The Mayor of Casterbridge by Thomas Hardy (page 2)

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.”

8.

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 presented 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 Scotch-man 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!”

9.

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-dechassez 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.

10.

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 comer was a fire-grate with a fluted semicircular 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.

11.

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 Jotuns. 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 towns-people 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 aeolian 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 debris 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.”

“Ts-s-s! 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 step-daughter. The thing is so natural and easy that it is half done in thinking o’t. This would leave my shady, head- strong, 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.

12.

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, carying 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!”

13.

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.”

14.

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 mediaeval 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 viva 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