been eight in number, and his great-great-grandparents sixteen,
every one of whom reached to years of discretion: at every stage
backwards his sires and gammers thus doubled and doubled till they
became a vast body of Gothic ladies and gentlemen of the rank known
as ceorls or villeins, full of importance to the country at large,
and ramifying throughout the unwritten history of England. His
immediate father had greatly improved the value of their residence
by building a new chimney, and setting up an additional pair of
millstones.

Overcombe Mill presented at one end the appearance of a hard-worked
house slipping into the river, and at the other of an idle, genteel
place, half-cloaked with creepers at this time of the year, and
having no visible connexion with flour. It had hips instead of
gables, giving it a round-shouldered look, four chimneys with no
smoke coming out of them, two zigzag cracks in the wall, several
open windows, with a looking-glass here and there inside, showing
its warped back to the passer-by; snowy dimity curtains waving in
the draught; two mill doors, one above the other, the upper enabling
a person to step out upon nothing at a height of ten feet from the
ground; a gaping arch vomiting the river, and a lean, long-nosed
fellow looking out from the mill doorway, who was the hired grinder,
except when a bulging fifteen stone man occupied the same place,
namely, the miller himself.

Behind the mill door, and invisible to the mere wayfarer who did not
visit the family, were chalked addition and subtraction sums, many
of them originally done wrong, and the figures half rubbed out and
corrected, noughts being turned into nines, and ones into twos.
These were the miller's private calculations. There were also
chalked in the same place rows and rows of strokes like open
palings, representing the calculations of the grinder, who in his
youthful ciphering studies had not gone so far as Arabic figures.

In the court in front were two worn-out millstones, made useful
again by being let in level with the ground. Here people stood to
smoke and consider things in muddy weather; and cats slept on the
clean surfaces when it was hot. In the large stubbard-tree at the
corner of the garden was erected a pole of larch fir, which the
miller had bought with others at a sale of small timber in Damer's
Wood one Christmas week. It rose from the upper boughs of the tree
to about the height of a fisherman's mast, and on the top was a vane
in the form of a sailor with his arm stretched out. When the sun
shone upon this figure it could be seen that the greater part of his
countenance was gone, and the paint washed from his body so far as
to reveal that he had been a soldier in red before he became a
sailor in blue. The image had, in fact, been John, one of our
coming characters, and was then turned into Robert, another of them.
This revolving piece of statuary could not, however, be relied on as
a vane, owing to the neighbouring hill, which formed variable
currents in the wind.

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