The Trumpet-Major by Thomas Hardy

While Loveday and his neighbours were thus rambling forth, full of / expectancy, some of them, including Anne in the rear, heard the crackling / of light wheels along the curved lane to which the path was the chord. At / once Anne thought, 'Perhaps that's he, and we are missing him. ' But / recent events were not of a kind to induce her to say anything; and the / others of the company did not reflect on the sound.

Had they gone across to the hedge which hid the lane, and looked through / it, they would have seen a light cart driven by a boy, beside whom was / seated a seafaring man, apparently of good standing in the merchant / service, with his feet outside on the shaft. The vehicle went over the / main bridge, turned in upon the other bridge at the tail of the mill, and / halted by the door. The sailor alighted, showing himself to be a well- / shaped, active, and fine young man, with a bright eye, an anonymous nose, / and of such a rich complexion by exposure to ripening suns that he might / have been some connexion of the foreigner who calls his likeness the / Portrait of a Gentleman in galleries of the Old Masters. Yet in spite of / this, and though Bob Loveday had been all over the world from Cape Horn / to Pekin, and from India's coral strand to the White Sea, the most / conspicuous of all the marks that he had brought back with him was an / increased resemblance to his mother, who had lain all the time beneath / Overcombe church wall.

Captain Loveday tried the house door; finding this locked he went to the / mill door: this was locked also, the mill being stopped for the night.

'They are not at home,' he said to the boy. 'But never mind that. Just / help to unload the things and then I'll pay you, and you can drive off / home.'

The cart was unloaded, and the boy was dismissed, thanking the sailor / profusely for the payment rendered. Then Bob Loveday, finding that he / had still some leisure on his hands, looked musingly east, west, north, / south, and nadir; after which he bestirred himself by carrying his goods, / article by article, round to the back door, out of the way of casual / passers. This done, he walked round the mill in a more regardful / attitude, and surveyed its familiar features one by one -- the panes of the / grinding-room, now as heretofore clouded with flour as with stale hoar- / frost; the meal lodged in the corners of the window-sills, forming a soil / in which lichens grew without ever getting any bigger, as they had done / since his smallest infancy; the mosses on the plinth towards the river, / reaching as high as the capillary power of the walls would fetch up / moisture for their nourishment, and the penned mill-pond, now as ever on / the point of overflowing into the garden. Everything was the same.

When he had had enough of this it occurred to Loveday that he might get / into the house in spite of the locked doors; and by entering the garden, / placing a pole from the fork of an apple-tree to the window-sill of a / bedroom on that side, and climbing across like a Barbary ape, he entered / the window and stepped down inside. There was something anomalous in / being close to the familiar furniture without having first seen his / father, and its silent, impassive shine was not cheering; it was as if / his relations were all dead, and only their tables and chests of drawers / left to greet him. He went downstairs and seated himself in the dark / parlour. Finding this place, too, rather solitary, and the tick of the / invisible clock preternaturally loud, he unearthed the tinder-box, / obtained a light, and set about making the house comfortable for his / father's return, divining that the miller had gone out to meet him by the / wrong road.

Robert's interest in this work increased as he proceeded, and he bustled / round and round the kitchen as lightly as a girl. David, the indoor / factotum, having lost himself among the quart pots of Budmouth, there had / been nobody left here to prepare supper, and Bob had it all to himself. / In a short time a fire blazed up the chimney, a tablecloth was found, the / plates were clapped down, and a search made for what provisions the house / afforded, which, in addition to various meats, included some fresh eggs / of the elongated shape that produces cockerels when hatched, and had been / set aside on that account for putting under the next broody hen.

A more reckless cracking of eggs than that which now went on had never / been known in Overcombe since the last large christening; and as Loveday / gashed one on the side, another at the end, another longways, and another / diagonally, he acquired adroitness by practice, and at last made every / son of a hen of them fall into two hemispheres as neatly as if it opened / by a hinge. From eggs he proceeded to ham, and from ham to kidneys, the / result being a brilliant fry.

Not to be tempted to fall to before his father came back, the returned / navigator emptied the whole into a dish, laid a plate over the top, his / coat over the plate, and his hat over his coat. Thus completely stopping / in the appetizing smell, he sat down to await events. He was relieved / from the tediousness of doing this by hearing voices outside; and in a / minute his father entered.

'Glad to welcome ye home, father,' said Bob. 'And supper is just ready.'

'Lard, lard -- why, Captain Bob's here! ' said Mrs. Garland.

'And we've been out waiting to meet thee! ' said the miller, as he entered / the room, followed by representatives of the houses of Cripplestraw, / Comfort, Mitchell, Beach, and Snooks, together with some small beginnings / of Fencible Tremlett's posterity. In the rear came David, and quite in / the vanishing-point of the composition, Anne the fair.

'I drove over; and so was forced to come by the road,' said Bob.

'And we went across the fields, thinking you'd walk,' said his father.