Thomas Hardy

A MERE INTERLUDE

(The Bolton Weekly Journal, 17 and 24 October 1885)

I

The traveller in school-books, who vouched in dryest tones for the fidelity to fact of the following narrative, used to add a ring of truth to it by opening with a nicety of criticism on the heroine’s personality.  People were wrong, he declared, when they surmised that Baptista Trewthen was a young woman with scarcely emotions or character.  There was nothing in her to love, and nothing to hate—­so ran the general opinion.  That she showed few positive qualities was true.  The colours and tones which changing events paint on the faces of active womankind were looked for in vain upon hers.  But still waters run deep; and no crisis had come in the years of her early maidenhood to demonstrate what lay hidden within her, like metal in a mine.

She was the daughter of a small farmer in St Maria’s, one of the Isles of Lyonesse beyond Off-Wessex, who had spent a large sum, as there understood, on her education, by sending her to the mainland for two years.  At nineteen she was entered at the Training College for Teachers, and at twenty-one nominated to a school in the country, near Tor-upon-Sea, whither she proceeded after the Christmas examination and holidays.

The months passed by from winter to spring and summer, and Baptista applied herself to her new duties as best she could, till an uneventful year had elapsed.  Then an air of abstraction pervaded her bearing as she walked to and fro, twice a day, and she showed the traits of a person who had something on her mind.  A widow, by name Mrs Wace, in whose house Baptista Trewthen had been provided with a sitting-room and bedroom till the schoolhouse should be built, noticed this change in her youthful tenant’s manner, and at last ventured to press her with a few questions.

‘It has nothing to do with the place, nor with you,’ said Miss Trewthen.

‘Then it is the salary?’

‘No, nor the salary.’

‘Then it is something you have heard from home, my dear.’

Baptista was silent for a few moments.  ‘It is Mr Heddegan,’ she murmured.  ’Him they used to call David Heddegan before he got his money.’

‘And who is the Mr Heddegan they used to call David?’

’An old bachelor at Giant’s Town, St Maria’s, with no relations whatever, who lives about a stone’s throw from father’s.  When I was a child he used to take me on his knee and say he’d marry me some day.  Now I am a woman the jest has turned earnest, and he is anxious to do it.  And father and mother say I can’t do better than have him.’

‘He’s well off?’

‘Yes—­he’s the richest man we know—­as a friend and neighbour.’

‘How much older did you say he was than yourself?’

‘I didn’t say.  Twenty years at least.’