row in paralyzed attitudes. Being on the sunny side of the street the
three comrades had suffered largely from warping, splitting, fading, and
shrinkage, so that they were but a half-invisible film upon the reality
of the grain, and knots, and nails, which composed the signboard. As a
matter of fact, this state of things was not so much owing to Stannidge
the landlord's neglect, as from the lack of a painter in Casterbridge
who would undertake to reproduce the features of men so traditional.
A long, narrow, dimly-lit passage gave access to the inn, within which
passage the horses going to their stalls at the back, and the coming and
departing human guests, rubbed shoulders indiscriminately, the latter
running no slight risk of having their toes trodden upon by the animals.
The good stabling and the good ale of the Mariners, though somewhat
difficult to reach on account of there being but this narrow way to
both, were nevertheless perseveringly sought out by the sagacious old
heads who knew what was what in Casterbridge.
Henchard stood without the inn for a few instants; then lowering the
dignity of his presence as much as possible by buttoning the brown
holland coat over his shirt-front, and in other ways toning himself down
to his ordinary everyday appearance, he entered the inn door.
7.
Elizabeth-Jane and her mother had arrived some twenty minutes earlier.
Outside the house they had stood and considered whether even this homely
place, though recommended as moderate, might not be too serious in its
prices for their light pockets. Finally, however, they had found courage
to enter, and duly met Stannidge the landlord, a silent man, who drew
and carried frothing measures to this room and to that, shoulder to
shoulder with his waiting-maids - a stately slowness, however, entering
into his ministrations by contrast with theirs, as became one whose
service was somewhat optional. It would have been altogether optional
but for the orders of the landlady, a person who sat in the bar,
corporeally motionless, but with a flitting eye and quick ear, with
which she observed and heard through the open door and hatchway the
pressing needs of customers whom her husband overlooked though close at
hand. Elizabeth and her mother were passively accepted as sojourners,
and shown to a small bedroom under one of the gables, where they sat
down.
The principle of the inn seemed to be to compensate for the antique
awkwardness, crookedness, and obscurity of the passages, floors, and
windows, by quantities of clean linen spread about everywhere, and this
had a dazzling effect upon the travellers.
"'Tis too good for us - we can't meet it!" said the elder woman, looking
round the apartment with misgiving as soon as they were left alone.
"I fear it is, too," said Elizabeth. "But we must be respectable."
"We must pay our way even before we must be respectable," replied her
mother. "Mr. Henchard is too high for us to make ourselves known to him,
I much fear; so we've only our own pockets to depend on."
"I know what I'll do," said Elizabeth-Jane after an interval of waiting,
during which their needs seemed quite forgotten under the press of
business below. And leaving the room, she descended the stairs and
penetrated to the bar.
If there was one good thing more than another which characterized this
single-hearted girl it was a willingness to sacrifice her personal
comfort and dignity to the common weal.
"As you seem busy here to-night, and mother's not well off, might I take
out part of our accommodation by helping?" she asked of the landlady.
The latter, who remained as fixed in the arm-chair as if she had been
melted into it when in a liquid state, and could not now be unstuck,
looked the girl up and down inquiringly, with her hands on the
chair-arms. Such arrangements as the one Elizabeth proposed were
not uncommon in country villages; but, though Casterbridge was
old-fashioned, the custom was well-nigh obsolete here. The mistress
of the house, however, was an easy woman to strangers, and she made no
objection. Thereupon Elizabeth, being instructed by nods and motions
from the taciturn landlord as to where she could find the different
things, trotted up and down stairs with materials for her own and her
parent's meal.
While she was doing this the wood partition in the centre of the house
thrilled to its centre with the tugging of a bell-pull upstairs. A bell
below tinkled a note that was feebler in sound than the twanging of
wires and cranks that had produced it.
"'Tis the Scotch gentleman," said the landlady omnisciently; and turning
her eyes to Elizabeth, "Now then, can you go and see if his supper is on
the tray? If it is you can take it up to him. The front room over this."
Elizabeth-Jane, though hungry, willingly postponed serving herself
awhile, and applied to the cook in the kitchen whence she brought
forth the tray of supper viands, and proceeded with it upstairs to the
apartment indicated. The accommodation of the Three Mariners was far
from spacious, despite the fair area of ground it covered. The
room demanded by intrusive beams and rafters, partitions, passages,
staircases, disused ovens, settles, and four-posters, left comparatively
small quarters for human beings. Moreover, this being at a time before
home-brewing was abandoned by the smaller victuallers, and a house in
which the twelve-bushel strength was still religiously adhered to by the
landlord in his ale, the quality of the liquor was the chief attraction
of the premises, so that everything had to make way for utensils and
operations in connection therewith. Thus Elizabeth found that the
Scotchman was located in a room quite close to the small one that had
been allotted to herself and her mother.
When she entered nobody was present but the young man himself - the
same whom she had seen lingering without the windows of the King's Arms
Hotel. He was now idly reading a copy of the local paper, and was hardly
conscious of her entry, so that she looked at him quite coolly, and saw
how his forehead shone where the light caught it, and how nicely his
hair was cut, and the sort of velvet-pile or down that was on the skin
at the back of his neck, and how his cheek was so truly curved as to be
part of a globe, and how clearly drawn were the lids and lashes which
hid his bent eyes.
She set down the tray, spread his supper, and went away without a word.
On her arrival below the landlady, who was as kind as she was fat
and lazy, saw that Elizabeth-Jane was rather tired, though in her
earnestness to be useful she was waiving her own needs altogether. Mrs.
Stannidge thereupon said with a considerate peremptoriness that she and
her mother had better take their own suppers if they meant to have any.
Elizabeth fetched their simple provisions, as she had fetched the
Scotchman's, and went up to the little chamber where she had left her
mother, noiselessly pushing open the door with the edge of the tray. To
her surprise her mother, instead of being reclined on the bed where she
had left her was in an erect position, with lips parted. At Elizabeth's
entry she lifted her finger.
The meaning of this was soon apparent. The room allotted to the two
women had at one time served as a dressing-room to the Scotchman's
chamber, as was evidenced by signs of a door of communication between
them - now screwed up and pasted over with the wall paper. But, as is
frequently the case with hotels of far higher pretensions than the Three
Mariners, every word spoken in either of these rooms was distinctly
audible in the other. Such sounds came through now.
Thus silently conjured Elizabeth deposited the tray, and her mother
whispered as she drew near, "'Tis he."
"Who?" said the girl.
"The Mayor."
The tremors in Susan Henchard's tone might have led any person but one
so perfectly unsuspicious of the truth as the girl was, to surmise
some closer connection than the admitted simple kinship as a means of
accounting for them.
Two men were indeed talking in the adjoining chamber, the young
Scotchman and Henchard, who, having entered the inn while Elizabeth-Jane
was in the kitchen waiting for the supper, had been deferentially
conducted upstairs by host Stannidge himself. The girl noiselessly laid
out their little meal, and beckoned to her mother to join her, which
Mrs. Henchard mechanically did, her attention being fixed on the
conversation through the door.
"I merely strolled in on my way home to ask you a question about
something that has excited my curiosity," said the Mayor, with careless
geniality. "But I see you have not finished supper."
"Ay, but I will be done in a little! Ye needn't go, sir. Take a seat.
I've almost done, and it makes no difference at all."
Henchard seemed to take the seat offered, and in a moment he resumed:
"Well, first I should ask, did you write this?" A rustling of paper
followed.
"Yes, I did," said the Scotchman.
"Then," said Henchard, "I am under the impression that we have met by
accident while waiting for the morning to keep an appointment with each
other? My name is Henchard, ha'n't you replied to an advertisement for a
corn-factor's manager that I put into the paper - ha'n't you come here to
see me about it?"
"No," said the Scotchman, with some surprise.
"Surely you are the man," went on Henchard insistingly, "who arranged to
come and see me? Joshua, Joshua, Jipp - Jopp - what was his name?"
"You're wrong!" said the young man. "My name is Donald Farfrae. It is
true I am in the corren trade - but I have replied to no advertisement,
and arranged to see no one. I am on my way to Bristol - from there to the
other side of the warrld, to try my fortune in the great wheat-growing
districts of the West! I have some inventions useful to the trade, and
there is no scope for developing them heere."
"To America - well, well," said Henchard, in a tone of disappointment, so
strong as to make itself felt like a damp atmosphere. "And yet I could
have sworn you were the man!"
The Scotchman murmured another negative, and there was a silence, till
Henchard resumed: "Then I am truly and sincerely obliged to you for the
few words you wrote on that paper."
"It was nothing, sir."
"Well, it has a great importance for me just now. This row about my
grown wheat, which I declare to Heaven I didn't know to be bad till the
people came complaining, has put me to my wits' end. I've some hundreds
of quarters of it on hand; and if your renovating process will make it
wholesome, why, you can see what a quag 'twould get me out of. I saw
in a moment there might be truth in it. But I should like to have it
proved; and of course you don't care to tell the steps of the process
sufficiently for me to do that, without my paying ye well for't first."
The young man reflected a moment or two. "I don't know that I have any
objection," he said. "I'm going to another country, and curing bad
corn is not the line I'll take up there. Yes, I'll tell ye the whole of
it - you'll make more out of it heere than I will in a foreign country.
Just look heere a minute, sir. I can show ye by a sample in my
carpet-bag."
The click of a lock followed, and there was a sifting and rustling;
then a discussion about so many ounces to the bushel, and drying, and
refrigerating, and so on.
"These few grains will be sufficient to show ye with," came in the young
fellow's voice; and after a pause, during which some operation seemed
to be intently watched by them both, he exclaimed, "There, now, do you
taste that."
"It's complete! - quite restored, or - well - nearly."
"Quite enough restored to make good seconds out of it," said the
Scotchman. "To fetch it back entirely is impossible; Nature won't stand
so much as that, but heere you go a great way towards it. Well, sir,
that's the process, I don't value it, for it can be but of little use
in countries where the weather is more settled than in ours; and I'll be
only too glad if it's of service to you."
"But hearken to me," pleaded Henchard. "My business you know, is in corn
and in hay, but I was brought up as a hay-trusser simply, and hay is
what I understand best though I now do more in corn than in the other.
If you'll accept the place, you shall manage the corn branch entirely,
and receive a commission in addition to salary."
"You're liberal - very liberal, but no, no - I cannet!" the young man
still replied, with some distress in his accents.
"So be it!" said Henchard conclusively. "Now - to change the subject - one
good turn deserves another; don't stay to finish that miserable supper.
Come to my house, I can find something better for 'ee than cold ham and
ale."
Donald Farfrae was grateful - said he feared he must decline - that he
wished to leave early next day.
"Very well," said Henchard quickly, "please yourself. But I tell you,
young man, if this holds good for the bulk, as it has done for the
sample, you have saved my credit, stranger though you be. What shall I
pay you for this knowledge?"
"Nothing at all, nothing at all. It may not prove necessary to ye to use
it often, and I don't value it at all. I thought I might just as well
let ye know, as you were in a difficulty, and they were harrd upon ye."
Henchard paused. "I shan't soon forget this," he said. "And from a
stranger!... I couldn't believe you were not the man I had engaged! Says
I to myself, 'He knows who I am, and recommends himself by this stroke.'
And yet it turns out, after all, that you are not the man who answered
my advertisement, but a stranger!"
"Ay, ay; that's so," said the young man.
Henchard again suspended his words, and then his voice came
thoughtfully: "Your forehead, Farfrae, is something like my poor
brother's - now dead and gone; and the nose, too, isn't unlike his. You
must be, what - five foot nine, I reckon? I am six foot one and a half
out of my shoes. But what of that? In my business, 'tis true that
strength and bustle build up a firm. But judgment and knowledge are what
keep it established. Unluckily, I am bad at science, Farfrae; bad at
figures - a rule o' thumb sort of man. You are just the reverse - I can
see that. I have been looking for such as you these two year, and yet
you are not for me. Well, before I go, let me ask this: Though you are
not the young man I thought you were, what's the difference? Can't
ye stay just the same? Have you really made up your mind about this
American notion? I won't mince matters. I feel you would be invaluable
to me - that needn't be said - and if you will bide and be my manager, I
will make it worth your while."
"My plans are fixed," said the young man, in negative tones. "I have
formed a scheme, and so we need na say any more about it. But will you
not drink with me, sir? I find this Casterbridge ale warreming to the
stomach."
"No, no; I fain would, but I can't," said Henchard gravely, the scraping
of his chair informing the listeners that he was rising to leave. "When
I was a young man I went in for that sort of thing too strong - far too
strong - and was well-nigh ruined by it! I did a deed on account of it
which I shall be ashamed of to my dying day. It made such an impression
on me that I swore, there and then, that I'd drink nothing stronger than
tea for as many years as I was old that day. I have kept my oath; and
though, Farfrae, I am sometimes that dry in the dog days that I could
drink a quarter-barrel to the pitching, I think o' my oath, and touch no
strong drink at all."
"I'll no' press ye, sir - I'll no' press ye. I respect your vow.
"Well, I shall get a manager somewhere, no doubt," said Henchard, with
strong feeling in his tones. "But it will be long before I see one that
would suit me so well!"
The young man appeared much moved by Henchard's warm convictions of
his value. He was silent till they reached the door. "I wish I could
stay - sincerely I would like to," he replied. "But no - it cannet be! it
cannet! I want to see the warrld."
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,