The Mayor of Casterbridge by Thomas Hardy

Sometimes the man’s bent elbow almost touched her shoulder, for she kept as close to his side as was possible without actual contact, but she seemed to have no idea of taking his arm, nor he of offering it and far from exhibiting surprise at his ignoring silence she appeared to receive it as a natural thing.

Virtually she walked the highway alone, save for the child she bore. Whether this apparent cause were the real cause, or whether it were an assumed one to escape an intercourse that would have been irksome to him, nobody but himself could have said precisely but his taciturnity was unbroken, and the woman enjoyed no society whatever from his presence. They walked side by side in such a way as to suggest afar off the low, easy, confidential chat of people full of reciprocity but on closer view it could be discerned that the man was reading, or pretending to read, a ballad sheet which he kept before his eyes with some difficulty by the hand that was passed through the basket strap. What was really peculiar, however, in this couple’s progress, and would have attracted the attention of any casual observer otherwise disposed to overlook them, was the perfect silence they preserved. His measured, springless walk was the walk of the skilled countryman as distinct from the desultory shamble of the general labourer while in the turn and plant of each foot there was, further, a dogged and cynical indifference personal to himself, showing its presence even in the regularly interchanging fustian folds, now in the left leg, now in the right, as he paced along. At his back he carried by a looped strap a rush basket, from which protruded at one end the crutch of a hay-knife, a wimble for hay-bonds being also visible in the aperture. He wore a short jacket of brown corduroy, newer than the remainder of his suit, which was a fustian waistcoat with white horn buttons, breeches of the same, tanned leggings, and a straw hat overlaid with black glazed canvas.

The man was of fine figure, swarthy, and stern in aspect and he showed in profile a facial angle so slightly inclined as to be almost perpendicular. They were plainly but not ill clad, though the thick hoar of dust which had accumulated on their shoes and garments from an obviously long journey lent a disadvantageous shabbiness to their appearance just now. One evening of late summer, before the nineteenth century had reached one-third of its span, a young man and woman, the latter carrying a child, were approaching the large village of Weydon-Priors, in Upper Wessex, on foot.

The Mayor of Casterbridge by Thomas Hardy