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The Mayor of Casterbridge

by Thomas Hardy · English · Gutenberg #143 · 671,045 chars · public domain (US)

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Title: The Mayor of Casterbridge

Author: Thomas Hardy


        
Release date: March 11, 2006 [eBook #143]
                Most recently updated: October 29, 2024

Language: English

Other information and formats: www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/143

Credits: John Hamm and David Widger


*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK THE MAYOR OF CASTERBRIDGE ***

cover



The Mayor of Casterbridge

The Life and Death of a Man of Character


by Thomas Hardy




Contents


 I
 II
 III
 IV
 V
 VI
 VII
 VIII
 IX
 X
 XI
 XII
 XIII
 XIV
 XV
 XVI
 XVII
 XVIII
 XIX
 XX
 XXI
 XXII
 XXIII
 XXIV
 XXV
 XXVI
 XXVII
 XXVIII
 XXIX
 XXX
 XXXI
 XXXII
 XXXIII
 XXXIV
 XXXV
 XXXVI
 XXXVII
 XXXVIII
 XXXIX
 XL
 XLI
 XLII
 XLIII
 XLIV
 XLV


I.

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. 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.

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. 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. 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.
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.

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. 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. 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. Virtually she
walked the highway alone, save for the child she bore. 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. If any word at all were uttered by the little
group, it was an occasional whisper of the woman to the child—a tiny
girl in short clothes and blue boots of knitted yarn—and the murmured
babble of the child in reply.

The chief—almost the only—attraction of the young woman’s face was its
mobility. When she looked down sideways to the girl she became pretty,
and even handsome, particularly that in the action her features caught
slantwise the rays of the strongly coloured sun, which made
transparencies of her eyelids and nostrils and set fire on her lips.
When she plodded on in the shade of the hedge, silently thinking, she
had the hard, half-apathetic expression of one who deems anything
possible at the hands of Time and Chance except, perhaps, fair play.
The first phase was the work of Nature, the second probably of
civilization.

That the man and woman were husband and wife, and the parents of the
girl in arms there could be little doubt. No other than such
relationship would have accounted for the atmosphere of stale
familiarity which the trio carried along with them like a nimbus as
they moved down the road.

The wife mostly kept her eyes fixed ahead, though with little
interest—the scene for that matter being one that might have been
matched at almost any spot in any county in England at this time of the
year; a road neither straight nor crooked, neither level nor hilly,
bordered by hedges, trees, and other vegetation, which had entered the
blackened-green stage of colour that the doomed leaves pass through on
their way to dingy, and yellow, and red. The grassy margin of the bank,
and the nearest hedgerow boughs, were powdered by the dust that had
been stirred over them by hasty vehicles, the same dust as it lay on
the road deadening their footfalls like a carpet; and this, with the
aforesaid total absence of conversation, allowed every extraneous sound
to be heard.

For a long time there was none, beyond the voice of a weak bird singing
a trite old evening song that might doubtless have been heard on the
hill at the same hour, and with the self-same trills, quavers, and
breves, at any sunset of that season for centuries untold. But as they
approached the village sundry distant shouts and rattles reached their
ears from some elevated spot in that direction, as yet screened from
view by foliage. When the outlying houses of Weydon-Priors could just
be described, the family group was met by a turnip-hoer with his hoe on
his shoulder, and his dinner-bag suspended from it. The reader promptly
glanced up.

“Any trade doing here?” he asked phlegmatically, designating the
village in his van by a wave of the broadsheet. And thinking the
labourer did not understand him, he added, “Anything in the
hay-trussing line?”

The turnip-hoer had already begun shaking his head. “Why, save the man,
what wisdom’s in him that ’a should come to Weydon for a job of that
sort this time o’ year?”

“Then is there any house to let—a little small new cottage just a
builded, or such like?” asked the other.

The pessimist still maintained a negative. “Pulling down is more the
nater of Weydon. There were five houses cleared away last year, and
three this; and the volk nowhere to go—no, not so much as a thatched
hurdle; that’s the way o’ Weydon-Priors.”

The hay-trusser, which he obviously was, nodded with some
superciliousness. Looking towards the village, he continued, “There is
something going on here, however, is there not?”

“Ay. ’Tis Fair Day. Though what you hear now is little more than the
clatter and scurry of getting away the money o’ children and fools, for
the real business is done earlier than this. I’ve been working within
sound o’t all day, but I didn’t go up—not I. ’Twas no business of
mine.”

The trusser and his family proceeded on their way, and soon entered the
Fair-field, which showed standing-places and pens where many hundreds
of horses and sheep had been exhibited and sold in the forenoon, but
were now in great part taken away. At present, as their informant had
observed, but little real business remained on hand, the chief being
the sale by auction of a few inferior animals, that could not otherwise
be disposed of, and had been absolutely refused by the better class of
traders, who came and went early. Yet the crowd was denser now than
during the morning hours, the frivolous contingent of visitors,
including journeymen out for a holiday, a stray soldier or two come on
furlough, village shopkeepers, and the like, having latterly flocked
in; persons whose activities found a congenial field among the
peep-shows, toy-stands, waxworks, inspired monsters, disinterested
medical men who travelled for the public good, thimble-riggers,
nick-nack vendors, and readers of Fate.

Neither of our pedestrians had much heart for these things, and they
looked around for a refreshment tent among the many which dotted the
down. Two, which stood nearest to them in the ochreous haze of expiring
sunlight, seemed almost equally inviting. One was formed of new,
milk-hued canvas, and bore red flags on its summit; it announced “Good
Home-brewed Beer, Ale, and Cyder.” The other was less new; a little
iron stove-pipe came out of it at the back and in front appeared the
placard, “Good Furmity Sold Hear.” The man mentally weighed the two
inscriptions and inclined to the former tent.

“No—no—the other one,” said the woman. “I always like furmity; and so
does Elizabeth-Jane; and so will you. It is nourishing after a long
hard day.”

“I’ve never tasted it,” said the man. However, he gave way to her
representations, and they entered the furmity booth forthwith.

A rather numerous company appeared within, seated at the long narrow
tables that ran down the tent on each side. At the upper end stood a
stove, containing a charcoal fire, over which hung a large three-legged
crock, sufficiently polished round the rim to show that it was made of
bell-metal. A haggish creature of about fifty presided, in a white
apron, which as it threw an air of respectability over her as far as it
extended, was made so wide as to reach nearly round her waist. She
slowly stirred the contents of the pot. The dull scrape of her large
spoon was audible throughout the tent as she thus kept from burning the
mixture of corn in the grain, flour, milk, raisins, currants, and what
not, that composed the antiquated slop in which she dealt. Vessels
holding the separate ingredients stood on a white-clothed table of
boards and trestles close by.

The young man and woman ordered a basin each of the mixture, steaming
hot, and sat down to consume it at leisure. This was very well so far,
for furmity, as the woman had said, was nourishing, and as proper a
food as could be obtained within the four seas; though, to those not
accustomed to it, the grains of wheat swollen as large as lemon-pips,
which floated on its surface, might have a deterrent effect at first.

But there was more in that tent than met the cursory glance; and the
man, with the instinct of a perverse character, scented it quickly.
After a mincing attack on his bowl, he watched the hag’s proceedings
from the corner of his eye, and saw the game she played. He winked to
her, and passed up his basin in reply to her nod; when she took a
bottle from under the table, slily measured out a quantity of its
contents, and tipped the same into the man’s furmity. The liquor poured
in was rum. The man as slily sent back money in payment.

He found the concoction, thus strongly laced, much more to his
satisfaction than it had been in its natural state. His wife had
observed the proceeding with much uneasiness; but he persuaded her to
have hers laced also, and she agreed to a milder allowance after some
misgiving.

The man finished his basin, and called for another, the rum being
signalled for in yet stronger proportion. The effect of it was soon
apparent in his manner, and his wife but too sadly perceived that in
strenuously steering off the rocks of the licensed liquor-tent she had
only got into maelstrom depths here amongst the smugglers.

The child began to prattle impatiently, and the wife more than once
said to her husband, “Michael, how about our lodging? You know we may
have trouble in getting it if we don’t go soon.”

But he turned a deaf ear to those bird-like chirpings. He talked loud
to the company. The child’s black eyes, after slow, round, ruminating
gazes at the candles when they were lighted, fell together; then they
opened, then shut again, and she slept.

At the end of the first basin the man had risen to serenity; at the
second he was jovial; at the third, argumentative, at the fourth, the
qualities signified by the shape of his face, the occasional clench of
his mouth, and the fiery spark of his dark eye, began to tell in his
conduct; he was overbearing—even brilliantly quarrelsome.

The conversation took a high turn, as it often does on such occasions.
The ruin of good men by bad wives, and, more particularly, the
frustration of many a promising youth’s high aims and hopes and the
extinction of his energies by an early imprudent marriage, was the
theme.

“I did for myself that way thoroughly,” said the trusser with a
contemplative bitterness that was well-nigh resentful. “I married at
eighteen, like the fool that I was; and this is the consequence o’t.”
He pointed at himself and family with a wave of the hand intended to
bring out the penuriousness of the exhibition.

The young woman his wife, who seemed accustomed to such remarks, acted
as if she did not hear them, and continued her intermittent private
words of tender trifles to the sleeping and waking child, who was just
big enough to be placed for a moment on the bench beside her when she
wished to ease her arms. The man continued—

“I haven’t more than fifteen shillings in the world, and yet I am a
good experienced hand in my line. I’d challenge England to beat me in
the fodder business; and if I were a free man again I’d be worth a
thousand pound before I’d done o’t. But a fellow never knows these
little things till all chance of acting upon ’em is past.”

The auctioneer selling the old horses in the field outside could be
heard saying, “Now this is the last lot—now who’ll take the last lot
for a song? Shall I say forty shillings? ’Tis a very promising
broodmare, a trifle over five years old, and nothing the matter with
the hoss at all, except that she’s a little holler in the back and had
her left eye knocked out by the kick of another, her own sister, coming
along the road.”

“For my part I don’t see why men who have got wives and don’t want ’em,
shouldn’t get rid of ’em as these gipsy fellows do their old horses,”
said the man in the tent. “Why shouldn’t they put ’em up and sell ’em
by auction to men who are in need of such articles? Hey? Why, begad,
I’d sell mine this minute if anybody would buy her!”

“There’s them that would do that,” some of the guests replied, looking
at the woman, who was by no means ill-favoured.

“True,” said a smoking gentleman, whose coat had the fine polish about
the collar, elbows, seams, and shoulder-blades that long-continued
friction with grimy surfaces will produce, and which is usually more
desired on furniture than on clothes. From his appearance he had
possibly been in former time groom or coachman to some neighbouring
county family. “I’ve had my breedings in as good circles, I may say, as
any man,” he added, “and I know true cultivation, or nobody do; and I
can declare she’s got it—in the bone, mind ye, I say—as much as any
female in the fair—though it may want a little bringing out.” Then,
crossing his legs, he resumed his pipe with a nicely-adjusted gaze at a
point in the air.

The fuddled young husband stared for a few seconds at this unexpected
praise of his wife, half in doubt of the wisdom of his own attitude
towards the possessor of such qualities. But he speedily lapsed into
his former conviction, and said harshly—

“Well, then, now is your chance; I am open to an offer for this gem o’
creation.”

She turned to her husband and murmured, “Michael, you have talked this
nonsense in public places before. A joke is a joke, but you may make it
once too often, mind!”

“I know I’ve said it before; I meant it. All I want is a buyer.”

At the moment a swallow, one among the last of the season, which had by
chance found its way through an opening into the upper part of the
tent, flew to and fro quick curves above their heads, causing all eyes
to follow it absently. In watching the bird till it made its escape the
assembled company neglected to respond to the workman’s offer, and the
subject dropped.

But a quarter of an hour later the man, who had gone on lacing his
furmity more and more heavily, though he was either so strong-minded or
such an intrepid toper that he still appeared fairly sober, recurred to
the old strain, as in a musical fantasy the instrument fetches up the
original theme. “Here—I am waiting to know about this offer of mine.
The woman is no good to me. Who’ll have her?”

The company had by this time decidedly degenerated, and the renewed
inquiry was received with a laugh of appreciation. The woman whispered;
she was imploring and anxious: “Come, come, it is getting dark, and
this nonsense won’t do. If you don’t come along, I shall go without
you. Come!”

She waited and waited; yet he did not move. In ten minutes the man
broke in upon the desultory conversation of the furmity drinkers with,
“I asked this question, and nobody answered to ’t. Will any Jack Rag or
Tom Straw among ye buy my goods?”

The woman’s manner changed, and her face assumed the grim shape and
colour of which mention has been made.

“Mike, Mike,” she said; “this is getting serious. O!—too serious!”

“Will anybody buy her?” said the man.

“I wish somebody would,” said she firmly. “Her present owner is not at
all to her liking!”

“Nor you to mine,” said he. “So we are agreed about that. Gentlemen,
you hear? It’s an agreement to part. She shall take the girl if she
wants to, and go her ways. I’ll take my tools, and go my ways. ’Tis
simple as Scripture history. Now then, stand up, Susan, and show
yourself.”

“Don’t, my chiel,” whispered a buxom staylace dealer in voluminous
petticoats, who sat near the woman; “yer good man don’t know what he’s
saying.”

The woman, however, did stand up. “Now, who’s auctioneer?” cried the
hay-trusser.

“I be,” promptly answered a short man, with a nose resembling a copper
knob, a damp voice, and eyes like button-holes. “Who’ll make an offer
for this lady?”

The woman looked on the ground, as if she maintained her position by a
supreme effort of will.

“Five shillings,” said someone, at which there was a laugh.

“No insults,” said the husband. “Who’ll say a guinea?”

Nobody answered; and the female dealer in staylaces interposed.

“Behave yerself moral, good man, for Heaven’s love! Ah, what a cruelty
is the poor soul married to! Bed and board is dear at some figures ’pon
my ’vation ’tis!”

“Set it higher, auctioneer,” said the trusser.

“Two guineas!” said the auctioneer; and no one replied.

“If they don’t take her for that, in ten seconds they’ll have to give
more,” said the husband. “Very well. Now auctioneer, add another.”

“Three guineas—going for three guineas!” said the rheumy man.

“No bid?” said the husband. “Good Lord, why she’s cost me fifty times
the money, if a penny. Go on.”

“Four guineas!” cried the auctioneer.

“I’ll tell ye what—I won’t sell her for less than five,” said the
husband, bringing down his fist so that the basins danced. “I’ll sell
her for five guineas to any man that will pay me the money, and treat
her well; and he shall have her for ever, and never hear aught o’ me.
But she shan’t go for less. Now then—five guineas—and she’s yours.
Susan, you agree?”

She bowed her head with absolute indifference.

“Five guineas,” said the auctioneer, “or she’ll be withdrawn. Do
anybody give it? The last time. Yes or no?”

“Yes,” said a loud voice from the doorway.

All eyes were turned. Standing in the triangular opening which formed
the door of the tent was a sailor, who, unobserved by the rest, had
arrived there within the last two or three minutes. A dead silence
followed his affirmation.

“You say you do?” asked the husband, staring at him.

“I say so,” replied the sailor.

“Saying is one thing, and paying is another. Where’s the money?”

The sailor hesitated a moment, looked anew at the woman, came in,
unfolded five crisp pieces of paper, and threw them down upon the
tablecloth. They were Bank-of-England notes for five pounds. Upon the
face of this he clinked down the shillings severally—one, two, three,
four, five.

The sight of real money in full amount, in answer to a challenge for
the same till then deemed slightly hypothetical had a great effect upon
the spectators. Their eyes became riveted upon the faces of the chief
actors, and then upon the notes as they lay, weighted by the shillings,
on the table.

Up to this moment it could not positively have been asserted that the
man, in spite of his tantalizing declaration, was really in earnest.
The spectators had indeed taken the proceedings throughout as a piece
of mirthful irony carried to extremes; and had assumed that, being out
of work, he was, as a consequence, out of temper with the world, and
society, and his nearest kin. But with the demand and response of real
cash the jovial frivolity of the scene departed. A lurid colour seemed
to fill the tent, and change the aspect of all therein. The
mirth-wrinkles left the listeners’ faces, and they waited with parting
lips.

“Now,” said the woman, breaking the silence, so that her low dry voice
sounded quite loud, “before you go further, Michael, listen to me. If
you touch that money, I and this girl go with the man. Mind, it is a
joke no longer.”

“A joke? Of course it is not a joke!” shouted her husband, his
resentment rising at her suggestion. “I take the money; the sailor
takes you. That’s plain enough. It has been done elsewhere—and why not
here?”

“’Tis quite on the understanding that the young woman is willing,” said
the sailor blandly. “I wouldn’t hurt her feelings for the world.”

“Faith, nor I,” said her husband. “But she is willing, provided she can
have the child. She said so only the other day when I talked o’t!”

“That you swear?” said the sailor to her.

“I do,” said she, after glancing at her husband’s face and seeing no
repentance there.

“Very well, she shall have the child, and the bargain’s complete,” said
the trusser. He took the sailor’s notes and deliberately folded them,
and put them with the shillings in a high remote pocket, with an air of
finality.

The sailor looked at the woman and smiled. “Come along!” he said
kindly. “The little one too—the more the merrier!” She paused for an
instant, with a close glance at him. Then dropping her eyes again, and
saying nothing, she took up the child and followed him as he made
towards the door. On reaching it, she turned, and pulling off her
wedding-ring, flung it across the booth in the hay-trusser’s face.

“Mike,” she said, “I’ve lived with thee a couple of years, and had
nothing but temper! Now I’m no more to ’ee; I’ll try my luck elsewhere.
’Twill be better for me and Elizabeth-Jane, both. So good-bye!”

Seizing the sailor’s arm with her right hand, and mounting the little
girl on her left, she went out of the tent sobbing bitterly.

A stolid look of concern filled the husband’s face, as if, after all,
he had not quite anticipated this ending; and some of the guests
laughed.

“Is she gone?” he said.

“Faith, ay! she’s gone clane enough,” said some rustics near the door.

He rose and walked to the entrance with the careful tread of one
conscious of his alcoholic load. Some others followed, and they stood
looking into the twilight. The difference between the peacefulness of
inferior nature and the wilful hostilities of mankind was very apparent
at this place. In contrast with the harshness of the act just ended
within the tent was the sight of several horses crossing their necks
and rubbing each other lovingly as they waited in patience to be
harnessed for the homeward journey. Outside the fair, in the valleys
and woods, all was quiet. The sun had recently set, and the west heaven
was hung with rosy cloud, which seemed permanent, yet slowly changed.
To watch it was like looking at some grand feat of stagery from a
darkened auditorium. In presence of this scene after the other there
was a natural instinct to abjure man as the blot on an otherwise kindly
universe; till it was remembered that all terrestrial conditions were
intermittent, and that mankind might some night be innocently sleeping
when these quiet objects were raging loud.

“Where do the sailor live?” asked a spectator, when they had vainly
gazed around.

“God knows that,” replied the man who had seen high life. “He’s without
doubt a stranger here.”

“He came in about five minutes ago,” said the furmity woman, joining
the rest with her hands on her hips. “And then ’a stepped back, and
then ’a looked in again. I’m not a penny the better for him.”

“Serves the husband well be-right,” said the staylace vendor. “A comely
respectable body like her—what can a man want more? I glory in the
woman’s sperrit. I’d ha’ done it myself—od send if I wouldn’t, if a
husband had behaved so to me! I’d go, and ’a might call, and call, till
his keacorn was raw; but I’d never come back—no, not till the great
trumpet, would I!”

“Well, the woman will be better off,” said another of a more
deliberative turn. “For seafaring natures be very good shelter for
shorn lambs, and the man do seem to have plenty of money, which is what
she’s not been used to lately, by all showings.”

“Mark me—I’ll not go after her!” said the trusser, returning doggedly
to his seat. “Let her go! If she’s up to such vagaries she must suffer
for ’em. She’d no business to take the maid—’tis my maid; and if it
were the doing again she shouldn’t have her!”

Perhaps from some little sense of having countenanced an indefensible
proceeding, perhaps because it was late, the customers thinned away
from the tent shortly after this episode. The man stretched his elbows
forward on the table leant his face upon his arms, and soon began to
snore. The furmity seller decided to close for the night, and after
seeing the rum-bottles, milk, corn, raisins, etc., that remained on
hand, loaded into the cart, came to where the man reclined. She shook
him, but could not wake him. As the tent was not to be struck that
night, the fair continuing for two or three days, she decided to let
the sleeper, who was obviously no tramp, stay where he was, and his
basket with him. Extinguishing the last candle, and lowering the flap
of the tent, she left it, and drove away.



II.

The morning sun was streaming through the crevices of the canvas when
the man awoke. A warm glow pervaded the whole atmosphere of the
marquee, and a single big blue fly buzzed musically round and round it.
Besides the buzz of the fly there was not a sound. He looked about—at
the benches—at the table supported by trestles—at his basket of
tools—at the stove where the furmity had been boiled—at the empty
basins—at some shed grains of wheat—at the corks which dotted the
grassy floor. Among the odds and ends he discerned a little shining
object, and picked it up. It was his wife’s ring.

A confused picture of the events of the previous evening seemed to come
back to him, and he thrust his hand into his breast-pocket. A rustling
revealed the sailor’s bank-notes thrust carelessly in.

This second verification of his dim memories was enough; he knew now
they were not dreams. He remained seated, looking on the ground for
some time. “I must get out of this as soon as I can,” he said
deliberately at last, with the air of one who could not catch his
thoughts without pronouncing them. “She’s gone—to be sure she is—gone
with that sailor who bought her, and little Elizabeth-Jane. We walked
here, and I had the furmity, and rum in it—and sold her. Yes, that’s
what’s happened and here am I. Now, what am I to do—am I sober enough
to walk, I wonder?” He stood up, found that he was in fairly good
condition for progress, unencumbered. Next he shouldered his tool
basket, and found he could carry it. Then lifting the tent door he
emerged into the open air.

Here the man looked around with gloomy curiosity. The freshness of the
September morning inspired and braced him as he stood. He and his
family had been weary when they arrived the night before, and they had
observed but little of the place; so that he now beheld it as a new
thing. It exhibited itself as the top of an open down, bounded on one
extreme by a plantation, and approached by a winding road. At the
bottom stood the village which lent its name to the upland and the
annual fair that was held thereon. The spot stretched downward into
valleys, and onward to other uplands, dotted with barrows, and trenched
with the remains of prehistoric forts. The whole scene lay under the
rays of a newly risen sun, which had not as yet dried a single blade of
the heavily dewed grass, whereon the shadows of the yellow and red vans
were projected far away, those thrown by the felloe of each wheel being
elongated in shape to the orbit of a comet. All the gipsies and showmen
who had remained on the ground lay snug within their carts and tents or
wrapped in horse-cloths under them, and were silent and still as death,
with the exception of an occasional snore that revealed their presence.
But the Seven Sleepers had a dog; and dogs of the mysterious breeds
that vagrants own, that are as much like cats as dogs and as much like
foxes as cats also lay about here. A little one started up under one of
the carts, barked as a matter of principle, and quickly lay down again.
He was the only positive spectator of the hay-trusser’s exit from the
Weydon Fair-field.

This seemed to accord with his desire. He went on in silent thought,
unheeding the yellowhammers which flitted about the hedges with straws
in their bills, the crowns of the mushrooms, and the tinkling of local
sheep-bells, whose wearer had had the good fortune not to be included
in the fair. When he reached a lane, a good mile from the scene of the
previous evening, the man pitched his basket and leant upon a gate. A
difficult problem or two occupied his mind.

“Did I tell my name to anybody last night, or didn’t I tell my name?”
he said to himself; and at last concluded that he did not. His general
demeanour was enough to show how he was surprised and nettled that his
wife had taken him so literally—as much could be seen in his face, and
in the way he nibbled a straw which he pulled from the hedge. He knew
that she must have been somewhat excited to do this; moreover, she must
have believed that there was some sort of binding force in the
transaction. On this latter point he felt almost certain, knowing her
freedom from levity of character, and the extreme simplicity of her
intellect. There may, too, have been enough recklessness and resentment
beneath her ordinary placidity to make her stifle any momentary doubts.
On a previous occasion when he had declared during a fuddle that he
would dispose of her as he had done, she had replied that she would not
hear him say that many times more before it happened, in the resigned
tones of a fatalist.... “Yet she knows I am not in my senses when I do
that!” he exclaimed. “Well, I must walk about till I find her.... Seize
her, why didn’t she know better than bring me into this disgrace!” he
roared out. “She wasn’t queer if I was. ’Tis like Susan to show such
idiotic simplicity. Meek—that meekness has done me more harm than the
bitterest temper!”

When he was calmer he turned to his original conviction that he must
somehow find her and his little Elizabeth-Jane, and put up with the
shame as best he could. It was of his own making, and he ought to bear
it. But first he resolved to register an oath, a greater oath than he
had ever sworn before: and to do it properly he required a fit place
and imagery; for there was something fetichistic in this man’s beliefs.

He shouldered his basket and moved on, casting his eyes inquisitively
round upon the landscape as he walked, and at the distance of three or
four miles perceived the roofs of a village and the tower of a church.
He instantly made towards the latter object. The village was quite
still, it being that motionless hour of rustic daily life which fills
the interval between the departure of the field-labourers to their
work, and the rising of their wives and daughters to prepare the
breakfast for their return. Hence he reached the church without
observation, and the door being only latched he entered. The
hay-trusser deposited his basket by the font, went up the nave till he
reached the altar-rails, and opening the gate entered the sacrarium,
where he seemed to feel a sense of the strangeness for a moment; then
he knelt upon the footpace. Dropping his head upon the clamped book
which lay on the Communion-table, he said aloud—

“I, Michael Henchard, on this morning of the sixteenth of September, do
take an oath before God here in this solemn place that I will avoid all
strong liquors for the space of twenty-one years to come, being a year
for every year that I have lived. And this I swear upon the book before
me; and may I be strook dumb, blind, and helpless, if I break this my
oath!”

When he had said it and kissed the big book, the hay-trusser arose, and
seemed relieved at having made a start in a new direction. While
standing in the porch a moment he saw a thick jet of wood smoke
suddenly start up from the red chimney of a cottage near, and knew that
the occupant had just lit her fire. He went round to the door, and the
housewife agreed to prepare him some breakfast for a trifling payment,
which was done. Then he started on the search for his wife and child.

The perplexing nature of the undertaking became apparent soon enough.
Though he examined and inquired, and walked hither and thither day
after day, no such characters as those he described had anywhere been
seen since the evening of the fair. To add to the difficulty he could
gain no sound of the sailor’s name. As money was short with him he
decided, after some hesitation, to spend the sailor’s money in the
prosecution of this search; but it was equally in vain. The truth was
that a certain shyness of revealing his conduct prevented Michael
Henchard from following up the investigation with the loud hue-and-cry
such a pursuit demanded to render it effectual; and it was probably for
this reason that he obtained no clue, though everything was done by him
that did not involve an explanation of the circumstances under which he
had lost her.

Weeks counted up to months, and still he searched on, maintaining
himself by small jobs of work in the intervals. By this time he had
arrived at a seaport, and there he derived intelligence that persons
answering somewhat to his description had emigrated a little time
before. Then he said he would search no longer, and that he would go
and settle in the district which he had had for some time in his mind.

Next day he started, journeying south-westward, and did not pause,
except for nights’ lodgings, till he reached the town of Casterbridge,
in a far distant part of Wessex.



III.

The highroad into the village of Weydon-Priors was again carpeted with
dust. The trees had put on as of yore their aspect of dingy green, and
where the Henchard family of three had once walked along, two persons
not unconnected with the family walked now.

The scene in its broad aspect had so much of its previous character,
even to the voices and rattle from the neighbouring village down, that
it might for that matter have been the afternoon following the
previously recorded episode. Change was only to be observed in details;
but here it was obvious that a long procession of years had passed by.
One of the two who walked the road was she who had figured as the young
wife of Henchard on the previous occasion; now her face had lost much
of its rotundity; her skin had undergone a textural change; and though
her hair had not lost colour it was considerably thinner than
heretofore. She was dressed in the mourning clothes of a widow. Her
companion, also in black, appeared as a well-formed young woman about
eighteen, completely possessed of that ephemeral precious essence
youth, which is itself beauty, irrespective of complexion or contour.

A glance was sufficient to inform the eye that this was Susan
Henchard’s grown-up daughter. While life’s middle summer had set its
hardening mark on the mother’s face, her former spring-like
specialities were transferred so dexterously by Time to the second
figure, her child, that the absence of certain facts within her
mother’s knowledge from the girl’s mind would have seemed for the
moment, to one reflecting on those facts, to be a curious imperfection
in Nature’s powers of continuity.

They walked with joined hands, and it could be perceived that this was
the act of simple affection. The daughter carried in her outer hand a
withy basket of old-fashioned make; the mother a blue bundle, which
contrasted oddly with her black stuff gown.

Reaching the outskirts of the village they pursued the same track as
formerly, and ascended to the fair. Here, too it was evident that the
years had told. Certain mechanical improvements might have been noticed
in the roundabouts and high-fliers, machines for testing rustic
strength and weight, and in the erections devoted to shooting for nuts.
But the real business of the fair had considerably dwindled. The new
periodical great markets of neighbouring towns were beginning to
interfere seriously with the trade carried on here for centuries. The
pens for sheep, the tie-ropes for horses, were about half as long as
they had been. The stalls of tailors, hosiers, coopers, linen-drapers,
and other such trades had almost disappeared, and the vehicles were far
less numerous. The mother and daughter threaded the crowd for some
little distance, and then stood still.

“Why did we hinder our time by coming in here? I thought you wished to
get onward?” said the maiden.

“Yes, my dear Elizabeth-Jane,” explained the other. “But I had a fancy
for looking up here.”

“Why?”

“It was here I first met with Newson—on such a day as this.”

“First met with father here? Yes, you have told me so before. And now
he’s drowned and gone from us!” As she spoke the girl drew a card from
her pocket and looked at it with a sigh. It was edged with black, and
inscribed within a design resembling a mural tablet were the words, “In
affectionate memory of Richard Newson, mariner, who was unfortunately
lost at sea, in the month of November 184—, aged forty-one years.”

“And it was here,” continued her mother, with more hesitation, “that I
last saw the relation we are going to look for—Mr. Michael Henchard.”

“What is his exact kin to us, mother? I have never clearly had it told
me.”

“He is, or was—for he may be dead—a connection by marriage,” said her
mother deliberately.

“That’s exactly what you have said a score of times before!” replied
the young woman, looking about her inattentively. “He’s not a near
relation, I suppose?”

“Not by any means.”

“He was a hay-trusser, wasn’t he, when you last heard of him?

“He was.”

“I suppose he never knew me?” the girl innocently continued.

Mrs. Henchard paused for a moment, and answered uneasily, “Of course
not, Elizabeth-Jane. But come this way.” She moved on to another part
of the field.

“It is not much use inquiring here for anybody, I should think,” the
daughter observed, as she gazed round about. “People at fairs change
like the leaves of trees; and I daresay you are the only one here
to-day who was here all those years ago.”

“I am not so sure of that,” said Mrs. Newson, as she now called
herself, keenly eyeing something under a green bank a little way off.
“See there.”

The daughter looked in the direction signified. The object pointed out
was a tripod of sticks stuck into the earth, from which hung a
three-legged crock, kept hot by a smouldering wood fire beneath. Over
the pot stooped an old woman haggard, wrinkled, and almost in rags. She
stirred the contents of the pot with a large spoon, and occasionally
croaked in a broken voice, “Good furmity sold here!”

It was indeed the former mistress of the furmity tent—once thriving,
cleanly, white-aproned, and chinking with money—now tentless, dirty,
owning no tables or benches, and having scarce any customers except two
small whity-brown boys, who came up and asked for “A ha’p’orth,
please—good measure,” which she served in a couple of chipped yellow
basins of commonest clay.

“She was here at that time,” resumed Mrs. Newson, making a step as if
to draw nearer.

“Don’t speak to her—it isn’t respectable!” urged the other.

“I will just say a word—you, Elizabeth-Jane, can stay here.”

The girl was not loth, and turned to some stalls of coloured prints
while her mother went forward. The old woman begged for the latter’s
custom as soon as she saw her, and responded to Mrs. Henchard-Newson’s
request for a pennyworth with more alacrity than she had shown in
selling six-pennyworths in her younger days. When the _soi-disant_
widow had taken the basin of thin poor slop that stood for the rich
concoction of the former time, the hag opened a little basket behind
the fire, and looking up slily, whispered, “Just a thought o’ rum in
it?—smuggled, you know—say two penn’orth—’twill make it slip down like
cordial!”

Her customer smiled bitterly at this survival of the old trick, and
shook her head with a meaning the old woman was far from translating.
She pretended to eat a little of the furmity with the leaden spoon
offered, and as she did so said blandly to the hag, “You’ve seen better
days?”

“Ah, ma’am—well ye may say it!” responded the old woman, opening the
sluices of her heart forthwith. “I’ve stood in this fair-ground, maid,
wife, and widow, these nine-and-thirty years, and in that time have
known what it was to do business with the richest stomachs in the land!
Ma’am you’d hardly believe that I was once the owner of a great
pavilion-tent that was the attraction of the fair. Nobody could come,
nobody could go, without having a dish of Mrs. Goodenough’s furmity. I
knew the clergy’s taste, the dandy gent’s taste; I knew the town’s
taste, the country’s taste. I even knowed the taste of the coarse
shameless females. But Lord’s my life—the world’s no memory;
straightforward dealings don’t bring profit—’tis the sly and the
underhand that get on in these times!”

Mrs. Newson glanced round—her daughter was still bending over the
distant stalls. “Can you call to mind,” she said cautiously to the old
woman, “the sale of a wife by her husband in your tent eighteen years
ago to-day?”

The hag reflected, and half shook her head. “If it had been a big thing
I should have minded it in a moment,” she said. “I can mind every
serious fight o’ married parties, every murder, every manslaughter,
even every pocket-picking—leastwise large ones—that ’t has been my lot
to witness. But a selling? Was it done quiet-like?”

“Well, yes. I think so.”

The furmity woman half shook her head again. “And yet,” she said, “I
do. At any rate, I can mind a man doing something o’ the sort—a man in
a cord jacket, with a basket of tools; but, Lord bless ye, we don’t
gi’e it head-room, we don’t, such as that. The only reason why I can
mind the man is that he came back here to the next year’s fair, and
told me quite private-like that if a woman ever asked for him I was to
say he had gone to—where?—Casterbridge—yes—to Casterbridge, said he.
But, Lord’s my life, I shouldn’t ha’ thought of it again!”

Mrs. Newson would have rewarded the old woman as far as her small means
afforded had she not discreetly borne in mind that it was by that
unscrupulous person’s liquor her husband had been degraded. She briefly
thanked her informant, and rejoined Elizabeth, who greeted her with,
“Mother, do let’s get on—it was hardly respectable for you to buy
refreshments there. I see none but the lowest do.”

“I have learned what I wanted, however,” said her mother quietly. “The
last time our relative visited this fair he said he was living at
Casterbridge. It is a long, long way from here, and it was many years
ago that he said it, but there I think we’ll go.”

With this they descended out of the fair, and went onward to the
village, where they obtained a night’s lodging.



IV.

Henchard’s wife acted for the best, but she had involved herself in
difficulties. A hundred times she had been upon the point of telling
her daughter Elizabeth-Jane the true story of her life, the tragical
crisis of which had been the transaction at Weydon Fair, when she was
not much older than the girl now beside her. But she had refrained. An
innocent maiden had thus grown up in the belief that the relations
between the genial sailor and her mother were the ordinary ones that
they had always appeared to be. The risk of endangering a child’s
strong affection by disturbing ideas which had grown with her growth
was to Mrs. Henchard too fearful a thing to contemplate. It had seemed,
indeed folly to think of making Elizabeth-Jane wise.

But Susan Henchard’s fear of losing her dearly loved daughter’s heart
by a revelation had little to do with any sense of wrong-doing on her
own part. Her simplicity—the original ground of Henchard’s contempt for
her—had allowed her to live on in the conviction that Newson had
acquired a morally real and justifiable right to her by his
purchase—though the exact bearings and legal limits of that right were
vague. It may seem strange to sophisticated minds that a sane young
matron could believe in the seriousness of such a transfer; and were
there not numerous other instances of the same belief the thing might
scarcely be credited. But she was by no means the first or last peasant
woman who had religiously adhered to her purchaser, as too many rural
records show.

The history of Susan Henchard’s adventures in the interim can be told
in two or three sentences. Absolutely helpless she had been taken off
to Canada where they had lived several years without any great worldly
success, though she worked as hard as any woman could to keep their
cottage cheerful and well-provided. When Elizabeth-Jane was about
twelve years old the three returned to England, and settled at
Falmouth, where Newson made a living for a few years as boatman and
general handy shoreman.

He then engaged in the Newfoundland trade, and it was during this
period that Susan had an awakening. A friend to whom she confided her
history ridiculed her grave acceptance of her position; and all was
over with her peace of mind. When Newson came home at the end of one
winter he saw that the delusion he had so carefully sustained had
vanished for ever.

There was then a time of sadness, in which she told him her doubts if
she could live with him longer. Newson left home again on the
Newfoundland trade when the season came round. The vague news of his
loss at sea a little later on solved a problem which had become torture
to her meek conscience. She saw him no more.

Of Henchard they heard nothing. To the liege subjects of Labour, the
England of those days was a continent, and a mile a geographical
degree.

Elizabeth-Jane developed early into womanliness. One day a month or so
after receiving intelligence of Newson’s death off the Bank of
Newfoundland, when the girl was about eighteen, she was sitting on a
willow chair in the cottage they still occupied, working twine nets for
the fishermen. Her mother was in a back corner of the same room engaged
in the same labour, and dropping the heavy wood needle she was filling
she surveyed her daughter thoughtfully. The sun shone in at the door
upon the young woman’s head and hair, which was worn loose, so that the
rays streamed into its depths as into a hazel copse. Her face, though
somewhat wan and incomplete, possessed the raw materials of beauty in a
promising degree. There was an under-handsomeness in it, struggling to
reveal itself through the provisional curves of immaturity, and the
casual disfigurements that resulted from the straitened circumstances
of their lives. She was handsome in the bone, hardly as yet handsome in
the flesh. She possibly might never be fully handsome, unless the
carking accidents of her daily existence could be evaded before the
mobile parts of her countenance had settled to their final mould.

The sight of the girl made her mother sad—not vaguely but by logical
inference. They both were still in that strait-waistcoat of poverty
from which she had tried so many times to be delivered for the girl’s
sake. The woman had long perceived how zealously and constantly the
young mind of her companion was struggling for enlargement; and yet
now, in her eighteenth year, it still remained but little unfolded. The
desire—sober and repressed—of Elizabeth-Jane’s heart was indeed to see,
to hear, and to understand. How could she become a woman of wider
knowledge, higher repute—“better,” as she termed it—this was her
constant inquiry of her mother. She sought further into things than
other girls in her position ever did, and her mother groaned as she
felt she could not aid in the search.

The sailor, drowned or no, was probably now lost to them; and Susan’s
staunch, religious adherence to him as her husband in principle, till
her views had been disturbed by enlightenment, was demanded no more.
She asked herself whether the present moment, now that she was a free
woman again, were not as opportune a one as she would find in a world
where everything had been so inopportune, for making a desperate effort
to advance Elizabeth. To pocket her pride and search for the first
husband seemed, wisely or not, the best initiatory step. He had
possibly drunk himself into his tomb. But he might, on the other hand,
have had too much sense to do so; for in her time with him he had been
given to bouts only, and was not a habitual drunkard.

At any rate, the propriety of returning to him, if he lived, was
unquestionable. The awkwardness of searching for him lay in
enlightening Elizabeth, a proceeding which her mother could not endure
to contemplate. She finally resolved to undertake the search without
confiding to the girl her former relations with Henchard, leaving it to
him if they found him to take what steps he might choose to that end.
This will account for their conversation at the fair and the
half-informed state at which Elizabeth was led onward.

In this attitude they proceeded on their journey, trusting solely to
the dim light afforded of Henchard’s whereabouts by the furmity woman.
The strictest economy was indispensable. Sometimes they might have been
seen on foot, sometimes on farmers’ waggons, sometimes in carriers’
vans; and thus they drew near to Casterbridge. Elizabeth-Jane
discovered to her alarm that her mother’s health was not what it once
had been, and there was ever and anon in her talk that renunciatory
tone which showed that, but for the girl, she would not be very sorry
to quit a life she was growing thoroughly weary of.

It was on a Friday evening, near the middle of September and just
before dusk, that they reached the summit of a hill within a mile of
the place they sought. There were high banked hedges to the coach-road
here, and they mounted upon the green turf within, and sat down. The
spot commanded a full view of the town and its environs.

“What an old-fashioned place it seems to be!” said Elizabeth-Jane,
while her silent mother mused on other things than topography. “It is
huddled all together; and it is shut in by a square wall of trees, like
a plot of garden ground by a box-edging.”

Its squareness was, indeed, the characteristic which most struck the
eye in this antiquated borough, the borough of Casterbridge—at that
time, recent as it was, untouched by the faintest sprinkle of
modernism. It was compact as a box of dominoes. It had no suburbs—in
the ordinary sense. Country and town met at a mathematical line.

To birds of the more soaring kind Casterbridge must have appeared on
this fine evening as a mosaic-work of subdued reds, browns, greys, and
crystals, held together by a rectangular frame of deep green. To the
level eye of humanity it stood as an indistinct mass behind a dense
stockade of limes and chestnuts, set in the midst of miles of rotund
down and concave field. The mass became gradually dissected by the
vision into towers, gables, chimneys, and casements, the highest
glazings shining bleared and bloodshot with the coppery fire they
caught from the belt of sunlit cloud in the west.

From the centre of each side of this tree-bound square ran avenues
east, west, and south into the wide expanse of cornland and coomb to
the distance of a mile or so. It was by one of these avenues that the
pedestrians were about to enter. Before they had risen to proceed two
men passed outside the hedge, engaged in argumentative conversation.

“Why, surely,” said Elizabeth, as they receded, “those men mentioned
the name of Henchard in their talk—the name of our relative?”

“I thought so too,” said Mrs. Newson.

“That seems a hint to us that he is still here.”

“Yes.”

“Shall I run after them, and ask them about him——”

“No, no, no! Not for the world just yet. He may be in the workhouse, or
in the stocks, for all we know.”

“Dear me—why should you think that, mother?”

“’Twas just something to say—that’s all! But we must make private
inquiries.”

Having sufficiently rested they proceeded on their way at evenfall. The
dense trees of the avenue rendered the road dark as a tunnel, though
the open land on each side was still under a faint daylight, in other
words, they passed down a midnight between two gloamings. The features
of the town had a keen interest for Elizabeth’s mother, now that the
human side came to the fore. As soon as they had wandered about they
could see that the stockade of gnarled trees which framed in
Casterbridge was itself an avenue, standing on a low green bank or
escarpment, with a ditch yet visible without. Within the avenue and
bank was a wall more or less discontinuous, and within the wall were
packed the abodes of the burghers.

Though the two women did not know it these external features were but
the ancient defences of the town, planted as a promenade.

The lamplights now glimmered through the engirdling trees, conveying a
sense of great smugness and comfort inside, and rendering at the same
time the unlighted country without strangely solitary and vacant in
aspect, considering its nearness to life. The difference between burgh
and champaign was increased, too, by sounds which now reached them
above others—the notes of a brass band. The travellers returned into
the High Street, where there were timber houses with overhanging
stories, whose small-paned lattices were screened by dimity curtains on
a drawing-string, and under whose bargeboards old cobwebs waved in the
breeze. There were houses of brick-nogging, which derived their chief
support from those adjoining. There were slate roofs patched with
tiles, and tile roofs patched with slate, with occasionally a roof of
thatch.

The agricultural and pastoral character of the people upon whom the
town depended for its existence was shown by the class of objects
displayed in the shop windows. Scythes, reap-hooks, sheep-shears,
bill-hooks, spades, mattocks, and hoes at the iron-monger’s; bee-hives,
butter-firkins, churns, milking stools and pails, hay-rakes,
field-flagons, and seed-lips at the cooper’s; cart-ropes and
plough-harness at the saddler’s; carts, wheel-barrows, and mill-gear at
the wheelwright’s and machinist’s, horse-embrocations at the chemist’s;
at the glover’s and leather-cutter’s, hedging-gloves, thatchers’
knee-caps, ploughmen’s leggings, villagers’ pattens and clogs.

They came to a grizzled church, whose massive square tower rose
unbroken into the darkening sky, the lower parts being illuminated by
the nearest lamps sufficiently to show how completely the mortar from
the joints of the stonework had been nibbled out by time and weather,
which had planted in the crevices thus made little tufts of stone-crop
and grass almost as far up as the very battlements. From this tower the
clock struck eight, and thereupon a bell began to toll with a
peremptory clang. The curfew was still rung in Casterbridge, and it was
utilized by the inhabitants as a signal for shutting their shops. No
sooner did the deep notes of the bell throb between the house-fronts
than a clatter of shutters arose through the whole length of the High
Street. In a few minutes business at Casterbridge was ended for the
day.

Other clocks struck eight from time to time—one gloomily from the gaol,
another from the gable of an almshouse, with a preparative creak of
machinery, more audible than the note of the bell; a row of tall,
varnished case-clocks from the interior of a clock-maker’s shop joined
in one after another just as the shutters were enclosing them, like a
row of actors delivering their final speeches before the fall of the
curtain; then chimes were heard stammering out the Sicilian Mariners’
Hymn; so that chronologists of the advanced school were appreciably on
their way to the next hour before the whole business of the old one was
satisfactorily wound up.

In an open space before the church walked a woman with her gown-sleeves
rolled up so high that the edge of her underlinen was visible, and her
skirt tucked up through her pocket hole. She carried a loaf under her
arm from which she was pulling pieces of bread, and handing them to
some other women who walked with her, which pieces they nibbled
critically. The sight reminded Mrs. Henchard-Newson and her daughter
that they had an appetite; and they inquired of the woman for the
nearest baker’s.

“Ye may as well look for manna-food as good bread in Casterbridge just
now,” she said, after directing them. “They can blare their trumpets
and thump their drums, and have their roaring dinners”—waving her hand
towards a point further along the street, where the brass band could be
seen standing in front of an illuminated building—“but we must needs be
put-to for want of a wholesome crust. There’s less good bread than good
beer in Casterbridge now.”

“And less good beer than swipes,” said a man with his hands in his
pockets.

“How does it happen there’s no good bread?” asked Mrs. Henchard.

“Oh, ’tis the corn-factor—he’s the man that our millers and bakers all
deal wi’, and he has sold ’em growed wheat, which they didn’t know was
growed, so they say, till the dough ran all over the ovens like
quicksilver; so that the loaves be as flat as toads, and like suet
pudden inside. I’ve been a wife, and I’ve been a mother, and I never
see such unprincipled bread in Casterbridge as this before.—But you
must be a real stranger here not to know what’s made all the poor
volks’ insides plim like blowed bladders this week?”

“I am,” said Elizabeth’s mother shyly.

Not wishing to be observed further till she knew more of her future in
this place, she withdrew with her daughter from the speaker’s side.
Getting a couple of biscuits at the shop indicated as a temporary
substitute for a meal, they next bent their steps instinctively to
where the music was playing.



V.

A few score yards brought them to the spot where the town band was now
shaking the window-panes with the strains of “The Roast Beef of Old
England.”

The building before whose doors they had pitched their music-stands was
the chief hotel in Casterbridge—namely, the King’s Arms. A spacious
bow-window projected into the street over the main portico, and from
the open sashes came the babble of voices, the jingle of glasses, and
the drawing of corks. The blinds, moreover, being left unclosed, the
whole interior of this room could be surveyed from the top of a flight
of stone steps to the road-waggon office opposite, for which reason a
knot of idlers had gathered there.

“We might, perhaps, after all, make a few inquiries about—our relation
Mr. Henchard,” whispered Mrs. Newson who, since her entry into
Casterbridge, had seemed strangely weak and agitated, “And this, I
think, would be a good place for trying it—just to ask, you know, how
he stands in the town—if he is here, as I think he must be. You,
Elizabeth-Jane, had better be the one to do it. I’m too worn out to do
anything—pull down your fall first.”

She sat down upon the lowest step, and Elizabeth-Jane obeyed her
directions and stood among the idlers.

“What’s going on to-night?” asked the girl, after singling out an old
man and standing by him long enough to acquire a neighbourly right of
converse.

“Well, ye must be a stranger sure,” said the old man, without taking
his eyes from the window. “Why, ’tis a great public dinner of the
gentle-people and such like leading volk—wi’ the Mayor in the chair. As
we plainer fellows bain’t invited, they leave the winder-shutters open
that we may get jist a sense o’t out here. If you mount the steps you
can see em. That’s Mr. Henchard, the Mayor, at the end of the table, a
facing ye; and that’s the Council men right and left.... Ah, lots of
them when they begun life were no more than I be now!”

“Henchard!” said Elizabeth-Jane, surprised, but by no means suspecting
the whole force of the revelation. She ascended to the top of the
steps.

Her mother, though her head was bowed, had already caught from the
inn-window tones that strangely riveted her attention, before the old
man’s words, “Mr. Henchard, the Mayor,” reached her ears. She arose,
and stepped up to her daughter’s side as soon as she could do so
without showing exceptional eagerness.

The interior of the hotel dining-room was spread out before her, with
its tables, and glass, and plate, and inmates. Facing the window, in
the chair of dignity, sat a man about forty years of age; of heavy
frame, large features, and commanding voice; his general build being
rather coarse than compact. He had a rich complexion, which verged on
swarthiness, a flashing black eye, and dark, bushy brows and hair. When
he indulged in an occasional loud laugh at some remark among the
guests, his large mouth parted so far back as to show to the rays of
the chandelier a full score or more of the two-and-thirty sound white
teeth that he obviously still could boast of.

That laugh was not encouraging to strangers, and hence it may have been
well that it was rarely heard. Many theories might have been built upon
it. It fell in well with conjectures of a temperament which would have
no pity for weakness, but would be ready to yield ungrudging admiration
to greatness and strength. Its producer’s personal goodness, if he had
any, would be of a very fitful cast—an occasional almost oppressive
generosity rather than a mild and constant kindness.

Susan Henchard’s husband—in law, at least—sat before them, matured in
shape, stiffened in line, exaggerated in traits; disciplined,
thought-marked—in a word, older. Elizabeth, encumbered with no
recollections as her mother was, regarded him with nothing more than
the keen curiosity and interest which the discovery of such unexpected
social standing in the long-sought relative naturally begot. He was
dressed in an old-fashioned evening suit, an expanse of frilled shirt
showing on his broad breast; jewelled studs, and a heavy gold chain.
Three glasses stood at his right hand; but, to his wife’s surprise, the
two for wine were empty, while the third, a tumbler, was half full of
water.

When last she had seen him he was sitting in a corduroy jacket, fustian
waistcoat and breeches, and tanned leather leggings, with a basin of
hot furmity before him. Time, the magician, had wrought much here.
Watching him, and thus thinking of past days, she became so moved that
she shrank back against the jamb of the waggon-office doorway to which
the steps gave access, the shadow from it conveniently hiding her
features. She forgot her daughter till a touch from Elizabeth-Jane
aroused her. “Have you seen him, mother?” whispered the girl.

“Yes, yes,” answered her companion hastily. “I have seen him, and it is
enough for me! Now I only want to go—pass away—die.”

“Why—O what?” She drew closer, and whispered in her mother’s ear, “Does
he seem to you not likely to befriend us? I thought he looked a
generous man. What a gentleman he is, isn’t he? and how his diamond
studs shine! How strange that you should have said he might be in the
stocks, or in the workhouse, or dead! Did ever anything go more by
contraries! Why do you feel so afraid of him? I am not at all; I’ll
call upon him—he can but say he don’t own such remote kin.”

“I don’t know at all—I can’t tell what to set about. I feel so down.”

“Don’t be that, mother, now we have got here and all! Rest there where
you be a little while—I will look on and find out more about him.”

“I don’t think I can ever meet Mr. Henchard. He is not how I thought he
would be—he overpowers me! I don’t wish to see him any more.”

“But wait a little time and consider.”

Elizabeth-Jane had never been so much interested in anything in her
life as in their present position, partly from the natural elation she
felt at discovering herself akin to a coach; and she gazed again at the
scene. The younger guests were talking and eating with animation; their
elders were searching for titbits, and sniffing and grunting over their
plates like sows nuzzling for acorns. Three drinks seemed to be sacred
to the company—port, sherry, and rum; outside which old-established
trinity few or no palates ranged.

A row of ancient rummers with ground figures on their sides, and each
primed with a spoon, was now placed down the table, and these were
promptly filled with grog at such high temperatures as to raise serious
considerations for the articles exposed to its vapours. But
Elizabeth-Jane noticed that, though this filling went on with great
promptness up and down the table, nobody filled the Mayor’s glass, who
still drank large quantities of water from the tumbler behind the clump
of crystal vessels intended for wine and spirits.

“They don’t fill Mr. Henchard’s wine-glasses,” she ventured to say to
her elbow acquaintance, the old man.

“Ah, no; don’t ye know him to be the celebrated abstaining worthy of
that name? He scorns all tempting liquors; never touches nothing. O
yes, he’ve strong qualities that way. I have heard tell that he sware a
gospel oath in bygone times, and has bode by it ever since. So they
don’t press him, knowing it would be unbecoming in the face of that:
for yer gospel oath is a serious thing.”

Another elderly man, hearing this discourse, now joined in by
inquiring, “How much longer have he got to suffer from it, Solomon
Longways?”

“Another two year, they say. I don’t know the why and the wherefore of
his fixing such a time, for ’a never has told anybody. But ’tis exactly
two calendar years longer, they say. A powerful mind to hold out so
long!”

“True.... But there’s great strength in hope. Knowing that in
four-and-twenty months’ time ye’ll be out of your bondage, and able to
make up for all you’ve suffered, by partaking without stint—why, it
keeps a man up, no doubt.”

“No doubt, Christopher Coney, no doubt. And ’a must need such
reflections—a lonely widow man,” said Longways.

“When did he lose his wife?” asked Elizabeth.

“I never knowed her. ’Twas afore he came to Casterbridge,” Solomon
Longways replied with terminative emphasis, as if the fact of his
ignorance of Mrs. Henchard were sufficient to deprive her history of
all interest. “But I know that ’a’s a banded teetotaller, and that if
any of his men be ever so little overtook by a drop he’s down upon ’em
as stern as the Lord upon the jovial Jews.”

“Has he many men, then?” said Elizabeth-Jane.

“Many! Why, my good maid, he’s the powerfullest member of the Town
Council, and quite a principal man in the country round besides. Never
a big dealing in wheat, barley, oats, hay, roots, and such-like but
Henchard’s got a hand in it. Ay, and he’ll go into other things too;
and that’s where he makes his mistake. He worked his way up from
nothing when ’a came here; and now he’s a pillar of the town. Not but
what he’s been shaken a little to-year about this bad corn he has
supplied in his contracts. I’ve seen the sun rise over Durnover Moor
these nine-and-sixty year, and though Mr. Henchard has never cussed me
unfairly ever since I’ve worked for’n, seeing I be but a little small
man, I must say that I have never before tasted such rough bread as has
been made from Henchard’s wheat lately. ’Tis that growed out that ye
could a’most call it malt, and there’s a list at bottom o’ the loaf as
thick as the sole of one’s shoe.”

The band now struck up another melody, and by the time it was ended the
dinner was over, and speeches began to be made. The evening being calm,
and the windows still open, these orations could be distinctly heard.
Henchard’s voice arose above the rest; he was telling a story of his
hay-dealing experiences, in which he had outwitted a sharper who had
been bent upon outwitting him.

“Ha-ha-ha!” responded his audience at the upshot of the story; and
hilarity was general till a new voice arose with, “This is all very
well; but how about the bad bread?”

It came from the lower end of the table, where there sat a group of
minor tradesmen who, although part of the company, appeared to be a
little below the social level of the others; and who seemed to nourish
a certain independence of opinion and carry on discussions not quite in
harmony with those at the head; just as the west end of a church is
sometimes persistently found to sing out of time and tune with the
leading spirits in the chancel.

This interruption about the bad bread afforded infinite satisfaction to
the loungers outside, several of whom were in the mood which finds its
pleasure in others’ discomfiture; and hence they echoed pretty freely,
“Hey! How about the bad bread, Mr. Mayor?” Moreover, feeling none of
the restraints of those who shared the feast, they could afford to add,
“You rather ought to tell the story o’ that, sir!”

The interruption was sufficient to compel the Mayor to notice it.

“Well, I admit that the wheat turned out badly,” he said. “But I was
taken in in buying it as much as the bakers who bought it o’ me.”

“And the poor folk who had to eat it whether or no,” said the
inharmonious man outside the window.

Henchard’s face darkened. There was temper under the thin bland
surface—the temper which, artificially intensified, had banished a wife
nearly a score of years before.

“You must make allowances for the accidents of a large business,” he
said. “You must bear in mind that the weather just at the harvest of
that corn was worse than we have known it for years. However, I have
mended my arrangements on account o’t. Since I have found my business
too large to be well looked after by myself alone, I have advertised
for a thorough good man as manager of the corn department. When I’ve
got him you will find these mistakes will no longer occur—matters will
be better looked into.”

“But what are you going to do to repay us for the past?” inquired the
man who had before spoken, and who seemed to be a baker or miller.
“Will you replace the grown flour we’ve still got by sound grain?”

Henchard’s face had become still more stern at these interruptions, and
he drank from his tumbler of water as if to calm himself or gain time.
Instead of vouchsafing a direct reply, he stiffly observed—

“If anybody will tell me how to turn grown wheat into wholesome wheat
I’ll take it back with pleasure. But it can’t be done.”

Henchard was not to be drawn again. Having said this, he sat down.



VI.

Now the group outside the window had within the last few minutes been
reinforced by new arrivals, some of them respectable shopkeepers and
their assistants, who had come out for a whiff of air after putting up
the shutters for the night; some of them of a lower class. Distinct
from either there appeared a stranger—a young man of remarkably
pleasant aspect—who carried in his hand a carpet-bag of the smart
floral pattern prevalent in such articles at that time.

He was ruddy and of a fair countenance, bright-eyed, and slight in
build. He might possibly have passed by without stopping at all, or at
most for half a minute to glance in at the scene, had not his advent
coincided with the discussion on corn and bread, in which event this
history had never been enacted. But the subject seemed to arrest him,
and he whispered some inquiries of the other bystanders, and remained
listening.

When he heard Henchard’s closing words, “It can’t be done,” he smiled
impulsively, drew out his pocketbook, and wrote down a few words by the
aid of the light in the window. He tore out the leaf, folded and
directed it, and seemed about to throw it in through the open sash upon
the dining-table; but, on second thoughts, edged himself through the
loiterers, till he reached the door of the hotel, where one of the
waiters who had been serving inside was now idly leaning against the
doorpost.

“Give this to the Mayor at once,” he said, handing in his hasty note.

Elizabeth-Jane had seen his movements and heard the words, which
attracted her both by their subject and by their accent—a strange one
for those parts. It was quaint and northerly.

The waiter took the note, while the young stranger continued—

“And can ye tell me of a respectable hotel that’s a little more
moderate than this?”

The waiter glanced indifferently up and down the street.

“They say the Three Mariners, just below here, is a very good place,”
he languidly answered; “but I have never stayed there myself.”

The Scotchman, as he seemed to be, thanked him, and strolled on in the
direction of the Three Mariners aforesaid, apparently more concerned
about the question of an inn than about the fate of his note, now that
the momentary impulse of writing it was over. While he was disappearing
slowly down the street the waiter left the door, and Elizabeth-Jane saw
with some interest the note brought into the dining-room and handed to
the Mayor.

Henchard looked at it carelessly, unfolded it with one hand, and
glanced it through. Thereupon it was curious to note an unexpected
effect. The nettled, clouded aspect which had held possession of his
face since the subject of his corn-dealings had been broached, changed
itself into one of arrested attention. He read the note slowly, and
fell into thought, not moody, but fitfully intense, as that of a man
who has been captured by an idea.

By this time toasts and speeches had given place to songs, the wheat
subject being quite forgotten. Men were putting their heads together in
twos and threes, telling good stories, with pantomimic laughter which
reached convulsive grimace. Some were beginning to look as if they did
not know how they had come there, what they had come for, or how they
were going to get home again; and provisionally sat on with a dazed
smile. Square-built men showed a tendency to become hunchbacks; men
with a dignified presence lost it in a curious obliquity of figure, in
which their features grew disarranged and one-sided, whilst the heads
of a few who had dined with extreme thoroughness were somehow sinking
into their shoulders, the corners of their mouth and eyes being bent
upwards by the subsidence. Only Henchard did not conform to these
flexuous changes; he remained stately and vertical, silently thinking.

The clock struck nine. Elizabeth-Jane turned to her companion. “The
evening is drawing on, mother,” she said. “What do you propose to do?”

She was surprised to find how irresolute her mother had become. “We
must get a place to lie down in,” she murmured. “I have seen—Mr.
Henchard; and that’s all I wanted to do.”

“That’s enough for to-night, at any rate,” Elizabeth-Jane replied
soothingly. “We can think to-morrow what is best to do about him. The
question now is—is it not?—how shall we find a lodging?”

As her mother did not reply Elizabeth-Jane’s mind reverted to the words
of the waiter, that the Three Mariners was an inn of moderate charges.
A recommendation good for one person was probably good for another.
“Let’s go where the young man has gone to,” she said. “He is
respectable. What do you say?”

Her mother assented, and down the street they went.

In the meantime the Mayor’s thoughtfulness, engendered by the note as
stated, continued to hold him in abstraction; till, whispering to his
neighbour to take his place, he found opportunity to leave the chair.
This was just after the departure of his wife and Elizabeth.

Outside the door of the assembly-room he saw the waiter, and beckoning
to him asked who had brought the note which had been handed in a
quarter of an hour before.

“A young man, sir—a sort of traveller. He was a Scotchman seemingly.”

“Did he say how he had got it?”

“He wrote it himself, sir, as he stood outside the window.”

“Oh—wrote it himself.... Is the young man in the hotel?”

“No, sir. He went to the Three Mariners, I believe.”

The mayor walked up and down the vestibule of the hotel with his hands
under his coat tails, as if he were merely seeking a cooler atmosphere
than that of the room he had quitted. But there could be no doubt that
he was in reality still possessed to the full by the new idea, whatever
that might be. At length he went back to the door of the dining-room,
paused, and found that the songs, toasts, and conversation were
proceeding quite satisfactorily without his presence. The Corporation,
private residents, and major and minor tradesmen had, in fact, gone in
for comforting beverages to such an extent that they had quite
forgotten, not only the Mayor, but all those vast, political,
religious, and social differences which they felt necessary to maintain
in the daytime, and which separated them like iron grills. Seeing this
the Mayor took his hat, and when the waiter had helped him on with a
thin holland overcoat, went out and stood under the portico.

Very few persons were now in the street; and his eyes, by a sort of
attraction, turned and dwelt upon a spot about a hundred yards further
down. It was the house to which the writer of the note had gone—the
Three Mariners—whose two prominent Elizabethan gables, bow-window, and
passage-light could be seen from where he stood. Having kept his eyes
on it for a while he strolled in that direction.

This ancient house of accommodation for man and beast, now,
unfortunately, pulled down, was built of mellow sandstone, with
mullioned windows of the same material, markedly out of perpendicular
from the settlement of foundations. The bay window projecting into the
street, whose interior was so popular among the frequenters of the inn,
was closed with shutters, in each of which appeared a heart-shaped
aperture, somewhat more attenuated in the right and left ventricles
than is seen in Nature. Inside these illuminated holes, at a distance
of about three inches, were ranged at this hour, as every passer knew,
the ruddy polls of Billy Wills the glazier, Smart the shoemaker,
Buzzford the general dealer, and others of a secondary set of worthies,
of a grade somewhat below that of the diners at the King’s Arms, each
with his yard of clay.

A four-centred Tudor arch was over the entrance, and over the arch the
signboard, now visible in the rays of an opposite lamp. Hereon the
Mariners, who had been represented by the artist as persons of two
dimensions only—in other words, flat as a shadow—were standing in a row
in paralyzed attitudes. Being on the sunny side of the street the three
comrades had suffered largely from warping, splitting, fading, and
shrinkage, so that they were but a half-invisible film upon the reality
of the grain, and knots, and nails, which composed the signboard. As a
matter of fact, this state of things was not so much owing to Stannidge
the landlord’s neglect, as from the lack of a painter in Casterbridge
who would undertake to reproduce the features of men so traditional.

A long, narrow, dimly-lit passage gave access to the inn, within which
passage the horses going to their stalls at the back, and the coming
and departing human guests, rubbed shoulders indiscriminately, the
latter running no slight risk of having their toes trodden upon by the
animals. The good stabling and the good ale of the Mariners, though
somewhat difficult to reach on account of there being but this narrow
way to both, were nevertheless perseveringly sought out by the
sagacious old heads who knew what was what in Casterbridge.

Henchard stood without the inn for a few instants; then lowering the
dignity of his presence as much as possible by buttoning the brown
holland coat over his shirt-front, and in other ways toning himself
down to his ordinary everyday appearance, he entered the inn door.



VII.

Elizabeth-Jane and her mother had arrived some twenty minutes earlier.
Outside the house they had stood and considered whether even this
homely place, though recommended as moderate, might not be too serious
in its prices for their light pockets. Finally, however, they had found
courage to enter, and duly met Stannidge the landlord, a silent man,
who drew and carried frothing measures to this room and to that,
shoulder to shoulder with his waiting-maids—a stately slowness,
however, entering into his ministrations by contrast with theirs, as
became one whose service was somewhat optional. It would have been
altogether optional but for the orders of the landlady, a person who
sat in the bar, corporeally motionless, but with a flitting eye and
quick ear, with which she observed and heard through the open door and
hatchway the pressing needs of customers whom her husband overlooked
though close at hand. Elizabeth and her mother were passively accepted
as sojourners, and shown to a small bedroom under one of the gables,
where they sat down.

The principle of the inn seemed to be to compensate for the antique
awkwardness, crookedness, and obscurity of the passages, floors, and
windows, by quantities of clean linen spread about everywhere, and this
had a dazzling effect upon the travellers.

“’Tis too good for us—we can’t meet it!” said the elder woman, looking
round the apartment with misgiving as soon as they were left alone.

“I fear it is, too,” said Elizabeth. “But we must be respectable.”

“We must pay our way even before we must be respectable,” replied her
mother. “Mr. Henchard is too high for us to make ourselves known to
him, I much fear; so we’ve only our own pockets to depend on.”

“I know what I’ll do,” said Elizabeth-Jane after an interval of
waiting, during which their needs seemed quite forgotten under the
press of business below. And leaving the room, she descended the stairs
and penetrated to the bar.

If there was one good thing more than another which characterized this
single-hearted girl it was a willingness to sacrifice her personal
comfort and dignity to the common weal.

“As you seem busy here to-night, and mother’s not well off, might I
take out part of our accommodation by helping?” she asked of the
landlady.

The latter, who remained as fixed in the arm-chair as if she had been
melted into it when in a liquid state, and could not now be unstuck,
looked the girl up and down inquiringly, with her hands on the
chair-arms. Such arrangements as the one Elizabeth proposed were not
uncommon in country villages; but, though Casterbridge was
old-fashioned, the custom was well-nigh obsolete here. The mistress of
the house, however, was an easy woman to strangers, and she made no
objection. Thereupon Elizabeth, being instructed by nods and motions
from the taciturn landlord as to where she could find the different
things, trotted up and down stairs with materials for her own and her
parent’s meal.

While she was doing this the wood partition in the centre of the house
thrilled to its centre with the tugging of a bell-pull upstairs. A bell
below tinkled a note that was feebler in sound than the twanging of
wires and cranks that had produced it.

“’Tis the Scotch gentleman,” said the landlady omnisciently; and
turning her eyes to Elizabeth, “Now then, can you go and see if his
supper is on the tray? If it is you can take it up to him. The front
room over this.”

Elizabeth-Jane, though hungry, willingly postponed serving herself
awhile, and applied to the cook in the kitchen whence she brought forth
the tray of supper viands, and proceeded with it upstairs to the
apartment indicated. The accommodation of the Three Mariners was far
from spacious, despite the fair area of ground it covered. The room
demanded by intrusive beams and rafters, partitions, passages,
staircases, disused ovens, settles, and four-posters, left
comparatively small quarters for human beings. Moreover, this being at
a time before home-brewing was abandoned by the smaller victuallers,
and a house in which the twelve-bushel strength was still religiously
adhered to by the landlord in his ale, the quality of the liquor was
the chief attraction of the premises, so that everything had to make
way for utensils and operations in connection therewith. Thus Elizabeth
found that the Scotchman was located in a room quite close to the small
one that had been allotted to herself and her mother.

When she entered nobody was present but the young man himself—the same
whom she had seen lingering without the windows of the King’s Arms
Hotel. He was now idly reading a copy of the local paper, and was
hardly conscious of her entry, so that she looked at him quite coolly,
and saw how his forehead shone where the light caught it, and how
nicely his hair was cut, and the sort of velvet-pile or down that was
on the skin at the back of his neck, and how his cheek was so truly
curved as to be part of a globe, and how clearly drawn were the lids
and lashes which hid his bent eyes.

She set down the tray, spread his supper, and went away without a word.
On her arrival below the landlady, who was as kind as she was fat and
lazy, saw that Elizabeth-Jane was rather tired, though in her
earnestness to be useful she was waiving her own needs altogether. Mrs.
Stannidge thereupon said with a considerate peremptoriness that she and
her mother had better take their own suppers if they meant to have any.

Elizabeth fetched their simple provisions, as she had fetched the
Scotchman’s, and went up to the little chamber where she had left her
mother, noiselessly pushing open the door with the edge of the tray. To
her surprise her mother, instead of being reclined on the bed where she
had left her was in an erect position, with lips parted. At Elizabeth’s
entry she lifted her finger.

The meaning of this was soon apparent. The room allotted to the two
women had at one time served as a dressing-room to the Scotchman’s
chamber, as was evidenced by signs of a door of communication between
them—now screwed up and pasted over with the wall paper. But, as is
frequently the case with hotels of far higher pretensions than the
Three Mariners, every word spoken in either of these rooms was
distinctly audible in the other. Such sounds came through now.

Thus silently conjured Elizabeth deposited the tray, and her mother
whispered as she drew near, “’Tis he.”

“Who?” said the girl.

“The Mayor.”

The tremors in Susan Henchard’s tone might have led any person but one
so perfectly unsuspicious of the truth as the girl was, to surmise some
closer connection than the admitted simple kinship as a means of
accounting for them.

Two men were indeed talking in the adjoining chamber, the young
Scotchman and Henchard, who, having entered the inn while
Elizabeth-Jane was in the kitchen waiting for the supper, had been
deferentially conducted upstairs by host Stannidge himself. The girl
noiselessly laid out their little meal, and beckoned to her mother to
join her, which Mrs. Henchard mechanically did, her attention being
fixed on the conversation through the door.

“I merely strolled in on my way home to ask you a question about
something that has excited my curiosity,” said the Mayor, with careless
geniality. “But I see you have not finished supper.”

“Ay, but I will be done in a little! Ye needn’t go, sir. Take a seat.
I’ve almost done, and it makes no difference at all.”

Henchard seemed to take the seat offered, and in a moment he resumed:
“Well, first I should ask, did you write this?” A rustling of paper
followed.

“Yes, I did,” said the Scotchman.

“Then,” said Henchard, “I am under the impression that we have met by
accident while waiting for the morning to keep an appointment with each
other? My name is Henchard, ha’n’t you replied to an advertisement for
a corn-factor’s manager that I put into the paper—ha’n’t you come here
to see me about it?”

“No,” said the Scotchman, with some surprise.

“Surely you are the man,” went on Henchard insistingly, “who arranged
to come and see me? Joshua, Joshua, Jipp—Jopp—what was his name?”

“You’re wrong!” said the young man. “My name is Donald Farfrae. It is
true I am in the corren trade—but I have replied to no advertisement,
and arranged to see no one. I am on my way to Bristol—from there to the
other side of the warrld, to try my fortune in the great wheat-growing
districts of the West! I have some inventions useful to the trade, and
there is no scope for developing them heere.”

“To America—well, well,” said Henchard, in a tone of disappointment, so
strong as to make itself felt like a damp atmosphere. “And yet I could
have sworn you were the man!”

The Scotchman murmured another negative, and there was a silence, till
Henchard resumed: “Then I am truly and sincerely obliged to you for the
few words you wrote on that paper.”

“It was nothing, sir.”

“Well, it has a great importance for me just now. This row about my
grown wheat, which I declare to Heaven I didn’t know to be bad till the
people came complaining, has put me to my wits’ end. I’ve some hundreds
of quarters of it on hand; and if your renovating process will make it
wholesome, why, you can see what a quag ’twould get me out of. I saw in
a moment there might be truth in it. But I should like to have it
proved; and of course you don’t care to tell the steps of the process
sufficiently for me to do that, without my paying ye well for’t first.”

The young man reflected a moment or two. “I don’t know that I have any
objection,” he said. “I’m going to another country, and curing bad corn
is not the line I’ll take up there. Yes, I’ll tell ye the whole of
it—you’ll make more out of it heere than I will in a foreign country.
Just look heere a minute, sir. I can show ye by a sample in my
carpet-bag.”

The click of a lock followed, and there was a sifting and rustling;
then a discussion about so many ounces to the bushel, and drying, and
refrigerating, and so on.

“These few grains will be sufficient to show ye with,” came in the
young fellow’s voice; and after a pause, during which some operation
seemed to be intently watched by them both, he exclaimed, “There, now,
do you taste that.”

“It’s complete!—quite restored, or—well—nearly.”

“Quite enough restored to make good seconds out of it,” said the
Scotchman. “To fetch it back entirely is impossible; Nature won’t stand
so much as that, but heere you go a great way towards it. Well, sir,
that’s the process, I don’t value it, for it can be but of little use
in countries where the weather is more settled than in ours; and I’ll
be only too glad if it’s of service to you.”

“But hearken to me,” pleaded Henchard. “My business you know, is in
corn and in hay, but I was brought up as a hay-trusser simply, and hay
is what I understand best though I now do more in corn than in the
other. If you’ll accept the place, you shall manage the corn branch
entirely, and receive a commission in addition to salary.”

“You’re liberal—very liberal, but no, no—I cannet!” the young man still
replied, with some distress in his accents.

“So be it!” said Henchard conclusively. “Now—to change the subject—one
good turn deserves another; don’t stay to finish that miserable supper.
Come to my house, I can find something better for ’ee than cold ham and
ale.”

Donald Farfrae was grateful—said he feared he must decline—that he
wished to leave early next day.

“Very well,” said Henchard quickly, “please yourself. But I tell you,
young man, if this holds good for the bulk, as it has done for the
sample, you have saved my credit, stranger though you be. What shall I
pay you for this knowledge?”

“Nothing at all, nothing at all. It may not prove necessary to ye to
use it often, and I don’t value it at all. I thought I might just as
well let ye know, as you were in a difficulty, and they were harrd upon
ye.”

Henchard paused. “I shan’t soon forget this,” he said. “And from a
stranger!... I couldn’t believe you were not the man I had engaged!
Says I to myself, ‘He knows who I am, and recommends himself by this
stroke.’ And yet it turns out, after all, that you are not the man who
answered my advertisement, but a stranger!”

“Ay, ay; that’s so,” said the young man.

Henchard again suspended his words, and then his voice came
thoughtfully: “Your forehead, Farfrae, is something like my poor
brother’s—now dead and gone; and the nose, too, isn’t unlike his. You
must be, what—five foot nine, I reckon? I am six foot one and a half
out of my shoes. But what of that? In my business, ’tis true that
strength and bustle build up a firm. But judgment and knowledge are
what keep it established. Unluckily, I am bad at science, Farfrae; bad
at figures—a rule o’ thumb sort of man. You are just the reverse—I can
see that. I have been looking for such as you these two year, and yet
you are not for me. Well, before I go, let me ask this: Though you are
not the young man I thought you were, what’s the difference? Can’t ye
stay just the same? Have you really made up your mind about this
American notion? I won’t mince matters. I feel you would be invaluable
to me—that needn’t be said—and if you will bide and be my manager, I
will make it worth your while.”

“My plans are fixed,” said the young man, in negative tones. “I have
formed a scheme, and so we need na say any more about it. But will you
not drink with me, sir? I find this Casterbridge ale warreming to the
stomach.”

“No, no; I fain would, but I can’t,” said Henchard gravely, the
scraping of his chair informing the listeners that he was rising to
leave. “When I was a young man I went in for that sort of thing too
strong—far too strong—and was well-nigh ruined by it! I did a deed on
account of it which I shall be ashamed of to my dying day. It made such
an impression on me that I swore, there and then, that I’d drink
nothing stronger than tea for as many years as I was old that day. I
have kept my oath; and though, Farfrae, I am sometimes that dry in the
dog days that I could drink a quarter-barrel to the pitching, I think
o’ my oath, and touch no strong drink at all.”

“I’ll no’ press ye, sir—I’ll no’ press ye. I respect your vow.”

“Well, I shall get a manager somewhere, no doubt,” said Henchard, with
strong feeling in his tones. “But it will be long before I see one that
would suit me so well!”

The young man appeared much moved by Henchard’s warm convictions of his
value. He was silent till they reached the door. “I wish I could
stay—sincerely I would like to,” he replied. “But no—it cannet be! it
cannet! I want to see the warrld.”



VIII.

Thus they parted; and Elizabeth-Jane and her mother remained each in
her thoughts over their meal, the mother’s face being strangely bright
since Henchard’s avowal of shame for a past action. The quivering of
the partition to its core presently denoted that Donald Farfrae had
again rung his bell, no doubt to have his supper removed; for humming a
tune, and walking up and down, he seemed to be attracted by the lively
bursts of conversation and melody from the general company below. He
sauntered out upon the landing, and descended the staircase.

When Elizabeth-Jane had carried down his supper tray, and also that
used by her mother and herself, she found the bustle of serving to be
at its height below, as it always was at this hour. The young woman
shrank from having anything to do with the ground-floor serving, and
crept silently about observing the scene—so new to her, fresh from the
seclusion of a seaside cottage. In the general sitting-room, which was
large, she remarked the two or three dozen strong-backed chairs that
stood round against the wall, each fitted with its genial occupant; the
sanded floor; the black settle which, projecting endwise from the wall
within the door, permitted Elizabeth to be a spectator of all that went
on without herself being particularly seen.

The young Scotchman had just joined the guests. These, in addition to
the respectable master-tradesmen occupying the seats of privileges in
the bow-window and its neighbourhood, included an inferior set at the
unlighted end, whose seats were mere benches against the wall, and who
drank from cups instead of from glasses. Among the latter she noticed
some of those personages who had stood outside the windows of the
King’s Arms.

Behind their backs was a small window, with a wheel ventilator in one
of the panes, which would suddenly start off spinning with a jingling
sound, as suddenly stop, and as suddenly start again.

While thus furtively making her survey the opening words of a song
greeted her ears from the front of the settle, in a melody and accent
of peculiar charm. There had been some singing before she came down;
and now the Scotchman had made himself so soon at home that, at the
request of some of the master-tradesmen, he, too, was favouring the
room with a ditty.

Elizabeth-Jane was fond of music; she could not help pausing to listen;
and the longer she listened the more she was enraptured. She had never
heard any singing like this and it was evident that the majority of the
audience had not heard such frequently, for they were attentive to a
much greater degree than usual. They neither whispered, nor drank, nor
dipped their pipe-stems in their ale to moisten them, nor pushed the
mug to their neighbours. The singer himself grew emotional, till she
could imagine a tear in his eye as the words went on:—

“It’s hame, and it’s hame, hame fain would I be,
O hame, hame, hame to my ain countree!
There’s an eye that ever weeps, and a fair face will be fain,
As I pass through Annan Water with my bonnie bands again;
When the flower is in the bud, and the leaf upon the tree,
The lark shall sing me hame to my ain countree!”


There was a burst of applause, and a deep silence which was even more
eloquent than the applause. It was of such a kind that the snapping of
a pipe-stem too long for him by old Solomon Longways, who was one of
those gathered at the shady end of the room, seemed a harsh and
irreverent act. Then the ventilator in the window-pane spasmodically
started off for a new spin, and the pathos of Donald’s song was
temporarily effaced.

“’Twas not amiss—not at all amiss!” muttered Christopher Coney, who was
also present. And removing his pipe a finger’s breadth from his lips,
he said aloud, “Draw on with the next verse, young gentleman, please.”

“Yes. Let’s have it again, stranger,” said the glazier, a stout,
bucket-headed man, with a white apron rolled up round his waist. “Folks
don’t lift up their hearts like that in this part of the world.” And
turning aside, he said in undertones, “Who is the young man?—Scotch,
d’ye say?”

“Yes, straight from the mountains of Scotland, I believe,” replied
Coney.

Young Farfrae repeated the last verse. It was plain that nothing so
pathetic had been heard at the Three Mariners for a considerable time.
The difference of accent, the excitability of the singer, the intense
local feeling, and the seriousness with which he worked himself up to a
climax, surprised this set of worthies, who were only too prone to shut
up their emotions with caustic words.

“Danged if our country down here is worth singing about like that!”
continued the glazier, as the Scotchman again melodized with a dying
fall, “My ain countree!” “When you take away from among us the fools
and the rogues, and the lammigers, and the wanton hussies, and the
slatterns, and such like, there’s cust few left to ornament a song with
in Casterbridge, or the country round.”

“True,” said Buzzford, the dealer, looking at the grain of the table.
“Casterbridge is a old, hoary place o’ wickedness, by all account. ’Tis
recorded in history that we rebelled against the King one or two
hundred years ago, in the time of the Romans, and that lots of us was
hanged on Gallows Hill, and quartered, and our different jints sent
about the country like butcher’s meat; and for my part I can well
believe it.”

“What did ye come away from yer own country for, young maister, if ye
be so wownded about it?” inquired Christopher Coney, from the
background, with the tone of a man who preferred the original subject.
“Faith, it wasn’t worth your while on our account, for as Maister Billy
Wills says, we be bruckle folk here—the best o’ us hardly honest
sometimes, what with hard winters, and so many mouths to fill, and
Goda’mighty sending his little taties so terrible small to fill ’em
with. We don’t think about flowers and fair faces, not we—except in the
shape o’ cauliflowers and pigs’ chaps.”

“But, no!” said Donald Farfrae, gazing round into their faces with
earnest concern; “the best of ye hardly honest—not that surely? None of
ye has been stealing what didn’t belong to him?”

“Lord! no, no!” said Solomon Longways, smiling grimly. “That’s only his
random way o’ speaking. ’A was always such a man of underthoughts.”
(And reprovingly towards Christopher): “Don’t ye be so over-familiar
with a gentleman that ye know nothing of—and that’s travelled a’most
from the North Pole.”

Christopher Coney was silenced, and as he could get no public sympathy,
he mumbled his feelings to himself: “Be dazed, if I loved my country
half as well as the young feller do, I’d live by claning my neighbour’s
pigsties afore I’d go away! For my part I’ve no more love for my
country than I have for Botany Bay!”

“Come,” said Longways; “let the young man draw onward with his ballet,
or we shall be here all night.”

“That’s all of it,” said the singer apologetically.

“Soul of my body, then we’ll have another!” said the general dealer.

“Can you turn a strain to the ladies, sir?” inquired a fat woman with a
figured purple apron, the waiststring of which was overhung so far by
her sides as to be invisible.

“Let him breathe—let him breathe, Mother Cuxsom. He hain’t got his
second wind yet,” said the master glazier.

“Oh yes, but I have!” exclaimed the young man; and he at once rendered
“O Nannie” with faultless modulations, and another or two of the like
sentiment, winding up at their earnest request with “Auld Lang Syne.”

By this time he had completely taken possession of the hearts of the
Three Mariners’ inmates, including even old Coney. Notwithstanding an
occasional odd gravity which awoke their sense of the ludicrous for the
moment, they began to view him through a golden haze which the tone of
his mind seemed to raise around him. Casterbridge had
sentiment—Casterbridge had romance; but this stranger’s sentiment was
of differing quality. Or rather, perhaps, the difference was mainly
superficial; he was to them like the poet of a new school who takes his
contemporaries by storm; who is not really new, but is the first to
articulate what all his listeners have felt, though but dumbly till
then.

The silent landlord came and leant over the settle while the young man
sang; and even Mrs. Stannidge managed to unstick herself from the
framework of her chair in the bar and get as far as the door-post,
which movement she accomplished by rolling herself round, as a cask is
trundled on the chine by a drayman without losing much of its
perpendicular.

“And are you going to bide in Casterbridge, sir?” she asked.

“Ah—no!” said the Scotchman, with melancholy fatality in his voice,
“I’m only passing thirrough! I am on my way to Bristol, and on frae
there to foreign parts.”

“We be truly sorry to hear it,” said Solomon Longways. “We can ill
afford to lose tuneful wynd-pipes like yours when they fall among us.
And verily, to mak’ acquaintance with a man a-come from so far, from
the land o’ perpetual snow, as we may say, where wolves and wild boars
and other dangerous animalcules be as common as blackbirds
here-about—why, ’tis a thing we can’t do every day; and there’s good
sound information for bide-at-homes like we when such a man opens his
mouth.”

“Nay, but ye mistake my country,” said the young man, looking round
upon them with tragic fixity, till his eye lighted up and his cheek
kindled with a sudden enthusiasm to right their errors. “There are not
perpetual snow and wolves at all in it!—except snow in winter,
and—well—a little in summer just sometimes, and a ‘gaberlunzie’ or two
stalking about here and there, if ye may call them dangerous. Eh, but
you should take a summer jarreny to Edinboro’, and Arthur’s Seat, and
all round there, and then go on to the lochs, and all the Highland
scenery—in May and June—and you would never say ’tis the land of wolves
and perpetual snow!”

“Of course not—it stands to reason,” said Buzzford. “’Tis barren
ignorance that leads to such words. He’s a simple home-spun man, that
never was fit for good company—think nothing of him, sir.”

“And do ye carry your flock bed, and your quilt, and your crock, and
your bit of chiney? or do ye go in bare bones, as I may say?” inquired
Christopher Coney.

“I’ve sent on my luggage—though it isn’t much; for the voyage is long.”
Donald’s eyes dropped into a remote gaze as he added: “But I said to
myself, ‘Never a one of the prizes of life will I come by unless I
undertake it!’ and I decided to go.”

A general sense of regret, in which Elizabeth-Jane shared not least,
made itself apparent in the company. As she looked at Farfrae from the
back of the settle she decided that his statements showed him to be no
less thoughtful than his fascinating melodies revealed him to be
cordial and impassioned. She admired the serious light in which he
looked at serious things. He had seen no jest in ambiguities and
roguery, as the Casterbridge toss-pots had done; and rightly not—there
was none. She disliked those wretched humours of Christopher Coney and
his tribe; and he did not appreciate them. He seemed to feel exactly as
she felt about life and its surroundings—that they were a tragical
rather than a comical thing; that though one could be gay on occasion,
moments of gaiety were interludes, and no part of the actual drama. It
was extraordinary how similar their views were.

Though it was still early the young Scotchman expressed his wish to
retire, whereupon the landlady whispered to Elizabeth to run upstairs
and turn down his bed. She took a candlestick and proceeded on her
mission, which was the act of a few moments only. When, candle in hand,
she reached the top of the stairs on her way down again, Mr. Farfrae
was at the foot coming up. She could not very well retreat; they met
and passed in the turn of the staircase.

She must have appeared interesting in some way—not-withstanding her
plain dress—or rather, possibly, in consequence of it, for she was a
girl characterized by earnestness and soberness of mien, with which
simple drapery accorded well. Her face flushed, too, at the slight
awkwardness of the meeting, and she passed him with her eyes bent on
the candle-flame that she carried just below her nose. Thus it happened
that when confronting her he smiled; and then, with the manner of a
temporarily light-hearted man, who has started himself on a flight of
song whose momentum he cannot readily check, he softly tuned an old
ditty that she seemed to suggest—

“As I came in by my bower door,
    As day was waxin’ wearie,
Oh wha came tripping down the stair
    But bonnie Peg my dearie.”


Elizabeth-Jane, rather disconcerted, hastened on; and the Scotchman’s
voice died away, humming more of the same within the closed door of his
room.

Here the scene and sentiment ended for the present. When soon after,
the girl rejoined her mother, the latter was still in thought—on quite
another matter than a young man’s song.

“We’ve made a mistake,” she whispered (that the Scotchman might not
overhear). “On no account ought ye to have helped serve here to-night.
Not because of ourselves, but for the sake of _him_. If he should
befriend us, and take us up, and then find out what you did when
staying here, ’twould grieve and wound his natural pride as Mayor of
the town.”

Elizabeth, who would perhaps have been more alarmed at this than her
mother had she known the real relationship, was not much disturbed
about it as things stood. Her “he” was another man than her poor
mother’s. “For myself,” she said, “I didn’t at all mind waiting a
little upon him. He’s so respectable, and educated—far above the rest
of ’em in the inn. They thought him very simple not to know their grim
broad way of talking about themselves here. But of course he didn’t
know—he was too refined in his mind to know such things!” Thus she
earnestly pleaded.

Meanwhile, the “he” of her mother was not so far away as even they
thought. After leaving the Three Mariners he had sauntered up and down
the empty High Street, passing and repassing the inn in his promenade.
When the Scotchman sang his voice had reached Henchard’s ears through
the heart-shaped holes in the window-shutters, and had led him to pause
outside them a long while.

“To be sure, to be sure, how that fellow does draw me!” he had said to
himself. “I suppose ’tis because I’m so lonely. I’d have given him a
third share in the business to have stayed!”



IX.

When Elizabeth-Jane opened the hinged casement next morning the mellow
air brought in the feel of imminent autumn almost as distinctly as if
she had been in the remotest hamlet. Casterbridge was the complement of
the rural life around, not its urban opposite. Bees and butterflies in
the cornfields at the top of the town, who desired to get to the meads
at the bottom, took no circuitous course, but flew straight down High
Street without any apparent consciousness that they were traversing
strange latitudes. And in autumn airy spheres of thistledown floated
into the same street, lodged upon the shop fronts, blew into drains,
and innumerable tawny and yellow leaves skimmed along the pavement, and
stole through people’s doorways into their passages with a hesitating
scratch on the floor, like the skirts of timid visitors.

Hearing voices, one of which was close at hand, she withdrew her head
and glanced from behind the window-curtains. Mr. Henchard—now habited
no longer as a great personage, but as a thriving man of business—was
pausing on his way up the middle of the street, and the Scotchman was
looking from the window adjoining her own. Henchard it appeared, had
gone a little way past the inn before he had noticed his acquaintance
of the previous evening. He came back a few steps, Donald Farfrae
opening the window further.

“And you are off soon, I suppose?” said Henchard upwards.

“Yes—almost this moment, sir,” said the other. “Maybe I’ll walk on till
the coach makes up on me.”

“Which way?”

“The way ye are going.”

“Then shall we walk together to the top o’ town?”

“If ye’ll wait a minute,” said the Scotchman.

In a few minutes the latter emerged, bag in hand. Henchard looked at
the bag as at an enemy. It showed there was no mistake about the young
man’s departure. “Ah, my lad,” he said, “you should have been a wise
man, and have stayed with me.”

“Yes, yes—it might have been wiser,” said Donald, looking
microscopically at the houses that were furthest off. “It is only
telling ye the truth when I say my plans are vague.”

They had by this time passed on from the precincts of the inn, and
Elizabeth-Jane heard no more. She saw that they continued in
conversation, Henchard turning to the other occasionally, and
emphasizing some remark with a gesture. Thus they passed the King’s
Arms Hotel, the Market House, St. Peter’s churchyard wall, ascending to
the upper end of the long street till they were small as two grains of
corn; when they bent suddenly to the right into the Bristol Road, and
were out of view.

“He was a good man—and he’s gone,” she said to herself. “I was nothing
to him, and there was no reason why he should have wished me good-bye.”

The simple thought, with its latent sense of slight, had moulded itself
out of the following little fact: when the Scotchman came out at the
door he had by accident glanced up at her; and then he had looked away
again without nodding, or smiling, or saying a word.

“You are still thinking, mother,” she said, when she turned inwards.

“Yes; I am thinking of Mr. Henchard’s sudden liking for that young man.
He was always so. Now, surely, if he takes so warmly to people who are
not related to him at all, may he not take as warmly to his own kin?”

While they debated this question a procession of five large waggons
went past, laden with hay up to the bedroom windows. They came in from
the country, and the steaming horses had probably been travelling a
great part of the night. To the shaft of each hung a little board, on
which was painted in white letters, “Henchard, corn-factor and
hay-merchant.” The spectacle renewed his wife’s conviction that, for
her daughter’s sake, she should strain a point to rejoin him.

The discussion was continued during breakfast, and the end of it was
that Mrs. Henchard decided, for good or for ill, to send Elizabeth-Jane
with a message to Henchard, to the effect that his relative Susan, a
sailor’s widow, was in the town; leaving it to him to say whether or
not he would recognize her. What had brought her to this determination
were chiefly two things. He had been described as a lonely widower; and
he had expressed shame for a past transaction of his life. There was
promise in both.

“If he says no,” she enjoined, as Elizabeth-Jane stood, bonnet on,
ready to depart; “if he thinks it does not become the good position he
has reached to in the town, to own—to let us call on him as—his distant
kinfolk, say, ‘Then, sir, we would rather not intrude; we will leave
Casterbridge as quietly as we have come, and go back to our own
country.’ ...I almost feel that I would rather he did say so, as I have
not seen him for so many years, and we are so—little allied to him!”

“And if he say yes?” inquired the more sanguine one.

“In that case,” answered Mrs. Henchard cautiously, “ask him to write me
a note, saying when and how he will see us—or _me_.”

Elizabeth-Jane went a few steps towards the landing. “And tell him,”
continued her mother, “that I fully know I have no claim upon him—that
I am glad to find he is thriving; that I hope his life may be long and
happy—there, go.” Thus with a half-hearted willingness, a smothered
reluctance, did the poor forgiving woman start her unconscious daughter
on this errand.

It was about ten o’clock, and market-day, when Elizabeth paced up the
High Street, in no great hurry; for to herself her position was only
that of a poor relation deputed to hunt up a rich one. The front doors
of the private houses were mostly left open at this warm autumn time,
no thought of umbrella stealers disturbing the minds of the placid
burgesses. Hence, through the long, straight, entrance passages thus
unclosed could be seen, as through tunnels, the mossy gardens at the
back, glowing with nasturtiums, fuchsias, scarlet geraniums, “bloody
warriors,” snapdragons, and dahlias, this floral blaze being backed by
crusted grey stone-work remaining from a yet remoter Casterbridge than
the venerable one visible in the street. The old-fashioned fronts of
these houses, which had older than old-fashioned backs, rose sheer from
the pavement, into which the bow windows protruded like bastions,
necessitating a pleasing _chassez-déchassez_ movement to the
time-pressed pedestrian at every few yards. He was bound also to evolve
other Terpsichorean figures in respect of door-steps, scrapers,
cellar-hatches, church buttresses, and the overhanging angles of walls
which, originally unobtrusive, had become bow-legged and knock-kneed.

In addition to these fixed obstacles which spoke so cheerfully of
individual unrestraint as to boundaries, movables occupied the path and
roadway to a perplexing extent. First the vans of the carriers in and
out of Casterbridge, who hailed from Mellstock, Weatherbury, The
Hintocks, Sherton-Abbas, Kingsbere, Overcombe, and many other towns and
villages round. Their owners were numerous enough to be regarded as a
tribe, and had almost distinctiveness enough to be regarded as a race.
Their vans had just arrived, and were drawn up on each side of the
street in close file, so as to form at places a wall between the
pavement and the roadway. Moreover every shop pitched out half its
contents upon trestles and boxes on the kerb, extending the display
each week a little further and further into the roadway, despite the
expostulations of the two feeble old constables, until there remained
but a tortuous defile for carriages down the centre of the street,
which afforded fine opportunities for skill with the reins. Over the
pavement on the sunny side of the way hung shopblinds so constructed as
to give the passenger’s hat a smart buffet off his head, as from the
unseen hands of Cranstoun’s Goblin Page, celebrated in romantic lore.

Horses for sale were tied in rows, their forelegs on the pavement,
their hind legs in the street, in which position they occasionally
nipped little boys by the shoulder who were passing to school. And any
inviting recess in front of a house that had been modestly kept back
from the general line was utilized by pig-dealers as a pen for their
stock.

The yeomen, farmers, dairymen, and townsfolk, who came to transact
business in these ancient streets, spoke in other ways than by
articulation. Not to hear the words of your interlocutor in
metropolitan centres is to know nothing of his meaning. Here the face,
the arms, the hat, the stick, the body throughout spoke equally with
the tongue. To express satisfaction the Casterbridge market-man added
to his utterance a broadening of the cheeks, a crevicing of the eyes, a
throwing back of the shoulders, which was intelligible from the other
end of the street. If he wondered, though all Henchard’s carts and
waggons were rattling past him, you knew it from perceiving the inside
of his crimson mouth, and a target-like circling of his eyes.
Deliberation caused sundry attacks on the moss of adjoining walls with
the end of his stick, a change of his hat from the horizontal to the
less so; a sense of tediousness announced itself in a lowering of the
person by spreading the knees to a lozenge-shaped aperture and
contorting the arms. Chicanery, subterfuge, had hardly a place in the
streets of this honest borough to all appearance; and it was said that
the lawyers in the Court House hard by occasionally threw in strong
arguments for the other side out of pure generosity (though apparently
by mischance) when advancing their own.

Thus Casterbridge was in most respects but the pole, focus, or
nerve-knot of the surrounding country life; differing from the many
manufacturing towns which are as foreign bodies set down, like boulders
on a plain, in a green world with which they have nothing in common.
Casterbridge lived by agriculture at one remove further from the
fountainhead than the adjoining villages—no more. The townsfolk
understood every fluctuation in the rustic’s condition, for it affected
their receipts as much as the labourer’s; they entered into the
troubles and joys which moved the aristocratic families ten miles
round—for the same reason. And even at the dinner-parties of the
professional families the subjects of discussion were corn,
cattle-disease, sowing and reaping, fencing and planting; while
politics were viewed by them less from their own standpoint of
burgesses with rights and privileges than from the standpoint of their
country neighbours.

All the venerable contrivances and confusions which delighted the eye
by their quaintness, and in a measure reasonableness, in this rare old
market-town, were metropolitan novelties to the unpractised eyes of
Elizabeth-Jane, fresh from netting fish-seines in a seaside cottage.
Very little inquiry was necessary to guide her footsteps. Henchard’s
house was one of the best, faced with dull red-and-grey old brick. The
front door was open, and, as in other houses, she could see through the
passage to the end of the garden—nearly a quarter of a mile off.

Mr. Henchard was not in the house, but in the store-yard. She was
conducted into the mossy garden, and through a door in the wall, which
was studded with rusty nails speaking of generations of fruit-trees
that had been trained there. The door opened upon the yard, and here
she was left to find him as she could. It was a place flanked by
hay-barns, into which tons of fodder, all in trusses, were being packed
from the waggons she had seen pass the inn that morning. On other sides
of the yard were wooden granaries on stone staddles, to which access
was given by Flemish ladders, and a store-house several floors high.
Wherever the doors of these places were open, a closely packed throng
of bursting wheat-sacks could be seen standing inside, with the air of
awaiting a famine that would not come.

She wandered about this place, uncomfortably conscious of the impending
interview, till she was quite weary of searching; she ventured to
inquire of a boy in what quarter Mr. Henchard could be found. He
directed her to an office which she had not seen before, and knocking
at the door she was answered by a cry of “Come in.”

Elizabeth turned the handle; and there stood before her, bending over
some sample-bags on a table, not the corn-merchant, but the young
Scotchman Mr. Farfrae—in the act of pouring some grains of wheat from
one hand to the other. His hat hung on a peg behind him, and the roses
of his carpet-bag glowed from the corner of the room.

Having toned her feelings and arranged words on her lips for Mr.
Henchard, and for him alone, she was for the moment confounded.

“Yes, what it is?” said the Scotchman, like a man who permanently ruled
there.

She said she wanted to see Mr. Henchard.

“Ah, yes; will you wait a minute? He’s engaged just now,” said the
young man, apparently not recognizing her as the girl at the inn. He
handed her a chair, bade her sit down and turned to his sample-bags
again. While Elizabeth-Jane sits waiting in great amaze at the young
man’s presence we may briefly explain how he came there.

When the two new acquaintances had passed out of sight that morning
towards the Bath and Bristol road they went on silently, except for a
few commonplaces, till they had gone down an avenue on the town walls
called the Chalk Walk, leading to an angle where the North and West
escarpments met. From this high corner of the square earthworks a vast
extent of country could be seen. A footpath ran steeply down the green
slope, conducting from the shady promenade on the walls to a road at
the bottom of the scarp. It was by this path the Scotchman had to
descend.

“Well, here’s success to ’ee,” said Henchard, holding out his right
hand and leaning with his left upon the wicket which protected the
descent. In the act there was the inelegance of one whose feelings are
nipped and wishes defeated. “I shall often think of this time, and of
how you came at the very moment to throw a light upon my difficulty.”

Still holding the young man’s hand he paused, and then added
deliberately: “Now I am not the man to let a cause be lost for want of
a word. And before ye are gone for ever I’ll speak. Once more, will ye
stay? There it is, flat and plain. You can see that it isn’t all
selfishness that makes me press ’ee; for my business is not quite so
scientific as to require an intellect entirely out of the common.
Others would do for the place without doubt. Some selfishness perhaps
there is, but there is more; it isn’t for me to repeat what. Come bide
with me—and name your own terms. I’ll agree to ’em willingly and
’ithout a word of gainsaying; for, hang it, Farfrae, I like thee well!”

The young man’s hand remained steady in Henchard’s for a moment or two.
He looked over the fertile country that stretched beneath them, then
backward along the shaded walk reaching to the top of the town. His
face flushed.

“I never expected this—I did not!” he said. “It’s Providence! Should
any one go against it? No; I’ll not go to America; I’ll stay and be
your man!”

His hand, which had lain lifeless in Henchard’s, returned the latter’s
grasp.

“Done,” said Henchard.

“Done,” said Donald Farfrae.

The face of Mr. Henchard beamed forth a satisfaction that was almost
fierce in its strength. “Now you are my friend!” he exclaimed. “Come
back to my house; let’s clinch it at once by clear terms, so as to be
comfortable in our minds.” Farfrae caught up his bag and retraced the
North-West Avenue in Henchard’s company as he had come. Henchard was
all confidence now.

“I am the most distant fellow in the world when I don’t care for a
man,” he said. “But when a man takes my fancy he takes it strong. Now I
am sure you can eat another breakfast? You couldn’t have eaten much so
early, even if they had anything at that place to gi’e thee, which they
hadn’t; so come to my house and we will have a solid, staunch tuck-in,
and settle terms in black-and-white if you like; though my word’s my
bond. I can always make a good meal in the morning. I’ve got a splendid
cold pigeon-pie going just now. You can have some home-brewed if you
want to, you know.”

“It is too airly in the morning for that,” said Farfrae with a smile.

“Well, of course, I didn’t know. I don’t drink it because of my oath,
but I am obliged to brew for my work-people.”

Thus talking they returned, and entered Henchard’s premises by the back
way or traffic entrance. Here the matter was settled over the
breakfast, at which Henchard heaped the young Scotchman’s plate to a
prodigal fulness. He would not rest satisfied till Farfrae had written
for his luggage from Bristol, and dispatched the letter to the
post-office. When it was done this man of strong impulses declared that
his new friend should take up his abode in his house—at least till some
suitable lodgings could be found.

He then took Farfrae round and showed him the place, and the stores of
grain, and other stock; and finally entered the offices where the
younger of them has already been discovered by Elizabeth.



X.

While she still sat under the Scotchman’s eyes a man came up to the
door, reaching it as Henchard opened the door of the inner office to
admit Elizabeth. The newcomer stepped forward like the quicker cripple
at Bethesda, and entered in her stead. She could hear his words to
Henchard: “Joshua Jopp, sir—by appointment—the new manager.”

“The new manager!—he’s in his office,” said Henchard bluntly.

“In his office!” said the man, with a stultified air.

“I mentioned Thursday,” said Henchard; “and as you did not keep your
appointment, I have engaged another manager. At first I thought he must
be you. Do you think I can wait when business is in question?”

“You said Thursday or Saturday, sir,” said the newcomer, pulling out a
letter.

“Well, you are too late,” said the corn-factor. “I can say no more.”

“You as good as engaged me,” murmured the man.

“Subject to an interview,” said Henchard. “I am sorry for you—very
sorry indeed. But it can’t be helped.”

There was no more to be said, and the man came out, encountering
Elizabeth-Jane in his passage. She could see that his mouth twitched
with anger, and that bitter disappointment was written in his face
everywhere.

Elizabeth-Jane now entered, and stood before the master of the
premises. His dark pupils—which always seemed to have a red spark of
light in them, though this could hardly be a physical fact—turned
indifferently round under his dark brows until they rested on her
figure. “Now then, what is it, my young woman?” he said blandly.

“Can I speak to you—not on business, sir?” said she.

“Yes—I suppose.” He looked at her more thoughtfully.

“I am sent to tell you, sir,” she innocently went on, “that a distant
relative of yours by marriage, Susan Newson, a sailor’s widow, is in
the town, and to ask whether you would wish to see her.”

The rich _rouge-et-noir_ of his countenance underwent a slight change.
“Oh—Susan is—still alive?” he asked with difficulty.

“Yes, sir.”

“Are you her daughter?”

“Yes, sir—her only daughter.”

“What—do you call yourself—your Christian name?”

“Elizabeth-Jane, sir.”

“Newson?”

“Elizabeth-Jane Newson.”

This at once suggested to Henchard that the transaction of his early
married life at Weydon Fair was unrecorded in the family history. It
was more than he could have expected. His wife had behaved kindly to
him in return for his unkindness, and had never proclaimed her wrong to
her child or to the world.

“I am—a good deal interested in your news,” he said. “And as this is
not a matter of business, but pleasure, suppose we go indoors.”

It was with a gentle delicacy of manner, surprising to Elizabeth, that
he showed her out of the office and through the outer room, where
Donald Farfrae was overhauling bins and samples with the inquiring
inspection of a beginner in charge. Henchard preceded her through the
door in the wall to the suddenly changed scene of the garden and
flowers, and onward into the house. The dining-room to which he
introduced her still exhibited the remnants of the lavish breakfast
laid for Farfrae. It was furnished to profusion with heavy mahogany
furniture of the deepest red-Spanish hues. Pembroke tables, with leaves
hanging so low that they well-nigh touched the floor, stood against the
walls on legs and feet shaped like those of an elephant, and on one lay
three huge folio volumes—a Family Bible, a “Josephus,” and a “Whole
Duty of Man.” In the chimney corner was a fire-grate with a fluted
semi-circular back, having urns and festoons cast in relief thereon,
and the chairs were of the kind which, since that day, has cast lustre
upon the names of Chippendale and Sheraton, though, in point of fact,
their patterns may have been such as those illustrious carpenters never
saw or heard of.

“Sit down—Elizabeth-Jane—sit down,” he said, with a shake in his voice
as he uttered her name, and sitting down himself he allowed his hands
to hang between his knees while he looked upon the carpet. “Your
mother, then, is quite well?”

“She is rather worn out, sir, with travelling.”

“A sailor’s widow—when did he die?”

“Father was lost last spring.”

Henchard winced at the word “father,” thus applied. “Do you and she
come from abroad—America or Australia?” he asked.

“No. We have been in England some years. I was twelve when we came here
from Canada.”

“Ah; exactly.” By such conversation he discovered the circumstances
which had enveloped his wife and her child in such total obscurity that
he had long ago believed them to be in their graves. These things being
clear, he returned to the present. “And where is your mother staying?”

“At the Three Mariners.”

“And you are her daughter Elizabeth-Jane?” repeated Henchard. He arose,
came close to her, and glanced in her face. “I think,” he said,
suddenly turning away with a wet eye, “you shall take a note from me to
your mother. I should like to see her.... She is not left very well off
by her late husband?” His eye fell on Elizabeth’s clothes, which,
though a respectable suit of black, and her very best, were decidedly
old-fashioned even to Casterbridge eyes.

“Not very well,” she said, glad that he had divined this without her
being obliged to express it.

He sat down at the table and wrote a few lines, next taking from his
pocket-book a five-pound note, which he put in the envelope with the
letter, adding to it, as by an afterthought, five shillings. Sealing
the whole up carefully, he directed it to “Mrs. Newson, Three Mariners
Inn,” and handed the packet to Elizabeth.

“Deliver it to her personally, please,” said Henchard. “Well, I am glad
to see you here, Elizabeth-Jane—very glad. We must have a long talk
together—but not just now.”

He took her hand at parting, and held it so warmly that she, who had
known so little friendship, was much affected, and tears rose to her
aerial-grey eyes. The instant that she was gone Henchard’s state showed
itself more distinctly; having shut the door he sat in his dining-room
stiffly erect, gazing at the opposite wall as if he read his history
there.

“Begad!” he suddenly exclaimed, jumping up. “I didn’t think of that.
Perhaps these are impostors—and Susan and the child dead after all!”

However, a something in Elizabeth-Jane soon assured him that, as
regarded her, at least, there could be little doubt. And a few hours
would settle the question of her mother’s identity; for he had arranged
in his note to see her that evening.

“It never rains but it pours!” said Henchard. His keenly excited
interest in his new friend the Scotchman was now eclipsed by this
event, and Donald Farfrae saw so little of him during the rest of the
day that he wondered at the suddenness of his employer’s moods.

In the meantime Elizabeth had reached the inn. Her mother, instead of
taking the note with the curiosity of a poor woman expecting
assistance, was much moved at sight of it. She did not read it at once,
asking Elizabeth to describe her reception, and the very words Mr.
Henchard used. Elizabeth’s back was turned when her mother opened the
letter. It ran thus:—

“Meet me at eight o’clock this evening, if you can, at the Ring on the
Budmouth road. The place is easy to find. I can say no more now. The
news upsets me almost. The girl seems to be in ignorance. Keep her so
till I have seen you. M. H.”


He said nothing about the enclosure of five guineas. The amount was
significant; it may tacitly have said to her that he bought her back
again. She waited restlessly for the close of the day, telling
Elizabeth-Jane that she was invited to see Mr. Henchard; that she would
go alone. But she said nothing to show that the place of meeting was
not at his house, nor did she hand the note to Elizabeth.



XI.

The Ring at Casterbridge was merely the local name of one of the finest
Roman Amphitheatres, if not the very finest, remaining in Britain.

Casterbridge announced old Rome in every street, alley, and precinct.
It looked Roman, bespoke the art of Rome, concealed dead men of Rome.
It was impossible to dig more than a foot or two deep about the town
fields and gardens without coming upon some tall soldier or other of
the Empire, who had lain there in his silent unobtrusive rest for a
space of fifteen hundred years. He was mostly found lying on his side,
in an oval scoop in the chalk, like a chicken in its shell; his knees
drawn up to his chest; sometimes with the remains of his spear against
his arm, a fibula or brooch of bronze on his breast or forehead, an urn
at his knees, a jar at his throat, a bottle at his mouth; and mystified
conjecture pouring down upon him from the eyes of Casterbridge street
boys and men, who had turned a moment to gaze at the familiar spectacle
as they passed by.

Imaginative inhabitants, who would have felt an unpleasantness at the
discovery of a comparatively modern skeleton in their gardens, were
quite unmoved by these hoary shapes. They had lived so long ago, their
time was so unlike the present, their hopes and motives were so widely
removed from ours, that between them and the living there seemed to
stretch a gulf too wide for even a spirit to pass.

The Amphitheatre was a huge circular enclosure, with a notch at
opposite extremities of its diameter north and south. From its sloping
internal form it might have been called the spittoon of the Jötuns. It
was to Casterbridge what the ruined Coliseum is to modern Rome, and was
nearly of the same magnitude. The dusk of evening was the proper hour
at which a true impression of this suggestive place could be received.
Standing in the middle of the arena at that time there by degrees
became apparent its real vastness, which a cursory view from the summit
at noon-day was apt to obscure. Melancholy, impressive, lonely, yet
accessible from every part of the town, the historic circle was the
frequent spot for appointments of a furtive kind. Intrigues were
arranged there; tentative meetings were there experimented after
divisions and feuds. But one kind of appointment—in itself the most
common of any—seldom had place in the Amphitheatre: that of happy
lovers.

Why, seeing that it was pre-eminently an airy, accessible, and
sequestered spot for interviews, the cheerfullest form of those
occurrences never took kindly to the soil of the ruin, would be a
curious inquiry. Perhaps it was because its associations had about them
something sinister. Its history proved that. Apart from the sanguinary
nature of the games originally played therein, such incidents attached
to its past as these: that for scores of years the town-gallows had
stood at one corner; that in 1705 a woman who had murdered her husband
was half-strangled and then burnt there in the presence of ten thousand
spectators. Tradition reports that at a certain stage of the burning
her heart burst and leapt out of her body, to the terror of them all,
and that not one of those ten thousand people ever cared particularly
for hot roast after that. In addition to these old tragedies,
pugilistic encounters almost to the death had come off down to recent
dates in that secluded arena, entirely invisible to the outside world
save by climbing to the top of the enclosure, which few townspeople in
the daily round of their lives ever took the trouble to do. So that,
though close to the turnpike-road, crimes might be perpetrated there
unseen at mid-day.

Some boys had latterly tried to impart gaiety to the ruin by using the
central arena as a cricket-ground. But the game usually languished for
the aforesaid reason—the dismal privacy which the earthen circle
enforced, shutting out every appreciative passer’s vision, every
commendatory remark from outsiders—everything, except the sky; and to
play at games in such circumstances was like acting to an empty house.
Possibly, too, the boys were timid, for some old people said that at
certain moments in the summer time, in broad daylight, persons sitting
with a book or dozing in the arena had, on lifting their eyes, beheld
the slopes lined with a gazing legion of Hadrian’s soldiery as if
watching the gladiatorial combat; and had heard the roar of their
excited voices, that the scene would remain but a moment, like a
lightning flash, and then disappear.

It was related that there still remained under the south entrance
excavated cells for the reception of the wild animals and athletes who
took part in the games. The arena was still smooth and circular, as if
used for its original purpose not so very long ago. The sloping
pathways by which spectators had ascended to their seats were pathways
yet. But the whole was grown over with grass, which now, at the end of
summer, was bearded with withered bents that formed waves under the
brush of the wind, returning to the attentive ear Æolian modulations,
and detaining for moments the flying globes of thistledown.

Henchard had chosen this spot as being the safest from observation
which he could think of for meeting his long-lost wife, and at the same
time as one easily to be found by a stranger after nightfall. As Mayor
of the town, with a reputation to keep up, he could not invite her to
come to his house till some definite course had been decided on.

Just before eight he approached the deserted earth-work and entered by
the south path which descended over the _débris_ of the former dens. In
a few moments he could discern a female figure creeping in by the great
north gap, or public gateway. They met in the middle of the arena.
Neither spoke just at first—there was no necessity for speech—and the
poor woman leant against Henchard, who supported her in his arms.

“I don’t drink,” he said in a low, halting, apologetic voice. “You
hear, Susan?—I don’t drink now—I haven’t since that night.” Those were
his first words.

He felt her bow her head in acknowledgment that she understood. After a
minute or two he again began:

“If I had known you were living, Susan! But there was every reason to
suppose you and the child were dead and gone. I took every possible
step to find you—travelled—advertised. My opinion at last was that you
had started for some colony with that man, and had been drowned on your
voyage. Why did you keep silent like this?”

“O Michael! because of him—what other reason could there be? I thought
I owed him faithfulness to the end of one of our lives—foolishly I
believed there was something solemn and binding in the bargain; I
thought that even in honour I dared not desert him when he had paid so
much for me in good faith. I meet you now only as his widow—I consider
myself that, and that I have no claim upon you. Had he not died I
should never have come—never! Of that you may be sure.”

“Tut-tut! How could you be so simple?”

“I don’t know. Yet it would have been very wicked—if I had not thought
like that!” said Susan, almost crying.

“Yes—yes—so it would. It is only that which makes me feel ’ee an
innocent woman. But—to lead me into this!”

“What, Michael?” she asked, alarmed.

“Why, this difficulty about our living together again, and
Elizabeth-Jane. She cannot be told all—she would so despise us both
that—I could not bear it!”

“That was why she was brought up in ignorance of you. I could not bear
it either.”

“Well—we must talk of a plan for keeping her in her present belief, and
getting matters straight in spite of it. You have heard I am in a large
way of business here—that I am Mayor of the town, and churchwarden, and
I don’t know what all?”

“Yes,” she murmured.

“These things, as well as the dread of the girl discovering our
disgrace, makes it necessary to act with extreme caution. So that I
don’t see how you two can return openly to my house as the wife and
daughter I once treated badly, and banished from me; and there’s the
rub o’t.”

“We’ll go away at once. I only came to see—”

“No, no, Susan; you are not to go—you mistake me!” he said with kindly
severity. “I have thought of this plan: that you and Elizabeth take a
cottage in the town as the widow Mrs. Newson and her daughter; that I
meet you, court you, and marry you. Elizabeth-Jane coming to my house
as my stepdaughter. The thing is so natural and easy that it is half
done in thinking o’t. This would leave my shady, headstrong,
disgraceful life as a young man absolutely unopened; the secret would
be yours and mine only; and I should have the pleasure of seeing my own
only child under my roof, as well as my wife.”

“I am quite in your hands, Michael,” she said meekly. “I came here for
the sake of Elizabeth; for myself, if you tell me to leave again
to-morrow morning, and never come near you more, I am content to go.”

“Now, now; we don’t want to hear that,” said Henchard gently. “Of
course you won’t leave again. Think over the plan I have proposed for a
few hours; and if you can’t hit upon a better one we’ll adopt it. I
have to be away for a day or two on business, unfortunately; but during
that time you can get lodgings—the only ones in the town fit for you
are those over the china-shop in High Street—and you can also look for
a cottage.”

“If the lodgings are in High Street they are dear, I suppose?”

“Never mind—you _must_ start genteel if our plan is to be carried out.
Look to me for money. Have you enough till I come back?”

“Quite,” said she.

“And are you comfortable at the inn?”

“O yes.”

“And the girl is quite safe from learning the shame of her case and
ours?—that’s what makes me most anxious of all.”

“You would be surprised to find how unlikely she is to dream of the
truth. How could she ever suppose such a thing?”

“True!”

“I like the idea of repeating our marriage,” said Mrs. Henchard, after
a pause. “It seems the only right course, after all this. Now I think I
must go back to Elizabeth-Jane, and tell her that our kinsman, Mr.
Henchard, kindly wishes us to stay in the town.”

“Very well—arrange that yourself. I’ll go some way with you.”

“No, no. Don’t run any risk!” said his wife anxiously. “I can find my
way back—it is not late. Please let me go alone.”

“Right,” said Henchard. “But just one word. Do you forgive me, Susan?”

She murmured something; but seemed to find it difficult to frame her
answer.

“Never mind—all in good time,” said he. “Judge me by my future
works—good-bye!”

He retreated, and stood at the upper side of the Amphitheatre while his
wife passed out through the lower way, and descended under the trees to
the town. Then Henchard himself went homeward, going so fast that by
the time he reached his door he was almost upon the heels of the
unconscious woman from whom he had just parted. He watched her up the
street, and turned into his house.



XII.

On entering his own door after watching his wife out of sight, the
Mayor walked on through the tunnel-shaped passage into the garden, and
thence by the back door towards the stores and granaries. A light shone
from the office-window, and there being no blind to screen the interior
Henchard could see Donald Farfrae still seated where he had left him,
initiating himself into the managerial work of the house by overhauling
the books. Henchard entered, merely observing, “Don’t let me interrupt
you, if ye will stay so late.”

He stood behind Farfrae’s chair, watching his dexterity in clearing up
the numerical fogs which had been allowed to grow so thick in
Henchard’s books as almost to baffle even the Scotchman’s perspicacity.
The corn-factor’s mien was half admiring, and yet it was not without a
dash of pity for the tastes of any one who could care to give his mind
to such finnikin details. Henchard himself was mentally and physically
unfit for grubbing subtleties from soiled paper; he had in a modern
sense received the education of Achilles, and found penmanship a
tantalizing art.

“You shall do no more to-night,” he said at length, spreading his great
hand over the paper. “There’s time enough to-morrow. Come indoors with
me and have some supper. Now you shall! I am determined on’t.” He shut
the account-books with friendly force.

Donald had wished to get to his lodgings; but he already saw that his
friend and employer was a man who knew no moderation in his requests
and impulses, and he yielded gracefully. He liked Henchard’s warmth,
even if it inconvenienced him; the great difference in their characters
adding to the liking.

They locked up the office, and the young man followed his companion
through the private little door which, admitting directly into
Henchard’s garden, permitted a passage from the utilitarian to the
beautiful at one step. The garden was silent, dewy, and full of
perfume. It extended a long way back from the house, first as lawn and
flower-beds, then as fruit-garden, where the long-tied espaliers, as
old as the old house itself, had grown so stout, and cramped, and
gnarled that they had pulled their stakes out of the ground and stood
distorted and writhing in vegetable agony, like leafy Laocoons. The
flowers which smelt so sweetly were not discernible; and they passed
through them into the house.

The hospitalities of the morning were repeated, and when they were over
Henchard said, “Pull your chair round to the fireplace, my dear fellow,
and let’s make a blaze—there’s nothing I hate like a black grate, even
in September.” He applied a light to the laid-in fuel, and a cheerful
radiance spread around.

“It is odd,” said Henchard, “that two men should meet as we have done
on a purely business ground, and that at the end of the first day I
should wish to speak to ’ee on a family matter. But, damn it all, I am
a lonely man, Farfrae: I have nobody else to speak to; and why
shouldn’t I tell it to ’ee?”

“I’ll be glad to hear it, if I can be of any service,” said Donald,
allowing his eyes to travel over the intricate wood-carvings of the
chimney-piece, representing garlanded lyres, shields, and quivers, on
either side of a draped ox-skull, and flanked by heads of Apollo and
Diana in low relief.

“I’ve not been always what I am now,” continued Henchard, his firm deep
voice being ever so little shaken. He was plainly under that strange
influence which sometimes prompts men to confide to the new-found
friend what they will not tell to the old. “I began life as a working
hay-trusser, and when I was eighteen I married on the strength o’ my
calling. Would you think me a married man?”

“I heard in the town that you were a widower.”

“Ah, yes—you would naturally have heard that. Well, I lost my wife
nineteen years ago or so—by my own fault.... This is how it came about.
One summer evening I was travelling for employment, and she was walking
at my side, carrying the baby, our only child. We came to a booth in a
country fair. I was a drinking man at that time.”

Henchard paused a moment, threw himself back so that his elbow rested
on the table, his forehead being shaded by his hand, which, however,
did not hide the marks of introspective inflexibility on his features
as he narrated in fullest detail the incidents of the transaction with
the sailor. The tinge of indifference which had at first been visible
in the Scotchman now disappeared.

Henchard went on to describe his attempts to find his wife; the oath he
swore; the solitary life he led during the years which followed. “I
have kept my oath for nineteen years,” he went on; “I have risen to
what you see me now.”

“Ay!”

“Well—no wife could I hear of in all that time; and being by nature
something of a woman-hater, I have found it no hardship to keep mostly
at a distance from the sex. No wife could I hear of, I say, till this
very day. And now—she has come back.”

“Come back, has she!”

“This morning—this very morning. And what’s to be done?”

“Can ye no’ take her and live with her, and make some amends?”

“That’s what I’ve planned and proposed. But, Farfrae,” said Henchard
gloomily, “by doing right with Susan I wrong another innocent woman.”

“Ye don’t say that?”

“In the nature of things, Farfrae, it is almost impossible that a man
of my sort should have the good fortune to tide through twenty years o’
life without making more blunders than one. It has been my custom for
many years to run across to Jersey in the the way of business,
particularly in the potato and root season. I do a large trade wi’ them
in that line. Well, one autumn when stopping there I fell quite ill,
and in my illness I sank into one of those gloomy fits I sometimes
suffer from, on account o’ the loneliness of my domestic life, when the
world seems to have the blackness of hell, and, like Job, I could curse
the day that gave me birth.”

“Ah, now, I never feel like it,” said Farfrae.

“Then pray to God that you never may, young man. While in this state I
was taken pity on by a woman—a young lady I should call her, for she
was of good family, well bred, and well educated—the daughter of some
harum-scarum military officer who had got into difficulties, and had
his pay sequestrated. He was dead now, and her mother too, and she was
as lonely as I. This young creature was staying at the boarding-house
where I happened to have my lodging; and when I was pulled down she
took upon herself to nurse me. From that she got to have a foolish
liking for me. Heaven knows why, for I wasn’t worth it. But being
together in the same house, and her feeling warm, we got naturally
intimate. I won’t go into particulars of what our relations were. It is
enough to say that we honestly meant to marry. There arose a scandal,
which did me no harm, but was of course ruin to her. Though, Farfrae,
between you and me, as man and man, I solemnly declare that
philandering with womankind has neither been my vice nor my virtue. She
was terribly careless of appearances, and I was perhaps more, because
o’ my dreary state; and it was through this that the scandal arose. At
last I was well, and came away. When I was gone she suffered much on my
account, and didn’t forget to tell me so in letters one after another;
till latterly, I felt I owed her something, and thought that, as I had
not heard of Susan for so long, I would make this other one the only
return I could make, and ask her if she would run the risk of Susan
being alive (very slight as I believed) and marry me, such as I was.
She jumped for joy, and we should no doubt soon have been married—but,
behold, Susan appears!”

Donald showed his deep concern at a complication so far beyond the
degree of his simple experiences.

“Now see what injury a man may cause around him! Even after that
wrong-doing at the fair when I was young, if I had never been so
selfish as to let this giddy girl devote herself to me over at Jersey,
to the injury of her name, all might now be well. Yet, as it stands, I
must bitterly disappoint one of these women; and it is the second. My
first duty is to Susan—there’s no doubt about that.”

“They are both in a very melancholy position, and that’s true!”
murmured Donald.

“They are! For myself I don’t care—’twill all end one way. But these
two.” Henchard paused in reverie. “I feel I should like to treat the
second, no less than the first, as kindly as a man can in such a case.”

“Ah, well, it cannet be helped!” said the other, with philosophic
woefulness. “You mun write to the young lady, and in your letter you
must put it plain and honest that it turns out she cannet be your wife,
the first having come back; that ye cannet see her more; and that—ye
wish her weel.”

“That won’t do. ’Od seize it, I must do a little more than that! I
must—though she did always brag about her rich uncle or rich aunt, and
her expectations from ’em—I must send a useful sum of money to her, I
suppose—just as a little recompense, poor girl.... Now, will you help
me in this, and draw up an explanation to her of all I’ve told ye,
breaking it as gently as you can? I’m so bad at letters.”

“And I will.”

“Now, I haven’t told you quite all yet. My wife Susan has my daughter
with her—the baby that was in her arms at the fair; and this girl knows
nothing of me beyond that I am some sort of relation by marriage. She
has grown up in the belief that the sailor to whom I made over her
mother, and who is now dead, was her father, and her mother’s husband.
What her mother has always felt, she and I together feel now—that we
can’t proclaim our disgrace to the girl by letting her know the truth.
Now what would you do?—I want your advice.”

“I think I’d run the risk, and tell her the truth. She’ll forgive ye
both.”

“Never!” said Henchard. “I am not going to let her know the truth. Her
mother and I be going to marry again; and it will not only help us to
keep our child’s respect, but it will be more proper. Susan looks upon
herself as the sailor’s widow, and won’t think o’ living with me as
formerly without another religious ceremony—and she’s right.”

Farfrae thereupon said no more. The letter to the young Jersey woman
was carefully framed by him, and the interview ended, Henchard saying,
as the Scotchman left, “I feel it a great relief, Farfrae, to tell some
friend o’ this! You see now that the Mayor of Casterbridge is not so
thriving in his mind as it seems he might be from the state of his
pocket.”

“I do. And I’m sorry for ye!” said Farfrae.

When he was gone Henchard copied the letter, and, enclosing a cheque,
took it to the post-office, from which he walked back thoughtfully.

“Can it be that it will go off so easily!” he said. “Poor thing—God
knows! Now then, to make amends to Susan!”



XIII.

The cottage which Michael Henchard hired for his wife Susan under her
name of Newson—in pursuance of their plan—was in the upper or western
part of the town, near the Roman wall, and the avenue which
overshadowed it. The evening sun seemed to shine more yellowly there
than anywhere else this autumn—stretching its rays, as the hours grew
later, under the lowest sycamore boughs, and steeping the ground-floor
of the dwelling, with its green shutters, in a substratum of radiance
which the foliage screened from the upper parts. Beneath these
sycamores on the town walls could be seen from the sitting-room the
tumuli and earth forts of the distant uplands; making it altogether a
pleasant spot, with the usual touch of melancholy that a past-marked
prospect lends.

As soon as the mother and daughter were comfortably installed, with a
white-aproned servant and all complete, Henchard paid them a visit, and
remained to tea. During the entertainment Elizabeth was carefully
hoodwinked by the very general tone of the conversation that
prevailed—a proceeding which seemed to afford some humour to Henchard,
though his wife was not particularly happy in it. The visit was
repeated again and again with business-like determination by the Mayor,
who seemed to have schooled himself into a course of strict mechanical
rightness towards this woman of prior claim, at any expense to the
later one and to his own sentiments.

One afternoon the daughter was not indoors when Henchard came, and he
said drily, “This is a very good opportunity for me to ask you to name
the happy day, Susan.”

The poor woman smiled faintly; she did not enjoy pleasantries on a
situation into which she had entered solely for the sake of her girl’s
reputation. She liked them so little, indeed, that there was room for
wonder why she had countenanced deception at all, and had not bravely
let the girl know her history. But the flesh is weak; and the true
explanation came in due course.

“O Michael!” she said, “I am afraid all this is taking up your time and
giving trouble—when I did not expect any such thing!” And she looked at
him and at his dress as a man of affluence, and at the furniture he had
provided for the room—ornate and lavish to her eyes.

“Not at all,” said Henchard, in rough benignity. “This is only a
cottage—it costs me next to nothing. And as to taking up my time”—here
his red and black visage kindled with satisfaction—“I’ve a splendid
fellow to superintend my business now—a man whose like I’ve never been
able to lay hands on before. I shall soon be able to leave everything
to him, and have more time to call my own than I’ve had for these last
twenty years.”

Henchard’s visits here grew so frequent and so regular that it soon
became whispered, and then openly discussed in Casterbridge that the
masterful, coercive Mayor of the town was raptured and enervated by the
genteel widow Mrs. Newson. His well-known haughty indifference to the
society of womankind, his silent avoidance of converse with the sex,
contributed a piquancy to what would otherwise have been an unromantic
matter enough. That such a poor fragile woman should be his choice was
inexplicable, except on the ground that the engagement was a family
affair in which sentimental passion had no place; for it was known that
they were related in some way. Mrs. Henchard was so pale that the boys
called her “The Ghost.” Sometimes Henchard overheard this epithet when
they passed together along the Walks—as the avenues on the walls were
named—at which his face would darken with an expression of
destructiveness towards the speakers ominous to see; but he said
nothing.

He pressed on the preparations for his union, or rather reunion, with
this pale creature in a dogged, unflinching spirit which did credit to
his conscientiousness. Nobody would have conceived from his outward
demeanour that there was no amatory fire or pulse of romance acting as
stimulant to the bustle going on in his gaunt, great house; nothing but
three large resolves—one, to make amends to his neglected Susan,
another, to provide a comfortable home for Elizabeth-Jane under his
paternal eye; and a third, to castigate himself with the thorns which
these restitutory acts brought in their train; among them the lowering
of his dignity in public opinion by marrying so comparatively humble a
woman.

Susan Henchard entered a carriage for the first time in her life when
she stepped into the plain brougham which drew up at the door on the
wedding-day to take her and Elizabeth-Jane to church. It was a windless
morning of warm November rain, which floated down like meal, and lay in
a powdery form on the nap of hats and coats. Few people had gathered
round the church door though they were well packed within. The
Scotchman, who assisted as groomsman, was of course the only one
present, beyond the chief actors, who knew the true situation of the
contracting parties. He, however, was too inexperienced, too
thoughtful, too judicial, too strongly conscious of the serious side of
the business, to enter into the scene in its dramatic aspect. That
required the special genius of Christopher Coney, Solomon Longways,
Buzzford, and their fellows. But they knew nothing of the secret;
though, as the time for coming out of church drew on, they gathered on
the pavement adjoining, and expounded the subject according to their
lights.

“’Tis five-and-forty years since I had my settlement in this here
town,” said Coney; “but daze me if I ever see a man wait so long before
to take so little! There’s a chance even for thee after this, Nance
Mockridge.” The remark was addressed to a woman who stood behind his
shoulder—the same who had exhibited Henchard’s bad bread in public when
Elizabeth and her mother entered Casterbridge.

“Be cust if I’d marry any such as he, or thee either,” replied that
lady. “As for thee, Christopher, we know what ye be, and the less said
the better. And as for he—well, there—(lowering her voice) ’tis said ’a
was a poor parish ’prentice—I wouldn’t say it for all the world—but ’a
was a poor parish ’prentice, that began life wi’ no more belonging to
’en than a carrion crow.”

“And now he’s worth ever so much a minute,” murmured Longways. “When a
man is said to be worth so much a minute, he’s a man to be considered!”

Turning, he saw a circular disc reticulated with creases, and
recognized the smiling countenance of the fat woman who had asked for
another song at the Three Mariners. “Well, Mother Cuxsom,” he said,
“how’s this? Here’s Mrs. Newson, a mere skellinton, has got another
husband to keep her, while a woman of your tonnage have not.”

“I have not. Nor another to beat me.... Ah, yes, Cuxsom’s gone, and so
shall leather breeches!”

“Yes; with the blessing of God leather breeches shall go.”

“’Tisn’t worth my old while to think of another husband,” continued
Mrs. Cuxsom. “And yet I’ll lay my life I’m as respectable born as she.”

“True; your mother was a very good woman—I can mind her. She were
rewarded by the Agricultural Society for having begot the greatest
number of healthy children without parish assistance, and other
virtuous marvels.”

“’Twas that that kept us so low upon ground—that great hungry family.”

“Ay. Where the pigs be many the wash runs thin.”

“And dostn’t mind how mother would sing, Christopher?” continued Mrs.
Cuxsom, kindling at the retrospection; “and how we went with her to the
party at Mellstock, do ye mind?—at old Dame Ledlow’s, farmer Shinar’s
aunt, do ye mind?—she we used to call Toad-skin, because her face were
so yaller and freckled, do ye mind?”

“I do, hee-hee, I do!” said Christopher Coney.

“And well do I—for I was getting up husband-high at that time—one-half
girl, and t’other half woman, as one may say. And canst mind”—she
prodded Solomon’s shoulder with her finger-tip, while her eyes twinkled
between the crevices of their lids—“canst mind the sherry-wine, and the
zilver-snuffers, and how Joan Dummett was took bad when we were coming
home, and Jack Griggs was forced to carry her through the mud; and how
’a let her fall in Dairyman Sweet-apple’s cow-barton, and we had to
clane her gown wi’ grass—never such a mess as ’a were in?”

“Ay—that I do—hee-hee, such doggery as there was in them ancient days,
to be sure! Ah, the miles I used to walk then; and now I can hardly
step over a furrow!”

Their reminiscences were cut short by the appearance of the reunited
pair—Henchard looking round upon the idlers with that ambiguous gaze of
his, which at one moment seemed to mean satisfaction, and at another
fiery disdain.

“Well—there’s a difference between ’em, though he do call himself a
teetotaller,” said Nance Mockridge. “She’ll wish her cake dough afore
she’s done of him. There’s a blue-beardy look about ’en; and ’twill out
in time.”

“Stuff—he’s well enough! Some folk want their luck buttered. If I had a
choice as wide as the ocean sea I wouldn’t wish for a better man. A
poor twanking woman like her—’tis a godsend for her, and hardly a pair
of jumps or night-rail to her name.”

The plain little brougham drove off in the mist, and the idlers
dispersed. “Well, we hardly know how to look at things in these times!”
said Solomon. “There was a man dropped down dead yesterday, not so very
many miles from here; and what wi’ that, and this moist weather, ’tis
scarce worth one’s while to begin any work o’ consequence to-day. I’m
in such a low key with drinking nothing but small table ninepenny this
last week or two that I shall call and warm up at the Mar’ners as I
pass along.”

“I don’t know but that I may as well go with ’ee, Solomon,” said
Christopher; “I’m as clammy as a cockle-snail.”



XIV.

A Martinmas summer of Mrs. Henchard’s life set in with her entry into
her husband’s large house and respectable social orbit; and it was as
bright as such summers well can be. Lest she should pine for deeper
affection than he could give he made a point of showing some semblance
of it in external action. Among other things he had the iron railings,
that had smiled sadly in dull rust for the last eighty years, painted a
bright green, and the heavy-barred, small-paned Georgian sash windows
enlivened with three coats of white. He was as kind to her as a man,
mayor, and churchwarden could possibly be. The house was large, the
rooms lofty, and the landings wide; and the two unassuming women
scarcely made a perceptible addition to its contents.

To Elizabeth-Jane the time was a most triumphant one. The freedom she
experienced, the indulgence with which she was treated, went beyond her
expectations. The reposeful, easy, affluent life to which her mother’s
marriage had introduced her was, in truth, the beginning of a great
change in Elizabeth. She found she could have nice personal possessions
and ornaments for the asking, and, as the mediæval saying puts it,
“Take, have, and keep, are pleasant words.” With peace of mind came
development, and with development beauty. Knowledge—the result of great
natural insight—she did not lack; learning, accomplishment—those, alas,
she had not; but as the winter and spring passed by her thin face and
figure filled out in rounder and softer curves; the lines and
contractions upon her young brow went away; the muddiness of skin which
she had looked upon as her lot by nature departed with a change to
abundance of good things, and a bloom came upon her cheek. Perhaps,
too, her grey, thoughtful eyes revealed an arch gaiety sometimes; but
this was infrequent; the sort of wisdom which looked from their pupils
did not readily keep company with these lighter moods. Like all people
who have known rough times, light-heartedness seemed to her too
irrational and inconsequent to be indulged in except as a reckless dram
now and then; for she had been too early habituated to anxious
reasoning to drop the habit suddenly. She felt none of those ups and
downs of spirit which beset so many people without cause; never—to
paraphrase a recent poet—never a gloom in Elizabeth-Jane’s soul but she
well knew how it came there; and her present cheerfulness was fairly
proportionate to her solid guarantees for the same.

It might have been supposed that, given a girl rapidly becoming
good-looking, comfortably circumstanced, and for the first time in her
life commanding ready money, she would go and make a fool of herself by
dress. But no. The reasonableness of almost everything that Elizabeth
did was nowhere more conspicuous than in this question of clothes. To
keep in the rear of opportunity in matters of indulgence is as valuable
a habit as to keep abreast of opportunity in matters of enterprise.
This unsophisticated girl did it by an innate perceptiveness that was
almost genius. Thus she refrained from bursting out like a water-flower
that spring, and clothing herself in puffings and knick-knacks, as most
of the Casterbridge girls would have done in her circumstances. Her
triumph was tempered by circumspection, she had still that field-mouse
fear of the coulter of destiny despite fair promise, which is common
among the thoughtful who have suffered early from poverty and
oppression.

“I won’t be too gay on any account,” she would say to herself. “It
would be tempting Providence to hurl mother and me down, and afflict us
again as He used to do.”

We now see her in a black silk bonnet, velvet mantle or silk spencer,
dark dress, and carrying a sunshade. In this latter article she drew
the line at fringe, and had it plain edged, with a little ivory ring
for keeping it closed. It was odd about the necessity for that
sunshade. She discovered that with the clarification of her complexion
and the birth of pink cheeks her skin had grown more sensitive to the
sun’s rays. She protected those cheeks forthwith, deeming spotlessness
part of womanliness.

Henchard had become very fond of her, and she went out with him more
frequently than with her mother now. Her appearance one day was so
attractive that he looked at her critically.

“I happened to have the ribbon by me, so I made it up,” she faltered,
thinking him perhaps dissatisfied with some rather bright trimming she
had donned for the first time.

“Ay—of course—to be sure,” he replied in his leonine way. “Do as you
like—or rather as your mother advises ye. ’Od send—I’ve nothing to say
to’t!”

Indoors she appeared with her hair divided by a parting that arched
like a white rainbow from ear to ear. All in front of this line was
covered with a thick encampment of curls; all behind was dressed
smoothly, and drawn to a knob.

The three members of the family were sitting at breakfast one day, and
Henchard was looking silently, as he often did, at this head of hair,
which in colour was brown—rather light than dark. “I thought
Elizabeth-Jane’s hair—didn’t you tell me that Elizabeth-Jane’s hair
promised to be black when she was a baby?” he said to his wife.

She looked startled, jerked his foot warningly, and murmured, “Did I?”

As soon as Elizabeth was gone to her own room Henchard resumed. “Begad,
I nearly forgot myself just now! What I meant was that the girl’s hair
certainly looked as if it would be darker, when she was a baby.”

“It did; but they alter so,” replied Susan.

“Their hair gets darker, I know—but I wasn’t aware it lightened ever?”

“O yes.” And the same uneasy expression came out on her face, to which
the future held the key. It passed as Henchard went on:

“Well, so much the better. Now Susan, I want to have her called Miss
Henchard—not Miss Newson. Lots o’ people do it already in
carelessness—it is her legal name—so it may as well be made her usual
name—I don’t like t’other name at all for my own flesh and blood. I’ll
advertise it in the Casterbridge paper—that’s the way they do it. She
won’t object.”

“No. O no. But—”

“Well, then, I shall do it,” he said, peremptorily. “Surely, if she’s
willing, you must wish it as much as I?”

“O yes—if she agrees let us do it by all means,” she replied.

Then Mrs. Henchard acted somewhat inconsistently; it might have been
called falsely, but that her manner was emotional and full of the
earnestness of one who wishes to do right at great hazard. She went to
Elizabeth-Jane, whom she found sewing in her own sitting-room upstairs,
and told her what had been proposed about her surname. “Can you
agree—is it not a slight upon Newson—now he’s dead and gone?”

Elizabeth reflected. “I’ll think of it, mother,” she answered.

When, later in the day, she saw Henchard, she adverted to the matter at
once, in a way which showed that the line of feeling started by her
mother had been persevered in. “Do you wish this change so very much,
sir?” she asked.

“Wish it? Why, my blessed fathers, what an ado you women make about a
trifle! I proposed it—that’s all. Now, ’Lizabeth-Jane, just please
yourself. Curse me if I care what you do. Now, you understand, don’t
’ee go agreeing to it to please me.”

Here the subject dropped, and nothing more was said, and nothing was
done, and Elizabeth still passed as Miss Newson, and not by her legal
name.

Meanwhile the great corn and hay traffic conducted by Henchard throve
under the management of Donald Farfrae as it had never thriven before.
It had formerly moved in jolts; now it went on oiled casters. The old
crude _vivâ voce_ system of Henchard, in which everything depended upon
his memory, and bargains were made by the tongue alone, was swept away.
Letters and ledgers took the place of “I’ll do’t,” and “you shall
hae’t”; and, as in all such cases of advance, the rugged
picturesqueness of the old method disappeared with its inconveniences.

The position of Elizabeth-Jane’s room—rather high in the house, so that
it commanded a view of the hay-stores and granaries across the
garden—afforded her opportunity for accurate observation of what went
on there. She saw that Donald and Mr. Henchard were inseparables. When
walking together Henchard would lay his arm familiarly on his manager’s
shoulder, as if Farfrae were a younger brother, bearing so heavily that
his slight frame bent under the weight. Occasionally she would hear a
perfect cannonade of laughter from Henchard, arising from something
Donald had said, the latter looking quite innocent and not laughing at
all. In Henchard’s somewhat lonely life he evidently found the young
man as desirable for comradeship as he was useful for consultations.
Donald’s brightness of intellect maintained in the corn-factor the
admiration it had won at the first hour of their meeting. The poor
opinion, and but ill-concealed, that he entertained of the slim
Farfrae’s physical girth, strength, and dash was more than
counterbalanced by the immense respect he had for his brains.

Her quiet eye discerned that Henchard’s tigerish affection for the
younger man, his constant liking to have Farfrae near him, now and then
resulted in a tendency to domineer, which, however, was checked in a
moment when Donald exhibited marks of real offence. One day, looking
down on their figures from on high, she heard the latter remark, as
they stood in the doorway between the garden and yard, that their habit
of walking and driving about together rather neutralized Farfrae’s
value as a second pair of eyes, which should be used in places where
the principal was not. “’Od damn it,” cried Henchard, “what’s all the
world! I like a fellow to talk to. Now come along and hae some supper,
and don’t take too much thought about things, or ye’ll drive me crazy.”

When she walked with her mother, on the other hand, she often beheld
the Scotchman looking at them with a curious interest. The fact that he
had met her at the Three Mariners was insufficient to account for it,
since on the occasions on which she had entered his room he had never
raised his eyes. Besides, it was at her mother more particularly than
at herself that he looked, to Elizabeth-Jane’s half-conscious,
simple-minded, perhaps pardonable, disappointment. Thus she could not
account for this interest by her own attractiveness, and she decided
that it might be apparent only—a way of turning his eyes that Mr.
Farfrae had.

She did not divine the ample explanation of his manner, without
personal vanity, that was afforded by the fact of Donald being the
depositary of Henchard’s confidence in respect of his past treatment of
the pale, chastened mother who walked by her side. Her conjectures on
that past never went further than faint ones based on things casually
heard and seen—mere guesses that Henchard and her mother might have
been lovers in their younger days, who had quarrelled and parted.

Casterbridge, as has been hinted, was a place deposited in the block
upon a corn-field. There was no suburb in the modern sense, or
transitional intermixture of town and down. It stood, with regard to
the wide fertile land adjoining, clean-cut and distinct, like a
chess-board on a green tablecloth. The farmer’s boy could sit under his
barley-mow and pitch a stone into the office-window of the town-clerk;
reapers at work among the sheaves nodded to acquaintances standing on
the pavement-corner; the red-robed judge, when he condemned a
sheep-stealer, pronounced sentence to the tune of Baa, that floated in
at the window from the remainder of the flock browsing hard by; and at
executions the waiting crowd stood in a meadow immediately before the
drop, out of which the cows had been temporarily driven to give the
spectators room.

The corn grown on the upland side of the borough was garnered by
farmers who lived in an eastern purlieu called Durnover. Here
wheat-ricks overhung the old Roman street, and thrust their eaves
against the church tower; green-thatched barns, with doorways as high
as the gates of Solomon’s temple, opened directly upon the main
thoroughfare. Barns indeed were so numerous as to alternate with every
half-dozen houses along the way. Here lived burgesses who daily walked
the fallow; shepherds in an intra-mural squeeze. A street of farmers’
homesteads—a street ruled by a mayor and corporation, yet echoing with
the thump of the flail, the flutter of the winnowing-fan, and the purr
of the milk into the pails—a street which had nothing urban in it
whatever—this was the Durnover end of Casterbridge.

Henchard, as was natural, dealt largely with this nursery or bed of
small farmers close at hand—and his waggons were often down that way.
One day, when arrangements were in progress for getting home corn from
one of the aforesaid farms, Elizabeth-Jane received a note by hand,
asking her to oblige the writer by coming at once to a granary on
Durnover Hill. As this was the granary whose contents Henchard was
removing, she thought the request had something to do with his
business, and proceeded thither as soon as she had put on her bonnet.
The granary was just within the farm-yard, and stood on stone staddles,
high enough for persons to walk under. The gates were open, but nobody
was within. However, she entered and waited. Presently she saw a figure
approaching the gate—that of Donald Farfrae. He looked up at the church
clock, and came in. By some unaccountable shyness, some wish not to
meet him there alone, she quickly ascended the step-ladder leading to
the granary door, and entered it before he had seen her. Farfrae
advanced, imagining himself in solitude, and a few drops of rain
beginning to fall he moved and stood under the shelter where she had
just been standing. Here he leant against one of the staddles, and gave
himself up to patience. He, too, was plainly expecting some one; could
it be herself? If so, why? In a few minutes he looked at his watch, and
then pulled out a note, a duplicate of the one she had herself
received.

This situation began to be very awkward, and the longer she waited the
more awkward it became. To emerge from a door just above his head and
descend the ladder, and show she had been in hiding there, would look
so very foolish that she still waited on. A winnowing machine stood
close beside her, and to relieve her suspense she gently moved the
handle; whereupon a cloud of wheat husks flew out into her face, and
covered her clothes and bonnet, and stuck into the fur of her
victorine. He must have heard the slight movement for he looked up, and
then ascended the steps.

“Ah—it’s Miss Newson,” he said as soon as he could see into the
granary. “I didn’t know you were there. I have kept the appointment,
and am at your service.”

“O Mr. Farfrae,” she faltered, “so have I. But I didn’t know it was you
who wished to see me, otherwise I—”

“I wished to see you? O no—at least, that is, I am afraid there may be
a mistake.”

“Didn’t you ask me to come here? Didn’t you write this?” Elizabeth held
out her note.

“No. Indeed, at no hand would I have thought of it! And for you—didn’t
you ask me? This is not your writing?” And he held up his.

“By no means.”

“And is that really so! Then it’s somebody wanting to see us both.
Perhaps we would do well to wait a little longer.”

Acting on this consideration they lingered, Elizabeth-Jane’s face being
arranged to an expression of preternatural composure, and the young
Scot, at every footstep in the street without, looking from under the
granary to see if the passer were about to enter and declare himself
their summoner. They watched individual drops of rain creeping down the
thatch of the opposite rick—straw after straw—till they reached the
bottom; but nobody came, and the granary roof began to drip.

“The person is not likely to be coming,” said Farfrae. “It’s a trick
perhaps, and if so, it’s a great pity to waste our time like this, and
so much to be done.”

“’Tis a great liberty,” said Elizabeth.

“It’s true, Miss Newson. We’ll hear news of this some day depend on’t,
and who it was that did it. I wouldn’t stand for it hindering myself;
but you, Miss Newson——”

“I don’t mind—much,” she replied.

“Neither do I.”

They lapsed again into silence. “You are anxious to get back to
Scotland, I suppose, Mr. Farfrae?” she inquired.

“O no, Miss Newson. Why would I be?”

“I only supposed you might be from the song you sang at the Three
Mariners—about Scotland and home, I mean—which you seemed to feel so
deep down in your heart; so that we all felt for you.”

“Ay—and I did sing there—I did—— But, Miss Newson”—and Donald’s voice
musically undulated between two semi-tones as it always did when he
became earnest—“it’s well you feel a song for a few minutes, and your
eyes they get quite tearful; but you finish it, and for all you felt
you don’t mind it or think of it again for a long while. O no, I don’t
want to go back! Yet I’ll sing the song to you wi’ pleasure whenever
you like. I could sing it now, and not mind at all?”

“Thank you, indeed. But I fear I must go—rain or no.”

“Ay! Then, Miss Newson, ye had better say nothing about this hoax, and
take no heed of it. And if the person should say anything to you, be
civil to him or her, as if you did not mind it—so you’ll take the
clever person’s laugh away.” In speaking his eyes became fixed upon her
dress, still sown with wheat husks. “There’s husks and dust on you.
Perhaps you don’t know it?” he said, in tones of extreme delicacy. “And
it’s very bad to let rain come upon clothes when there’s chaff on them.
It washes in and spoils them. Let me help you—blowing is the best.”

As Elizabeth neither assented nor dissented Donald Farfrae began
blowing her back hair, and her side hair, and her neck, and the crown
of her bonnet, and the fur of her victorine, Elizabeth saying, “O,
thank you,” at every puff. At last she was fairly clean, though
Farfrae, having got over his first concern at the situation, seemed in
no manner of hurry to be gone.

“Ah—now I’ll go and get ye an umbrella,” he said.

She declined the offer, stepped out and was gone. Farfrae walked slowly
after, looking thoughtfully at her diminishing figure, and whistling in
undertones, “As I came down through Cannobie.”



XV.

At first Miss Newson’s budding beauty was not regarded with much
interest by anybody in Casterbridge. Donald Farfrae’s gaze, it is true,
was now attracted by the Mayor’s so-called stepdaughter, but he was
only one. The truth is that she was but a poor illustrative instance of
the prophet Baruch’s sly definition: “The virgin that loveth to go
gay.”

When she walked abroad she seemed to be occupied with an inner chamber
of ideas, and to have slight need for visible objects. She formed
curious resolves on checking gay fancies in the matter of clothes,
because it was inconsistent with her past life to blossom gaudily the
moment she had become possessed of money. But nothing is more insidious
than the evolution of wishes from mere fancies, and of wants from mere
wishes. Henchard gave Elizabeth-Jane a box of delicately-tinted gloves
one spring day. She wanted to wear them to show her appreciation of his
kindness, but she had no bonnet that would harmonize. As an artistic
indulgence she thought she would have such a bonnet. When she had a
bonnet that would go with the gloves she had no dress that would go
with the bonnet. It was now absolutely necessary to finish; she ordered
the requisite article, and found that she had no sunshade to go with
the dress. In for a penny in for a pound; she bought the sunshade, and
the whole structure was at last complete.

Everybody was attracted, and some said that her bygone simplicity was
the art that conceals art, the “delicate imposition” of Rochefoucauld;
she had produced an effect, a contrast, and it had been done on
purpose. As a matter of fact this was not true, but it had its result;
for as soon as Casterbridge thought her artful it thought her worth
notice. “It is the first time in my life that I have been so much
admired,” she said to herself; “though perhaps it is by those whose
admiration is not worth having.”

But Donald Farfrae admired her, too; and altogether the time was an
exciting one; sex had never before asserted itself in her so strongly,
for in former days she had perhaps been too impersonally human to be
distinctively feminine. After an unprecedented success one day she came
indoors, went upstairs, and leant upon her bed face downwards quite
forgetting the possible creasing and damage. “Good Heaven,” she
whispered, “can it be? Here am I setting up as the town beauty!”

When she had thought it over, her usual fear of exaggerating
appearances engendered a deep sadness. “There is something wrong in all
this,” she mused. “If they only knew what an unfinished girl I am—that
I can’t talk Italian, or use globes, or show any of the accomplishments
they learn at boarding schools, how they would despise me! Better sell
all this finery and buy myself grammar-books and dictionaries and a
history of all the philosophies!”

She looked from the window and saw Henchard and Farfrae in the hay-yard
talking, with that impetuous cordiality on the Mayor’s part, and genial
modesty on the younger man’s, that was now so generally observable in
their intercourse. Friendship between man and man; what a rugged
strength there was in it, as evinced by these two. And yet the seed
that was to lift the foundation of this friendship was at that moment
taking root in a chink of its structure.

It was about six o’clock; the men were dropping off homeward one by
one. The last to leave was a round-shouldered, blinking young man of
nineteen or twenty, whose mouth fell ajar on the slightest provocation,
seemingly because there was no chin to support it. Henchard called
aloud to him as he went out of the gate, “Here—Abel Whittle!”

Whittle turned, and ran back a few steps. “Yes, sir,” he said, in
breathless deprecation, as if he knew what was coming next.

“Once more—be in time to-morrow morning. You see what’s to be done, and
you hear what I say, and you know I’m not going to be trifled with any
longer.”

“Yes, sir.” Then Abel Whittle left, and Henchard and Farfrae; and
Elizabeth saw no more of them.

Now there was good reason for this command on Henchard’s part. Poor
Abel, as he was called, had an inveterate habit of over-sleeping
himself and coming late to his work. His anxious will was to be among
the earliest; but if his comrades omitted to pull the string that he
always tied round his great toe and left hanging out the window for
that purpose, his will was as wind. He did not arrive in time.

As he was often second hand at the hay-weighing, or at the crane which
lifted the sacks, or was one of those who had to accompany the waggons
into the country to fetch away stacks that had been purchased, this
affliction of Abel’s was productive of much inconvenience. For two
mornings in the present week he had kept the others waiting nearly an
hour; hence Henchard’s threat. It now remained to be seen what would
happen to-morrow.

Six o’clock struck, and there was no Whittle. At half-past six Henchard
entered the yard; the waggon was horsed that Abel was to accompany; and
the other man had been waiting twenty minutes. Then Henchard swore, and
Whittle coming up breathless at that instant, the corn-factor turned on
him, and declared with an oath that this was the last time; that if he
were behind once more, by God, he would come and drag him out o’ bed.

“There is sommit wrong in my make, your worshipful!” said Abel,
“especially in the inside, whereas my poor dumb brain gets as dead as a
clot afore I’ve said my few scrags of prayers. Yes—it came on as a
stripling, just afore I’d got man’s wages, whereas I never enjoy my bed
at all, for no sooner do I lie down than I be asleep, and afore I be
awake I be up. I’ve fretted my gizzard green about it, maister, but
what can I do? Now last night, afore I went to bed, I only had a
scantling o’ cheese and—”

“I don’t want to hear it!” roared Henchard. “To-morrow the waggons must
start at four, and if you’re not here, stand clear. I’ll mortify thy
flesh for thee!”

“But let me clear up my points, your worshipful——”

Henchard turned away.

“He asked me and he questioned me, and then ’a wouldn’t hear my
points!” said Abel, to the yard in general. “Now, I shall twitch like a
moment-hand all night to-night for fear o’ him!”

The journey to be taken by the waggons next day was a long one into
Blackmoor Vale, and at four o’clock lanterns were moving about the
yard. But Abel was missing. Before either of the other men could run to
Abel’s and warn him Henchard appeared in the garden doorway. “Where’s
Abel Whittle? Not come after all I’ve said? Now I’ll carry out my word,
by my blessed fathers—nothing else will do him any good! I’m going up
that way.”

Henchard went off, entered Abel’s house, a little cottage in Back
Street, the door of which was never locked because the inmates had
nothing to lose. Reaching Whittle’s bedside the corn-factor shouted a
bass note so vigorously that Abel started up instantly, and beholding
Henchard standing over him, was galvanized into spasmodic movements
which had not much relation to getting on his clothes.

“Out of bed, sir, and off to the granary, or you leave my employ
to-day! ’Tis to teach ye a lesson. March on; never mind your breeches!”

The unhappy Whittle threw on his sleeve waistcoat, and managed to get
into his boots at the bottom of the stairs, while Henchard thrust his
hat over his head. Whittle then trotted on down Back Street, Henchard
walking sternly behind.

Just at this time Farfrae, who had been to Henchard’s house to look for
him, came out of the back gate, and saw something white fluttering in
the morning gloom, which he soon perceived to be part of Abel’s shirt
that showed below his waistcoat.

“For maircy’s sake, what object’s this?” said Farfrae, following Abel
into the yard, Henchard being some way in the rear by this time.

“Ye see, Mr. Farfrae,” gibbered Abel with a resigned smile of terror,
“he said he’d mortify my flesh if so be I didn’t get up sooner, and now
he’s a-doing on’t! Ye see it can’t be helped, Mr. Farfrae; things do
happen queer sometimes! Yes—I’ll go to Blackmoor Vale half naked as I
be, since he do command; but I shall kill myself afterwards; I can’t
outlive the disgrace, for the women-folk will be looking out of their
winders at my mortification all the way along, and laughing me to scorn
as a man ’ithout breeches! You know how I feel such things, Maister
Farfrae, and how forlorn thoughts get hold upon me. Yes—I shall do
myself harm—I feel it coming on!”

“Get back home, and slip on your breeches, and come to wark like a man!
If ye go not, you’ll ha’e your death standing there!”

“I’m afeard I mustn’t! Mr. Henchard said——”

“I don’t care what Mr. Henchard said, nor anybody else! ’Tis simple
foolishness to do this. Go and dress yourself instantly Whittle.”

“Hullo, hullo!” said Henchard, coming up behind. “Who’s sending him
back?”

All the men looked towards Farfrae.

“I am,” said Donald. “I say this joke has been carried far enough.”

“And I say it hasn’t! Get up in the waggon, Whittle.”

“Not if I am manager,” said Farfrae. “He either goes home, or I march
out of this yard for good.”

Henchard looked at him with a face stern and red. But he paused for a
moment, and their eyes met. Donald went up to him, for he saw in
Henchard’s look that he began to regret this.

“Come,” said Donald quietly, “a man o’ your position should ken better,
sir! It is tyrannical and no worthy of you.”

“’Tis not tyrannical!” murmured Henchard, like a sullen boy. “It is to
make him remember!” He presently added, in a tone of one bitterly hurt:
“Why did you speak to me before them like that, Farfrae? You might have
stopped till we were alone. Ah—I know why! I’ve told ye the secret o’
my life—fool that I was to do’t—and you take advantage of me!”

“I had forgot it,” said Farfrae simply.

Henchard looked on the ground, said nothing more, and turned away.
During the day Farfrae learnt from the men that Henchard had kept
Abel’s old mother in coals and snuff all the previous winter, which
made him less antagonistic to the corn-factor. But Henchard continued
moody and silent, and when one of the men inquired of him if some oats
should be hoisted to an upper floor or not, he said shortly, “Ask Mr.
Farfrae. He’s master here!”

Morally he was; there could be no doubt of it. Henchard, who had
hitherto been the most admired man in his circle, was the most admired
no longer. One day the daughters of a deceased farmer in Durnover
wanted an opinion of the value of their haystack, and sent a messenger
to ask Mr. Farfrae to oblige them with one. The messenger, who was a
child, met in the yard not Farfrae, but Henchard.

“Very well,” he said. “I’ll come.”

“But please will Mr. Farfrae come?” said the child.

“I am going that way.... Why Mr. Farfrae?” said Henchard, with the
fixed look of thought. “Why do people always want Mr. Farfrae?”

“I suppose because they like him so—that’s what they say.”

“Oh—I see—that’s what they say—hey? They like him because he’s cleverer
than Mr. Henchard, and because he knows more; and, in short, Mr.
Henchard can’t hold a candle to him—hey?”

“Yes—that’s just it, sir—some of it.”

“Oh, there’s more? Of course there’s more! What besides? Come, here’s a
sixpence for a fairing.”

“‘And he’s better tempered, and Henchard’s a fool to him,’ they say.
And when some of the women were a-walking home they said, ‘He’s a
diment—he’s a chap o’ wax—he’s the best—he’s the horse for my money,’
says they. And they said, ‘He’s the most understanding man o’ them two
by long chalks. I wish he was the master instead of Henchard,’ they
said.”

“They’ll talk any nonsense,” Henchard replied with covered gloom.
“Well, you can go now. And _I_ am coming to value the hay, d’ye
hear?—I.” The boy departed, and Henchard murmured, “Wish he were master
here, do they?”

He went towards Durnover. On his way he overtook Farfrae. They walked
on together, Henchard looking mostly on the ground.

“You’re no yoursel’ the day?” Donald inquired.

“Yes, I am very well,” said Henchard.

“But ye are a bit down—surely ye are down? Why, there’s nothing to be
angry about! ’Tis splendid stuff that we’ve got from Blackmoor Vale. By
the by, the people in Durnover want their hay valued.”

“Yes. I am going there.”

“I’ll go with ye.”

As Henchard did not reply Donald practised a piece of music _sotto
voce_, till, getting near the bereaved people’s door, he stopped
himself with—

“Ah, as their father is dead I won’t go on with such as that. How could
I forget?”

“Do you care so very much about hurting folks’ feelings?” observed
Henchard with a half sneer. “You do, I know—especially mine!”

“I am sorry if I have hurt yours, sir,” replied Donald, standing still,
with a second expression of the same sentiment in the regretfulness of
his face. “Why should you say it—think it?”

The cloud lifted from Henchard’s brow, and as Donald finished the
corn-merchant turned to him, regarding his breast rather than his face.

“I have been hearing things that vexed me,” he said. “’Twas that made
me short in my manner—made me overlook what you really are. Now, I
don’t want to go in here about this hay—Farfrae, you can do it better
than I. They sent for ’ee, too. I have to attend a meeting of the Town
Council at eleven, and ’tis drawing on for’t.”

They parted thus in renewed friendship, Donald forbearing to ask
Henchard for meanings that were not very plain to him. On Henchard’s
part there was now again repose; and yet, whenever he thought of
Farfrae, it was with a dim dread; and he often regretted that he had
told the young man his whole heart, and confided to him the secrets of
his life.



XVI.

On this account Henchard’s manner towards Farfrae insensibly became
more reserved. He was courteous—too courteous—and Farfrae was quite
surprised at the good breeding which now for the first time showed
itself among the qualities of a man he had hitherto thought
undisciplined, if warm and sincere. The corn-factor seldom or never
again put his arm upon the young man’s shoulder so as to nearly weigh
him down with the pressure of mechanized friendship. He left off coming
to Donald’s lodgings and shouting into the passage. “Hoy, Farfrae, boy,
come and have some dinner with us! Don’t sit here in solitary
confinement!” But in the daily routine of their business there was
little change.

Thus their lives rolled on till a day of public rejoicing was suggested
to the country at large in celebration of a national event that had
recently taken place.

For some time Casterbridge, by nature slow, made no response. Then one
day Donald Farfrae broached the subject to Henchard by asking if he
would have any objection to lend some rick-cloths to himself and a few
others, who contemplated getting up an entertainment of some sort on
the day named, and required a shelter for the same, to which they might
charge admission at the rate of so much a head.

“Have as many cloths as you like,” Henchard replied.

When his manager had gone about the business Henchard was fired with
emulation. It certainly had been very remiss of him, as Mayor, he
thought, to call no meeting ere this, to discuss what should be done on
this holiday. But Farfrae had been so cursed quick in his movements as
to give old-fashioned people in authority no chance of the initiative.
However, it was not too late; and on second thoughts he determined to
take upon his own shoulders the responsibility of organizing some
amusements, if the other Councilmen would leave the matter in his
hands. To this they quite readily agreed, the majority being fine old
crusted characters who had a decided taste for living without worry.

So Henchard set about his preparations for a really brilliant
thing—such as should be worthy of the venerable town. As for Farfrae’s
little affair, Henchard nearly forgot it; except once now and then
when, on it coming into his mind, he said to himself, “Charge admission
at so much a head—just like a Scotchman!—who is going to pay anything a
head?” The diversions which the Mayor intended to provide were to be
entirely free.

He had grown so dependent upon Donald that he could scarcely resist
calling him in to consult. But by sheer self-coercion he ref

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