first time he felt a little hurt by what he thought her extravagance,
and resolved to say a word to her about it. But, before he had found
the courage to speak an event happened which set his thoughts flying in
quite another direction.
The busy time of the seed trade was over, and the quiet weeks that
preceded the hay-season had come - setting their special stamp upon
Casterbridge by thronging the market with wood rakes, new waggons in
yellow, green, and red, formidable scythes, and pitchforks of prong
sufficient to skewer up a small family. Henchard, contrary to his wont,
went out one Saturday afternoon towards the market-place from a curious
feeling that he would like to pass a few minutes on the spot of his
former triumphs. Farfrae, to whom he was still a comparative stranger,
stood a few steps below the Corn Exchange door - a usual position with
him at this hour - and he appeared lost in thought about something he was
looking at a little way off.
Henchard's eyes followed Farfrae's, and he saw that the object of his
gaze was no sample-showing farmer, but his own stepdaughter, who had
just come out of a shop over the way. She, on her part, was quite
unconscious of his attention, and in this was less fortunate than those
young women whose very plumes, like those of Juno's bird, are set with
Argus eyes whenever possible admirers are within ken.
Henchard went away, thinking that perhaps there was nothing significant
after all in Farfrae's look at Elizabeth-Jane at that juncture. Yet he
could not forget that the Scotchman had once shown a tender interest
in her, of a fleeting kind. Thereupon promptly came to the surface
that idiosyncrasy of Henchard's which had ruled his courses from the
beginning and had mainly made him what he was. Instead of thinking that
a union between his cherished step-daughter and the energetic thriving
Donald was a thing to be desired for her good and his own, he hated the
very possibility.
Time had been when such instinctive opposition would have taken shape
in action. But he was not now the Henchard of former days. He schooled
himself to accept her will, in this as in other matters, as absolute and
unquestionable. He dreaded lest an antagonistic word should lose for him
such regard as he had regained from her by his devotion, feeling that
to retain this under separation was better than to incur her dislike by
keeping her near.
But the mere thought of such separation fevered his spirit much, and in
the evening he said, with the stillness of suspense: "Have you seen Mr.
Farfrae to-day, Elizabeth?"
Elizabeth-Jane started at the question; and it was with some confusion
that she replied "No."
"Oh - that's right - that's right....It was only that I saw him in the
street when we both were there." He was wondering if her embarrassment
justified him in a new suspicion - that the long walks which she had
latterly been taking, that the new books which had so surprised him, had
anything to do with the young man. She did not enlighten him, and lest
silence should allow her to shape thoughts unfavourable to their present
friendly relations, he diverted the discourse into another channel.
Henchard was, by original make, the last man to act stealthily, for good
or for evil. But the solicitus timor of his love - the dependence upon
Elizabeth's regard into which he had declined (or, in another sense,
to which he had advanced) - denaturalized him. He would often weigh
and consider for hours together the meaning of such and such a deed or
phrase of hers, when a blunt settling question would formerly have been
his first instinct. And now, uneasy at the thought of a passion for
Farfrae which should entirely displace her mild filial sympathy with
himself, he observed her going and coming more narrowly.
There was nothing secret in Elizabeth-Jane's movements beyond what
habitual reserve induced, and it may at once be owned on her account
that she was guilty of occasional conversations with Donald when they
chanced to meet. Whatever the origin of her walks on the Budmouth
Road, her return from those walks was often coincident with Farfrae's
emergence from corn Street for a twenty minutes' blow on that rather
windy highway - just to winnow the seeds and chaff out of him before
sitting down to tea, as he said. Henchard became aware of this by going
to the Ring, and, screened by its enclosure, keeping his eye upon the
road till he saw them meet. His face assumed an expression of extreme
anguish.
"Of her, too, he means to rob me!" he whispered. "But he has the right.
I do not wish to interfere."
The meeting, in truth, was of a very innocent kind, and matters were by
no means so far advanced between the young people as Henchard's jealous
grief inferred. Could he have heard such conversation as passed he would
have been enlightened thus much: -
HE. - "You like walking this way, Miss Henchard - and is it not so?"
(uttered in his undulatory accents, and with an appraising, pondering
gaze at her).
SHE. - "O yes. I have chosen this road latterly. I have no great reason
for it."
HE. - "But that may make a reason for others."
SHE (reddening). - "I don't know that. My reason, however, such as it is,
is that I wish to get a glimpse of the sea every day."
HE. - "Is it a secret why?"
SHE ( reluctantly ). - "Yes."
HE (with the pathos of one of his native ballads). - "Ah, I doubt there
will be any good in secrets! A secret cast a deep shadow over my life.
And well you know what it was."
Elizabeth admitted that she did, but she refrained from confessing why
the sea attracted her. She could not herself account for it fully, not
knowing the secret possibly to be that, in addition to early marine
associations, her blood was a sailor's.
"Thank you for those new books, Mr. Farfrae," she added shyly. "I wonder
if I ought to accept so many!"
"Ay! why not? It gives me more pleasure to get them for you, than you to
have them!"
"It cannot."
They proceeded along the road together till they reached the town, and
their paths diverged.
Henchard vowed that he would leave them to their own devices, put
nothing in the way of their courses, whatever they might mean. If he
were doomed to be bereft of her, so it must be. In the situation which
their marriage would create he could see no locus standi for himself
at all. Farfrae would never recognize him more than superciliously; his
poverty ensured that, no less than his past conduct. And so Elizabeth
would grow to be a stranger to him, and the end of his life would be
friendless solitude.
With such a possibility impending he could not help watchfulness.
Indeed, within certain lines, he had the right to keep an eye upon her
as his charge. The meetings seemed to become matters of course with them
on special days of the week.
At last full proof was given him. He was standing behind a wall close
to the place at which Farfrae encountered her. He heard the young man
address her as "Dearest Elizabeth-Jane," and then kiss her, the girl
looking quickly round to assure herself that nobody was near.
When they were gone their way Henchard came out from the wall, and
mournfully followed them to Casterbridge. The chief looming trouble
in this engagement had not decreased. Both Farfrae and Elizabeth-Jane,
unlike the rest of the people, must suppose Elizabeth to be his actual
daughter, from his own assertion while he himself had the same belief;
and though Farfrae must have so far forgiven him as to have no objection
to own him as a father-in-law, intimate they could never be. Thus would
the girl, who was his only friend, be withdrawn from him by degrees
through her husband's influence, and learn to despise him.
Had she lost her heart to any other man in the world than the one he had
rivalled, cursed, wrestled with for life in days before his spirit was
broken, Henchard would have said, "I am content." But content with the
prospect as now depicted was hard to acquire.
There is an outer chamber of the brain in which thoughts unowned,
unsolicited, and of noxious kind, are sometimes allowed to wander for a
moment prior to being sent off whence they came. One of these thoughts
sailed into Henchard's ken now.
Suppose he were to communicate to Farfrae the fact that his betrothed
was not the child of Michael Henchard at all - legally, nobody's child;
how would that correct and leading townsman receive the information?
He might possibly forsake Elizabeth-Jane, and then she would be her
step-sire's own again.
Henchard shuddered, and exclaimed, "God forbid such a thing! Why should
I still be subject to these visitations of the devil, when I try so hard
to keep him away?"
43.
What Henchard saw thus early was, naturally enough, seen at a little
later date by other people. That Mr. Farfrae "walked with that bankrupt
Henchard's step-daughter, of all women," became a common topic in the
town, the simple perambulating term being used hereabout to signify a
wooing; and the nineteen superior young ladies of Casterbridge, who
had each looked upon herself as the only woman capable of making the
merchant Councilman happy, indignantly left off going to the church
Farfrae attended, left off conscious mannerisms, left off putting him in
their prayers at night amongst their blood relations; in short, reverted
to their normal courses.
Perhaps the only inhabitants of the town to whom this looming choice
of the Scotchman's gave unmixed satisfaction were the members of the
philosophic party, which included Longways, Christopher Coney, Billy
Wills, Mr. Buzzford, and the like. The Three Mariners having been, years
before, the house in which they had witnessed the young man and woman's
first and humble appearance on the Casterbridge stage, they took a
kindly interest in their career, not unconnected, perhaps, with visions
of festive treatment at their hands hereafter. Mrs. Stannidge, having
rolled into the large parlour one evening and said that it was a wonder
such a man as Mr. Farfrae, "a pillow of the town," who might have chosen
one of the daughters of the professional men or private residents,
should stoop so low, Coney ventured to disagree with her.
"No, ma'am, no wonder at all. 'Tis she that's a stooping to he - that's
my opinion. A widow man - whose first wife was no credit to him - what is
it for a young perusing woman that's her own mistress and well liked?
But as a neat patching up of things I see much good in it. When a man
have put up a tomb of best marble-stone to the other one, as he've
done, and weeped his fill, and thought it all over, and said to hisself,
'T'other took me in, I knowed this one first; she's a sensible piece for
a partner, and there's no faithful woman in high life now'; - well, he
may do worse than not to take her, if she's tender-inclined."
Thus they talked at the Mariners. But we must guard against a too
liberal use of the conventional declaration that a great sensation was
caused by the prospective event, that all the gossips' tongues were set
wagging thereby, and so-on, even though such a declaration might lend
some eclat to the career of our poor only heroine. When all has been
said about busy rumourers, a superficial and temporary thing is the
interest of anybody in affairs which do not directly touch them. It
would be a truer representation to say that Casterbridge (ever excepting
the nineteen young ladies) looked up for a moment at the news, and
withdrawing its attention, went on labouring and victualling, bringing
up its children, and burying its dead, without caring a tittle for
Farfrae's domestic plans.
Not a hint of the matter was thrown out to her stepfather by Elizabeth
herself or by Farfrae either. Reasoning on the cause of their reticence
he concluded that, estimating him by his past, the throbbing pair were
afraid to broach the subject, and looked upon him as an irksome obstacle
whom they would be heartily glad to get out of the way. Embittered as he
was against society, this moody view of himself took deeper and deeper
hold of Henchard, till the daily necessity of facing mankind, and of
them particularly Elizabeth-Jane, became well-nigh more than he could
endure. His health declined; he became morbidly sensitive. He wished he
could escape those who did not want him, and hide his head for ever.
But what if he were mistaken in his views, and there were no necessity
that his own absolute separation from her should be involved in the
incident of her marriage?
He proceeded to draw a picture of the alternative - himself living like a
fangless lion about the back rooms of a house in which his stepdaughter
was mistress, an inoffensive old man, tenderly smiled on by Elizabeth,
and good-naturedly tolerated by her husband. It was terrible to his
pride to think of descending so low; and yet, for the girl's sake
he might put up with anything; even from Farfrae; even snubbings and
masterful tongue-scourgings. The privilege of being in the house she
occupied would almost outweigh the personal humiliation.
Whether this were a dim possibility or the reverse, the courtship - which
it evidently now was - had an absorbing interest for him.
Elizabeth, as has been said, often took her walks on the Budmouth Road,
and Farfrae as often made it convenient to create an accidental meeting
with her there. Two miles out, a quarter of a mile from the highway,
was the prehistoric fort called Mai Dun, of huge dimensions and many
ramparts, within or upon whose enclosures a human being as seen from
the road, was but an insignificant speck. Hitherward Henchard often
resorted, glass in hand, and scanned the hedgeless Via - for it was the
original track laid out by the legions of the Empire - to a distance of
two or three miles, his object being to read the progress of affairs
between Farfrae and his charmer.
One day Henchard was at this spot when a masculine figure came along
the road from Budmouth, and lingered. Applying his telescope to his eye
Henchard expected that Farfrae's features would be disclosed as usual.
But the lenses revealed that today the man was not Elizabeth-Jane's
lover.
It was one clothed as a merchant captain, and as he turned in the
scrutiny of the road he revealed his face. Henchard lived a lifetime the
moment he saw it. The face was Newson's.
Henchard dropped the glass, and for some seconds made no other movement.
Newson waited, and Henchard waited - if that could be called a waiting
which was a transfixture. But Elizabeth-Jane did not come. Something
or other had caused her to neglect her customary walk that day. Perhaps
Farfrae and she had chosen another road for variety's sake. But what did
that amount to? She might be here to-morrow, and in any case Newson, if
bent on a private meeting and a revelation of the truth to her, would
soon make his opportunity.
Then he would tell her not only of his paternity, but of the ruse by
which he had been once sent away. Elizabeth's strict nature would cause
her for the first time to despise her stepfather, would root out his
image as that of an arch-deceiver, and Newson would reign in her heart
in his stead.
But Newson did not see anything of her that morning. Having stood still
awhile he at last retraced his steps, and Henchard felt like a condemned
man who has a few hours' respite. When he reached his own house he found
her there.
"O father!" she said innocently. "I have had a letter - a strange
one - not signed. Somebody has asked me to meet him, either on the
Budmouth Road at noon today, or in the evening at Mr. Farfrae's. He says
he came to see me some time ago, but a trick was played him, so that he
did not see me. I don't understand it; but between you and me I think
Donald is at the bottom of the mystery, and that it is a relation of
his who wants to pass an opinion on his choice. But I did not like to go
till I had seen you. Shall I go?"
Henchard replied heavily, "Yes; go."
The question of his remaining in Casterbridge was for ever disposed of
by this closing in of Newson on the scene. Henchard was not the man to
stand the certainty of condemnation on a matter so near his heart. And
being an old hand at bearing anguish in silence, and haughty withal,
he resolved to make as light as he could of his intentions, while
immediately taking his measures.
He surprised the young woman whom he had looked upon as his all in this
world by saying to her, as if he did not care about her more: "I am
going to leave Casterbridge, Elizabeth-Jane."
"Leave Casterbridge!" she cried, "and leave - me?"
"Yes, this little shop can be managed by you alone as well as by us
both; I don't care about shops and streets and folk - I would rather get
into the country by myself, out of sight, and follow my own ways, and
leave you to yours."
She looked down and her tears fell silently. It seemed to her that this
resolve of his had come on account of her attachment and its probable
result. She showed her devotion to Farfrae, however, by mastering her
emotion and speaking out.
"I am sorry you have decided on this," she said with difficult firmness.
"For I thought it probable - possible - that I might marry Mr. Farfrae
some little time hence, and I did not know that you disapproved of the
step!"
"I approve of anything you desire to do, Izzy," said Henchard huskily.
"If I did not approve it would be no matter! I wish to go away. My
presence might make things awkward in the future, and, in short, it is
best that I go."
Nothing that her affection could urge would induce him to reconsider his
determination; for she could not urge what she did not know - that when
she should learn he was not related to her other than as a step-parent
she would refrain from despising him, and that when she knew what he had
done to keep her in ignorance she would refrain from hating him. It was
his conviction that she would not so refrain; and there existed as yet
neither word nor event which could argue it away.
"Then," she said at last, "you will not be able to come to my wedding;
and that is not as it ought to be."
"I don't want to see it - I don't want to see it!" he exclaimed; adding
more softly, "but think of me sometimes in your future life - you'll do
that, Izzy? - think of me when you are living as the wife of the richest,
the foremost man in the town, and don't let my sins, WHEN YOU KNOW THEM
ALL, cause 'ee to quite forget that though I loved 'ee late I loved 'ee
well."
"It is because of Donald!" she sobbed.
"I don't forbid you to marry him," said Henchard. "Promise not to quite
forget me when - - " He meant when Newson should come.
She promised mechanically, in her agitation; and the same evening at
dusk Henchard left the town, to whose development he had been one of
the chief stimulants for many years. During the day he had bought a new
tool-basket, cleaned up his old hay-knife and wimble, set himself up in
fresh leggings, kneenaps and corduroys, and in other ways gone back
to the working clothes of his young manhood, discarding for ever the
shabby-genteel suit of cloth and rusty silk hat that since his decline
had characterized him in the Casterbridge street as a man who had seen
better days.
He went secretly and alone, not a soul of the many who had known him
being aware of his departure. Elizabeth-Jane accompanied him as far as
the second bridge on the highway - for the hour of her appointment with
the unguessed visitor at Farfrae's had not yet arrived - and parted from
him with unfeigned wonder and sorrow, keeping him back a minute or two
before finally letting him go. She watched his form diminish across the
moor, the yellow rush-basket at his back moving up and down with each
tread, and the creases behind his knees coming and going alternately
till she could no longer see them. Though she did not know it Henchard
formed at this moment much the same picture as he had presented when
entering Casterbridge for the first time nearly a quarter of a century
before; except, to be sure, that the serious addition to his years
had considerably lessened the spring to his stride, that his state
of hopelessness had weakened him, and imparted to his shoulders, as
weighted by the basket, a perceptible bend.
He went on till he came to the first milestone, which stood in the bank,
half way up a steep hill. He rested his basket on the top of the stone,
placed his elbows on it, and gave way to a convulsive twitch, which was
worse than a sob, because it was so hard and so dry.
"If I had only got her with me - if I only had!" he said. "Hard work
would be nothing to me then! But that was not to be. I - Cain - go alone
as I deserve - an outcast and a vagabond. But my punishment is not
greater than I can bear!"
He sternly subdued his anguish, shouldered his basket, and went on.
Elizabeth, in the meantime, had breathed him a sigh, recovered her
equanimity, and turned her face to Casterbridge. Before she had reached
the first house she was met in her walk by Donald Farfrae. This was
evidently not their first meeting that day; they joined hands without
ceremony, and Farfrae anxiously asked, "And is he gone - and did you tell
him? - I mean of the other matter - not of ours."
"He is gone; and I told him all I knew of your friend. Donald, who is
he?"
"Well, well, dearie; you will know soon about that. And Mr. Henchard
will hear of it if he does not go far."
"He will go far - he's bent upon getting out of sight and sound!"
She walked beside her lover, and when they reached the Crossways, or
Bow, turned with him into Corn Street instead of going straight on to
her own door. At Farfrae's house they stopped and went in.
Farfrae flung open the door of the ground-floor sitting-room, saying,
"There he is waiting for you," and Elizabeth entered. In the arm-chair
sat the broad-faced genial man who had called on Henchard on a memorable
morning between one and two years before this time, and whom the latter
had seen mount the coach and depart within half-an-hour of his arrival.
It was Richard Newson. The meeting with the light-hearted father from
whom she had been separated half-a-dozen years, as if by death, need
hardly be detailed. It was an affecting one, apart from the question of
paternity. Henchard's departure was in a moment explained. When the
true facts came to be handled the difficulty of restoring her to her
old belief in Newson was not so great as might have seemed likely,
for Henchard's conduct itself was a proof that those facts were true.
Moreover, she had grown up under Newson's paternal care; and even had
Henchard been her father in nature, this father in early domiciliation
might almost have carried the point against him, when the incidents of
her parting with Henchard had a little worn off.
Newson's pride in what she had grown up to be was more than he could
express. He kissed her again and again.
"I've saved you the trouble to come and meet me - ha-ha!" said Newson.
"The fact is that Mr. Farfrae here, he said, 'Come up and stop with me
for a day or two, Captain Newson, and I'll bring her round.' 'Faith,'
says I, 'so I will'; and here I am."
"Well, Henchard is gone," said Farfrae, shutting the door. "He has done
it all voluntarily, and, as I gather from Elizabeth, he has been very
nice with her. I was got rather uneasy; but all is as it should be, and
we will have no more deefficulties at all."
"Now, that's very much as I thought," said Newson, looking into the face
of each by turns. "I said to myself, ay, a hundred times, when I tried
to get a peep at her unknown to herself - 'Depend upon it, 'tis best that
I should live on quiet for a few days like this till something turns up
for the better.' I now know you are all right, and what can I wish for
more?"
"Well, Captain Newson, I will be glad to see ye here every day now,
since it can do no harm," said Farfrae. "And what I've been thinking is
that the wedding may as well be kept under my own roof, the house being
large, and you being in lodgings by yourself - so that a great deal of
trouble and expense would be saved ye? - and 'tis a convenience when a
couple's married not to hae far to go to get home!"
"With all my heart," said Captain Newson; "since, as ye say, it can
do no harm, now poor Henchard's gone; though I wouldn't have done it
otherwise, or put myself in his way at all; for I've already in my
lifetime been an intruder into his family quite as far as politeness
can be expected to put up with. But what do the young woman say herself
about it? Elizabeth, my child, come and hearken to what we be talking
about, and not bide staring out o' the window as if ye didn't hear.'
"Donald and you must settle it," murmured Elizabeth, still keeping up a
scrutinizing gaze at some small object in the street.
"Well, then," continued Newson, turning anew to Farfrae with a face
expressing thorough entry into the subject, "that's how we'll have it.
And, Mr. Farfrae, as you provide so much, and houseroom, and all
that, I'll do my part in the drinkables, and see to the rum and
schiedam - maybe a dozen jars will be sufficient? - as many of the folk
will be ladies, and perhaps they won't drink hard enough to make a high
average in the reckoning? But you know best. I've provided for men and
shipmates times enough, but I'm as ignorant as a child how many glasses
of grog a woman, that's not a drinking woman, is expected to consume at
these ceremonies?"
"Oh, none - we'll no want much of that - O no!" said Farfrae, shaking his
head with appalled gravity. "Do you leave all to me."
When they had gone a little further in these particulars Newson, leaning
back in his chair and smiling reflectively at the ceiling, said, "I've
never told ye, or have I, Mr. Farfrae, how Henchard put me off the scent
that time?"
He expressed ignorance of what the Captain alluded to.
"Ah, I thought I hadn't. I resolved that I would not, I remember, not
to hurt the man's name. But now he's gone I can tell ye. Why, I came to
Casterbridge nine or ten months before that day last week that I found
ye out. I had been here twice before then. The first time I passed
through the town on my way westward, not knowing Elizabeth lived here.
Then hearing at some place - I forget where - that a man of the name of
Henchard had been mayor here, I came back, and called at his house one
morning. The old rascal! - he said Elizabeth-Jane had died years ago."
Elizabeth now gave earnest heed to his story.
"Now, it never crossed my mind that the man was selling me a packet,"
continued Newson. "And, if you'll believe me, I was that upset, that
I went back to the coach that had brought me, and took passage onward
without lying in the town half-an-hour. Ha-ha! - 'twas a good joke, and
well carried out, and I give the man credit for't!"
Elizabeth-Jane was amazed at the intelligence. "A joke? - O no!" she
cried. "Then he kept you from me, father, all those months, when you
might have been here?"
The father admitted that such was the case.
"He ought not to have done it!" said Farfrae.
Elizabeth sighed. "I said I would never forget him. But O! I think I
ought to forget him now!"
Newson, like a good many rovers and sojourners among strange men and
strange moralities, failed to perceive the enormity of Henchard's crime,
notwithstanding that he himself had been the chief sufferer therefrom.
Indeed, the attack upon the absent culprit waxing serious, he began to
take Henchard's part.
"Well, 'twas not ten words that he said, after all," Newson pleaded.
"And how could he know that I should be such a simpleton as to believe
him? 'Twas as much my fault as his, poor fellow!"
"No," said Elizabeth-Jane firmly, in her revulsion of feeling. "He knew
your disposition - you always were so trusting, father; I've heard my
mother say so hundreds of times - and he did it to wrong you. After
weaning me from you these five years by saying he was my father, he
should not have done this."
Thus they conversed; and there was nobody to set before Elizabeth
any extenuation of the absent one's deceit. Even had he been present
Henchard might scarce have pleaded it, so little did he value himself or
his good name.
"Well, well - never mind - it is all over and past," said Newson
good-naturedly. "Now, about this wedding again."
44.
Meanwhile, the man of their talk had pursued his solitary way eastward
till weariness overtook him, and he looked about for a place of rest.
His heart was so exacerbated at parting from the girl that he could not
face an inn, or even a household of the most humble kind; and entering
a field he lay down under a wheatrick, feeling no want of food. The very
heaviness of his soul caused him to sleep profoundly.
The bright autumn sun shining into his eyes across the stubble awoke him
the next morning early. He opened his basket and ate for his breakfast
what he had packed for his supper; and in doing so overhauled the
remainder of his kit. Although everything he brought necessitated
carriage at his own back, he had secreted among his tools a few of
Elizabeth-Jane's cast-off belongings, in the shape of gloves, shoes, a
scrap of her handwriting, and the like, and in his pocket he carried a
curl of her hair. Having looked at these things he closed them up again,
and went onward.
During five consecutive days Henchard's rush basket rode along upon
his shoulder between the highway hedges, the new yellow of the rushes
catching the eye of an occasional field-labourer as he glanced through
the quickset, together with the wayfarer's hat and head, and down-turned
face, over which the twig shadows moved in endless procession. It now
became apparent that the direction of his journey was Weydon Priors,
which he reached on the afternoon of the sixth day.
The renowned hill whereon the annual fair had been held for so many
generations was now bare of human beings, and almost of aught besides. A
few sheep grazed thereabout, but these ran off when Henchard halted upon
the summit. He deposited his basket upon the turf, and looked about with
sad curiosity; till he discovered the road by which his wife and himself
had entered on the upland so memorable to both, five-and-twenty years
before.
"Yes, we came up that way," he said, after ascertaining his bearings.
"She was carrying the baby, and I was reading a ballet-sheet. Then we
crossed about here - she so sad and weary, and I speaking to her hardly
at all, because of my cursed pride and mortification at being poor.
Then we saw the tent - that must have stood more this way." He walked to
another spot, it was not really where the tent had stood but it seemed
so to him. "Here we went in, and here we sat down. I faced this way.
Then I drank, and committed my crime. It must have been just on that
very pixy-ring that she was standing when she said her last words to me
before going off with him; I can hear their sound now, and the sound of
her sobs: 'O Mike! I've lived with thee all this while, and had nothing
but temper. Now I'm no more to 'ee - I'll try my luck elsewhere.'"
He experienced not only the bitterness of a man who finds, in looking
back upon an ambitious course, that what he has sacrificed in sentiment
was worth as much as what he has gained in substance; but the superadded
bitterness of seeing his very recantation nullified. He had been sorry
for all this long ago; but his attempts to replace ambition by love had
been as fully foiled as his ambition itself. His wronged wife had foiled
them by a fraud so grandly simple as to be almost a virtue. It was an
odd sequence that out of all this tampering with social law came that
flower of Nature, Elizabeth. Part of his wish to wash his hands of
life arose from his perception of its contrarious inconsistencies - of
Nature's jaunty readiness to support unorthodox social principles.
He intended to go on from this place - visited as an act of penance - into
another part of the country altogether. But he could not help thinking
of Elizabeth, and the quarter of the horizon in which she lived. Out of
this it happened that the centrifugal tendency imparted by weariness of
the world was counteracted by the centripetal influence of his love
for his stepdaughter. As a consequence, instead of following a straight
course yet further away from Casterbridge, Henchard gradually, almost
unconsciously, deflected from that right line of his first intention;
till, by degrees, his wandering, like that of the Canadian woodsman,
became part of a circle of which Casterbridge formed the centre. In
ascending any particular hill he ascertained the bearings as nearly as
he could by means of the sun, moon, or stars, and settled in his mind
the exact direction in which Casterbridge and Elizabeth-Jane lay.
Sneering at himself for his weakness he yet every hour - nay, every few
minutes - conjectured her actions for the time being - her sitting down
and rising up, her goings and comings, till thought of Newson's and
Farfrae's counter-influence would pass like a cold blast over a pool,
and efface her image. And then he would say to himself, "O you fool! All
this about a daughter who is no daughter of thine!"
At length he obtained employment at his own occupation of hay-trusser,
work of that sort being in demand at this autumn time. The scene of his
hiring was a pastoral farm near the old western highway, whose course
was the channel of all such communications as passed between the busy
centres of novelty and the remote Wessex boroughs. He had chosen the
neighbourhood of this artery from a sense that, situated here, though at
a distance of fifty miles, he was virtually nearer to her whose welfare
was so dear than he would be at a roadless spot only half as remote.
And thus Henchard found himself again on the precise standing which he
had occupied a quarter of a century before. Externally there was nothing
to hinder his making another start on the upward slope, and by his new
lights achieving higher things than his soul in its half-formed state
had been able to accomplish. But the ingenious machinery contrived
by the Gods for reducing human possibilities of amelioration to a
minimum - which arranges that wisdom to do shall come pari passu with
the departure of zest for doing - stood in the way of all that. He had
no wish to make an arena a second time of a world that had become a mere
painted scene to him.
Very often, as his hay-knife crunched down among the sweet-smelling
grassy stems, he would survey mankind and say to himself: "Here and
everywhere be folk dying before their time like frosted leaves, though
wanted by their families, the country, and the world; while I, an
outcast, an encumberer of the ground, wanted by nobody, and despised by
all, live on against my will!"
He often kept an eager ear upon the conversation of those who passed
along the road - not from a general curiosity by any means - but in the
hope that among these travellers between Casterbridge and London
some would, sooner or later, speak of the former place. The distance,
however, was too great to lend much probability to his desire; and the
highest result of his attention to wayside words was that he did
indeed hear the name "Casterbridge" uttered one day by the driver of
a road-waggon. Henchard ran to the gate of the field he worked in, and
hailed the speaker, who was a stranger.
"Yes - I've come from there, maister," he said, in answer to Henchard's
inquiry. "I trade up and down, ye know; though, what with this
travelling without horses that's getting so common, my work will soon be
done."
"Anything moving in the old place, mid I ask?"
"All the same as usual."
"I've heard that Mr. Farfrae, the late mayor, is thinking of getting
married. Now is that true or not?"
"I couldn't say for the life o' me. O no, I should think not."
"But yes, John - you forget," said a woman inside the waggon-tilt. "What
were them packages we carr'd there at the beginning o' the week? Surely
they said a wedding was coming off soon - on Martin's Day?"
The man declared he remembered nothing about it; and the waggon went on
jangling over the hill.
Henchard was convinced that the woman's memory served her well. The date
was an extremely probable one, there being no reason for delay on either
side. He might, for that matter, write and inquire of Elizabeth; but his
instinct for sequestration had made the course difficult. Yet before he
left her she had said that for him to be absent from her wedding was not
as she wished it to be.
The remembrance would continually revive in him now that it was not
Elizabeth and Farfrae who had driven him away from them, but his own
haughty sense that his presence was no longer desired. He had assumed
the return of Newson without absolute proof that the Captain meant to
return; still less that Elizabeth-Jane would welcome him; and with no
proof whatever that if he did return he would stay. What if he had
been mistaken in his views; if there had been no necessity that his
own absolute separation from her he loved should be involved in these
untoward incidents? To make one more attempt to be near her: to go back,
to see her, to plead his cause before her, to ask forgiveness for his
fraud, to endeavour strenuously to hold his own in her love; it was
worth the risk of repulse, ay, of life itself.
But how to initiate this reversal of all his former resolves without
causing husband and wife to despise him for his inconsistency was a
question which made him tremble and brood.
He cut and cut his trusses two days more, and then he concluded his
hesitancies by a sudden reckless determination to go to the wedding
festivity. Neither writing nor message would be expected of him. She had
regretted his decision to be absent - his unanticipated presence would
fill the little unsatisfied corner that would probably have place in her
just heart without him.
To intrude as little of his personality as possible upon a gay event
with which that personality could show nothing in keeping, he decided
not to make his appearance till evening - when stiffness would have worn
off, and a gentle wish to let bygones be bygones would exercise its sway
in all hearts.
He started on foot, two mornings before St. Martin's-tide, allowing
himself about sixteen miles to perform for each of the three days'
journey, reckoning the wedding-day as one. There were only two towns,
Melchester and Shottsford, of any importance along his course, and at
the latter he stopped on the second night, not only to rest, but to
prepare himself for the next evening.
Possessing no clothes but the working suit he stood in - now stained and
distorted by their two months of hard usage, he entered a shop to make
some purchases which should put him, externally at any rate, a little in
harmony with the prevailing tone of the morrow. A rough yet respectable
coat and hat, a new shirt and neck-cloth, were the chief of these; and
having satisfied himself that in appearance at least he would not now
offend her, he proceeded to the more interesting particular of buying
her some present.
What should that present be? He walked up and down the street, regarding
dubiously the display in the shop windows, from a gloomy sense that what
he might most like to give her would be beyond his miserable pocket.
At length a caged goldfinch met his eye. The cage was a plain and small
one, the shop humble, and on inquiry he concluded he could afford
the modest sum asked. A sheet of newspaper was tied round the little