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29.


At this hour Lucetta was bounding along the road to Port-
Bredy just as Elizabeth had announced.  That she had chosen
for her afternoon walk the road along which she had returned
to Casterbridge three hours earlier in a carriage was
curious--if anything should be called curious in
concatenations of phenomena wherein each is known to have
its accounting cause.  It was the day of the chief market--
Saturday--and Farfrae for once had been missed from his
corn-stand in the dealers' room.  Nevertheless, it was known
that he would be home that night--"for Sunday," as
Casterbridge expressed it.

Lucetta, in continuing her walk, had at length reached the
end of the ranked trees which bordered the highway in this
and other directions out of the town.  This end marked a
mile; and here she stopped.

The spot was a vale between two gentle acclivities, and the
road, still adhering to its Roman foundation, stretched
onward straight as a surveyor's line till lost to sight on
the most distant ridge.  There was neither hedge nor tree in
the prospect now, the road clinging to the stubby expanse of
corn-land like a strip to an undulating garment.  Near her
was a barn--the single building of any kind within her
horizon.

She strained her eyes up the lessening road, but nothing
appeared thereon--not so much as a speck.  She sighed one
word--"Donald!" and turned her face to the town for retreat.

Here the case was different.  A single figure was
approaching her--Elizabeth-Jane's.

Lucetta, in spite of her loneliness, seemed a little vexed.
Elizabeth's face, as soon as she recognized her friend,
shaped itself into affectionate lines while yet beyond
speaking distance.  "I suddenly thought I would come and
meet you," she said, smiling.

Lucetta's reply was taken from her lips by an unexpected
diversion.  A by-road on her right hand descended from the
fields into the highway at the point where she stood, and
down the track a bull was rambling uncertainly towards her
and Elizabeth, who, facing the other way, did not observe
him.

In the latter quarter of each year cattle were at once the
mainstay and the terror of families about Casterbridge and
its neighbourhood, where breeding was carried on with
Abrahamic success.  The head of stock driven into and out of
the town at this season to be sold by the local auctioneer
was very large; and all these horned beasts, in travelling
to and fro, sent women and children to shelter as nothing
else could do.  In the main the animals would have walked
along quietly enough; but the Casterbridge tradition was
that to drive stock it was indispensable that hideous cries,
coupled with Yahoo antics and gestures, should be used,
large sticks flourished, stray dogs called in, and in
general everything done that was likely to infuriate the
viciously disposed and terrify the mild.  Nothing was
commoner than for a house-holder on going out of his parlour
to find his hall or passage full of little children,
nursemaids, aged women, or a ladies' school, who apologized
for their presence by saying, "A bull passing down street
from the sale."

Lucetta and Elizabeth regarded the animal in doubt, he
meanwhile drawing vaguely towards them.  It was a large
specimen of the breed, in colour rich dun, though disfigured
at present by splotches of mud about his seamy sides.  His
horns were thick and tipped with brass; his two nostrils
like the Thames Tunnel as seen in the perspective toys of
yore.  Between them, through the gristle of his nose, was a
stout copper ring, welded on, and irremovable as Gurth's
collar of brass.  To the ring was attached an ash staff
about a yard long, which the bull with the motions of his
head flung about like a flail.

It was not till they observed this dangling stick that the
young women were really alarmed; for it revealed to them
that the bull was an old one, too savage to be driven, which
had in some way escaped, the staff being the means by which
the drover controlled him and kept his horns at arms'
length.

They looked round for some shelter or hiding-place, and
thought of the barn hard by.  As long as they had kept their
eyes on the bull he had shown some deference in his manner
of approach; but no sooner did they turn their backs to seek
the barn than he tossed his head and decided to thoroughly
terrify them.  This caused the two helpless girls to run
wildly, whereupon the bull advanced in a deliberate charge.

The barn stood behind a green slimy pond, and it was closed
save as to one of the usual pair of doors facing them, which
had been propped open by a hurdle-stick, and for this
opening they made.  The interior had been cleared by a
recent bout of threshing except at one end, where there was
a stack of dry clover.  Elizabeth-Jane took in the
situation.  "We must climb up there," she said.

But before they had even approached it they heard the bull
scampering through the pond without, and in a second he
dashed into the barn, knocking down the hurdle-stake in
passing; the heavy door slammed behind him; and all three
were imprisoned in the barn together.  The mistaken creature
saw them, and stalked towards the end of the barn into which
they had fled.  The girls doubled so adroitly that their
pursuer was against the wall when the fugitives were already
half way to the other end.  By the time that his length
would allow him to turn and follow them thither they had
crossed over; thus the pursuit went on, the hot air from his
nostrils blowing over them like a sirocco, and not a moment
being attainable by Elizabeth or Lucetta in which to open
the door.  What might have happened had their situation
continued cannot be said; but in a few moments a rattling of
the door distracted their adversary's attention, and a man
appeared.  He ran forward towards the leading-staff, seized
it, and wrenched the animal's head as if he would snap it
off.  The wrench was in reality so violent that the thick
neck seemed to have lost its stiffness and to become half-
paralyzed, whilst the nose dropped blood.  The premeditated
human contrivance of the nose-ring was too cunning for
impulsive brute force, and the creature flinched.

The man was seen in the partial gloom to be large-framed and
unhesitating.  He led the bull to the door, and the light
revealed Henchard.  He made the bull fast without, and re-
entered to the succour of Lucetta; for he had not perceived
Elizabeth, who had climbed on to the clover-heap.  Lucetta
was hysterical, and Henchard took her in his arms and
carried her to the door.

"You--have saved me!" she cried, as soon as she could speak.

"I have returned your kindness," he responded tenderly.
"You once saved me."

"How--comes it to be you--you?" she asked, not heeding his
reply.

"I came out here to look for you.  I have been wanting to
tell you something these two or three days; but you have
been away, and I could not.  Perhaps you cannot talk now?"

"Oh--no!  Where is Elizabeth?"

"Here am I!" cried the missing one cheerfully; and without
waiting for the ladder to be placed she slid down the face
of the clover-stack to the floor.

Henchard supporting Lucetta on one side, and Elizabeth-Jane
on the other, they went slowly along the rising road.  They
had reached the top and were descending again when Lucetta,
now much recovered, recollected that she had dropped her
muff in the barn.

"I'll run back," said Elizabeth-Jane.  "I don't mind it at
all, as I am not tired as you are."  She thereupon hastened
down again to the barn, the others pursuing their way.

Elizabeth soon found the muff, such an article being by no
means small at that time.  Coming out she paused to look for
a moment at the bull, now rather to be pitied with his
bleeding nose, having perhaps rather intended a practical
joke than a murder.  Henchard had secured him by jamming the
staff into the hinge of the barn-door, and wedging it there
with a stake.  At length she turned to hasten onward after
her contemplation, when she saw a green-and-black gig
approaching from the contrary direction, the vehicle being
driven by Farfrae.

His presence here seemed to explain Lucetta's walk that way.
Donald saw her, drew up, and was hastily made acquainted
with what had occurred.  At Elizabeth-Jane mentioning how
greatly Lucetta had been jeopardized, he exhibited an
agitation different in kind no less than in intensity from
any she had seen in him before.  He became so absorbed in
the circumstance that he scarcely had sufficient knowledge
of what he was doing to think of helping her up beside him.

"She has gone on with Mr. Henchard, you say?" he inquired at
last.

"Yes.  He is taking her home.  They are almost there by this
time."

"And you are sure she can get home?"

Elizabeth-Jane was quite sure.

"Your stepfather saved her?"

"Entirely."

Farfrae checked his horse's pace; she guessed why.  He was
thinking that it would be best not to intrude on the other
two just now.  Henchard had saved Lucetta, and to provoke a
possible exhibition of her deeper affection for himself was
as ungenerous as it was unwise.

The immediate subject of their talk being exhausted she felt
more embarrassed at sitting thus beside her past lover; but
soon the two figures of the others were visible at the
entrance to the town.  The face of the woman was frequently
turned back, but Farfrae did not whip on the horse.  When
these reached the town walls Henchard and his companion had
disappeared down the street; Farfrae set down Elizabeth-Jane
on her expressing a particular wish to alight there, and
drove round to the stables at the back of his lodgings.

On this account he entered the house through his garden, and
going up to his apartments found them in a particularly
disturbed state, his boxes being hauled out upon the
landing, and his bookcase standing in three pieces.  These
phenomena, however, seemed to cause him not the least
surprise.  "When will everything be sent up?" he said to the
mistress of the house, who was superintending.

"I am afraid not before eight, sir," said she.  "You see we
wasn't aware till this morning that you were going to move,
or we could have been forwarder."

"A--well, never mind, never mind!" said Farfrae cheerily.
"Eight o'clock will do well enough if it be not later.  Now,
don't ye be standing here talking, or it will be twelve, I
doubt."  Thus speaking he went out by the front door and up
the street.

During this interval Henchard and Lucetta had had
experiences of a different kind.  After Elizabeth's
departure for the muff the corn-merchant opened himself
frankly, holding her hand within his arm, though she would
fain have withdrawn it.  "Dear Lucetta, I have been very,
very anxious to see you these two or three days," he said,
"ever since I saw you last!  I have thought over the way I
got your promise that night.  You said to me, 'If I were a
man I should not insist.' That cut me deep.  I felt that
there was some truth in it.  I don't want to make you
wretched; and to marry me just now would do that as nothing
else could--it is but too plain.  Therefore I agree to an
indefinite engagement--to put off all thought of marriage
for a year or two."

"But--but--can I do nothing of a different kind?" said
Lucetta.  "I am full of gratitude to you--you have saved my
life.  And your care of me is like coals of fire on my head!
I am a monied person now.  Surely I can do something in
return for your goodness--something practical?"

Henchard remained in thought.  He had evidently not expected
this.  "There is one thing you might do, Lucetta," he said.
"But not exactly of that kind."

"Then of what kind is it?" she asked with renewed misgiving.

"I must tell you a secret to ask it.--You may have heard
that I have been unlucky this year? I did what I have never
done before--speculated rashly; and I lost.  That's just put
me in a strait.

"And you would wish me to advance some money?"

"No, no!" said Henchard, almost in anger.  "I'm not the man
to sponge on a woman, even though she may be so nearly my
own as you.  No, Lucetta; what you can do is this and it
would save me.  My great creditor is Grower, and it is at
his hands I shall suffer if at anybody's; while a
fortnight's forbearance on his part would be enough to allow
me to pull through.  This may be got out of him in one way--
that you would let it be known to him that you are my
intended--that we are to be quietly married in the next
fortnight.--Now stop, you haven't heard all!  Let him have
this story, without, of course, any prejudice to the fact
that the actual engagement between us is to be a long one.
Nobody else need know: you could go with me to Mr. Grower
and just let me speak to 'ee before him as if we were on
such terms.  We'll ask him to keep it secret.  He will
willingly wait then.  At the fortnight's end I shall be able
to face him; and I can coolly tell him all is postponed
between us for a year or two.  Not a soul in the town need
know how you've helped me.  Since you wish to be of use,
there's your way."

It being now what the people called the "pinking in" of the
day, that is, the quarter-hour just before dusk, he did not
at first observe the result of his own words upon her.

"If it were anything else," she began, and the dryness of
her lips was represented in her voice.

"But it is such a little thing!" he said, with a deep
reproach.  "Less than you have offered--just the beginning
of what you have so lately promised!  I could have told him
as much myself, but he would not have believed me."

"It is not because I won't--it is because I absolutely
can't," she said, with rising distress.

"You are provoking!" he burst out.  "It is enough to make me
force you to carry out at once what you have promised."

"I cannot!" she insisted desperately.

"Why? When I have only within these few minutes released you
from your promise to do the thing offhand."

"Because--he was a witness!"

"Witness? Of what?

"If I must tell you----.  Don't, don't upbraid me!"

"Well!  Let's hear what you mean?"

"Witness of my marriage--Mr. Grower was!"

"Marriage?"

"Yes.  With Mr. Farfrae.  O Michael!  I am already his wife.
We were married this week at Port-Bredy.  There were reasons
against our doing it here.  Mr. Grower was a witness because
he happened to be at Port-Bredy at the time."

Henchard stood as if idiotized.  She was so alarmed at his
silence that she murmured something about lending him
sufficient money to tide over the perilous fortnight.

"Married him?" said Henchard at length.  "My good--what,
married him whilst--bound to marry me?"

"It was like this," she explained, with tears in her eyes
and quavers in her voice; "don't--don't be cruel!  I loved
him so much, and I thought you might tell him of the past--
and that grieved me!  And then, when I had promised you, I
learnt of the rumour that you had--sold your first wife at a
fair like a horse or cow!  How could I keep my promise after
hearing that? I could not risk myself in your hands; it
would have been letting myself down to take your name after
such a scandal.  But I knew I should lose Donald if I did
not secure him at once--for you would carry out your threat
of telling him of our former acquaintance, as long as there
was a chance of keeping me for yourself by doing so.  But
you will not do so now, will you, Michael? for it is too
late to separate us."

The notes of St. Peter's bells in full peal had been wafted
to them while he spoke, and now the genial thumping of the
town band, renowned for its unstinted use of the drum-stick,
throbbed down the street.

"Then this racket they are making is on account of it, I
suppose?" said he.

"Yes--I think he has told them, or else Mr. Grower
has....May I leave you now? My--he was detained at Port-
Bredy to-day, and sent me on a few hours before him."

"Then it is HIS WIFE'S life I have saved this
afternoon."

"Yes--and he will be for ever grateful to you."

"I am much obliged to him....O you false woman!" burst from
Henchard.  "You promised me!"

"Yes, yes!  But it was under compulsion, and I did not know
all your past----"

"And now I've a mind to punish you as you deserve!  One word
to this bran-new husband of how you courted me, and your
precious happiness is blown to atoms!"

"Michael--pity me, and be generous!"

"You don't deserve pity!  You did; but you don't now."

"I'll help you to pay off your debt."

"A pensioner of Farfrae's wife--not I!  Don't stay with me
longer--I shall say something worse.  Go home!"

She disappeared under the trees of the south walk as the
band came round the corner, awaking the echoes of every
stock and stone in celebration of her happiness.  Lucetta
took no heed, but ran up the back street and reached her own
home unperceived.



30.


Farfrae's words to his landlady had referred to the removal
of his boxes and other effects from his late lodgings to
Lucetta's house.  The work was not heavy, but it had been
much hindered on account of the frequent pauses necessitated
by exclamations of surprise at the event, of which the good
woman had been briefly informed by letter a few hours
earlier.

At the last moment of leaving Port-Bredy, Farfrae, like John
Gilpin, had been detained by important customers, whom, even
in the exceptional circumstances, he was not the man to
neglect.  Moreover, there was a convenience in Lucetta
arriving first at her house.  Nobody there as yet knew what
had happened; and she was best in a position to break the
news to the inmates, and give directions for her husband's
accommodation.  He had, therefore, sent on his two-days'
bride in a hired brougham, whilst he went across the country
to a certain group of wheat and barley ricks a few miles
off, telling her the hour at which he might be expected the
same evening.  This accounted for her trotting out to meet
him after their separation of four hours.

By a strenuous effort, after leaving Henchard she calmed
herself in readiness to receive Donald at High-Place Hall
when he came on from his lodgings.  One supreme fact
empowered her to this, the sense that, come what would, she
had secured him.  Half-an-hour after her arrival he walked
in, and she met him with a relieved gladness, which a
month's perilous absence could not have intensified.

"There is one thing I have not done; and yet it is
important," she said earnestly, when she had finished
talking about the adventure with the bull.  "That is, broken
the news of our marriage to my dear Elizabeth-Jane."

"Ah, and you have not?" he said thoughtfully.  "I gave her a
lift from the barn homewards; but I did not tell her either;
for I thought she might have heard of it in the town, and
was keeping back her congratulations from shyness, and all
that."

"She can hardly have heard of it.  But I'll find out; I'll
go to her now.  And, Donald, you don't mind her living on
with me just the same as before? She is so quiet and
unassuming."

"O no, indeed I don't," Farfrae answered with, perhaps, a
faint awkwardness.  "But I wonder if she would care to?"

"O yes!" said Lucetta eagerly.  "I am sure she would like
to.  Besides, poor thing, she has no other home."

Farfrae looked at her and saw that she did not suspect the
secret of her more reserved friend.  He liked her all the
better for the blindness.  "Arrange as you like with her by
all means," he said.  "It is I who have come to your house,
not you to mine."

"I'll run and speak to her," said Lucetta.

When she got upstairs to Elizabeth-Jane's room the latter
had taken off her out-door things, and was resting over a
book.  Lucetta found in a moment that she had not yet learnt
the news.

"I did not come down to you, Miss Templeman," she said
simply.  "I was coming to ask if you had quite recovered
from your fright, but I found you had a visitor.  What are
the bells ringing for, I wonder? And the band, too, is
playing.  Somebody must be married; or else they are
practising for Christmas."

Lucetta uttered a vague "Yes," and seating herself by the
other young woman looked musingly at her.  "What a lonely
creature you are," she presently said; "never knowing what's
going on, or what people are talking about everywhere with
keen interest.  You should get out, and gossip about as
other women do, and then you wouldn't be obliged to ask me a
question of that kind.  Well, now, I have something to tell
you.

Elizabeth-Jane said she was so glad, and made herself
receptive.

"I must go rather a long way back," said Lucetta, the
difficulty of explaining herself satisfactorily to the
pondering one beside her growing more apparent at each
syllable.  "You remember that trying case of conscience I
told you of some time ago--about the first lover and the
second lover?" She let out in jerky phrases a leading word
or two of the story she had told.

"O yes--I remember the story of YOUR FRIEND," said
Elizabeth drily, regarding the irises of Lucetta's eyes as
though to catch their exact shade.  "The two lovers--the old
one and the new: how she wanted to marry the second, but
felt she ought to marry the first; so that she neglected the
better course to follow the evil, like the poet Ovid I've
just been construing: 'Video meliora proboque, deteriora
sequor.'"

"O no; she didn't follow evil exactly!" said Lucetta
hastily.

"But you said that she--or as I may say you"--answered
Elizabeth, dropping the mask, "were in honour and conscience
bound to marry the first?"

Lucetta's blush at being seen through came and went again
before she replied anxiously, "You will never breathe this,
will you, Elizabeth-Jane?"

"Certainly not, if you say not.

"Then I will tell you that the case is more complicated--
worse, in fact--than it seemed in my story.  I and the first
man were thrown together in a strange way, and felt that we
ought to be united, as the world had talked of us.  He was a
widower, as he supposed.  He had not heard of his first wife
for many years.  But the wife returned, and we parted.  She
is now dead, and the husband comes paying me addresses
again, saying, 'Now we'll complete our purposes.' But,
Elizabeth-Jane, all this amounts to a new courtship of me by
him; I was absolved from all vows by the return of the other
woman."

"Have you not lately renewed your promise?" said the younger
with quiet surmise.  She had divined Man Number One.

"That was wrung from me by a threat."

"Yes, it was.  But I think when any one gets coupled up with
a man in the past so unfortunately as you have done she
ought to become his wife if she can, even if she were not
the sinning party."

Lucetta's countenance lost its sparkle.  "He turned out to
be a man I should be afraid to marry," she pleaded.  "Really
afraid!  And it was not till after my renewed promise that I
knew it."

"Then there is only one course left to honesty.  You must
remain a single woman."

"But think again!  Do consider----"

"I am certain," interrupted her companion hardily.  "I have
guessed very well who the man is.  My father; and I say it
is him or nobody for you."

Any suspicion of impropriety was to Elizabeth-Jane like a
red rag to a bull.  Her craving for correctness of procedure
was, indeed, almost vicious.  Owing to her early troubles
with regard to her mother a semblance of irregularity had
terrors for her which those whose names are safeguarded from
suspicion know nothing of.  "You ought to marry Mr. Henchard
or nobody--certainly not another man!" she went on with a
quivering lip in whose movement two passions shared.

"I don't admit that!" said Lucetta passionately.

"Admit it or not, it is true!"

Lucetta covered her eyes with her right hand, as if she
could plead no more, holding out her left to Elizabeth-Jane.

"Why, you HAVE married him!" cried the latter, jumping
up with pleasure after a glance at Lucetta's fingers.  "When
did you do it? Why did you not tell me, instead of teasing
me like this? How very honourable of you!  He did treat my
mother badly once, it seems, in a moment of intoxication.
And it is true that he is stern sometimes.  But you will
rule him entirely, I am sure, with your beauty and wealth
and accomplishments.  You are the woman he will adore, and
we shall all three be happy together now!"

"O, my Elizabeth-Jane!" cried Lucetta distressfully.  "'Tis
somebody else that I have married!  I was so desperate--so
afraid of being forced to anything else--so afraid of
revelations that would quench his love for me, that I
resolved to do it offhand, come what might, and purchase a
week of happiness at any cost!"

"You--have--married Mr. Farfrae!" cried Elizabeth-Jane, in
Nathan tones

Lucetta bowed.  She had recovered herself.

"The bells are ringing on that account," she said.  "My
husband is downstairs.  He will live here till a more
suitable house is ready for us; and I have told him that I
want you to stay with me just as before."

"Let me think of it alone," the girl quickly replied,
corking up the turmoil of her feeling with grand control.

"You shall.  I am sure we shall be happy together."

Lucetta departed to join Donald below, a vague uneasiness
floating over her joy at seeing him quite at home there.
Not on account of her friend Elizabeth did she feel it: for
of the bearings of Elizabeth-Jane's emotions she had not the
least suspicion; but on Henchard's alone.

Now the instant decision of Susan Henchard's daughter was to
dwell in that house no more.  Apart from her estimate of the
propriety of Lucetta's conduct, Farfrae had been so nearly
her avowed lover that she felt she could not abide there.

It was still early in the evening when she hastily put on
her things and went out.  In a few minutes, knowing the
ground, she had found a suitable lodging, and arranged to
enter it that night.  Returning and entering noiselessly she
took off her pretty dress and arrayed herself in a plain
one, packing up the other to keep as her best; for she would
have to be very economical now.  She wrote a note to leave
for Lucetta, who was closely shut up in the drawing-room
with Farfrae; and then Elizabeth-Jane called a man with a
wheel-barrow; and seeing her boxes put into it she trotted
off down the street to her rooms.  They were in the street
in which Henchard lived, and almost opposite his door.

Here she sat down and considered the means of subsistence.
The little annual sum settled on her by her stepfather would
keep body and soul together.  A wonderful skill in netting
of all sorts--acquired in childhood by making seines in
Newson's home--might serve her in good stead; and her
studies, which were pursued unremittingly, might serve her
in still better.

By this time the marriage that had taken place was known
throughout Casterbridge; had been discussed noisily on
kerbstones, confidentially behind counters, and jovially at
the Three Mariners.  Whether Farfrae would sell his business
and set up for a gentleman on his wife's money, or whether
he would show independence enough to stick to his trade in
spite of his brilliant alliance, was a great point of
interest.



31.


The retort of the furmity-woman before the magistrates had
spread; and in four-and-twenty hours there was not a person
in Casterbridge who remained unacquainted with the story of
Henchard's mad freak at Weydon-Priors Fair, long years
before.  The amends he had made in after life were lost
sight of in the dramatic glare of the original act.  Had the
incident been well known of old and always, it might by this
time have grown to be lightly regarded as the rather tall
wild oat, but well-nigh the single one, of a young man with
whom the steady and mature (if somewhat headstrong) burgher
of to-day had scarcely a point in common.  But the act
having lain as dead and buried ever since, the interspace of
years was unperceived; and the black spot of his youth wore
the aspect of a recent crime.

Small as the police-court incident had been in itself, it
formed the edge or turn in the incline of Henchard's
fortunes.  On that day--almost at that minute--he passed the
ridge of prosperity and honour, and began to descend rapidly
on the other side.  It was strange how soon he sank in
esteem.  Socially he had received a startling fillip
downwards; and, having already lost commercial buoyancy from
rash transactions, the velocity of his descent in both
aspects became accelerated every hour.

He now gazed more at the pavements and less at the house-
fronts when he walked about; more at the feet and leggings
of men, and less into the pupils of their eyes with the
blazing regard which formerly had made them blink.

New events combined to undo him.  It had been a bad year for
others besides himself, and the heavy failure of a debtor
whom he had trusted generously completed the overthrow of
his tottering credit.  And now, in his desperation, he
failed to preserve that strict correspondence between bulk
and sample which is the soul of commerce in grain.  For
this, one of his men was mainly to blame; that worthy, in
his great unwisdom, having picked over the sample of an
enormous quantity of second-rate corn which Henchard had in
hand, and removed the pinched, blasted, and smutted grains
in great numbers.  The produce if honestly offered would
have created no scandal; but the blunder of
misrepresentation, coming at such a moment, dragged
Henchard's name into the ditch.

The details of his failure were of the ordinary kind.  One
day Elizabeth-Jane was passing the King's Arms, when she saw
people bustling in and out more than usual where there was
no market.  A bystander informed her, with some surprise at
her ignorance, that it was a meeting of the Commissioners
under Mr. Henchard's bankruptcy.  She felt quite tearful,
and when she heard that he was present in the hotel she
wished to go in and see him, but was advised not to intrude
that day.

The room in which debtor and creditors had assembled was a
front one, and Henchard, looking out of the window, had
caught sight of Elizabeth-Jane through the wire blind.  His
examination had closed, and the creditors were leaving.  The
appearance of Elizabeth threw him into a reverie, till,
turning his face from the window, and towering above all the
rest, he called their attention for a moment more.  His
countenance had somewhat changed from its flush of
prosperity; the black hair and whiskers were the same as
ever, but a film of ash was over the rest.

"Gentlemen," he said, "over and above the assets that we've
been talking about, and that appear on the balance-sheet,
there be these.  It all belongs to ye, as much as everything
else I've got, and I don't wish to keep it from you, not I."
Saying this, he took his gold watch from his pocket and laid
it on the table; then his purse--the yellow canvas money-
bag, such as was carried by all farmers and dealers--untying
it, and shaking the money out upon the table beside the
watch.  The latter he drew back quickly for an instant, to
remove the hair-guard made and given him by Lucetta.
"There, now you have all I've got in the world," he said.
"And I wish for your sakes 'twas more."

The creditors, farmers almost to a man, looked at the watch,
and at the money, and into the street; when Farmer James
Everdene of Weatherbury spoke.

"No, no, Henchard," he said warmly.  "We don't want that.
'Tis honourable in ye; but keep it.  What do you say,
neighbours--do ye agree?"

"Ay, sure: we don't wish it at all," said Grower, another
creditor.

"Let him keep it, of course," murmured another in the
background--a silent, reserved young man named Boldwood; and
the rest responded unanimously.

"Well," said the senior Commissioner, addressing Henchard,
"though the case is a desperate one, I am bound to admit
that I have never met a debtor who behaved more fairly.
I've proved the balance-sheet to be as honestly made out as
it could possibly be; we have had no trouble; there have
been no evasions and no concealments.  The rashness of
dealing which led to this unhappy situation is obvious
enough; but as far as I can see every attempt has been made
to avoid wronging anybody."

Henchard was more affected by this than he cared to let them
perceive, and he turned aside to the window again.  A
general murmur of agreement followed the Commissioner's
words, and the meeting dispersed.  When they were gone
Henchard regarded the watch they had returned to him.
"'Tisn't mine by rights," he said to himself.  "Why the
devil didn't they take it?--I don't want what don't belong
to me!" Moved by a recollection he took the watch to the
maker's just opposite, sold it there and then for what the
tradesman offered, and went with the proceeds to one among
the smaller of his creditors, a cottager of Durnover in
straitened circumstances, to whom he handed the money.

When everything was ticketed that Henchard had owned, and
the auctions were in progress, there was quite a sympathetic
reaction in the town, which till then for some time past had
done nothing but condemn him.  Now that Henchard's whole
career was pictured distinctly to his neighbours, and they
could see how admirably he had used his one talent of energy
to create a position of affluence out of absolutely nothing--
which was really all he could show when he came to the town
as a journeyman hay-trusser, with his wimble and knife in
his basket--they wondered and regretted his fall.

Try as she might, Elizabeth could never meet with him.  She
believed in him still, though nobody else did; and she
wanted to be allowed to forgive him for his roughness to
her, and to help him in his trouble.

She wrote to him; he did not reply.  She then went to his
house--the great house she had lived in so happily for a
time--with its front of dun brick, vitrified here and there
and its heavy sash-bars--but Henchard was to be found there
no more.  The ex-Mayor had left the home of his prosperity,
and gone into Jopp's cottage by the Priory Mill--the sad
purlieu to which he had wandered on the night of his
discovery that she was not his daughter.  Thither she went.

Elizabeth thought it odd that he had fixed on this spot to
retire to, but assumed that necessity had no choice.  Trees
which seemed old enough to have been planted by the friars
still stood around, and the back hatch of the original mill
yet formed a cascade which had raised its terrific roar for
centuries.  The cottage itself was built of old stones from
the long dismantled Priory, scraps of tracery, moulded
window-jambs, and arch-labels, being mixed in with the
rubble of the walls.

In this cottage he occupied a couple of rooms, Jopp, whom
Henchard had employed, abused, cajoled, and dismissed by
turns, being the householder.  But even here her stepfather
could not be seen.

"Not by his daughter?" pleaded Elizabeth.

"By nobody--at present: that's his order," she was informed.

Afterwards she was passing by the corn-stores and hay-barns
which had been the headquarters of his business.  She knew
that he ruled there no longer; but it was with amazement
that she regarded the familiar gateway.  A smear of decisive
lead-coloured paint had been laid on to obliterate
Henchard's name, though its letters dimly loomed through
like ships in a fog.  Over these, in fresh white, spread the
name of Farfrae.

Abel Whittle was edging his skeleton in at the wicket, and
she said, "Mr. Farfrae is master here?"

"Yaas, Miss Henchet," he said, "Mr. Farfrae have bought the
concern and all of we work-folk with it; and 'tis better for
us than 'twas--though I shouldn't say that to you as a
daughter-law.  We work harder, but we bain't made afeard
now.  It was fear made my few poor hairs so thin!  No busting
out, no slamming of doors, no meddling with yer eternal soul
and all that; and though 'tis a shilling a week less I'm the
richer man; for what's all the world if yer mind is always
in a larry, Miss Henchet?"

The intelligence was in a general sense true; and Henchard's
stores, which had remained in a paralyzed condition during
the settlement of his bankruptcy, were stirred into activity
again when the new tenant had possession.  Thenceforward the
full sacks, looped with the shining chain, went scurrying up
and down under the cat-head, hairy arms were thrust out from
the different door-ways, and the grain was hauled in;
trusses of hay were tossed anew in and out of the barns, and
the wimbles creaked; while the scales and steel-yards began
to be busy where guess-work had formerly been the rule.



32.


Two bridges stood near the lower part of Casterbridge town.
The first, of weather-stained brick, was immediately at the
end of High Street, where a diverging branch from that
thoroughfare ran round to the low-lying Durnover lanes; so
that the precincts of the bridge formed the merging point of
respectability and indigence.  The second bridge, of stone,
was further out on the highway--in fact, fairly in the
meadows, though still within the town boundary.

These bridges had speaking countenances.  Every projection
in each was worn down to obtuseness, partly by weather, more
by friction from generations of loungers, whose toes and
heels had from year to year made restless movements against
these parapets, as they had stood there meditating on the
aspect of affairs.  In the case of the more friable bricks
and stones even the flat faces were worn into hollows by the
same mixed mechanism.  The masonry of the top was clamped
with iron at each joint; since it had been no uncommon thing
for desperate men to wrench the coping off and throw it down
the river, in reckless defiance of the magistrates.

For to this pair of bridges gravitated all the failures of
the town; those who had failed in business, in love, in
sobriety, in crime.  Why the unhappy hereabout usually chose
the bridges for their meditations in preference to a
railing, a gate, or a stile, was not so clear.

There was a marked difference of quality between the
personages who haunted the near bridge of brick and the
personages who haunted the far one of stone.  Those of
lowest character preferred the former, adjoining the town;
they did not mind the glare of the public eye.  They had
been of comparatively no account during their successes; and
though they might feel dispirited, they had no particular
sense of shame in their ruin.  Their hands were mostly kept
in their pockets; they wore a leather strap round their hips
or knees, and boots that required a great deal of lacing,
but seemed never to get any.  Instead of sighing at their
adversities they spat, and instead of saying the iron had
entered into their souls they said they were down on their
luck.  Jopp in his time of distress had often stood here; so
had Mother Cuxsom, Christopher Coney, and poor Abel Whittle.

The miserables who would pause on the remoter bridge
were of a politer stamp.  They included bankrupts,
hypochondriacs, persons who were what is called "out of a
situation" from fault or lucklessness, the inefficient of
the professional class--shabby-genteel men, who did not know
how to get rid of the weary time between breakfast and
dinner, and the yet more weary time between dinner and dark.
The eye of this species were mostly directed over the
parapet upon the running water below.  A man seen there
looking thus fixedly into the river was pretty sure to be
one whom the world did not treat kindly for some reason or
other.  While one in straits on the townward bridge did not
mind who saw him so, and kept his back to the parapet to
survey the passers-by, one in straits on this never faced
the road, never turned his head at coming footsteps, but,
sensitive to his own condition, watched the current whenever
a stranger approached, as if some strange fish interested
him, though every finned thing had been poached out of the
river years before.

There and thus they would muse; if their grief were the
grief of oppression they would wish themselves kings; if
their grief were poverty, wish themselves millionaires; if
sin, they would wish they were saints or angels; if despised
love, that they were some much-courted Adonis of county
fame.  Some had been known to stand and think so long with
this fixed gaze downward that eventually they had allowed
their poor carcases to follow that gaze; and they were
discovered the next morning out of reach of their troubles,
either here or in the deep pool called Blackwater, a little
higher up the river.

To this bridge came Henchard, as other unfortunates had come
before him, his way thither being by the riverside path on
the chilly edge of the town.  Here he was standing one windy
afternoon when Durnover church clock struck five.  While the
gusts were bringing the notes to his ears across the damp
intervening flat a man passed behind him and greeted
Henchard by name.  Henchard turned slightly and saw that the
corner was Jopp, his old foreman, now employed elsewhere, to
whom, though he hated him, he had gone for lodgings because
Jopp was the one man in Casterbridge whose observation and
opinion the fallen corn-merchant despised to the point of
indifference.

Henchard returned him a scarcely perceptible nod, and Jopp
stopped.

"He and she are gone into their new house to-day," said
Jopp.

"Oh," said Henchard absently.  "Which house is that?"

"Your old one."

"Gone into my house?" And starting up Henchard added, "
MY house of all others in the town!"

"Well, as somebody was sure to live there, and you couldn't,
it can do 'ee no harm that he's the man."

It was quite true: he felt that it was doing him no harm.
Farfrae, who had already taken the yards and stores, had
acquired possession of the house for the obvious convenience
of its contiguity.  And yet this act of his taking up
residence within those roomy chambers while he, their former
tenant, lived in a cottage, galled Henchard indescribably.

Jopp continued: "And you heard of that fellow who bought all
the best furniture at your sale? He was bidding for no other
than Farfrae all the while!  It has never been moved out of
the house, as he'd already got the lease."

"My furniture too!  Surely he'll buy my body and soul
likewise!"

"There's no saying he won't, if you be willing to sell."  And
having planted these wounds in the heart of his once
imperious master Jopp went on his way; while Henchard stared
and stared into the racing river till the bridge seemed
moving backward with him.

The low land grew blacker, and the sky a deeper grey, When
the landscape looked like a picture blotted in with ink,
another traveller approached the great stone bridge.  He was
driving a gig, his direction being also townwards.  On the
round of the middle of the arch the gig stopped.  "Mr
Henchard?" came from it in the voice of Farfrae.  Henchard
turned his face.

Finding that he had guessed rightly Farfrae told the man who
accompanied him to drive home; while he alighted and went up
to his former friend.

"I have heard that you think of emigrating, Mr. Henchard?"
he said.  "Is it true? I have a real reason for asking."

Henchard withheld his answer for several instants, and then
said, "Yes; it is true.  I am going where you were going to
a few years ago, when I prevented you and got you to bide
here.  'Tis turn and turn about, isn't it!  Do ye mind how we
stood like this in the Chalk Walk when I persuaded 'ee to
stay? You then stood without a chattel to your name, and I
was the master of the house in corn Street.  But now I stand
without a stick or a rag, and the master of that house is
you."

"Yes, yes; that's so!  It's the way o' the warrld," said
Farfrae.

"Ha, ha, true!" cried Henchard, throwing himself into a mood
of jocularity.  "Up and down!  I'm used to it.  What's the
odds after all!"

"Now listen to me, if it's no taking up your time," said
Farfrae, "just as I listened to you.  Don't go.  Stay at
home."

"But I can do nothing else, man!" said Henchard scornfully.
"The little money I have will just keep body and soul
together for a few weeks, and no more.  I have not felt
inclined to go back to journey-work yet; but I can't stay
doing nothing, and my best chance is elsewhere."

"No; but what I propose is this--if ye will listen.  Come
and live in your old house.  We can spare some rooms very
well--I am sure my wife would not mind it at all--until
there's an opening for ye."

Henchard started.  Probably the picture drawn by the
unsuspecting Donald of himself under the same roof with
Lucetta was too striking to be received with equanimity.
"No, no," he said gruffly; "we should quarrel."

"You should hae a part to yourself," said Farfrae; "and
nobody to interfere wi' you.  It will be a deal healthier
than down there by the river where you live now."

Still Henchard refused.  "You don't know what you ask," he
said.  "However, I can do no less than thank 'ee."

They walked into the town together side by side, as they had
done when Henchard persuaded the young Scotchman to remain.
"Will you come in and have some supper?" said Farfrae when
they reached the middle of the town, where their paths
diverged right and left.

"No, no."

"By-the-bye, I had nearly forgot.  I bought a good deal of
your furniture.

"So I have heard."

"Well, it was no that I wanted it so very much for myself;
but I wish ye to pick out all that you care to have--such
things as may be endeared to ye by associations, or
particularly suited to your use.  And take them to your own
house--it will not be depriving me, we can do with less very
well, and I will have plenty of opportunities of getting
more."

"What--give it to me for nothing?" said Henchard.  "But you
paid the creditors for it!"

"Ah, yes; but maybe it's worth more to you than it is to
me."

Henchard was a little moved.  "I--sometimes think I've
wronged 'ee!" he said, in tones which showed the disquietude
that the night shades hid in his face.  He shook Farfrae
abruptly by the hand, and hastened away as if unwilling to
betray himself further.  Farfrae saw him turn through the
thoroughfare into Bull Stake and vanish down towards the
Priory Mill.

Meanwhile Elizabeth-Jane, in an upper room no larger than
the Prophet's chamber, and with the silk attire of her palmy
days packed away in a box, was netting with great industry
between the hours which she devoted to studying such books
as she could get hold of.

Her lodgings being nearly opposite her stepfather's former
residence, now Farfrae's, she could see Donald and Lucetta
speeding in and out of their door with all the bounding
enthusiasm of their situation.  She avoided looking that way
as much as possible, but it was hardly in human nature to
keep the eyes averted when the door slammed.

While living on thus quietly she heard the news that
Henchard had caught cold and was confined to his room--
possibly a result of standing about the meads in damp
weather.  She went off to his house at once.  This time she
was determined not to be denied admittance, and made her way
upstairs.  He was sitting up in the bed with a greatcoat
round him, and at first resented her intrusion.  "Go away--
go away," he said.  "I don't like to see 'ee!"

"But, father--"

"I don't like to see 'ee," he repeated.

However, the ice was broken, and she remained.  She made the
room more comfortable, gave directions to the people below,
and by the time she went away had reconciled her stepfather
to her visiting him.

The effect, either of her ministrations or of her mere
presence, was a rapid recovery.  He soon was well enough to
go out; and now things seemed to wear a new colour in his
eyes.  He no longer thought of emigration, and thought more
of Elizabeth.  The having nothing to do made him more dreary
than any other circumstance; and one day, with better views
of Farfrae than he had held for some time, and a sense that
honest work was not a thing to be ashamed of, he stoically
went down to Farfrae's yard and asked to be taken on as a
journeyman hay-trusser.  He was engaged at once.  This
hiring of Henchard was done through a foreman, Farfrae
feeling that it was undesirable to come personally in
contact with the ex-corn-factor more than was absolutely
necessary.  While anxious to help him he was well aware by
this time of his uncertain temper, and thought reserved
relations best.  For the same reason his orders to Henchard
to proceed to this and that country farm trussing in the
usual way were always given through a third person.

For a time these arrangements worked well, it being the
custom to truss in the respective stack-yards, before
bringing it away, the hay bought at the different farms
about the neighbourhood; so that Henchard was often absent
at such places the whole week long.  When this was all done,
and Henchard had become in a measure broken in, he came to
work daily on the home premises like the rest.  And thus the
once flourishing merchant and Mayor and what not stood as a
day-labourer in the barns and granaries he formerly had
owned.

"I have worked as a journeyman before now, ha'n't I?" he
would say in his defiant way; "and why shouldn't I do it
again?" But he looked a far different journeyman from the
one he had been in his earlier days.  Then he had worn
clean, suitable clothes, light and cheerful in hue; leggings
yellow as marigolds, corduroys immaculate as new flax, and a
neckerchief like a flower-garden.  Now he wore the remains
of an old blue cloth suit of his gentlemanly times, a rusty
silk hat, and a once black satin stock, soiled and shabby.
Clad thus he went to and fro, still comparatively an active
man--for he was not much over forty--and saw with the other
men in the yard Donald Farfrae going in and out the green
door that led to the garden, and the big house, and Lucetta.

At the beginning of the winter it was rumoured about
Casterbridge that Mr. Farfrae, already in the Town Council,
was to be proposed for Mayor in a year or two.

"Yes, she was wise, she was wise in her generation!" said
Henchard to himself when he heard of this one day on his way
to Farfrae's hay-barn.  He thought it over as he wimbled his
bonds, and the piece of news acted as a reviviscent breath
to that old view of his--of Donald Farfrae as his triumphant
rival who rode rough-shod over him.

"A fellow of his age going to be Mayor, indeed!" he murmured
with a corner-drawn smile on his mouth.  "But 'tis her money
that floats en upward.  Ha-ha--how cust odd it is!  Here be
I, his former master, working for him as man, and he the man
standing as master, with my house and my furniture and my
what-you-may-call wife all his own."

He repeated these things a hundred times a day.  During the
whole period of his acquaintance with Lucetta he had never
wished to claim her as his own so desperately as he now
regretted her loss.  It was no mercenary hankering after her
fortune that moved him, though that fortune had been the
means of making her so much the more desired by giving her
the air of independence and sauciness which attracts men of
his composition.  It had given her servants, house, and fine
clothing--a setting that invested Lucetta with a startling
novelty in the eyes of him who had known her in her narrow
days.

He accordingly lapsed into moodiness, and at every allusion
to the possibility of Farfrae's near election to the
municipal chair his former hatred of the Scotchman returned.
Concurrently with this he underwent a moral change.  It
resulted in his significantly saying every now and then, in
tones of recklessness, "Only a fortnight more!"--"Only a
dozen days!" and so forth, lessening his figures day by day.

"Why d'ye say only a dozen days?" asked Solomon Longways as
he worked beside Henchard in the granary weighing oats.

"Because in twelve days I shall be released from my oath."

"What oath?"

"The oath to drink no spirituous liquid.  In twelve days it
will be twenty-one years since I swore it, and then I mean
to enjoy myself, please God!"

Elizabeth-Jane sat at her window one Sunday, and while there
she heard in the street below a conversation which
introduced Henchard's name.  She was wondering what was the
matter, when a third person who was passing by asked the
question in her mind.

"Michael Henchard have busted out drinking after taking
nothing for twenty-one years!"

Elizabeth-Jane jumped up, put on her things, and went out.



33.


At this date there prevailed in Casterbridge a convivial
custom--scarcely recognized as such, yet none the less
established.  On the afternoon of every Sunday a large
contingent of the Casterbridge journeymen--steady church-
goers and sedate characters--having attended service, filed
from the church doors across the way to the Three Mariners
Inn.  The rear was usually brought up by the choir, with
their bass-viols, fiddles, and flutes under their arms.

The great point, the point of honour, on these sacred
occasions was for each man to strictly limit himself to
half-a-pint of liquor.  This scrupulosity was so well
understood by the landlord that the whole company was served
in cups of that measure.  They were all exactly alike--
straight-sided, with two leafless lime-trees done in eel-
brown on the sides--one towards the drinker's lips, the
other confronting his comrade.  To wonder how many of these
cups the landlord possessed altogether was a favourite
exercise of children in the marvellous.  Forty at least
might have been seen at these times in the large room,
forming a ring round the margin of the great sixteen-legged
oak table, like the monolithic circle of Stonehenge in its
pristine days.  Outside and above the forty cups came a
circle of forty smoke-jets from forty clay pipes; outside
the pipes the countenances of the forty church-goers,
supported at the back by a circle of forty chairs.

The conversation was not the conversation of week-days, but
a thing altogether finer in point and higher in tone.  They
invariably discussed the sermon, dissecting it, weighing it,
as above or below the average--the general tendency being to
regard it as a scientific feat or performance which had no
relation to their own lives, except as between critics and
the thing criticized.  The bass-viol player and the clerk
usually spoke with more authority than the rest on account
of their official connection with the preacher.

Now the Three Mariners was the inn chosen by Henchard as the
place for closing his long term of dramless years.  He had
so timed his entry as to be well established in the large
room by the time the forty church-goers entered to their
customary cups.  The flush upon his face proclaimed at once
that the vow of twenty-one years had lapsed, and the era of
recklessness begun anew.  He was seated on a small table,
drawn up to the side of the massive oak board reserved for
the churchmen, a few of whom nodded to him as they took
their places and said, "How be ye, Mr. Henchard? Quite a
stranger here."

Henchard did not take the trouble to reply for a few
moments, and his eyes rested on his stretched-out legs and
boots.  "Yes," he said at length; "that's true.  I've been
down in spirit for weeks; some of ye know the cause.  I am
better now, but not quite serene.  I want you fellows of the
choir to strike up a tune; and what with that and this brew
of Stannidge's, I am in hopes of getting altogether out of
my minor key."

"With all my heart," said the first fiddle.  "We've let back
our strings, that's true, but we can soon pull 'em up again.
Sound A, neighbours, and give the man a stave."

"I don't care a curse what the words be," said Henchard.
"Hymns, ballets, or rantipole rubbish; the Rogue's March or
the cherubim's warble--'tis all the same to me if 'tis good
harmony, and well put out."

"Well--heh, heh--it may be we can do that, and not a man
among us that have sat in the gallery less than twenty
year," said the leader of the band.  "As 'tis Sunday,
neighbours, suppose we raise the Fourth Psa'am, to Samuel
Wakely's tune, as improved by me?"

"Hang Samuel Wakely's tune, as improved by thee!" said
Henchard.  "Chuck across one of your psalters--old Wiltshire
is the only tune worth singing--the psalm-tune that would
make my blood ebb and flow like the sea when I was a steady
chap.  I'll find some words to fit en."  He took one of the
psalters and began turning over the leaves.

Chancing to look out of the window at that moment he saw a
flock of people passing by, and perceived them to be the
congregation of the upper church, now just dismissed, their
sermon having been a longer one than that the lower parish
was favoured with.  Among the rest of the leading
inhabitants walked Mr. Councillor Farfrae with Lucetta upon
his arm, the observed and imitated of all the smaller
tradesmen's womankind.  Henchard's mouth changed a little,
and he continued to turn over the leaves.

"Now then," he said, "Psalm the Hundred-and-Ninth, to the
tune of Wiltshire: verses ten to fifteen.  I gi'e ye the
words:



  "His seed shall orphans be, his wife
     A widow plunged in grief;
   His vagrant children beg their bread
     Where none can give relief.

   His ill-got riches shall be made
     To usurers a prey;
   The fruit of all his toil shall be
     By strangers borne away.

   None shall be found that to his wants
     Their mercy will extend,
   Or to his helpless orphan seed
     The least assistance lend.

   A swift destruction soon shall seize
     On his unhappy race;
   And the next age his hated name
     Shall utterly deface."


"I know the Psa'am--I know the Psa'am!" said the leader
hastily; "but I would as lief not sing it.  'Twasn't made
for singing.  We chose it once when the gipsy stole the
pa'son's mare, thinking to please him, but pa'son were quite
upset.  Whatever Servant David were thinking about when he
made a Psalm that nobody can sing without disgracing
himself, I can't fathom!  Now then, the Fourth Psalm, to
Samuel Wakely's tune, as improved by me."

"'Od seize your sauce--I tell ye to sing the Hundred-and-
Ninth to Wiltshire, and sing it you shall!" roared Henchard.
"Not a single one of all the droning crew of ye goes out of
this room till that Psalm is sung!" He slipped off the
table, seized the poker, and going to the door placed his
back against it.  "Now then, go ahead, if you don't wish to
have your cust pates broke!"

"Don't 'ee, don't'ee take on so!--As 'tis the Sabbath-day,
and 'tis Servant David's words and not ours, perhaps we
don't mind for once, hey?" said one of the terrified choir,
looking round upon the rest.  So the instruments were tuned
and the comminatory verses sung.

"Thank ye, thank ye," said Henchard in a softened voice, his
eyes growing downcast, and his manner that of a man much
moved by the strains.  "Don't you blame David," he went on
in low tones, shaking his head without raising his eyes.
"He knew what he was about when he wrote that!...If I could
afford it, be hanged if I wouldn't keep a church choir at my
own expense to play and sing to me at these low, dark times
of my life.  But the bitter thing is, that when I was rich I
didn't need what I could have, and now I be poor I can't
have what I need!"

While they paused, Lucetta and Farfrae passed again, this
time homeward, it being their custom to take, like others, a
short walk out on the highway and back, between church and
tea-time.  "There's the man we've been singing about," said
Henchard.

The players and singers turned their heads and saw his
meaning.  "Heaven forbid!" said the bass-player.

"'Tis the man," repeated Henchard doggedly.

"Then if I'd known," said the performer on the clarionet
solemnly, "that 'twas meant for a living man, nothing should
have drawn out of my wynd-pipe the breath for that Psalm, so
help me!

"Nor from mine," said the first singer.  "But, thought I, as
it was made so long ago perhaps there isn't much in it, so
I'll oblige a neighbour; for there's nothing to be said
against the tune."

"Ah, my boys, you've sung it," said Henchard triumphantly.
"As for him, it was partly by his songs that he got over me,
and heaved me out....I could double him up like that--and
yet I don't."  He laid the poker across his knee, bent it as
if it were a twig, flung it down, and came away from the
door.

It was at this time that Elizabeth-Jane, having heard where
her stepfather was, entered the room with a pale and
agonized countenance.  The choir and the rest of the company
moved off, in accordance with their half-pint regulation.
Elizabeth-Jane went up to Henchard, and entreated him to
accompany her home.

By this hour the volcanic fires of his nature had burnt
down, and having drunk no great quantity as yet he was
inclined to acquiesce.  She took his arm, and together they
went on.  Henchard walked blankly, like a blind man,
repeating to himself the last words of the singers--


  "And the next age his hated name
     Shall utterly deface."


At length he said to her, "I am a man to my word.  I have
kept my oath for twenty-one years; and now I can drink with
a good conscience....If I don't do for him--well, I am a
fearful practical joker when I choose!  He has taken away
everything from me, and by heavens, if I meet him I won't
answer for my deeds!"

These half-uttered words alarmed Elizabeth--all the more by
reason of the still determination of Henchard's mien.

"What will you do?" she asked cautiously, while trembling
with disquietude, and guessing Henchard's allusion only too
well.

Henchard did not answer, and they went on till they had
reached his cottage.  "May I come in?" she said.

"No, no; not to-day," said Henchard; and she went away;
feeling that to caution Farfrae was almost her duty, as it
was certainly her strong desire.

As on the Sunday, so on the week-days, Farfrae and Lucetta
might have been seen flitting about the town like two
butterflies--or rather like a bee and a butterfly in league
for life.  She seemed to take no pleasure in going anywhere
except in her husband's company; and hence when business
would not permit him to waste an afternoon she remained
indoors waiting for the time to pass till his return, her
face being visible to Elizabeth-Jane from her window aloft.
The latter, however, did not say to herself that Farfrae
should be thankful for such devotion, but, full of her
reading, she cited Rosalind's exclamation: "Mistress, know
yourself; down on your knees and thank Heaven fasting for a
good man's love."

She kept her eye upon Henchard also.  One day he answered
her inquiry for his health by saying that he could not
endure Abel Whittle's pitying eyes upon him while they
worked together in the yard.  "He is such a fool," said
Henchard, "that he can never get out of his mind the time
when I was master there."

"I'll come and wimble for you instead of him, if you will
allow me," said she.  Her motive on going to the yard was to
get an opportunity of observing the general position of
affairs on Farfrae's premises now that her stepfather was a
workman there.  Henchard's threats had alarmed her so much
that she wished to see his behaviour when the two were face
to face.

For two or three days after her arrival Donald did not make
any appearance.  Then one afternoon the green door opened,
and through came, first Farfrae, and at his heels Lucetta.
Donald brought his wife forward without hesitation, it being
obvious that he had no suspicion whatever of any antecedents
in common between her and the now journeyman hay-trusser.

Henchard did not turn his eyes toward either of the pair,
keeping them fixed on the bond he twisted, as if that alone
absorbed him.  A feeling of delicacy, which ever prompted
Farfrae to avoid anything that might seem like triumphing
over a fallen rivel, led him to keep away from the hay-barn
where Henchard and his daughter were working, and to go on
to the corn department.  Meanwhile Lucetta, never having
been informed that Henchard had entered her husband's
service, rambled straight on to the barn, where she came
suddenly upon Henchard, and gave vent to a little "Oh!"
which the happy and busy Donald was too far off to hear.
Henchard, with withering humility of demeanour, touched the
brim of his hat to her as Whittle and the rest had done, to
which she breathed a dead-alive "Good afternoon."

"I beg your pardon, ma'am?" said Henchard, as if he had not
heard.

"I said good afternoon," she faltered.

"O yes, good afternoon, ma'am," he replied, touching his hat
again.  "I am glad to see you, ma'am."  Lucetta looked
embarrassed, and Henchard continued: "For we humble workmen
here feel it a great honour that a lady should look in and
take an interest in us."

She glanced at him entreatingly; the sarcasm was too bitter,
too unendurable.

"Can you tell me the time, ma'am?" he asked.

"Yes," she said hastily; "half-past four."

"Thank 'ee.  An hour and a half longer before we are
released from work.  Ah, ma'am, we of the lower classes know
nothing of the gay leisure that such as you enjoy!"

As soon as she could do so Lucetta left him, nodded and
smiled to Elizabeth-Jane, and joined her husband at the
other end of the enclosure, where she could be seen leading
him away by the outer gates, so as to avoid passing Henchard
again.  That she had been taken by surprise was obvious.
The result of this casual rencounter was that the next
morning a note was put into Henchard's hand by the postman.

"Will you," said Lucetta, with as much bitterness as she
could put into a small communication, "will you kindly
undertake not to speak to me in the biting undertones you
used to-day, if I walk through the yard at any time? I bear
you no ill-will, and I am only too glad that you should have
employment of my dear husband; but in common fairness treat
me as his wife, and do not try to make me wretched by covert
sneers.  I have committed no crime, and done you no injury.

"Poor fool!" said Henchard with fond savagery, holding out
the note.  "To know no better than commit herself in writing
like this!  Why, if I were to show that to her dear husband--
pooh!" He threw the letter into the fire.

Lucetta took care not to come again among the hay and corn.
She would rather have died than run the risk of encountering
Henchard at such close quarters a second time.  The gulf
between them was growing wider every day.  Farfrae was
always considerate to his fallen acquaintance; but it was
impossible that he should not, by degrees, cease to regard
the ex-corn-merchant as more than one of his other workmen.
Henchard saw this, and concealed his feelings under a cover
of stolidity, fortifying his heart by drinking more freely
at the Three Mariners every evening.

Often did Elizabeth-Jane, in her endeavours to prevent his
taking other liquor, carry tea to him in a little basket at
five o'clock.  Arriving one day on this errand she found her
stepfather was measuring up clover-seed and rape-seed in the
corn-stores on the top floor, and she ascended to him.  Each
floor had a door opening into the air under a cat-head, from
which a chain dangled for hoisting the sacks.

When Elizabeth's head rose through the trap she perceived
that the upper door was open, and that her stepfather and
Farfrae stood just within it in conversation, Farfrae being
nearest the dizzy edge, and Henchard a little way behind.
Not to interrupt them she remained on the steps without
raising her head any higher.  While waiting thus she saw--or
fancied she saw, for she had a terror of feeling certain--
her stepfather slowly raise his hand to a level behind
Farfrae's shoulders, a curious expression taking possession
of his face.  The young man was quite unconscious of the
action, which was so indirect that, if Farfrae had observed
it, he might almost have regarded it as an idle
outstretching of the arm.  But it would have been possible,
by a comparatively light touch, to push Farfrae off his
balance, and send him head over heels into the air.

Elizabeth felt quite sick at heart on thinking of what this
MIGHT have meant.  As soon as they turned she
mechanically took the tea to Henchard, left it, and went
away.  Reflecting, she endeavoured to assure herself that
the movement was an idle eccentricity, and no more.  Yet, on
the other hand, his subordinate position in an establishment
where he once had been master might be acting on him like an
irritant poison; and she finally resolved to caution Donald.



34.


Next morning, accordingly, she rose at five o'clock and went
into the street.  It was not yet light; a dense fog
prevailed, and the town was as silent as it was dark, except
that from the rectangular avenues which framed in the
borough there came a chorus of tiny rappings, caused by the
fall of water-drops condensed on the boughs; now it was
wafted from the West Walk, now from the South Walk; and then
from both quarters simultaneously.  She moved on to the
bottom of corn Street, and, knowing his time well, waited
only a few minutes before she heard the familiar bang of his
door, and then his quick walk towards her.  She met him at
the point where the last tree of the engirding avenue
flanked the last house in the street.

He could hardly discern her till, glancing inquiringly, he
said, "What--Miss Henchard--and are ye up so airly?"

She asked him to pardon her for waylaying him at such an
unseemly time.  "But I am anxious to mention something," she
said.  "And I wished not to alarm Mrs. Farfrae by calling."

"Yes?" said he, with the cheeriness of a superior.  "And
what may it be? It's very kind of ye, I'm sure."

She now felt the difficulty of conveying to his mind the
exact aspect of possibilities in her own.  But she somehow
began, and introduced Henchard's name.  "I sometimes fear,"
she said with an effort, "that he may be betrayed into some
attempt to--insult you, sir.

"But we are the best of friends?"

"Or to play some practical joke upon you, sir.  Remember
that he has been hardly used."

"But we are quite friendly?"

"Or to do something--that would injure you--hurt you--wound
you."  Every word cost her twice its length of pain.  And she
could see that Farfrae was still incredulous.  Henchard, a
poor man in his employ, was not to Farfrae's view the
Henchard who had ruled him.  Yet he was not only the same
man, but that man with his sinister qualities, formerly
latent, quickened into life by his buffetings.

Farfrae, happy, and thinking no evil, persisted in making
light of her fears.  Thus they parted, and she went
homeward, journeymen now being in the street, waggoners
going to the harness-makers for articles left to be
repaired, farm-horses going to the shoeing-smiths, and the
sons of labour showing themselves generally on the move.
Elizabeth entered her lodging unhappily, thinking she had
done no good, and only made herself appear foolish by her
weak note of warning.

But Donald Farfrae was one of those men upon whom an
incident is never absolutely lost.  He revised impressions
from a subsequent point of view, and the impulsive judgment
of the moment was not always his permanent one.  The vision
of Elizabeth's earnest face in the rimy dawn came back to
him several times during the day.  Knowing the solidity of
her character he did not treat her hints altogether as idle
sounds.

But he did not desist from a kindly scheme on Henchard's
account that engaged him just then; and when he met Lawyer
Joyce, the town-clerk, later in the day, he spoke of it as
if nothing had occurred to damp it.

"About that little seedsman's shop," he said, "the shop
overlooking the churchyard, which is to let.  It is not for
myself I want it, but for our unlucky fellow-townsman
Henchard.  It would be a new beginning for him, if a small
one; and I have told the Council that I would head a private
subscription among them to set him up in it--that I would be
fifty pounds, if they would make up the other fifty among
them."

"Yes, yes; so I've heard; and there's nothing to say against
it for that matter," the town-clerk replied, in his plain,
frank way.  "But, Farfrae, others see what you don't.
Henchard hates 'ee--ay, hates 'ee; and 'tis right that you
should know it.  To my knowledge he was at the Three
Mariners last night, saying in public that about you which a
man ought not to say about another."

"Is that so--ah, is that so?" said Farfrae, looking down.
"Why should he do it?" added the young man bitterly; "what
harm have I done him that he should try to wrong me?"

"God only knows," said Joyce, lifting his eyebrows.  "It
shows much long-suffering in you to put up with him, and
keep him in your employ."

"But I cannet discharge a man who was once a good friend to
me.  How can I forget that when I came here 'twas he enabled
me to make a footing for mysel'? No, no.  As long as I've a
day's work to offer he shall do it if he chooses.  'Tis not
I who will deny him such a little as that.  But I'll drop
the idea of establishing him in a shop till I can think more
about it."

It grieved Farfrae much to give up this scheme.  But a damp
having been thrown over it by these and other voices in the
air, he went and countermanded his orders.  The then
occupier of the shop was in it when Farfrae spoke to him and
feeling it necessary to give some explanation of his
withdrawal from the negotiation Donald mentioned Henchard's
name, and stated that the intentions of the Council had been
changed.

The occupier was much disappointed, and straight-way
informed Henchard, as soon as he saw him, that a scheme of
the Council for setting him up in a shop had been knocked on
the head by Farfrae.  And thus out of error enmity grew.

When Farfrae got indoors that evening the tea-kettle was
singing on the high hob of the semi-egg-shaped grate.
Lucetta, light as a sylph, ran forward and seized his hands,
whereupon Farfrae duly kissed her.

"Oh!" she cried playfully, turning to the window.  "See--the
blinds are not drawn down, and the people can look in--what
a scandal!"

When the candles were lighted, the curtains drawn, and the
twain sat at tea, she noticed that he looked serious.
Without directly inquiring why she let her eyes linger
solicitously on his face.

"Who has called?" he absently asked.  "Any folk for me?"

"No," said Lucetta.  "What's the matter, Donald?"

"Well--nothing worth talking of," he responded sadly.

"Then, never mind it.  You will get through it, Scotchmen
are always lucky."

"No--not always!" he said, shaking his head gloomily as he
contemplated a crumb on the table.  "I know many who have
not been so!  There was Sandy Macfarlane, who started to
America to try his fortune, and he was drowned; and
Archibald Leith, he was murdered!  And poor Willie Dunbleeze
and Maitland Macfreeze--they fell into bad courses, and went
the way of all such!"

"Why--you old goosey--I was only speaking in a general
sense, of course!  You are always so literal.  Now when we
have finished tea, sing me that funny song about high-heeled
shoon and siller tags, and the one-and-forty wooers."

"No, no.  I couldna sing to-night!  It's Henchard--he hates
me; so that I may not be his friend if I would.  I would
understand why there should be a wee bit of envy; but I
cannet see a reason for the whole intensity of what he
feels.  Now, can you, Lucetta? It is more like old-fashioned
rivalry in love than just a bit of rivalry in trade."

Lucetta had grown somewhat wan.  "No," she replied.

"I give him employment--I cannet refuse it.  But neither can
I blind myself to the fact that with a man of passions such
as his, there is no safeguard for conduct!"

"What have you heard--O Donald, dearest?" said Lucetta in
alarm.  The words on her lips were "anything about me?"--but
she did not utter them.  She could not, however, suppress
her agitation, and her eyes filled with tears.

"No, no--it is not so serious as ye fancy," declared Farfrae
soothingly; though he did not know its seriousness so well
as she.

"I wish you would do what we have talked of," mournfully
remarked Lucetta.  "Give up business, and go away from here.
We have plenty of money, and why should we stay?"

Farfrae seemed seriously disposed to discuss this move, and
they talked thereon till a visitor was announced.  Their
neighbour Alderman Vatt came in.

"You've heard, I suppose of poor Doctor Chalkfield's death?
Yes--died this afternoon at five," said Mr. Vatt Chalkfield
was the Councilman who had succeeded to the Mayoralty in the
preceding November.

Farfrae was sorry at the intelligence, and Mr. Vatt
continued: "Well, we know he's been going some days, and as
his family is well provided for we must take it all as it
is.  Now I have called to ask 'ee this--quite privately.  If
I should nominate 'ee to succeed him, and there should be no
particular opposition, will 'ee accept the chair?"

"But there are folk whose turn is before mine; and I'm over
young, and may be thought pushing!" said Farfrae after a
pause.

"Not at all.  I don't speak for myself only, several have
named it.  You won't refuse?"

"We thought of going away," interposed Lucetta, looking at
Farfrae anxiously.

"It was only a fancy," Farfrae murmured.  "I wouldna refuse
if it is the wish of a respectable majority in the Council."

"Very well, then, look upon yourself as elected.  We have
had older men long enough."

When he was gone Farfrae said musingly, "See now how it's
ourselves that are ruled by the Powers above us!  We plan
this, but we do that.  If they want to make me Mayor I will
stay, and Henchard must rave as he will."

From this evening onward Lucetta was very uneasy.  If she
had not been imprudence incarnate she would not have acted
as she did when she met Henchard by accident a day or two
later.  It was in the bustle of the market, when no one
could readily notice their discourse.

"Michael," said she, "I must again ask you what I asked you
months ago--to return me any letters or papers of mine that
you may have--unless you have destroyed them? You must see
how desirable it is that the time at Jersey should be
blotted out, for the good of all parties."

"Why, bless the woman!--I packed up every scrap of your
handwriting to give you in the coach--but you never
appeared."

She explained how the death of her aunt had prevented her
taking the journey on that day.  "And what became of the
parcel then?" she asked.

He could not say--he would consider.  When she was gone he
recollected that he had left a heap of useless papers in his
former dining-room safe--built up in the wall of his old
house--now occupied by Farfrae.  The letters might have been
amongst them.

A grotesque grin shaped itself on Henchard's face.  Had that
safe been opened?

On the very evening which followed this there was a great
ringing of bells in Casterbridge, and the combined brass,
wood, catgut, and leather bands played round the town with
more prodigality of percussion-notes than ever.  Farfrae was
Mayor--the two-hundredth odd of a series forming an elective
dynasty dating back to the days of Charles I--and the fair
Lucetta was the courted of the town....But, Ah! the worm i'
the bud--Henchard; what he could tell!

He, in the meantime, festering with indignation at some
erroneous intelligence of Farfrae's opposition to the scheme
for installing him in the little seed-shop, was greeted with
the news of the municipal election (which, by reason of
Farfrae's comparative youth and his Scottish nativity--a
thing unprecedented in the case--had an interest far beyond
the ordinary).  The bell-ringing and the band-playing, loud
as Tamerlane's trumpet, goaded the downfallen Henchard
indescribably: the ousting now seemed to him to be complete.

The next morning he went to the corn-yard as usual, and
about eleven o'clock Donald entered through the green door,
with no trace of the worshipful about him.  The yet more
emphatic change of places between him and Henchard which
this election had established renewed a slight embarrassment
in the manner of the modest young man; but Henchard showed
the front of one who had overlooked all this; and Farfrae
met his amenities half-way at once.

"I was going to ask you," said Henchard, "about a packet
that I may possibly have left in my old safe in the dining-
room."  He added particulars.

"If so, it is there now," said Farfrae.  "I have never
opened the safe at all as yet; for I keep ma papers at the
bank, to sleep easy o' nights."

"It was not of much consequence--to me," said Henchard.
"But I'll call for it this evening, if you don't mind?"

It was quite late when he fulfilled his promise.  He had
primed himself with grog, as he did very frequently now, and
a curl of sardonic humour hung on his lip as he approached
the house, as though he were contemplating some terrible
form of amusement.  Whatever it was, the incident of his
entry did not diminish its force, this being his first visit
to the house since he had lived there as owner.  The ring of
the bell spoke to him like the voice of a familiar drudge
who had been bribed to forsake him; the movements of the
doors were revivals of dead days.

Farfrae invited him into the dining-room, where he at once
unlocked the iron safe built into the wall, HIS,
Henchard's safe, made by an ingenious locksmith under his
direction.  Farfrae drew thence the parcel, and other
papers, with apologies for not having returned them.

"Never mind," said Henchard drily.  "The fact is they are
letters mostly....Yes," he went on, sitting down and
unfolding Lucetta's passionate bundle, "here they be.  That
ever I should see 'em again!  I hope Mrs. Farfrae is well
after her exertions of yesterday?"

"She has felt a bit weary; and has gone to bed airly on that
account.

Henchard returned to the letters, sorting them over with
interest, Farfrae being seated at the other end of the
dining-table.  "You don't forget, of course," he resumed,
"that curious chapter in the history of my past which I told
you of, and that you gave me some assistance in? These
letters are, in fact, related to that unhappy business.
Though, thank God, it is all over now."

"What became of the poor woman?" asked Farfrae.

"Luckily she married, and married well," said Henchard.  "So
that these reproaches she poured out on me do not now cause
me any twinges, as they might otherwise have done....Just
listen to what an angry woman will say!"

Farfrae, willing to humour Henchard, though quite
uninterested, and bursting with yawns, gave well-mannered
attention.

"'For me,'" Henchard read, "'there is practically no future.
A creature too unconventionally devoted to you--who feels it
impossible that she can be the wife of any other man; and
who is yet no more to you than the first woman you meet in
the street--such am I.  I quite acquit you of any intention
to wrong me, yet you are the door through which wrong has
come to me.  That in the event of your present wife's death
you will place me in her position is a consolation so far as
it goes--but how far does it go? Thus I sit here, forsaken
by my few acquaintance, and forsaken by you!'"

"That's how she went on to me," said Henchard, "acres of
words like that, when what had happened was what I could not
cure."

"Yes," said Farfrae absently, "it is the way wi' women."  But
the fact was that he knew very little of the sex; yet
detecting a sort of resemblance in style between the
effusions of the woman he worshipped and those of the
supposed stranger, he concluded that Aphrodite ever spoke
thus, whosesoever the personality she assumed.

Henchard unfolded another letter, and read it through
likewise, stopping at the subscription as before.  "Her name
I don't give," he said blandly.  "As I didn't marry her, and
another man did, I can scarcely do that in fairness to her."

"Tr-rue, tr-rue," said Farfrae.  "But why didn't you marry
her when your wife Susan died?" Farfrae asked this and the
other questions in the comfortably indifferent tone of one
whom the matter very remotely concerned.

"Ah--well you may ask that!" said Henchard, the new-moon-
shaped grin adumbrating itself again upon his mouth.  "In
spite of all her protestations, when I came forward to do
so, as in generosity bound, she was not the woman for me."

"She had already married another--maybe?"

Henchard seemed to think it would be sailing too near the
wind to descend further into particulars, and he answered
"Yes."

"The young lady must have had a heart that bore
transplanting very readily!"

"She had, she had," said Henchard emphatically.

He opened a third and fourth letter, and read.  This time he
approached the conclusion as if the signature were indeed
coming with the rest.  But again he stopped short.  The
truth was that, as may be divined, he had quite intended to
effect a grand catastrophe at the end of this drama by
reading out the name, he had come to the house with no other
thought.  But sitting here in cold blood he could not do it.

Such a wrecking of hearts appalled even him.  His quality
was such that he could have annihilated them both in the
heat of action; but to accomplish the deed by oral poison
was beyond the nerve of his enmity.



35.


As Donald stated, Lucetta had retired early to her room
because of fatigue.  She had, however, not gone to rest, but
sat in the bedside chair reading and thinking over the
events of the day.  At the ringing of the door-bell by
Henchard she wondered who it should be that would call at
that comparatively late hour.  The dining-room was almost
under her bed-room; she could hear that somebody was
admitted there, and presently the indistinct murmur of a
person reading became audible.

The usual time for Donald's arrival upstairs came and
passed, yet still the reading and conversation went on.
This was very singular.  She could think of nothing but that
some extraordinary crime had been committed, and that the
visitor, whoever he might be, was reading an account of it
from a special edition of the Casterbridge Chronicle.
At last she left the room, and descended the stairs.  The
dining-room door was ajar, and in the silence of the resting
household the voice and the words were recognizable before
she reached the lower flight.  She stood transfixed.  Her
own words greeted her in Henchard's voice, like spirits from
the grave.

Lucetta leant upon the banister with her cheek against the
smooth hand-rail, as if she would make a friend of it in her
misery.  Rigid in this position, more and more words fell
successively upon her ear.  But what amazed her most was the
tone of her husband.  He spoke merely in the accents of a
man who made a present of his time.

"One word," he was saying, as the crackling of paper denoted
that Henchard was unfolding yet another sheet.  "Is it quite
fair to this young woman's memory to read at such length to
a stranger what was intended for your eye alone?"

"Well, yes," said Henchard.  "By not giving her name I make
it an example of all womankind, and not a scandal to one."

"If I were you I would destroy them," said Farfrae, giving
more thought to the letters than he had hitherto done.  "As
another man's wife it would injure the woman if it were
known.

"No, I shall not destroy them," murmured Henchard, putting
the letters away.  Then he arose, and Lucetta heard no more.

She went back to her bedroom in a semi-paralyzed state.  For
very fear she could not undress, but sat on the edge of the
bed, waiting.  Would Henchard let out the secret in his
parting words? Her suspense was terrible.  Had she confessed
all to Donald in their early acquaintance he might possibly
have got over it, and married her just the same--unlikely as
it had once seemed; but for her or any one else to tell him
now would be fatal.

The door slammed; she could hear her husband bolting it.
After looking round in his customary way he came leisurely
up the stairs.  The spark in her eyes well-nigh went out
when he appeared round the bedroom door.  Her gaze hung
doubtful for a moment, then to her joyous amazement she saw
that he looked at her with the rallying smile of one who had
just been relieved of a scene that was irksome.  She could
hold out no longer, and sobbed hysterically.

When he had restored her Farfrae naturally enough spoke of
Henchard.  "Of all men he was the least desirable as a
visitor," he said; "but it is my belief that he's just a bit
crazed.  He has been reading to me a long lot of letters
relating to his past life; and I could do no less than
indulge him by listening.

This was sufficient.  Henchard, then, had not told.
Henchard's last words to Farfrae, in short, as he stood on
the doorstep, had been these: "Well--I'm obliged to 'ee for
listening.  I may tell more about her some day."

Finding this, she was much perplexed as to Henchard's
motives in opening the matter at all; for in such cases we
attribute to an enemy a power of consistent action which we
never find in ourselves or in our friends; and forget that
abortive efforts from want of heart are as possible to
revenge as to generosity.

Next morning Lucetta remained in bed, meditating how to
parry this incipient attack.  The bold stroke of telling
Donald the truth, dimly conceived, was yet too bold; for she
dreaded lest in doing so he, like the rest of the world,
should believe that the episode was rather her fault than
her misfortune.  She decided to employ persuasion--not with
Donald but with the enemy himself.  It seemed the only
practicable weapon left her as a woman.  Having laid her
plan she rose, and wrote to him who kept her on these
tenterhooks:--

"I overheard your interview with my husband last night, and
saw the drift of your revenge.  The very thought of it
crushes me!  Have pity on a distressed woman!  If you could
see me you would relent.  You do not know how anxiety has
told upon me lately.  I will be at the Ring at the time you
leave work--just before the sun goes down.  Please come that
way.  I cannot rest till I have seen you face to face, and
heard from your mouth that you will carry this horse-play no
further."

To herself she said, on closing up her appeal: "If ever
tears and pleadings have served the weak to fight the
strong, let them do so now!"

With this view she made a toilette which differed from all
she had ever attempted before.  To heighten her natural
attraction had hitherto been the unvarying endeavour of her
adult life, and one in which she was no novice.  But now she
neglected this, and even proceeded to impair the natural
presentation.  Beyond a natural reason for her slightly
drawn look, she had not slept all the previous night, and
this had produced upon her pretty though slightly worn
features the aspect of a countenance ageing prematurely from
extreme sorrow.  She selected--as much from want of spirit
as design--her poorest, plainest and longest discarded
attire.

To avoid the contingency of being recognized she veiled
herself, and slipped out of the house quickly.  The sun was
resting on the hill like a drop of blood on an eyelid by the
time she had got up the road opposite the amphitheatre,
which she speedily entered.  The interior was shadowy, and
emphatic of the absence of every living thing.

She was not disappointed in the fearful hope with which
she awaited him.  Henchard came over the top, descended and
Lucetta waited breathlessly.  But having reached the arena
she saw a change in his bearing: he stood still at a little
distance from her; she could not think why.

Nor could any one else have known.  The truth was that in
appointing this spot, and this hour, for the rendezvous,
Lucetta had unwittingly backed up her entreaty by the
strongest argument she could have used outside words, with
this man of moods, glooms, and superstitions.  Her figure in
the midst of the huge enclosure, the unusual plainness of
her dress, her attitude of hope and appeal, so strongly
revived in his soul the memory of another ill-used woman who
had stood there and thus in bygone days, and had now passed
away into her rest, that he was unmanned, and his heart
smote him for having attempted reprisals on one of a sex so
weak.  When he approached her, and before she had spoken a
word, her point was half gained.

His manner as he had come down had been one of cynical
carelessness; but he now put away his grim half-smile, and
said in a kindly subdued tone, "Goodnight t'ye.  Of course I
in glad to come if you want me."

"O, thank you," she said apprehensively.

"I am sorry to see 'ee looking so ill," he stammered with
unconcealed compunction.

She shook her head.  "How can you be sorry," she asked,
"when you deliberately cause it?"

"What!" said Henchard uneasily.  "Is it anything I have done
that has pulled you down like that?"

"It is all your doing," she said.  "I have no other grief.
My happiness would be secure enough but for your threats.  O
Michael! don't wreck me like this!  You might think that you
have done enough!  When I came here I was a young woman; now
I am rapidly becoming an old one.  Neither my husband nor
any other man will regard me with interest long."

Henchard was disarmed.  His old feeling of supercilious pity
for womankind in general was intensified by this suppliant
appearing here as the double of the first.  Moreover that
thoughtless want of foresight which had led to all her
trouble remained with poor Lucetta still; she had come to
meet him here in this compromising way without
perceiving the risk.  Such a woman was very small deer to
hunt; he felt ashamed, lost all zest and desire to humiliate
Lucetta there and then, and no longer envied Farfrae his
bargain.  He had married money, but nothing more.  Henchard
was anxious to wash his hands of the game.

"Well, what do you want me to do?" he said gently.  "I am
sure I shall be very willing.  My reading of those letters
was only a sort of practical joke, and I revealed nothing."

"To give me back the letters and any papers you may have
that breathe of matrimony or worse."

"So be it.  Every scrap shall be yours....But, between you
and me, Lucetta, he is sure to find out something of the
matter, sooner or later.

"Ah!" she said with eager tremulousness; "but not till I
have proved myself a faithful and deserving wife to him, and
then he may forgive me everything!"

Henchard silently looked at her: he almost envied Farfrae
such love as that, even now.  "H'm--I hope so," he said.
"But you shall have the letters without fail.  And your
secret shall be kept.  I swear it."

"How good you are!--how shall I get them?"

He reflected, and said he would send them the next morning.
"Now don't doubt me," he added.  "I can keep my word.



36.


Returning from her appointment Lucetta saw a man waiting by
the lamp nearest to her own door.  When she stopped to go in
he came and spoke to her.  It was Jopp.

He begged her pardon for addressing her.  But he had heard
that Mr. Farfrae had been applied to by a neighbouring corn-
merchant to recommend a working partner; if so he wished to
offer himself.  He could give good security, and had stated
as much to Mr. Farfrae in a letter; but he would feel
much obliged if Lucetta would say a word in his favour to
her husband.

"It is a thing I know nothing about," said Lucetta coldly.

"But you can testify to my trustworthiness better than
anybody, ma'am," said Jopp.  "I was in Jersey several years,
and knew you there by sight."

"Indeed," she replied.  "But I knew nothing of you."

"I think, ma'am, that a word or two from you would secure
for me what I covet very much," he persisted.

She steadily refused to have anything to do with the affair,
and cutting him short, because of her anxiety to get indoors
before her husband should miss her, left him on the
pavement.

He watched her till she had vanished, and then went home.
When he got there he sat down in the fireless chimney corner
looking at the iron dogs, and the wood laid across them for
heating the morning kettle.  A movement upstairs disturbed
him, and Henchard came down from his bedroom, where he
seemed to have been rummaging boxes.

"I wish," said Henchard, "you would do me a service, Jopp,
now--to-night, I mean, if you can.  Leave this at Mrs.
Farfrae's for her.  I should take it myself, of course, but
I don't wish to be seen there."

He handed a package in brown paper, sealed.  Henchard had
been as good as his word.  Immediately on coming indoors he
had searched over his few belongings, and every scrap of
Lucetta's writing that he possessed was here.  Jopp
indifferently expressed his willingness.

"Well, how have ye got on to-day?" his lodger asked.  "Any
prospect of an opening?"

"I am afraid not," said Jopp, who had not told the other of
his application to Farfrae.

"There never will be in Casterbridge," declared Henchard
decisively.  "You must roam further afield."  He said good-
night to Jopp, and returned to his own part of the house.

Jopp sat on till his eyes were attracted by the shadow of
the candle-snuff on the wall, and looking at the original he
found that it had formed itself into a head like a red-hot
cauliflower.  Henchard's packet next met his gaze.  He knew
there had been something of the nature of wooing between
Henchard and the now Mrs. Farfrae; and his vague ideas
on the subject narrowed themselves down to these: Henchard
had a parcel belonging to Mrs. Farfrae, and he had reasons
for not returning that parcel to her in person.  What could
be inside it? So he went on and on till, animated by
resentment at Lucetta's haughtiness, as he thought it, and
curiosity to learn if there were any weak sides to this
transaction with Henchard, he examined the package.  The pen
and all its relations being awkward tools in Henchard's
hands he had affixed the seals without an impression, it
never occurring to him that the efficacy of such a fastening
depended on this.  Jopp was far less of a tyro; he lifted
one of the seals with his penknife, peeped in at the end
thus opened, saw that the bundle consisted of letters; and,
having satisfied himself thus far, sealed up the end again
by simply softening the wax with the candle, and went off
with the parcel as requested.

His path was by the river-side at the foot of the town.
Coming into the light at the bridge which stood at the end
of High Street he beheld lounging thereon Mother Cuxsom and
Nance Mockridge.

"We be just going down Mixen Lane way, to look into Peter's
finger afore creeping to bed," said Mrs. Cuxsom.  "There's a
fiddle and tambourine going on there.  Lord, what's all the
world--do ye come along too, Jopp--'twon't hinder ye five
minutes."

Jopp had mostly kept himself out of this company, but
present circumstances made him somewhat more reckless than
usual, and without many words he decided to go to his
destination that way.


Though the upper part of Durnover was mainly composed of a
curious congeries of barns and farm-steads, there was a less
picturesque side to the parish.  This was Mixen Lane, now in
great part pulled down.

Mixen Lane was the Adullam of all the surrounding villages.
It was the hiding-place of those who were in distress, and
in debt, and trouble of every kind.  Farm-labourers and
other peasants, who combined a little poaching with their
farming, and a little brawling and bibbing with their
poaching, found themselves sooner or later in Mixen Lane.
Rural mechanics too idle to mechanize, rural servants
too rebellious to serve, drifted or were forced into Mixen
Lane.

The lane and its surrounding thicket of thatched cottages
stretched out like a spit into the moist and misty lowland.
Much that was sad, much that was low, some things that were
baneful, could be seen in Mixen Lane.  Vice ran freely in
and out certain of the doors in the neighbourhood;
recklessness dwelt under the roof with the crooked chimney;
shame in some bow-windows; theft (in times of privation) in
the thatched and mud-walled houses by the sallows.  Even
slaughter had not been altogether unknown here.  In a block
of cottages up an alley there might have been erected an
altar to disease in years gone by.  Such was Mixen Lane in
the times when Henchard and Farfrae were Mayors.

Yet this mildewed leaf in the sturdy and flourishing
Casterbridge plant lay close to the open country; not a
hundred yards from a row of noble elms, and commanding a
view across the moor of airy uplands and corn-fields, and
mansions of the great.  A brook divided the moor from the
tenements, and to outward view there was no way across it--
no way to the houses but round about by the road.  But under
every householder's stairs there was kept a mysterious plank
nine inches wide; which plank was a secret bridge.

If you, as one of those refugee householders, came in from
business after dark--and this was the business time here--
you stealthily crossed the moor, approached the border of
the aforesaid brook, and whistled opposite the house to
which you belonged.  A shape thereupon made its appearance
on the other side bearing the bridge on end against the sky;
it was lowered; you crossed, and a hand helped you to land
yourself, together with the pheasants and hares gathered
from neighbouring manors.  You sold them slily the next
morning, and the day after you stood before the magistrates
with the eyes of all your sympathizing neighbours
concentrated on your back.  You disappeared for a time; then
you were again found quietly living in Mixen Lane.

Walking along the lane at dusk the stranger was struck by
two or three peculiar features therein.  One was an
intermittent rumbling from the back premises of the inn
half-way up; this meant a skittle alley.  Another was the
extensive prevalence of whistling in the various
domiciles--a piped note of some kind coming from nearly
every open door.  Another was the frequency of white aprons
over dingy gowns among the women around the doorways.  A
white apron is a suspicious vesture in situations where
spotlessness is difficult; moreover, the industry and
cleanliness which the white apron expressed were belied by
the postures and gaits of the women who wore it--their
knuckles being mostly on their hips (an attitude which lent
them the aspect of two-handled mugs), and their shoulders
against door-posts; while there was a curious alacrity in
the turn of each honest woman's head upon her neck and in
the twirl of her honest eyes, at any noise resembling a
masculine footfall along the lane.

Yet amid so much that was bad needy respectability also
found a home.  Under some of the roofs abode pure and
virtuous souls whose presence there was due to the iron hand
of necessity, and to that alone.  Families from decayed
villages--families of that once bulky, but now nearly
extinct, section of village society called "liviers," or
lifeholders--copyholders and others, whose roof-trees had
fallen for some reason or other, compelling them to quit the
rural spot that had been their home for generations--came
here, unless they chose to lie under a hedge by the wayside.

The inn called Peter's finger was the church of Mixen Lane.

It was centrally situate, as such places should be, and bore
about the same social relation to the Three Mariners as the
latter bore to the King's Arms.  At first sight the inn was
so respectable as to be puzzling.  The front door was kept
shut, and the step was so clean that evidently but few
persons entered over its sanded surface.  But at the corner
of the public-house was an alley, a mere slit, dividing it
from the next building.  Half-way up the alley was a narrow
door, shiny and paintless from the rub of infinite hands and
shoulders.  This was the actual entrance to the inn.

A pedestrian would be seen abstractedly passing along Mixen
Lane; and then, in a moment, he would vanish, causing the
gazer to blink like Ashton at the disappearance of
Ravenswood.  That abstracted pedestrian had edged into the
slit by the adroit fillip of his person sideways; from the
slit he edged into the tavern by a similar exercise of
skill.

The company at the Three Mariners were persons of quality in
comparison with the company which gathered here; though it
must be admitted that the lowest fringe of the Mariner's
party touched the crest of Peter's at points.  Waifs and
strays of all sorts loitered about here.  The landlady was a
virtuous woman who years ago had been unjustly sent to gaol
as an accessory to something or other after the fact.  She
underwent her twelvemonth, and had worn a martyr's
countenance ever since, except at times of meeting the
constable who apprehended her, when she winked her eye.

To this house Jopp and his acquaintances had arrived.  The
settles on which they sat down were thin and tall, their
tops being guyed by pieces of twine to hooks in the ceiling;
for when the guests grew boisterous the settles would rock
and overturn without some such security.  The thunder of
bowls echoed from the backyard; swingels hung behind the
blower of the chimney; and ex-poachers and ex-gamekeepers,
whom squires had persecuted without a cause, sat elbowing
each other--men who in past times had met in fights under
the moon, till lapse of sentences on the one part, and loss
of favour and expulsion from service on the other, brought
them here together to a common level, where they sat calmly
discussing old times.

"Dost mind how you could jerk a trout ashore with a bramble,
and not ruffle the stream, Charl?" a deposed keeper was
saying.  "'Twas at that I caught 'ee once, if you can mind?"

"That I can.  But the worst larry for me was that pheasant
business at Yalbury Wood.  Your wife swore false that time,
Joe--O, by Gad, she did--there's no denying it."

"How was that?" asked Jopp.

"Why--Joe closed wi' me, and we rolled down together, close
to his garden hedge.  Hearing the noise, out ran his wife
with the oven pyle, and it being dark under the trees she
couldn't see which was uppermost.  'Where beest thee, Joe,
under or top?' she screeched.  'O--under, by Gad!' says he.
She then began to rap down upon my skull, back, and ribs
with the pyle till we'd roll over again.  'Where beest now,
dear Joe, under or top?' she'd scream again.  By George,
'twas through her I was took!  And then when we got up
in hall she sware that the cock pheasant was one of her
rearing, when 'twas not your bird at all, Joe; 'twas Squire
Brown's bird--that's whose 'twas--one that we'd picked off
as we passed his wood, an hour afore.  It did hurt my
feelings to be so wronged!...Ah well--'tis over now."

"I might have had 'ee days afore that," said the keeper.  "I
was within a few yards of 'ee dozens of times, with a sight
more of birds than that poor one."

"Yes--'tis not our greatest doings that the world gets wind
of," said the furmity-woman, who, lately settled in this
purlieu, sat among the rest.  Having travelled a great deal
in her time she spoke with cosmopolitan largeness of idea.
It was she who presently asked Jopp what was the parcel he
kept so snugly under his arm.

"Ah, therein lies a grand secret," said Jopp. "It is the
passion of love.  To think that a woman should love one man
so well, and hate another so unmercifully."

"Who's the object of your meditation, sir?"

"One that stands high in this town.  I'd like to shame her!
Upon my life, 'twould be as good as a play to read her love-
letters, the proud piece of silk and wax-work!  For 'tis her
love-letters that I've got here."

"Love letters? then let's hear 'em, good soul," said Mother
Cuxsom.  "Lord, do ye mind, Richard, what fools we used to
be when we were younger? Getting a schoolboy to write ours
for us; and giving him a penny, do ye mind, not to tell
other folks what he'd put inside, do ye mind?"

By this time Jopp had pushed his finger under the seals, and
unfastened the letters, tumbling them over and picking up
one here and there at random, which he read aloud.  These
passages soon began to uncover the secret which Lucetta had
so earnestly hoped to keep buried, though the epistles,
being allusive only, did not make it altogether plain.

"Mrs. Farfrae wrote that!" said Nance Mockridge.  "'Tis a
humbling thing for us, as respectable women, that one of the
same sex could do it.  And now she's avowed herself to
another man!"

"So much the better for her," said the aged furmity-woman.
"Ah, I saved her from a real bad marriage, and she's
never been the one to thank me."

"I say, what a good foundation for a skimmity-ride," said
Nance.

"True," said Mrs. Cuxsom, reflecting.  "'Tis as good a
ground for a skimmity-ride as ever I knowed; and it ought
not to be wasted.  The last one seen in Casterbridge must
have been ten years ago, if a day."

At this moment there was a shrill whistle, and the landlady
said to the man who had been called Charl, "'Tis Jim coming
in.  Would ye go and let down the bridge for me?"

Without replying Charl and his comrade Joe rose, and
receiving a lantern from her went out at the back door and
down the garden-path, which ended abruptly at the edge of
the stream already mentioned.  Beyond the stream was the
open moor, from which a clammy breeze smote upon their faces
as they advanced.  Taking up the board that had lain in
readiness one of them lowered it across the water, and the
instant its further end touched the ground footsteps entered
upon it, and there appeared from the shade a stalwart man
with straps round his knees, a double-barrelled gun under
his arm and some birds slung up behind him.  They asked him
if he had had much luck.

"Not much," he said indifferently.  "All safe inside?"

Receiving a reply in the affirmative he went on inwards, the
others withdrawing the bridge and beginning to retreat in
his rear.  Before, however, they had entered the house a cry
of "Ahoy" from the moor led them to pause.

The cry was repeated.  They pushed the lantern into an
outhouse, and went back to the brink of the stream.

"Ahoy--is this the way to Casterbridge?" said some one from
the other side.

"Not in particular," said Charl.  "There's a river afore
'ee."

"I don't care--here's for through it!" said the man in the
moor.  "I've had travelling enough for to-day."

"Stop a minute, then," said Charl, finding that the man was
no enemy.  "Joe, bring the plank and lantern; here's
somebody that's lost his way.  You should have kept along
the turnpike road, friend, and not have strook across here."

"I should--as I see now.  But I saw a light here, and says I
to myself, that's an outlying house, depend on't."

The plank was now lowered; and the stranger's form
shaped itself from the darkness.  He was a middle-aged man,
with hair and whiskers prematurely grey, and a broad and
genial face.  He had crossed on the plank without
hesitation, and seemed to see nothing odd in the transit.
He thanked them, and walked between them up the garden.
"What place is this?" he asked, when they reached the door.

"A public-house."

"Ah, perhaps it will suit me to put up at.  Now then, come
in and wet your whistle at my expense for the lift over you
have given me."

They followed him into the inn, where the increased light
exhibited him as one who would stand higher in an estimate
by the eye than in one by the ear.  He was dressed with a
certain clumsy richness--his coat being furred, and his head
covered by a cap of seal-skin, which, though the nights were
chilly, must have been warm for the daytime, spring being
somewhat advanced.  In his hand he carried a small mahogany
case, strapped, and clamped with brass.

Apparently surprised at the kind of company which confronted
him through the kitchen door, he at once abandoned his idea
of putting up at the house; but taking the situation
lightly, he called for glasses of the best, paid for them as
he stood in the passage, and turned to proceed on his way by
the front door.  This was barred, and while the landlady was
unfastening it the conversation about the skimmington was
continued in the sitting-room, and reached his ears.

"What do they mean by a 'skimmity-ride'?" he asked.

"O, sir!" said the landlady, swinging her long earrings with
deprecating modesty; "'tis a' old foolish thing they do in
these parts when a man's wife is--well, not too particularly
his own.  But as a respectable householder I don't encourage
it.

"Still, are they going to do it shortly? It is a good sight
to see, I suppose?"

"Well, sir!" she simpered.  And then, bursting into
naturalness, and glancing from the corner of her eye, "'Tis
the funniest thing under the sun!  And it costs money."

"Ah!  I remember hearing of some such thing.  Now I shall be
in Casterbridge for two or three weeks to come, and
should not mind seeing the performance.  Wait a
moment."  He turned back, entered the sitting-room, and said,
"Here, good folks; I should like to see the old custom you
are talking of, and I don't mind being something towards it--
take that."  He threw a sovereign on the table and returned
to the landlady at the door, of whom, having inquired the
way into the town, he took his leave.

"There were more where that one came from," said Charl when
the sovereign had been taken up and handed to the landlady
for safe keeping.  "By George! we ought to have got a few
more while we had him here."

"No, no," answered the landlady.  "This is a respectable
house, thank God!  And I'll have nothing done but what's
honourable."

"Well," said Jopp; "now we'll consider the business begun,
and will soon get it in train."

"We will!" said Nance.  "A good laugh warms my heart more
than a cordial, and that's the truth on't."

Jopp gathered up the letters, and it being now somewhat late
he did not attempt to call at Farfrae's with them that
night.  He reached home, sealed them up as before, and
delivered the parcel at its address next morning.  Within an
hour its contents were reduced to ashes by Lucetta, who,
poor soul! was inclined to fall down on her knees in
thankfulness that at last no evidence remained of the
unlucky episode with Henchard in her past.  For though hers
had been rather the laxity of inadvertence than of
intention, that episode, if known, was not the less likely
to operate fatally between herself and her husband.



37.


Such was the state of things when the current affairs of
Casterbridge were interrupted by an event of such magnitude
that its influence reached to the lowest social stratum
there, stirring the depths of its society simultaneously
with the preparations for the skimmington.  It was one of
those excitements which, when they move a country town,
leave permanent mark upon its chronicles, as a warm
summer permanently marks the ring in the tree-trunk
corresponding to its date.

A Royal Personage was about to pass through the borough on
his course further west, to inaugurate an immense
engineering work out that way.  He had consented to halt
half-an-hour or so in the town, and to receive an address
from the corporation of Casterbridge, which, as a
representative centre of husbandry, wished thus to express
its sense of the great services he had rendered to
agricultural science and economics, by his zealous promotion
of designs for placing the art of farming on a more
scientific footing.

Royalty had not been seen in Casterbridge since the days of
the third King George, and then only by candlelight for a
few minutes, when that monarch, on a night-journey, had
stopped to change horses at the King's Arms.  The
inhabitants therefore decided to make a thorough fete
carillonee of the unwonted occasion.  Half-an-hour's pause
was not long, it is true; but much might be done in it by a
judicious grouping of incidents, above all, if the weather
were fine.

The address was prepared on parchment by an artist who was
handy at ornamental lettering, and was laid on with the best
gold-leaf and colours that the sign-painter had in his shop.
The Council had met on the Tuesday before the appointed day,
to arrange the details of the procedure.  While they were
sitting, the door of the Council Chamber standing open, they
heard a heavy footstep coming up the stairs.  It advanced
along the passage, and Henchard entered the room, in clothes
of frayed and threadbare shabbiness, the very clothes which
he had used to wear in the primal days when he had sat among
them.

"I have a feeling," he said, advancing to the table and
laying his hand upon the green cloth, "that I should like to
join ye in this reception of our illustrious visitor.  I
suppose I could walk with the rest?"

Embarrassed glances were exchanged by the Council and Grower
nearly ate the end of his quill-pen off, so gnawed he it
during the silence.  Farfrae the young Mayor, who by virtue
of his office sat in the large chair, intuitively caught the
sense of the meeting, and as spokesman was obliged to
utter it, glad as he would have been that the duty should
have fallen to another tongue.

"I hardly see that it would be proper, Mr. Henchard," said
he.  "The Council are the Council, and as ye are no longer
one of the body, there would be an irregularity in the
proceeding.  If ye were included, why not others?"

"I have a particular reason for wishing to assist at the
ceremony."

Farfrae looked round.  "I think I have expressed the feeling
of the Council," he said.

"Yes, yes," from Dr. Bath, Lawyer Long, Alderman Tubber, and
several more.

"Then I am not to be allowed to have anything to do with it
officially?"

"I am afraid so; it is out of the question, indeed.  But of
course you can see the doings full well, such as they are to
be, like the rest of the spectators."

Henchard did not reply to that very obvious suggestion, and,
turning on his heel, went away.

It had been only a passing fancy of his, but opposition
crystallized it into a determination.  "I'll welcome his
Royal Highness, or nobody shall!" he went about saying.  "I
am not going to be sat upon by Farfrae, or any of the rest
of the paltry crew!  You shall see."

The eventful morning was bright, a full-faced sun
confronting early window-gazers eastward, and all perceived
(for they were practised in weather-lore) that there was
permanence in the glow.  Visitors soon began to flock in
from county houses, villages, remote copses, and lonely
uplands, the latter in oiled boots and tilt bonnets, to see
the reception, or if not to see it, at any rate to be near
it.  There was hardly a workman in the town who did not put
a clean shirt on.  Solomon Longways, Christopher Coney,
Buzzford, and the rest of that fraternity, showed their
sense of the occasion by advancing their customary eleven
o'clock pint to half-past ten; from which they found a
difficulty in getting back to the proper hour for several
days.

Henchard had determined to do no work that day.  He primed
himself in the morning with a glass of rum, and walking down
the street met Elizabeth-Jane, whom he had not seen for
a week.  "It was lucky," he said to her, "my twenty-one
years had expired before this came on, or I should never
have had the nerve to carry it out."

"Carry out what?" said she, alarmed.

"This welcome I am going to give our Royal visitor."

She was perplexed.  "Shall we go and see it together?" she
said.

"See it!  I have other fish to fry.  You see it.  It will be
worth seeing!"

She could do nothing to elucidate this, and decked herself
out with a heavy heart.  As the appointed time drew near she
got sight again of her stepfather.  She thought he was going
to the Three Mariners; but no, he elbowed his way through
the gay throng to the shop of Woolfrey, the draper.  She
waited in the crowd without.

In a few minutes he emerged, wearing, to her surprise, a
brilliant rosette, while more surprising still, in his hand
he carried a flag of somewhat homely construction, formed by
tacking one of the small Union Jacks, which abounded in the
town to-day, to the end of a deal wand--probably the roller
from a piece of calico.  Henchard rolled up his flag on the
doorstep, put it under his arm, and went down the street.

Suddenly the taller members of the crowd turned their heads,
and the shorter stood on tiptoe.  It was said that the Royal
cortege approached.  The railway had stretched out an
arm towards Casterbridge at this time, but had not reached
it by several miles as yet; so that the intervening
distance, as well as the remainder of the journey, was to be
traversed by road in the old fashion.  People thus waited--
the county families in their carriages, the masses on foot--
and watched the far-stretching London highway to the ringing
of bells and chatter of tongues.

From the background Elizabeth-Jane watched the scene.  Some
seats had been arranged from which ladies could witness the
spectacle, and the front seat was occupied by Lucetta, the
Mayor's wife, just at present.  In the road under her eyes
stood Henchard.  She appeared so bright and pretty that, as
it seemed, he was experiencing the momentary weakness of
wishing for her notice.  But he was far from attractive to a
woman's eye, ruled as that is so largely by the
superficies of things.  He was not only a journeyman,
unable to appear as he formerly had appeared, but he
disdained to appear as well as he might.  Everybody else,
from the Mayor to the washerwoman, shone in new vesture
according to means; but Henchard had doggedly retained the
fretted and weather-beaten garments of bygone years.

Hence, alas, this occurred: Lucetta's eyes slid over him to
this side and to that without anchoring on his features--as
gaily dressed women's eyes will too often do on such
occasions.  Her manner signified quite plainly that she
meant to know him in public no more.

But she was never tired of watching Donald, as he stood in
animated converse with his friends a few yards off, wearing
round his young neck the official gold chain with great
square links, like that round the Royal unicorn.  Every
trifling emotion that her husband showed as he talked had
its reflex on her face and lips, which moved in little
duplicates to his.  She was living his part rather than her
own, and cared for no one's situation but Farfrae's that
day.

At length a man stationed at the furthest turn of the high
road, namely, on the second bridge of which mention has been
made, gave a signal, and the Corporation in their robes
proceeded from the front of the Town Hall to the archway
erected at the entrance to the town.  The carriages
containing the Royal visitor and his suite arrived at the
spot in a cloud of dust, a procession was formed, and the
whole came on to the Town Hall at a walking pace.

This spot was the centre of interest.  There were a few
clear yards in front of the Royal carriage, sanded; and into
this space a man stepped before any one could prevent him.
It was Henchard.  He had unrolled his private flag, and
removing his hat he staggered to the side of the slowing
vehicle, waving the Union Jack to and fro with his left hand
while he blandly held out his right to the Illustrious
Personage.

All the ladies said with bated breath, "O, look there!" and
Lucetta was ready to faint.  Elizabeth-Jane peeped through
the shoulders of those in front, saw what it was, and was
terrified; and then her interest in the spectacle as a
strange phenomenon got the better of her fear.

Farfrae, with Mayoral authority, immediately rose to
the occasion.  He seized Henchard by the shoulder, dragged
him back, and told him roughly to be off.  Henchard's eyes
met his, and Farfrae observed the fierce light in them
despite his excitement and irritation.  For a moment
Henchard stood his ground rigidly; then by an unaccountable
impulse gave way and retired.  Farfrae glanced to the
ladies' gallery, and saw that his Calphurnia's cheek was
pale.

"Why--it is your husband's old patron!" said Mrs. Blowbody,
a lady of the neighbourhood who sat beside Lucetta.

"Patron!" said Donald's wife with quick indignation.

"Do you say the man is an acquaintance of Mr. Farfrae's?"
observed Mrs. Bath, the physician's wife, a new-comer to the
town through her recent marriage with the doctor.

"He works for my husband," said Lucetta.

"Oh--is that all? They have been saying to me that it was
through him your husband first got a footing in
Casterbridge.  What stories people will tell!"

"They will indeed.  It was not so at all.  Donald's genius
would have enabled him to get a footing anywhere, without
anybody's help!  He would have been just the same if there
had been no Henchard in the world!"

It was partly Lucetta's ignorance of the circumstances of
Donald's arrival which led her to speak thus, partly the
sensation that everybody seemed bent on snubbing her at this
triumphant time.  The incident had occupied but a few
moments, but it was necessarily witnessed by the Royal
Personage, who, however, with practised tact affected not to
have noticed anything unusual.  He alighted, the Mayor
advanced, the address was read; the Illustrious Personage
replied, then said a few words to Farfrae, and shook hands
with Lucetta as the Mayor's wife.  The ceremony occupied but
a few minutes, and the carriages rattled heavily as
Pharaoh's chariots down Corn Street and out upon the
Budmouth Road, in continuation of the journey coastward.

In the crowd stood Coney, Buzzford, and Longways "Some
difference between him now and when he zung at the Dree
Mariners," said the first.  "'Tis wonderful how he could get
a lady of her quality to go snacks wi' en in such quick
time."

"True.  Yet how folk do worship fine clothes!  Now
there's a better-looking woman than she that nobody notices
at all, because she's akin to that hontish fellow Henchard."

"I could worship ye, Buzz, for saying that," remarked Nance
Mockridge.  "I do like to see the trimming pulled off such
Christmas candles.  I am quite unequal to the part of
villain myself, or I'd gi'e all my small silver to see that
lady toppered....And perhaps I shall soon," she added
significantly.

"That's not a noble passiont for a 'oman to keep up," said
Longways.

Nance did not reply, but every one knew what she meant.  The
ideas diffused by the reading of Lucetta's letters at
Peter's finger had condensed into a scandal, which was
spreading like a miasmatic fog through Mixen Lane, and
thence up the back streets of Casterbridge.

The mixed assemblage of idlers known to each other presently
fell apart into two bands by a process of natural selection,
the frequenters of Peter's Finger going off Mixen Lane-
wards, where most of them lived, while Coney, Buzzford,
Longways, and that connection remained in the street.

"You know what's brewing down there, I suppose?" said
Buzzford mysteriously to the others.

Coney looked at him.  "Not the skimmity-ride?"

Buzzford nodded.

"I have my doubts if it will be carried out," said Longways.
"If they are getting it up they are keeping it mighty close.

"I heard they were thinking of it a fortnight ago, at all
events."

"If I were sure o't I'd lay information," said Longways
emphatically.  "'Tis too rough a joke, and apt to wake riots
in towns.  We know that the Scotchman is a right enough man,
and that his lady has been a right enough 'oman since she
came here, and if there was anything wrong about her afore,
that's their business, not ours."

Coney reflected.  Farfrae was still liked in the community;
but it must be owned that, as the Mayor and man of money,
engrossed with affairs and ambitions, he had lost in the
eyes of the poorer inhabitants something of that wondrous
charm which he had had for them as a light-hearted
penniless young man, who sang ditties as readily as the
birds in the trees.  Hence the anxiety to keep him from
annoyance showed not quite the ardour that would have
animated it in former days.

"Suppose we make inquiration into it, Christopher,"
continued Longways; "and if we find there's really anything
in it, drop a letter to them most concerned, and advise 'em
to keep out of the way?"

This course was decided on, and the group separated,
Buzzford saying to Coney, "Come, my ancient friend; let's
move on.  There's nothing more to see here."

These well-intentioned ones would have been surprised had
they known how ripe the great jocular plot really was.
"Yes, to-night," Jopp had said to the Peter's party at the
corner of Mixen Lane.  "As a wind-up to the Royal visit the
hit will be all the more pat by reason of their great
elevation to-day."

To him, at least, it was not a joke, but a retaliation.


38.


The proceedings had been brief--too brief--to Lucetta whom
an intoxicating Weltlust had fairly mastered; but they
had brought her a great triumph nevertheless.  The shake of
the Royal hand still lingered in her fingers; and the chit-
chat she had overheard, that her husband might possibly
receive the honour of knighthood, though idle to a degree,
seemed not the wildest vision; stranger things had occurred
to men so good and captivating as her Scotchman was.

After the collision with the Mayor, Henchard had withdrawn
behind the ladies' stand; and there he stood, regarding with
a stare of abstraction the spot on the lapel of his coat
where Farfrae's hand had seized it.  He put his own hand
there, as if he could hardly realize such an outrage from
one whom it had once been his wont to treat with ardent
generosity.  While pausing in this half-stupefied state
the conversation of Lucetta with the other ladies
reached his ears; and he distinctly heard her deny him--deny
that he had assisted Donald, that he was anything more than
a common journeyman.

He moved on homeward, and met Jopp in the archway to the
Bull Stake.  "So you've had a snub," said Jopp.

"And what if I have?" answered Henchard sternly.

"Why, I've had one too, so we are both under the same cold
shade."  He briefly related his attempt to win Lucetta's
intercession.

Henchard merely heard his story, without taking it deeply
in.  His own relation to Farfrae and Lucetta overshadowed
all kindred ones.  He went on saying brokenly to himself,
"She has supplicated to me in her time; and now her tongue
won't own me nor her eyes see me!...And he--how angry he
looked.  He drove me back as if I were a bull breaking
fence....I took it like a lamb, for I saw it could not be
settled there.  He can rub brine on a green wound!...But he
shall pay for it, and she shall be sorry.  It must come to a
tussle--face to face; and then we'll see how a coxcomb can
front a man!"

Without further reflection the fallen merchant, bent on some
wild purpose, ate a hasty dinner and went forth to find
Farfrae.  After being injured by him as a rival, and snubbed
by him as a journeyman, the crowning degradation had been
reserved for this day--that he should be shaken at the
collar by him as a vagabond in the face of the whole town.

The crowds had dispersed.  But for the green arches which
still stood as they were erected Casterbridge life had
resumed its ordinary shape.  Henchard went down corn Street
till he came to Farfrae's house, where he knocked, and left
a message that he would be glad to see his employer at the
granaries as soon as he conveniently could come there.
Having done this he proceeded round to the back and entered
the yard.

Nobody was present, for, as he had been aware, the labourers
and carters were enjoying a half-holiday on account of the
events of the morning--though the carters would have to
return for a short time later on, to feed and litter down
the horses.  He had reached the granary steps and was
about to ascend, when he said to himself aloud, "I'm
stronger than he."

Henchard returned to a shed, where he selected a short piece
of rope from several pieces that were lying about; hitching
one end of this to a nail, he took the other in his right
hand and turned himself bodily round, while keeping his arm
against his side; by this contrivance he pinioned the arm
effectively.  He now went up the ladders to the top floor of
the corn-stores.

It was empty except of a few sacks, and at the further end
was the door often mentioned, opening under the cathead and
chain that hoisted the sacks.  He fixed the door open and
looked over the sill.  There was a depth of thirty or forty
feet to the ground; here was the spot on which he had been
standing with Farfrae when Elizabeth-Jane had seen him lift
his arm, with many misgivings as to what the movement
portended.

He retired a few steps into the loft and waited.  From this
elevated perch his eyes could sweep the roofs round about,
the upper parts of the luxurious chestnut trees, now
delicate in leaves of a week's age, and the drooping boughs
of the lines; Farfrae's garden and the green door leading
therefrom.  In course of time--he could not say how long--
that green door opened and Farfrae came through.  He was
dressed as if for a journey.  The low light of the nearing
evening caught his head and face when he emerged from the
shadow of the wall, warming them to a complexion of flame-
colour.  Henchard watched him with his mouth firmly set the
squareness of his jaw and the verticality of his profile
being unduly marked.

Farfrae came on with one hand in his pocket, and humming a
tune in a way which told that the words were most in his
mind.  They were those of the song he had sung when he
arrived years before at the Three Mariners, a poor young
man, adventuring for life and fortune, and scarcely knowing
witherward:--


     "And here's a hand, my trusty fiere,
        And gie's a hand o' thine."


Nothing moved Henchard like an old melody.  He sank
back.  "No; I can't do it!" he gasped.  "Why does the
infernal fool begin that now!"

At length Farfrae was silent, and Henchard looked out of the
loft door.  "Will ye come up here?" he said.

"Ay, man," said Farfrae.  "I couldn't see ye.  What's
wrang?"

A minute later Henchard heard his feet on the lowest ladder.
He heard him land on the first floor, ascend and land on the
second, begin the ascent to the third.  And then his head
rose through the trap behind.

"What are you doing up here at this time?" he asked, coming
forward.  "Why didn't ye take your holiday like the rest of
the men?" He spoke in a tone which had just severity enough
in it to show that he remembered the untoward event of the
forenoon, and his conviction that Henchard had been
drinking.

Henchard said nothing; but going back he closed the stair
hatchway, and stamped upon it so that it went tight into its
frame; he next turned to the wondering young man, who by
this time observed that one of Henchard's arms was bound to
his side.

"Now," said Henchard quietly, "we stand face to face--man
and man.  Your money and your fine wife no longer lift 'ee
above me as they did but now, and my poverty does not press
me down."

"What does it all mean?" asked Farfrae simply.

"Wait a bit, my lad.  You should ha' thought twice before
you affronted to extremes a man who had nothing to lose.
I've stood your rivalry, which ruined me, and your snubbing,
which humbled me; but your hustling, that disgraced me, I
won't stand!"

Farfrae warmed a little at this.  "Ye'd no business there,"
he said.

"As much as any one among ye!  What, you forward stripling,
tell a man of my age he'd no business there!" The anger-vein
swelled in his forehead as he spoke.

"You insulted Royalty, Henchard; and 'twas my duty, as the
chief magistrate, to stop you."

"Royalty be damned," said Henchard.  "I am as loyal as
you, come to that!"

"I am not here to argue.  Wait till you cool doon, wait till
you cool; and you will see things the same way as I do."

"You may be the one to cool first," said Henchard grimly.
"Now this is the case.  Here be we, in this four-square
loft, to finish out that little wrestle you began this
morning.  There's the door, forty foot above ground.  One of
us two puts the other out by that door--the master stays
inside.  If he likes he may go down afterwards and give the
alarm that the other has fallen out by accident--or he may
tell the truth--that's his business.  As the strongest man
I've tied one arm to take no advantage of 'ee.  D'ye
understand? Then here's at 'ee!"

There was no time for Farfrae to do aught but one thing, to
close with Henchard, for the latter had come on at once.  It
was a wrestling match, the object of each being to give his
antagonist a back fall; and on Henchard's part,
unquestionably, that it should be through the door.

At the outset Henchard's hold by his only free hand, the
right, was on the left side of Farfrae's collar, which he
firmly grappled, the latter holding Henchard by his collar
with the contrary hand.  With his right he endeavoured to
get hold of his antagonist's left arm, which, however, he
could not do, so adroitly did Henchard keep it in the rear
as he gazed upon the lowered eyes of his fair and slim
antagonist.

Henchard planted the first toe forward, Farfrae crossing him
with his; and thus far the struggle had very much the
appearance of the ordinary wrestling of those parts.
Several minutes were passed by them in this attitude, the
pair rocking and writhing like trees in a gale, both
preserving an absolute silence.  By this time their
breathing could be heard.  Then Farfrae tried to get hold of
the other side of Henchard's collar, which was resisted by
the larger man exerting all his force in a wrenching
movement, and this part of the struggle ended by his forcing
Farfrae down on his knees by sheer pressure of one of his
muscular arms.  Hampered as he was, however, he could not
keep him there, and Farfrae finding his feet again the
struggle proceeded as before.

By a whirl Henchard brought Donald dangerously near the
precipice; seeing his position the Scotchman for the first
time locked himself to his adversary, and all the efforts of
that infuriated Prince of Darkness--as he might have been
called from his appearance just now--were inadequate to lift
or loosen Farfrae for a time.  By an extraordinary effort he
succeeded at last, though not until they had got far back
again from the fatal door.  In doing so Henchard contrived
to turn Farfrae a complete somersault.  Had Henchard's other
arm been free it would have been all over with Farfrae then.
But again he regained his feet, wrenching Henchard's arm
considerably, and causing him sharp pain, as could be seen
from the twitching of his face.  He instantly delivered the
younger man an annihilating turn by the left fore-hip, as it
used to be expressed, and following up his advantage thrust
him towards the door, never loosening his hold till
Farfrae's fair head was hanging over the window-sill, and
his arm dangling down outside the wall.

"Now," said Henchard between his gasps, "this is the end of
what you began this morning.  Your life is in my hands."

"Then take it, take it!" said Farfrae.  "Ye've wished to
long enough!"

Henchard looked down upon him in silence, and their eyes
met.  "O Farfrae!--that's not true!" he said bitterly.  "God
is my witness that no man ever loved another as I did thee
at one time....And now--though I came here to kill 'ee, I
cannot hurt thee!  Go and give me in charge--do what you
will--I care nothing for what comes of me!"

He withdrew to the back part of the loft, loosened his arm,
and flung himself in a corner upon some sacks, in the
abandonment of remorse.  Farfrae regarded him in silence;
then went to the hatch and descended through it.  Henchard
would fain have recalled him, but his tongue failed in its
task, and the young man's steps died on his ear.

Henchard took his full measure of shame and self-reproach.
The scenes of his first acquaintance with Farfrae rushed
back upon him--that time when the curious mixture of romance
and thrift in the young man's composition so commanded his
heart that Farfrae could play upon him as on an instrument.
So thoroughly subdued was he that he remained on the sacks
in a crouching attitude, unusual for a man, and for
such a man.  Its womanliness sat tragically on the figure of
so stern a piece of virility.  He heard a conversation
below, the opening of the coach-house door, and the putting
in of a horse, but took no notice.

Here he stayed till the thin shades thickened to opaque
obscurity, and the loft-door became an oblong of gray light--
the only visible shape around.  At length he arose, shook
the dust from his clothes wearily, felt his way to the
hatch, and gropingly descended the steps till he stood in
the yard.

"He thought highly of me once," he murmured.  "Now he'll
hate me and despise me for ever!"

He became possessed by an overpowering wish to see Farfrae
again that night, and by some desperate pleading to attempt
the well-nigh impossible task of winning pardon for his late
mad attack.  But as he walked towards Farfrae's door he
recalled the unheeded doings in the yard while he had lain
above in a sort of stupor.  Farfrae he remembered had gone
to the stable and put the horse into the gig; while doing so
Whittle had brought him a letter; Farfrae had then said that
he would not go towards Budmouth as he had intended--that he
was unexpectedly summoned to Weatherbury, and meant to call
at Mellstock on his way thither, that place lying but one or
two miles out of his course.

He must have come prepared for a journey when he first
arrived in the yard, unsuspecting enmity; and he must have
driven off (though in a changed direction) without saying a
word to any one on what had occurred between themselves.

It would therefore be useless to call at Farfrae's house
till very late.

There was no help for it but to wait till his return, though
waiting was almost torture to his restless and self-accusing
soul.  He walked about the streets and outskirts of the
town, lingering here and there till he reached the stone
bridge of which mention has been made, an accustomed
halting-place with him now.  Here he spent a long time, the
purl of waters through the weirs meeting his ear, and the
Casterbridge lights glimmering at no great distance off.

While leaning thus upon the parapet his listless attention
was awakened by sounds of an unaccustomed kind from the town
quarter.  They were a confusion of rhythmical noises,
to which the streets added yet more confusion by
encumbering them with echoes.  His first incurious thought
that the clangour arose from the town band, engaged in an
attempt to round off a memorable day in a burst of evening
harmony, was contradicted by certain peculiarities of
reverberation.  But inexplicability did not rouse him to
more than a cursory heed; his sense of degradation was too
strong for the admission of foreign ideas; and he leant
against the parapet as before.



39.


When Farfrae descended out of the loft breathless from his
encounter with Henchard, he paused at the bottom to recover
himself.  He arrived at the yard with the intention of
putting the horse into the gig himself (all the men having a
holiday), and driving to a village on the Budmouth Road.
Despite the fearful struggle he decided still to persevere
in his journey, so as to recover himself before going
indoors and meeting the eyes of Lucetta.  He wished to
consider his course in a case so serious.

When he was just on the point of driving off Whittle arrived
with a note badly addressed, and bearing the word
"immediate" upon the outside.  On opening it he was
surprised to see that it was unsigned.  It contained a brief
request that he would go to Weatherbury that evening about
some business which he was conducting there.  Farfrae knew
nothing that could make it pressing; but as he was bent upon
going out he yielded to the anonymous request, particularly
as he had a call to make at Mellstock which could be
included in the same tour.  Thereupon he told Whittle of his
change of direction, in words which Henchard had overheard,
and set out on his way.  Farfrae had not directed his man to
take the message indoors, and Whittle had not been supposed
to do so on his own responsibility.

Now the anonymous letter was a well-intentioned but clumsy
contrivance of Longways and other of Farfrae's men to
get him out of the way for the evening, in order that the
satirical mummery should fall flat, if it were attempted.
By giving open information they would have brought down upon
their heads the vengeance of those among their comrades who
enjoyed these boisterous old games; and therefore the plan
of sending a letter recommended itself by its indirectness.

For poor Lucetta they took no protective measure, believing
with the majority there was some truth in the scandal, which
she would have to bear as she best might.

It was about eight o'clock, and Lucetta was sitting in the
drawing-room alone.  Night had set in for more than half an
hour, but she had not had the candles lighted, for when
Farfrae was away she preferred waiting for him by the
firelight, and, if it were not too cold, keeping one of the
window-sashes a little way open that the sound of his wheels
might reach her ears early.  She was leaning back in the
chair, in a more hopeful mood than she had enjoyed since her
marriage.  The day had been such a success, and the
temporary uneasiness which Henchard's show of effrontery had
wrought in her disappeared with the quiet disappearance of
Henchard himself under her husband's reproof.  The floating
evidences of her absurd passion for him, and its
consequences, had been destroyed, and she really seemed to
have no cause for fear.

The reverie in which these and other subjects mingled was
disturbed by a hubbub in the distance, that increased moment
by moment.  It did not greatly surprise her, the afternoon
having been given up to recreation by a majority of the
populace since the passage of the Royal equipages.  But her
attention was at once riveted to the matter by the voice of
a maid-servant next door, who spoke from an upper window
across the street to some other maid even more elevated than
she.

"Which way be they going now?" inquired the first with
interest.

"I can't be sure for a moment," said the second, "because of
the malter's chimbley.  O yes--I can see 'em.  Well, I
declare, I declare!

"What, what?" from the first, more enthusiastically.

"They are coming up Corn Street after all!  They sit
back to back!"

"What--two of 'em--are there two figures?"

"Yes.  Two images on a donkey, back to back, their elbows
tied to one another's!  She's facing the head, and he's
facing the tail."

"Is it meant for anybody in particular?"

"Well--it mid be.  The man has got on a blue coat and
kerseymere leggings; he has black whiskers, and a reddish
face.  'Tis a stuffed figure, with a falseface."

The din was increasing now--then it lessened a little.

"There--I shan't see, after all!" cried the disappointed
first maid.

"They have gone into a back street--that's all," said the
one who occupied the enviable position in the attic.
"There--now I have got 'em all endways nicely!"

"What's the woman like? Just say, and I can tell in a moment
if 'tis meant for one I've in mind."

"My--why--'tis dressed just as SHE dressed when she sat
in the front seat at the time the play-actors came to the
Town Hall!"

Lucetta started to her feet, and almost at the instant the
door of the room was quickly and softly opened.  Elizabeth-
Jane advanced into the firelight.

"I have come to see you," she said breathlessly.  "I did not
stop to knock--forgive me!  I see you have not shut your
shutters, and the window is open."

Without waiting for Lucetta's reply she crossed quickly to
the window and pulled out one of the shutters.  Lucetta
glided to her side.  "Let it be--hush!" she said
perempority, in a dry voice, while she seized Elizabeth-Jane
by the hand, and held up her finger.  Their intercourse had
been so low and hurried that not a word had been lost of the
conversation without, which had thus proceeded:--

"Her neck is uncovered, and her hair in bands, and her back-
comb in place; she's got on a puce silk, and white
stockings, and coloured shoes."

Again Elizabeth-Jane attempted to close the window, but
Lucetta held her by main force.

"'Tis me!" she said, with a face pale as death.  "A
procession--a scandal--an effigy of me, and him!"

The look of Elizabeth betrayed that the latter knew it
already.

"Let us shut it out," coaxed Elizabeth-Jane, noting that the
rigid wildness of Lucetta's features was growing yet more
rigid and wild with the meaning of the noise and laughter.
"Let us shut it out!"

"It is of no use!" she shrieked.  "He will see it, won't he?
Donald will see it!  He is just coming home--and it will
break his heart--he will never love me any more--and O, it
will kill me--kill me!"

Elizabeth-Jane was frantic now.  "O, can't something be done
to stop it?" she cried.  "Is there nobody to do it--not
one?"

She relinquished Lucetta's hands, and ran to the door.
Lucetta herself, saying recklessly "I will see it!" turned
to the window, threw up the sash, and went out upon the
balcony.  Elizabeth immediately followed, and put her arm
round her to pull her in.  Lucetta's eyes were straight upon
the spectacle of the uncanny revel, now dancing rapidly.
The numerous lights round the two effigies threw them up
into lurid distinctness; it was impossible to mistake the
pair for other than the intended victims.

"Come in, come in," implored Elizabeth; "and let me shut the
window!"

"She's me--she's me--even to the parasol--my green parasol!"
cried Lucetta with a wild laugh as she stepped in.  She
stood motionless for one second--then fell heavily to the
floor.

Almost at the instant of her fall the rude music of the
skimmington ceased.  The roars of sarcastic laughter went
off in ripples, and the trampling died out like the rustle
of a spent wind.  Elizabeth was only indirectly conscious of
this; she had rung the bell, and was bending over Lucetta,
who remained convulsed on the carpet in the paroxysms of an
epileptic seizure.  She rang again and again, in vain; the
probability being that the servants had all run out of the
house to see more of the Daemonic Sabbath than they could
see within.

At last Farfrae's man, who had been agape on the door-
step, came up; then the cook.  The shutters, hastily
pushed to by Elizabeth, were quite closed, a light was
obtained, Lucetta carried to her room, and the man sent off
for a doctor.  While Elizabeth was undressing her she
recovered consciousness; but as soon as she remembered what
had passed the fit returned.

The doctor arrived with unhoped-for promptitude; he had been
standing at his door, like others, wondering what the uproar
meant.  As soon as he saw the unhappy sufferer he said, in
answer to Elizabeth's mute appeal, "This is serious."

"It is a fit," Elizabeth said.

"Yes.  But a fit in the present state of her health means
mischief.  You must send at once for Mr. Farfrae.  Where is
he?"

"He has driven into the country, sir," said the parlour-
maid; "to some place on the Budmouth Road.  He's likely to
be back soon."

"Never mind, he must be sent for, in case he should not
hurry."  The doctor returned to the bedside again.  The man
was despatched, and they soon heard him clattering out of
the yard at the back.

Meanwhile Mr. Benjamin Grower, that prominent burgess of
whom mention has been already made, hearing the din of
cleavers, tongs, tambourines, kits, crouds, humstrums,
serpents, rams'-horns, and other historical kinds of music
as he sat indoors in the High Street, had put on his hat and
gone out to learn the cause.  He came to the corner above
Farfrae's, and soon guessed the nature of the proceedings;
for being a native of the town he had witnessed such rough
jests before.  His first move was to search hither and
thither for the constables, there were two in the town,
shrivelled men whom he ultimately found in hiding up an
alley yet more shrivelled than usual, having some not
ungrounded fears that they might be roughly handled if seen.

"What can we two poor lammigers do against such a
multitude!" expostulated Stubberd, in answer to Mr. Grower's
chiding.  "'Tis tempting 'em to commit felo-de-se upon
us, and that would be the death of the perpetrator; and we
wouldn't be the cause of a fellow-creature's death on no
account, not we!"

"Get some help, then!  Here, I'll come with you.  We'll see
what a few words of authority can do.  Quick now; have
you got your staves?"

"We didn't want the folk to notice us as law officers, being
so short-handed, sir; so we pushed our Gover'ment staves up
this water-pipe.

"Out with 'em, and come along, for Heaven's sake!  Ah, here's
Mr. Blowbody; that's lucky."  (Blowbody was the third of the
three borough magistrates.)

"Well, what's the row?" said Blowbody.  "Got their names--
hey?"

"No.  Now," said Grower to one of the constables, "you go
with Mr. Blowbody round by the Old Walk and come up the
street; and I'll go with Stubberd straight forward.  By this
plan we shall have 'em between us.  Get their names only: no
attack or interruption."

Thus they started.  But as Stubberd with Mr. Grower advanced
into Corn Street, whence the sounds had proceeded, they were
surprised that no procession could be seen.  They passed
Farfrae's, and looked to the end of the street.  The lamp
flames waved, the Walk trees soughed, a few loungers stood
about with their hands in their pockets.  Everything was as
usual.

"Have you seen a motley crowd making a disturbance?" Grower
said magisterially to one of these in a fustian jacket, who
smoked a short pipe and wore straps round his knees.

"Beg yer pardon, sir?" blandly said the person addressed,
who was no other than Charl, of Peter's finger.  Mr. Grower
repeated the words.

Charl shook his head to the zero of childlike ignorance.
"No; we haven't seen anything; have we, Joe? And you was
here afore I."

Joseph was quite as blank as the other in his reply.

"H'm--that's odd," said Mr. Grower.  "Ah--here's a
respectable man coming that I know by sight.  Have you," he
inquired, addressing the nearing shape of Jopp, "have you
seen any gang of fellows making a devil of a noise--
skimmington riding, or something of the sort?"

"O no--nothing, sir," Jopp replied, as if receiving the most
singular news.  "But I've not been far tonight, so perhaps--
"

"Oh, 'twas here--just here," said the magistrate.

"Now I've noticed, come to think o't that the wind in the
Walk trees makes a peculiar poetical-like murmur to-night,
sir; more than common; so perhaps 'twas that?" Jopp
suggested, as he rearranged his hand in his greatcoat pocket
(where it ingeniously supported a pair of kitchen tongs and
a cow's horn, thrust up under his waistcoat).

"No, no, no--d'ye think I'm a fool? Constable, come this
way.  They must have gone into the back street."

Neither in back street nor in front street, however, could
the disturbers be perceived, and Blowbody and the second
constable, who came up at this time, brought similar
intelligence.  Effigies, donkey, lanterns, band, all had
disappeared like the crew of Comus.

"Now," said Mr. Grower, "there's only one thing more we can
do.  Get ye half-a-dozen helpers, and go in a body to Mixen
Lane, and into Peter's finger.  I'm much mistaken if you
don't find a clue to the perpetrators there."

The rusty-jointed executors of the law mustered assistance
as soon as they could, and the whole party marched off to
the lane of notoriety.  It was no rapid matter to get there
at night, not a lamp or glimmer of any sort offering itself
to light the way, except an occasional pale radiance through
some window-curtain, or through the chink of some door which
could not be closed because of the smoky chimney within.  At
last they entered the inn boldly, by the till then bolted
front-door, after a prolonged knocking of loudness
commensurate with the importance of their standing.

In the settles of the large room, guyed to the ceiling by
cords as usual for stability, an ordinary group sat drinking
and smoking with statuesque quiet of demeanour.  The
landlady looked mildly at the invaders, saying in honest
accents, "Good evening, gentlemen; there's plenty of room.
I hope there's nothing amiss?"

They looked round the room.  "Surely," said Stubberd to one
of the men, "I saw you by now in Corn Street--Mr. Grower
spoke to 'ee?"

The man, who was Charl, shook his head absently.  "I've been
here this last hour, hain't I, Nance?" he said to the woman
who meditatively sipped her ale near him.

"Faith, that you have.  I came in for my quiet supper-
time half-pint, and you were here then, as well as all the
rest."

The other constable was facing the clock-case, where he saw
reflected in the glass a quick motion by the landlady.
Turning sharply, he caught her closing the oven-door.

"Something curious about that oven, ma'am!" he observed
advancing, opening it, and drawing out a tambourine.

"Ah," she said apologetically, "that's what we keep here to
use when there's a little quiet dancing.  You see damp
weather spoils it, so I put it there to keep it dry."

The constable nodded knowingly, but what he knew was
nothing.  Nohow could anything be elicited from this mute
and inoffensive assembly.  In a few minutes the
investigators went out, and joining those of their
auxiliaries who had been left at the door they pursued their
way elsewhither.



40.


Long before this time Henchard, weary of his ruminations on
the bridge, had repaired towards the town.  When he stood at
the bottom of the street a procession burst upon his view,
in the act of turning out of an alley just above him.  The
lanterns, horns, and multitude startled him; he saw the
mounted images, and knew what it all meant.

They crossed the way, entered another street, and
disappeared.  He turned back a few steps and was lost in
grave reflection, finally wending his way homeward by the
obscure river-side path.  Unable to rest there he went to
his step-daughter's lodging, and was told that Elizabeth-
Jane had gone to Mr. Farfrae's.  Like one acting in
obedience to a charm, and with a nameless apprehension, he
followed in the same direction in the hope of meeting her,
the roysterers having vanished.  Disappointed in this he
gave the gentlest of pulls to the door-bell, and then learnt
particulars of what had occurred, together with the doctor's
imperative orders that Farfrae should be brought home, and
how they had set out to meet him on the Budmouth Road.

"But he has gone to Mellstock and Weatherbury!" exclaimed
Henchard, now unspeakably grieved.  "Not Budmouth way at
all."

But, alas! for Henchard; he had lost his good name.  They
would not believe him, taking his words but as the frothy
utterances of recklessness.  Though Lucetta's life seemed at
that moment to depend upon her husband's return (she being
in great mental agony lest he should never know the
unexaggerated truth of her past relations with Henchard), no
messenger was despatched towards Weatherbury.  Henchard, in
a state of bitter anxiety and contrition, determined to seek
Farfrae himself.

To this end he hastened down the town, ran along the eastern
road over Durnover Moor, up the hill beyond, and thus onward
in the moderate darkness of this spring night till he had
reached a second and almost a third hill about three miles
distant.  In Yalbury Bottom, or Plain, at the foot of the
hill, he listened.  At first nothing, beyond his own heart-
throbs, was to be heard but the slow wind making its moan
among the masses of spruce and larch of Yalbury Wood which
clothed the heights on either hand; but presently there came
the sound of light wheels whetting their felloes against the
newly stoned patches of road, accompanied by the distant
glimmer of lights.

He knew it was Farfrae's gig descending the hill from an
indescribable personality in its noise, the vehicle having
been his own till bought by the Scotchman at the sale of his
effects.  Henchard thereupon retraced his steps along
Yalbury Plain, the gig coming up with him as its driver
slackened speed between two plantations.

It was a point in the highway near which the road to
Mellstock branched off from the homeward direction.  By
diverging to that village, as he had intended to do, Farfrae
might probably delay his return by a couple of hours.  It
soon appeared that his intention was to do so still, the
light swerving towards Cuckoo Lane, the by-road aforesaid.
Farfrae's off gig-lamp flashed in Henchard's face.  At the
same time Farfrae discerned his late antagonist.

"Farfrae--Mr. Farfrae!" cried the breathless Henchard,
holding up his hand.

Farfrae allowed the horse to turn several steps into the
branch lane before he pulled up.  He then drew rein, and
said "Yes?" over his shoulder, as one would towards a
pronounced enemy.

"Come back to Casterbridge at once!" Henchard said.
"There's something wrong at your house--requiring your
return.  I've run all the way here on purpose to tell ye."

Farfrae was silent, and at his silence Henchard's soul sank
within him.  Why had he not, before this, thought of what
was only too obvious? He who, four hours earlier, had
enticed Farfrae into a deadly wrestle stood now in the
darkness of late night-time on a lonely road, inviting him
to come a particular way, where an assailant might have
confederates, instead of going his purposed way, where there
might be a better opportunity of guarding himself from
attack.  Henchard could almost feel this view of things in
course of passage through Farfrae's mind.

"I have to go to Mellstock," said Farfrae coldly, as he
loosened his reins to move on.

"But," implored Henchard, "the matter is more serious than
your business at Mellstock.  It is--your wife!  She is ill.
I can tell you particulars as we go along."

The very agitation and abruptness of Henchard increased
Farfrae's suspicion that this was a ruse to decoy him on
to the next wood, where might be effectually compassed what,
from policy or want of nerve, Henchard had failed to do
earlier in the day.  He started the horse.

"I know what you think," deprecated Henchard running after,
almost bowed down with despair as he perceived the image of
unscrupulous villainy that he assumed in his former friend's
eyes.  "But I am not what you think!" he cried hoarsely.
"Believe me, Farfrae; I have come entirely on your own and
your wife's account.  She is in danger.  I know no more; and
they want you to come.  Your man has gone the other way in a
mistake.  O Farfrae! don't mistrust me--I am a wretched man;
but my heart is true to you still!"

Farfrae, however, did distrust him utterly.  He knew his
wife was with child, but he had left her not long ago in
perfect health; and Henchard's treachery was more credible
than his story.  He had in his time heard bitter
ironies from Henchard's lips, and there might be ironies
now.  He quickened the horse's pace, and had soon risen into
the high country lying between there and Mellstock,
Henchard's spasmodic run after him lending yet more
substance to his thought of evil purposes.

The gig and its driver lessened against the sky in
Henchard's eyes; his exertions for Farfrae's good had been
in vain.  Over this repentant sinner, at least, there was to
be no joy in heaven.  He cursed himself like a less
scrupulous Job, as a vehement man will do when he loses
self-respect, the last mental prop under poverty.  To this
he had come after a time of emotional darkness of which the
adjoining woodland shade afforded inadequate illustration.
Presently he began to walk back again along the way by which
he had arrived.  Farfrae should at all events have no reason
for delay upon the road by seeing him there when he took his
journey homeward later on.

Arriving at Casterbridge Henchard went again to Farfrae's
house to make inquiries.  As soon as the door opened anxious
faces confronted his from the staircase, hall, and landing;
and they all said in grievous disappointment, "O--it is not
he!" The manservant, finding his mistake, had long since
returned, and all hopes had centred upon Henchard.

"But haven't you found him?" said the doctor.

"Yes....I cannot tell 'ee!" Henchard replied as he sank down
on a chair within the entrance.  "He can't be home for two
hours."

"H'm," said the surgeon, returning upstairs.

"How is she?" asked Henchard of Elizabeth, who formed one of
the group.

"In great danger, father.  Her anxiety to see her husband
makes her fearfully restless.  Poor woman--I fear they have
killed her!"

Henchard regarded the sympathetic speaker for a few instants
as if she struck him in a new light, then, without further
remark, went out of the door and onward to his lonely
cottage.  So much for man's rivalry, he thought.  Death was
to have the oyster, and Farfrae and himself the shells.  But
about Elizabeth-lane; in the midst of his gloom she
seemed to him as a pin-point of light.  He had liked
the look on her face as she answered him from the stairs.
There had been affection in it, and above all things what he
desired now was affection from anything that was good and
pure.  She was not his own, yet, for the first time, he had
a faint dream that he might get to like her as his own,--if
she would only continue to love him.

Jopp was just going to bed when Henchard got home.  As the
latter entered the door Jopp said, "This is rather bad about
Mrs. Farfrae's illness."

"Yes," said Henchard shortly, though little dreaming of Jopp
s complicity in the night's harlequinade, and raising his
eyes just sufficiently to observe that Jopp's face was lined
with anxiety.

"Somebody has called for you," continued Jopp, when Henchard
was shutting himself into his own apartment.  "A kind of
traveller, or sea-captain of some sort."

"Oh?--who could he be?"

"He seemed a well-be-doing man--had grey hair and a broadish
face; but he gave no name, and no message."

"Nor do I gi'e him any attention."  And, saying this,
Henchard closed his door.


The divergence to Mellstock delayed Farfrae's return very
nearly the two hours of Henchard's estimate.  Among the
other urgent reasons for his presence had been the need of
his authority to send to Budmouth for a second physician;
and when at length Farfrae did come back he was in a state
bordering on distraction at his misconception of Henchard's
motives.

A messenger was despatched to Budmouth, late as it had
grown; the night wore on, and the other doctor came in the
small hours.  Lucetta had been much soothed by Donald's
arrival; he seldom or never left her side; and when,
immediately after his entry, she had tried to lisp out to
him the secret which so oppressed her, he checked her feeble
words, lest talking should be dangerous, assuring her there
was plenty of time to tell him everything.

Up to this time he knew nothing of the skimmington-ride.
The dangerous illness and miscarriage of Mrs. Farfrae was
soon rumoured through the town, and an apprehensive
guess having been given as to its cause by the leaders in
the exploit, compunction and fear threw a dead silence over
all particulars of their orgie; while those immediately
around Lucetta would not venture to add to her husband's
distress by alluding to the subject.

What, and how much, Farfrae's wife ultimately explained to
him of her past entanglement with Henchard, when they were
alone in the solitude of that sad night, cannot be told.
That she informed him of the bare facts of her peculiar
intimacy with the corn-merchant became plain from Farfrae's
own statements.  But in respect of her subsequent conduct--
her motive in coming to Casterbridge to unite herself with
Henchard--her assumed justification in abandoning him when
she discovered reasons for fearing him (though in truth her
inconsequent passion for another man at first sight had most
to do with that abandonment)--her method of reconciling to
her conscience a marriage with the second when she was in a
measure committed to the first: to what extent she spoke of
these things remained Farfrae's secret alone.

Besides the watchman who called the hours and weather in
Casterbridge that night there walked a figure up and down
corn Street hardly less frequently.  It was Henchard's,
whose retiring to rest had proved itself a futility as soon
as attempted; and he gave it up to go hither and thither,
and make inquiries about the patient every now and then.  He
called as much on Farfrae's account as on Lucetta's, and on
Elizabeth-Jane's even more than on either's.  Shorn one by
one of all other interests, his life seemed centring on the
personality of the stepdaughter whose presence but recently
he could not endure.  To see her on each occasion of his
inquiry at Lucetta's was a comfort to him.

The last of his calls was made about four o'clock in the
morning, in the steely light of dawn.  Lucifer was fading
into day across Durnover Moor, the sparrows were just
alighting into the street, and the hens had begun to cackle
from the outhouses.  When within a few yards of Farfrae's he
saw the door gently opened, and a servant raise her hand to
the knocker, to untie the piece of cloth which had muffled
it.  He went across, the sparrows in his way scarcely
flying up from the road-litter, so little did they believe
in human aggression at so early a time.

"Why do you take off that?" said Henchard.

She turned in some surprise at his presence, and did not
answer for an instant or two.  Recognizing him, she said,
"Because they may knock as loud as they will; she will never
hear it any more."



41.


Henchard went home.  The morning having now fully broke he
lit his fire, and sat abstractedly beside it.  He had not
sat there long when a gentle footstep approached the house
and entered the passage, a finger tapping lightly at the
door.  Henchard's face brightened, for he knew the motions
to be Elizabeth's.  She came into his room, looking wan and
sad.

"Have you heard?" she asked.  "Mrs. Farfrae!  She is--dead!
Yes, indeed--about an hour ago!"

"I know it," said Henchard.  "I have but lately come in from
there.  It is so very good of 'ee, Elizabeth, to come and
tell me.  You must be so tired out, too, with sitting up.
Now do you bide here with me this morning.  You can go and
rest in the other room; and I will call 'ee when breakfast
is ready."

To please him, and herself--for his recent kindliness was
winning a surprised gratitude from the lonely girl--she did
as he bade her, and lay down on a sort of couch which
Henchard had rigged up out of a settle in the adjoining
room.  She could hear him moving about in his preparations;
but her mind ran most strongly on Lucetta, whose death in
such fulness of life and amid such cheerful hopes of
maternity was appallingly unexpected.  Presently she fell
asleep.

Meanwhile her stepfather in the outer room had set the
breakfast in readiness; but finding that she dozed he would
not call her; he waited on, looking into the fire and
keeping the kettle boiling with house-wifely care, as if it
were an honour to have her in his house.  In truth, a
great change had come over him with regard to her, and he
was developing the dream of a future lit by her filial
presence, as though that way alone could happiness lie.

He was disturbed by another knock at the door, and rose to
open it, rather deprecating a call from anybody just then.
A stoutly built man stood on the doorstep, with an alien,
unfamiliar air about his figure and bearing--an air which
might have been called colonial by people of cosmopolitan
experience.  It was the man who had asked the way at Peter's
finger.  Henchard nodded, and looked inquiry.

"Good morning, good morning," said the stranger with profuse
heartiness.  "Is it Mr. Henchard I am talking to?"

"My name is Henchard."

"Then I've caught 'ee at home--that's right.  Morning's the
time for business, says I.  Can I have a few words with
you?"

"By all means," Henchard answered, showing the way in.

"You may remember me?" said his visitor, seating himself.

Henchard observed him indifferently, and shook his head.

"Well--perhaps you may not.  My name is Newson."

Henchard's face and eyes seemed to die.  The other did not
notice it.  "I know the name well," Henchard said at last,
looking on the floor.

"I make no doubt of that.  Well, the fact is, I've been
looking for 'ee this fortnight past.  I landed at Havenpool
and went through Casterbridge on my way to Falmouth, and
when I got there, they told me you had some years before
been living at Casterbridge.  Back came I again, and by long
and by late I got here by coach, ten minutes ago.  'He lives
down by the mill,' says they.  So here I am.  Now--that
transaction between us some twenty years agone--'tis that
I've called about.  'Twas a curious business.  I was younger
then than I am now, and perhaps the less said about it, in
one sense, the better."

"Curious business!  'Twas worse than curious.  I cannot even
allow that I'm the man you met then.  I was not in my
senses, and a man's senses are himself."

"We were young and thoughtless," said Newson.  "However,
I've come to mend matters rather than open arguments.  Poor
Susan--hers was a strange experience."

"She was a warm-hearted, home-spun woman.  She was not
what they call shrewd or sharp at all--better she had been."

"She was not."

"As you in all likelihood know, she was simple-minded enough
to think that the sale was in a way binding.  She was as
guiltless o' wrong-doing in that particular as a saint in
the clouds."

"I know it, I know it.  I found it out directly," said
Henchard, still with averted eyes.  "There lay the sting o't
to me.  If she had seen it as what it was she would never
have left me.  Never!  But how should she be expected to
know? What advantages had she? None.  She could write her
own name, and no more.

"Well, it was not in my heart to undeceive her when the deed
was done," said the sailor of former days.  "I thought, and
there was not much vanity in thinking it, that she would be
happier with me.  She was fairly happy, and I never would
have undeceived her till the day of her death.  Your child
died; she had another, and all went well.  But a time came--
mind me, a time always does come.  A time came--it was some
while after she and I and the child returned from America--
when somebody she had confided her history to, told her my
claim to her was a mockery, and made a jest of her belief in
my right.  After that she was never happy with me.  She
pined and pined, and socked and sighed.  She said she must
leave me, and then came the question of our child.  Then a
man advised me how to act, and I did it, for I thought it
was best.  I left her at Falmouth, and went off to sea.
When I got to the other side of the Atlantic there was a
storm, and it was supposed that a lot of us, including
myself, had been washed overboard.  I got ashore at
Newfoundland, and then I asked myself what I should do.

"'Since I'm here, here I'll bide,' I thought to myself;
''twill be most kindness to her, now she's taken against me,
to let her believe me lost, for,' I thought, 'while she
supposes us both alive she'll be miserable; but if she
thinks me dead she'll go back to him, and the child will
have a home.' I've never returned to this country till a
month ago, and I found that, as I supposed, she went to you,
and my daughter with her.  They told me in Falmouth
that Susan was dead.  But my Elizabeth-Jane--where is she?"

"Dead likewise," said Henchard doggedly.  "Surely you learnt
that too?"

The sailor started up, and took an enervated pace or two
down the room.  "Dead!" he said, in a low voice.  "Then
what's the use of my money to me?"

Henchard, without answering, shook his head as if that were
rather a question for Newson himself than for him.

"Where is she buried?" the traveller inquired.

"Beside her mother," said Henchard, in the same stolid
tones.

"When did she die?"

"A year ago and more," replied the other without hesitation.

The sailor continued standing.  Henchard never looked up
from the floor.  At last Newson said: "My journey hither has
been for nothing!  I may as well go as I came!  It has served
me right.  I'll trouble you no longer."

Henchard heard the retreating footsteps of Newson upon the
sanded floor, the mechanical lifting of the latch, the slow
opening and closing of the door that was natural to a
baulked or dejected man; but he did not turn his head.
Newson's shadow passed the window.  He was gone.

Then Henchard, scarcely believing the evidence of his
senses, rose from his seat amazed at what he had done.  It
had been the impulse of a moment.  The regard he had lately
acquired for Elizabeth, the new-sprung hope of his
loneliness that she would be to him a daughter of whom he
could feel as proud as of the actual daughter she still
believed herself to be, had been stimulated by the
unexpected coming of Newson to a greedy exclusiveness in
relation to her; so that the sudden prospect of her loss had
caused him to speak mad lies like a child, in pure mockery
of consequences.  He had expected questions to close in
round him, and unmask his fabrication in five minutes; yet
such questioning had not come.  But surely they would come;
Newson's departure could be but momentary; he would learn
all by inquiries in the town; and return to curse him, and
carry his last treasure away!

He hastily put on his hat, and went out in the
direction that Newson had taken.  Newson's back was soon
visible up the road, crossing Bull-stake.  Henchard
followed, and saw his visitor stop at the King's Arms, where
the morning coach which had brought him waited half-an-hour
for another coach which crossed there.  The coach Newson had
come by was now about to move again.  Newson mounted, his
luggage was put in, and in a few minutes the vehicle
disappeared with him.

He had not so much as turned his head.  It was an act of
simple faith in Henchard's words--faith so simple as to be
almost sublime.  The young sailor who had taken Susan
Henchard on the spur of the moment and on the faith of a
glance at her face, more than twenty years before, was still
living and acting under the form of the grizzled traveller
who had taken Henchard's words on trust so absolute as to
shame him as he stood.

Was Elizabeth-Jane to remain his by virtue of this hardy
invention of a moment? "Perhaps not for long," said he.
Newson might converse with his fellow-travellers, some of
whom might be Casterbridge people; and the trick would be
discovered.

This probability threw Henchard into a defensive attitude,
and instead of considering how best to right the wrong, and
acquaint Elizabeth's father with the truth at once, he
bethought himself of ways to keep the position he had
accidentally won.  Towards the young woman herself his
affection grew more jealously strong with each new hazard to
which his claim to her was exposed.

He watched the distant highway expecting to see Newson
return on foot, enlightened and indignant, to claim his
child.  But no figure appeared.  Possibly he had spoken to
nobody on the coach, but buried his grief in his own heart.

His grief!--what was it, after all, to that which he,
Henchard, would feel at the loss of her? Newson's affection
cooled by years, could not equal his who had been constantly
in her presence.  And thus his jealous soul speciously
argued to excuse the separation of father and child.

He returned to the house half expecting that she would have
vanished.  No; there she was--just coming out from the
inner room, the marks of sleep upon her eyelids, and
exhibiting a generally refreshed air.

"O father!" she said smiling.  "I had no sooner lain down
than I napped, though I did not mean to.  I wonder I did not
dream about poor Mrs. Farfrae, after thinking of her so; but
I did not.  How strange it is that we do not often dream of
latest events, absorbing as they may be."

"I am glad you have been able to sleep," he said, taking her
hand with anxious proprietorship--an act which gave her a
pleasant surprise.

They sat down to breakfast, and Elizabeth-Jane's thoughts
reverted to Lucetta.  Their sadness added charm to a
countenance whose beauty had ever lain in its meditative
soberness.

"Father," she said, as soon as she recalled herself to the
outspread meal, "it is so kind of you to get this nice
breakfast with your own hands, and I idly asleep the while."

"I do it every day," he replied.  "You have left me;
everybody has left me; how should I live but by my own
hands."

"You are very lonely, are you not?"

"Ay, child--to a degree that you know nothing of!  It is my
own fault.  You are the only one who has been near me for
weeks.  And you will come no more."

"Why do you say that? Indeed I will, if you would like to
see me."

Henchard signified dubiousness.  Though he had so lately
hoped that Elizabeth-Jane might again live in his house as
daughter, he would not ask her to do so now.  Newson might
return at any moment, and what Elizabeth would think of him
for his deception it were best to bear apart from her.

When they had breakfasted his stepdaughter still lingered,
till the moment arrived at which Henchard was accustomed to
go to his daily work.  Then she arose, and with assurance of
coming again soon went up the hill in the morning sunlight.

"At this moment her heart is as warm towards me as mine is
towards her, she would live with me here in this humble
cottage for the asking!  Yet before the evening probably he
will have come, and then she will scorn me!"

This reflection, constantly repeated by Henchard to
himself, accompanied him everywhere through the day.
His mood was no longer that of the rebellious, ironical,
reckless misadventurer; but the leaden gloom of one who has
lost all that can make life interesting, or even tolerable.
There would remain nobody for him to be proud of, nobody to
fortify him; for Elizabeth-Jane would soon be but as a
stranger, and worse.  Susan, Farfrae, Lucetta, Elizabeth--
all had gone from him, one after one, either by his fault or
by his misfortune.

In place of them he had no interest, hobby, or desire.  If
he could have summoned music to his aid his existence might
even now have been borne; for with Henchard music was of
regal power.  The merest trumpet or organ tone was enough to
move him, and high harmonies transubstantiated him.  But
hard fate had ordained that he should be unable to call up
this Divine spirit in his need.

The whole land ahead of him was as darkness itself; there
was nothing to come, nothing to wait for.  Yet in the
natural course of life he might possibly have to linger on
earth another thirty or forty years--scoffed at; at best
pitied.

The thought of it was unendurable.

To the east of Casterbridge lay moors and meadows through
which much water flowed.  The wanderer in this direction who
should stand still for a few moments on a quiet night, might
hear singular symphonies from these waters, as from a
lampless orchestra, all playing in their sundry tones from
near and far parts of the moor.  At a hole in a rotten weir
they executed a recitative; where a tributary brook fell
over a stone breastwork they trilled cheerily; under an arch
they performed a metallic cymballing, and at Durnover Hole
they hissed.  The spot at which their instrumentation rose
loudest was a place called Ten Hatches, whence during high
springs there proceeded a very fugue of sounds.

The river here was deep and strong at all times, and the
hatches on this account were raised and lowered by cogs and
a winch.  A patch led from the second bridge over the
highway (so often mentioned) to these Hatches, crossing the
stream at their head by a narrow plank-bridge.  But after
night-fall human beings were seldom found going that way,
the path leading only to a deep reach of the stream
called Blackwater, and the passage being dangerous.

Henchard, however, leaving the town by the east road,
proceeded to the second, or stone bridge, and thence struck
into this path of solitude, following its course beside the
stream till the dark shapes of the Ten Hatches cut the sheen
thrown upon the river by the weak lustre that still lingered
in the west.  In a second or two he stood beside the weir-
hole where the water was at its deepest.  He looked
backwards and forwards, and no creature appeared in view.
He then took off his coat and hat, and stood on the brink of
the stream with his hands clasped in front of him.

While his eyes were bent on the water beneath there slowly
became visible a something floating in the circular pool
formed by the wash of centuries; the pool he was intending
to make his death-bed.  At first it was indistinct by reason
of the shadow from the bank; but it emerged thence and took
shape, which was that of a human body, lying stiff and stark
upon the surface of the stream.

In the circular current imparted by the central flow the
form was brought forward, till it passed under his eyes; and
then he perceived with a sense of horror that it was
HIMSELF.  Not a man somewhat resembling him, but one in all
respects his counterpart, his actual double, was floating as
if dead in Ten Hatches Hole.

The sense of the supernatural was strong in this unhappy
man, and he turned away as one might have done in the actual
presence of an appalling miracle.  He covered his eyes and
bowed his head.  Without looking again into the stream he
took his coat and hat, and went slowly away.

Presently he found himself by the door of his own dwelling.
To his surprise Elizabeth-Jane was standing there.  She came
forward, spoke, called him "father" just as before.  Newson,
then, had not even yet returned.

"I thought you seemed very sad this morning," she said, "so
I have come again to see you.  Not that I am anything but
sad myself.  But everybody and everything seem against you
so, and I know you must be suffering.

How this woman divined things!  Yet she had not divined their
whole extremity.

He said to her, "Are miracles still worked, do ye
think, Elizabeth? I am not a read man.  I don't know so much
as I could wish.  I have tried to peruse and learn all my
life; but the more I try to know the more ignorant I seem."

"I don't quite think there are any miracles nowadays," she
said.

"No interference in the case of desperate intentions, for
instance? Well, perhaps not, in a direct way.  Perhaps not.
But will you come and walk with me, and I will show 'ee what
I mean."

She agreed willingly, and he took her over the highway, and
by the lonely path to Ten Hatches.  He walked restlessly, as
if some haunting shade, unseen of her, hovered round him and
troubled his glance.  She would gladly have talked of
Lucetta, but feared to disturb him.  When they got near the
weir he stood still, and asked her to go forward and look
into the pool, and tell him what she saw.

She went, and soon returned to him.  "Nothing," she said.

"Go again," said Henchard, "and look narrowly."

She proceeded to the river brink a second time.  On her
return, after some delay, she told him that she saw
something floating round and round there; but what it was
she could not discern.  It seemed to be a bundle of old
clothes.

"Are they like mine?" asked Henchard.

"Well--they are.  Dear me--I wonder if--Father, let us go
away!"

"Go and look once more; and then we will get home."

She went back, and he could see her stoop till her head was
close to the margin of the pool.  She started up, and
hastened back to his side.

"Well," said Henchard; "what do you say now?"

"Let us go home."

"But tell me--do--what is it floating there?"

"The effigy," she answered hastily.  "They must have thrown
it into the river higher up amongst the willows at
Blackwater, to get rid of it in their alarm at discovery by
the magistrates, and it must have floated down here."

"Ah--to be sure--the image o' me!  But where is the other?
Why that one only?...That performance of theirs killed her,
but kept me alive!"

Elizabeth-Jane thought and thought of these words "kept
me alive," as they slowly retraced their way to the town,
and at length guessed their meaning.  "Father!--I will not
leave you alone like this!" she cried.  "May I live with
you, and tend upon you as I used to do? I do not mind your
being poor.  I would have agreed to come this morning, but
you did not ask me."

"May you come to me?" he cried bitterly.  "Elizabeth, don't
mock me!  If you only would come!"

"I will," said she.

"How will you forgive all my roughness in former days? You
cannot!"

"I have forgotten it.  Talk of that no more."

Thus she assured him, and arranged their plans for reunion;
and at length each went home.  Then Henchard shaved for the
first time during many days, and put on clean linen, and
combed his hair; and was as a man resuscitated thence-
forward.

The next morning the fact turned out to be as Elizabeth-Jane
had stated; the effigy was discovered by a cowherd, and that
of Lucetta a little higher up in the same stream.  But as
little as possible was said of the matter, and the figures
were privately destroyed.

Despite this natural solution of the mystery Henchard no
less regarded it as an intervention that the figure should
have been floating there.  Elizabeth-Jane heard him say,
"Who is such a reprobate as I!  And yet it seems that even I
be in Somebody's hand!"



42.


But the emotional conviction that he was in Somebody's hand
began to die out of Henchard's breast as time slowly removed
into distance the event which had given that feeling birth.
The apparition of Newson haunted him.  He would surely
return.

Yet Newson did not arrive.  Lucetta had been borne along
the churchyard path; Casterbridge had for the last time
turned its regard upon her, before proceeding to its work as
if she had never lived.  But Elizabeth remained undisturbed
in the belief of her relationship to Henchard, and now
shared his home.  Perhaps, after all, Newson was gone for
ever.

In due time the bereaved Farfrae had learnt the, at least,
proximate cause of Lucetta's illness and death, and his
first impulse was naturally enough to wreak vengeance in the
name of the law upon the perpetrators of the mischief.  He
resolved to wait till the funeral was over ere he moved in
the matter.  The time having come he reflected.  Disastrous
as the result had been, it was obviously in no way foreseen
or intended by the thoughtless crew who arranged the motley
procession.  The tempting prospect of putting to the blush
people who stand at the head of affairs--that supreme and
piquant enjoyment of those who writhe under the heel of the
same--had alone animated them, so far as he could see; for
he knew nothing of Jopp's incitements.  Other considerations
were also involved.  Lucetta had confessed everything to him
before her death, and it was not altogether desirable to
make much ado about her history, alike for her sake, for
Henchard's, and for his own.  To regard the event as an
untoward accident seemed, to Farfrae, truest consideration
for the dead one's memory, as well as best philosophy.

Henchard and himself mutually forbore to meet.  For
Elizabeth's sake the former had fettered his pride
sufficiently to accept the small seed and root business
which some of the Town Council, headed by Farfrae, had
purchased to afford him a new opening.  Had he been only
personally concerned Henchard, without doubt, would have
declined assistance even remotely brought about by the man
whom he had so fiercely assailed.  But the sympathy of the
girl seemed necessary to his very existence; and on her
account pride itself wore the garments of humility.

Here they settled themselves; and on each day of their lives
Henchard anticipated her every wish with a watchfulness in
which paternal regard was heightened by a burning jealous
dread of rivalry.  Yet that Newson would ever now return to
Casterbridge to claim her as a daughter there was
little reason to suppose.  He was a wanderer and a
stranger, almost an alien; he had not seen his daughter for
several years; his affection for her could not in the nature
of things be keen; other interests would probably soon
obscure his recollections of her, and prevent any such
renewal of inquiry into the past as would lead to a
discovery that she was still a creature of the present.  To
satisfy his conscience somewhat Henchard repeated to himself
that the lie which had retained for him the coveted treasure
had not been deliberately told to that end, but had come
from him as the last defiant word of a despair which took no
thought of consequences.  Furthermore he pleaded within
himself that no Newson could love her as he loved her, or
would tend her to his life's extremity as he was prepared to
do cheerfully.

Thus they lived on in the shop overlooking the churchyard,
and nothing occurred to mark their days during the remainder
of the year.  Going out but seldom, and never on a market-
day, they saw Donald Farfrae only at rarest intervals, and
then mostly as a transitory object in the distance of the
street.  Yet he was pursuing his ordinary avocations,
smiling mechanically to fellow-tradesmen, and arguing with
bargainers--as bereaved men do after a while.

Time, "in his own grey style," taught Farfrae how to
estimate his experience of Lucetta--all that it was, and all
that it was not.  There are men whose hearts insist upon a
dogged fidelity to some image or cause thrown by chance into
their keeping, long after their judgment has pronounced it
no rarity--even the reverse, indeed, and without them the
band of the worthy is incomplete.  But Farfrae was not of
those.  It was inevitable that the insight, briskness, and
rapidity of his nature should take him out of the dead blank
which his loss threw about him.  He could not but perceive
that by the death of Lucetta he had exchanged a looming
misery for a simple sorrow.  After that revelation of her
history, which must have come sooner or later in any
circumstances, it was hard to believe that life with her
would have been productive of further happiness.

But as a memory, nothwithstanding such conditions, Lucetta's
image still lived on with him, her weaknesses provoking only
the gentlest criticism, and her sufferings attenuating
wrath at her concealments to a momentary spark now and
then.

By the end of a year Henchard's little retail seed and grain
shop, not much larger than a cupboard, had developed its
trade considerably, and the stepfather and daughter enjoyed
much serenity in the pleasant, sunny corner in which it
stood.  The quiet bearing of one who brimmed with an inner
activity characterized Elizabeth-Jane at this period.  She
took long walks into the country two or three times a week,
mostly in the direction of Budmouth.  Sometimes it occurred
to him that when she sat with him in the evening after those
invigorating walks she was civil rather than affectionate;
and he was troubled; one more bitter regret being added to
those he had already experienced at having, by his severe
censorship, frozen up her precious affection when originally
offered.

She had her own way in everything now.  In going and coming,
in buying and selling, her word was law.

"You have got a new muff, Elizabeth," he said to her one day
quite humbly.

"Yes; I bought it," she said.

He looked at it again as it lay on an adjoining table.  The
fur was of a glossy brown, and, though he was no judge of
such articles, he thought it seemed an unusually good one
for her to possess.

"Rather costly, I suppose, my dear, was it not?" he
hazarded.

"It was rather above my figure," she said quietly.  "But it
is not showy."

"O no," said the netted lion, anxious not to pique her in
the least.

Some little time after, when the year had advanced into
another spring, he paused opposite her empty bedroom in
passing it.  He thought of the time when she had cleared out
of his then large and handsome house in corn Street, in
consequence of his dislike and harshness, and he had looked
into her chamber in just the same way.  The present room was
much humbler, but what struck him about it was the abundance
of books lying everywhere.  Their number and quality made
the meagre furniture that supported them seem absurdly
disproportionate.  Some, indeed many, must have been
recently purchased; and though he encouraged her to buy in
reason, he had no notion that she indulged her innate
passion so extensively in proportion to the narrowness of
their income.  For the 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," contiued 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 creature's wire prison, and with the wrapped up
cage in his hand Henchard sought a lodging for the night.

Next day he set out upon the last stage, and was soon within
the district which had been his dealing ground in bygone
years.  Part of the distance he travelled by carrier,
seating himself in the darkest corner at the back of that
trader's van; and as the other passengers, mainly women
going short journeys, mounted and alighted in front of
Henchard, they talked over much local news, not the least
portion of this being the wedding then in course of
celebration at the town they were nearing.  It appeared from
their accounts that the town band had been hired for the
evening party, and, lest the convivial instincts of that
body should get the better of their skill, the further step
had been taken of engaging the string band from Budmouth, so
that there would be a reserve of harmony to fall back upon
in case of need.

He heard, however, but few particulars beyond those
known to him already, the incident of the deepest interest
on the journey being the soft pealing of the Casterbridge
bells, which reached the travellers' ears while the van
paused on the top of Yalbury Hill to have the drag lowered.
The time was just after twelve o'clock.

Those notes were a signal that all had gone well; that there
had been no slip 'twixt cup and lip in this case; that
Elizabeth-Jane and Donald Farfrae were man and wife.

Henchard did not care to ride any further with his
chattering companions after hearing this sound.  Indeed, it
quite unmanned him; and in pursuance of his plan of not
showing himself in Casterbridge street till evening, lest he
should mortify Farfrae and his bride, he alighted here, with
his bundle and bird-cage, and was soon left as a lonely
figure on the broad white highway.

It was the hill near which he had waited to meet Farfrae,
almost two years earlier, to tell him of the serious illness
of his wife Lucetta.  The place was unchanged; the same
larches sighed the same notes; but Farfrae had another wife--
and, as Henchard knew, a better one.  He only hoped that
Elizabeth-Jane had obtained a better home than had been hers
at the former time.

He passed the remainder of the afternoon in a curious high-
strung condition, unable to do much but think of the
approaching meeting with her, and sadly satirize himself for
his emotions thereon, as a Samson shorn.  Such an innovation
on Casterbridge customs as a flitting of bridegroom and
bride from the town immediately after the ceremony, was not
likely, but if it should have taken place he would wait till
their return.  To assure himself on this point he asked a
market-man when near the borough if the newly-married couple
had gone away, and was promptly informed that they had not;
they were at that hour, according to all accounts,
entertaining a houseful of guests at their home in Corn
Street.

Henchard dusted his boots, washed his hands at the
riverside, and proceeded up the town under the feeble lamps.
He need have made no inquiries beforehand, for on drawing
near Farfrae's residence it was plain to the least observant
that festivity prevailed within, and that Donald
himself shared it, his voice being distinctly audible in the
street, giving strong expression to a song of his dear
native country that he loved so well as never to have
revisited it.  Idlers were standing on the pavement in
front; and wishing to escape the notice of these Henchard
passed quickly on to the door.

It was wide open, the hall was lighted extravagantly, and
people were going up and down the stairs.  His courage
failed him; to enter footsore, laden, and poorly dressed
into the midst of such resplendency was to bring needless
humiliation upon her he loved, if not to court repulse from
her husband.  Accordingly he went round into the street at
the back that he knew so well, entered the garden, and came
quietly into the house through the kitchen, temporarily
depositing the bird and cage under a bush outside, to lessen
the awkwardness of his arrival.

Solitude and sadness had so emolliated Henchard that he now
feared circumstances he would formerly have scorned, and he
began to wish that he had not taken upon himself to arrive
at such a juncture.  However, his progress was made
unexpectedly easy by his discovering alone in the kitchen an
elderly woman who seemed to be acting as provisional
housekeeper during the convulsions from which Farfrae's
establishment was just then suffering.  She was one of those
people whom nothing surprises, and though to her, a total
stranger, his request must have seemed odd, she willingly
volunteered to go up and inform the master and mistress of
the house that "a humble old friend" had come.

On second thought she said that he had better not wait in
the kitchen, but come up into the little back-parlour, which
was empty.  He thereupon followed her thither, and she left
him.  Just as she got across the landing to the door of the
best parlour a dance was struck up, and she returned to say
that she would wait till that was over before announcing
him--Mr. and Mrs. Farfrae having both joined in the figure.

The door of the front room had been taken off its hinges to
give more space, and that of the room Henchard sat in being
ajar, he could see fractional parts of the dancers whenever
their gyrations brought them near the doorway, chiefly in
the shape of the skirts of dresses and streaming curls of
hair; together with about three-fifths of the band in
profile, including the restless shadow of a fiddler's elbow,
and the tip of the bass-viol bow.

The gaiety jarred upon Henchard's spirits; and he could not
quite understand why Farfrae, a much-sobered man, and a
widower, who had had his trials, should have cared for it
all, notwithstanding the fact that he was quite a young man
still, and quickly kindled to enthusiasm by dance and song.
That the quiet Elizabeth, who had long ago appraised life at
a moderate value, and who knew in spite of her maidenhood
that marriage was as a rule no dancing matter, should have
had zest for this revelry surprised him still more.
However, young people could not be quite old people, he
concluded, and custom was omnipotent.

With the progress of the dance the performers spread out
somewhat, and then for the first time he caught a glimpse of
the once despised daughter who had mastered him, and made
his heart ache.  She was in a dress of white silk or satin,
he was not near enough to say which--snowy white, without a
tinge of milk or cream; and the expression of her face was
one of nervous pleasure rather than of gaiety.  Presently
Farfrae came round, his exuberant Scotch movement making him
conspicuous in a moment.  The pair were not dancing
together, but Henchard could discern that whenever the
chances of the figure made them the partners of a moment
their emotions breathed a much subtler essence than at other
times.

By degrees Henchard became aware that the measure was trod
by some one who out-Farfraed Farfrae in saltatory
intenseness.  This was strange, and it was stranger to find
that the eclipsing personage was Elizabeth-Jane's partner.
The first time that Henchard saw him he was sweeping grandly
round, his head quivering and low down, his legs in the form
of an X and his back towards the door.  The next time he
came round in the other direction, his white waist-coat
preceding his face, and his toes preceding his white
waistcoat.  That happy face--Henchard's complete
discomfiture lay in it.  It was Newson's, who had indeed
come and supplanted him.

Henchard pushed to the door, and for some seconds made
no other movement.  He rose to his feet, and stood like
a dark ruin, obscured by "the shade from his own soul up-
thrown."

But he was no longer the man to stand these reverses
unmoved.  His agitation was great, and he would fain have
been gone, but before he could leave the dance had ended,
the housekeeper had informed Elizabeth-Jane of the stranger
who awaited her, and she entered the room immediately.

"Oh--it is--Mr. Henchard!" she said, starting back.

"What, Elizabeth?" he cried, as she seized her hand.  "What
do you say?--Mr. Henchard? Don't, don't scourge me like
that!  Call me worthless old Henchard--anything--but don't
'ee be so cold as this!  O my maid--I see you have another--a
real father in my place.  Then you know all; but don't give
all your thought to him!  Do ye save a little room for me!"

She flushed up, and gently drew her hand away.  "I could
have loved you always--I would have, gladly," she said.
"But how can I when I know you have deceived me so--so
bitterly deceived me!  You persuaded me that my father was
not my father--allowed me to live on in ignorance of the
truth for years; and then when he, my warm-hearted real
father, came to find me, cruelly sent him away with a wicked
invention of my death, which nearly broke his heart.  O how
can I love as I once did a man who has served us like this!"

Henchard's lips half parted to begin an explanation.  But he
shut them up like a vice, and uttered not a sound.  How
should he, there and then, set before her with any effect
the palliatives of his great faults--that he had himself
been deceived in her identity at first, till informed by her
mother's letter that his own child had died; that, in the
second accusation, his lie had been the last desperate throw
of a gamester who loved her affection better than his own
honour? Among the many hindrances to such a pleading not the
least was this, that he did not sufficiently value himself
to lessen his sufferings by strenuous appeal or elaborate
argument.

Waiving, therefore, his privilege of self-defence, he
regarded only his discomposure.  "Don't ye distress yourself
on my account," he said, with proud superiority.  "I would
not wish it--at such a time, too, as this.  I have done
wrong in coming to 'ee--I see my error.  But it is only for
once, so forgive it.  I'll never trouble 'ee again,
Elizabeth-Jane--no, not to my dying day!  Good-night.  Good-
bye!"

Then, before she could collect her thoughts, Henchard went
out from her rooms, and departed from the house by the back
way as he had come; and she saw him no more.



45.


It was about a month after the day which closed as in the
last chapter.  Elizabeth-Jane had grown accustomed to the
novelty of her situation, and the only difference between
Donald's movements now and formerly was that he hastened
indoors rather more quickly after business hours than he had
been in the habit of doing for some time.

Newson had stayed in Casterbridge three days after the
wedding party (whose gaiety, as might have been surmised,
was of his making rather than of the married couple's), and
was stared at and honoured as became the returned Crusoe of
the hour.  But whether or not because Casterbridge was
difficult to excite by dramatic returns and disappearances
through having been for centuries an assize town, in which
sensational exits from the world, antipodean absences, and
such like, were half-yearly occurrences, the inhabitants did
not altogether lose their equanimity on his account.  On the
fourth morning he was discovered disconsolately climbing a
hill, in his craving to get a glimpse of the sea from
somewhere or other.  The contiguity of salt water proved to
be such a necessity of his existence that he preferred
Budmouth as a place of residence, notwithstanding the
society of his daughter in the other town.  Thither he went,
and settled in lodgings in a green-shuttered cottage which
had a bow-window, jutting out sufficiently to afford
glimpses of a vertical strip of blue sea to any one opening
the sash, and leaning forward far enough to look through a
narrow lane of tall intervening houses.

Elizabeth-Jane was standing in the middle of her
upstairs parlour, critically surveying some re-arrangement
of articles with her head to one side, when the housemaid
came in with the announcement, "Oh, please ma'am, we know
now how that bird-cage came there."

In exploring her new domain during the first week of
residence, gazing with critical satisfaction on this
cheerful room and that, penetrating cautiously into dark
cellars, sallying forth with gingerly tread to the garden,
now leaf-strewn by autumn winds, and thus, like a wise
field-marshal, estimating the capabilities of the site
whereon she was about to open her housekeeping campaign--
Mrs. Donald Farfrae had discovered in a screened corner a
new bird-cage, shrouded in newspaper, and at the bottom of
the cage a little ball of feathers--the dead body of a
goldfinch.  Nobody could tell her how the bird and cage had
come there, though that the poor little songster had been
starved to death was evident.  The sadness of the incident
had made an impression on her.  She had not been able to
forget it for days, despite Farfrae's tender banter; and now
when the matter had been nearly forgotten it was again
revived.

"Oh, please ma'am, we know how the bird-cage came there.
That farmer's man who called on the evening of the wedding--
he was seen wi' it in his hand as he came up the street; and
'tis thoughted that he put it down while he came in with his
message, and then went away forgetting where he had left
it."

This was enough to set Elizabeth thinking, and in thinking
she seized hold of the idea, at one feminine bound, that the
caged bird had been brought by Henchard for her as a wedding
gift and token of repentance.  He had not expressed to her
any regrets or excuses for what he had done in the past; but
it was a part of his nature to extenuate nothing, and live
on as one of his own worst accusers.  She went out, looked
at the cage, buried the starved little singer, and from that
hour her heart softened towards the self-alienated man.

When her husband came in she told him her solution of the
bird-cage mystery; and begged Donald to help her in finding
out, as soon as possible, whither Henchard had banished
himself, that she might make her peace with him; try to do
something to render his life less that of an outcast, and
more tolerable to him.  Although Farfrae had never so
passionately liked Henchard as Henchard had liked him, he
had, on the other hand, never so passionately hated in the
same direction as his former friend had done, and he was
therefore not the least indisposed to assist Elizabeth-Jane
in her laudable plan.

But it was by no means easy to set about discovering
Henchard.  He had apparently sunk into the earth on leaving
Mr. and Mrs. Farfrae's door.  Elizabeth-Jane remembered what
he had once attempted; and trembled.

But though she did not know it Henchard had become a changed
man since then--as far, that is, as change of emotional
basis can justify such a radical phrase; and she needed not
to fear.  In a few days Farfrae's inquiries elicited that
Henchard had been seen by one who knew him walking steadily
along the Melchester highway eastward, at twelve o'clock at
night--in other words, retracing his steps on the road by
which he had come.

This was enough; and the next morning Farfrae might have
been discovered driving his gig out of Casterbridge in that
direction, Elizabeth-Jane sitting beside him, wrapped in a
thick flat fur--the victorine of the period--her complexion
somewhat richer than formerly, and an incipient matronly
dignity, which the serene Minerva-eyes of one "whose
gestures beamed with mind" made becoming, settling on her
face.  Having herself arrived at a promising haven from at
least the grosser troubles of her life, her object was to
place Henchard in some similar quietude before he should
sink into that lower stage of existence which was only too
possible to him now.

After driving along the highway for a few miles they made
further inquiries, and learnt of a road-mender, who had been
working thereabouts for weeks, that he had observed such a
man at the time mentioned; he had left the Melchester
coachroad at Weatherbury by a forking highway which skirted
the north of Egdon Heath.  Into this road they directed the
horse's head, and soon were bowling across that ancient
country whose surface never had been stirred to a
finger's depth, save by the scratchings of rabbits,
since brushed by the feet of the earliest tribes.  The
tumuli these had left behind, dun and shagged with heather,
jutted roundly into the sky from the uplands, as though they
were the full breasts of Diana Multimammia supinely extended
there.

They searched Egdon, but found no Henchard.  Farfrae drove
onward, and by the afternoon reached the neighbourhood of
some extension of the heath to the north of Anglebury, a
prominent feature of which, in the form of a blasted clump
of firs on a summit of a hill, they soon passed under.  That
the road they were following had, up to this point, been
Henchard's track on foot they were pretty certain; but the
ramifications which now began to reveal themselves in the
route made further progress in the right direction a matter
of pure guess-work, and Donald strongly advised his wife to
give up the search in person, and trust to other means for
obtaining news of her stepfather.  They were now a score of
miles at least from home, but, by resting the horse for a
couple of hours at a village they had just traversed, it
would be possible to get back to Casterbridge that same day,
while to go much further afield would reduce them to the
necessity of camping out for the night, "and that will make
a hole in a sovereign," said Farfrae.  She pondered the
position, and agreed with him.

He accordingly drew rein, but before reversing their
direction paused a moment and looked vaguely round upon the
wide country which the elevated position disclosed.  While
they looked a solitary human form came from under the clump
of trees, and crossed ahead of them.  The person was some
labourer; his gait was shambling, his regard fixed in front
of him as absolutely as if he wore blinkers; and in his hand
he carried a few sticks.  Having crossed the road he
descended into a ravine, where a cottage revealed itself,
which he entered.

"If it were not so far away from Casterbridge I should say
that must be poor Whittle.  'Tis just like him," observed
Elizabeth-Jane.

"And it may be Whittle, for he's never been to the yard
these three weeks, going away without saying any word at
all; and I owing him for two days' work, without
knowing who to pay it to."

The possibility led them to alight, and at least make an
inquiry at the cottage.  Farfrae hitched the reins to the
gate-post, and they approached what was of humble dwellings
surely the humblest.  The walls, built of kneaded clay
originally faced with a trowel, had been worn by years of
rain-washings to a lumpy crumbling surface, channelled and
sunken from its plane, its gray rents held together here and
there by a leafy strap of ivy which could scarcely find
substance enough for the purpose.  The rafters were sunken,
and the thatch of the roof in ragged holes.  Leaves from the
fence had been blown into the corners of the doorway, and
lay there undisturbed.  The door was ajar; Farfrae knocked;
and he who stood before them was Whittle, as they had
conjectured.

His face showed marks of deep sadness, his eyes lighting on
them with an unfocused gaze; and he still held in his hand
the few sticks he had been out to gather.  As soon as he
recognized them he started.

"What, Abel Whittle; is it that ye are heere?" said Farfrae.

"Ay, yes sir!  You see he was kind-like to mother when she
wer here below, though 'a was rough to me."

"Who are you talking of?"

"O sir--Mr. Henchet!  Didn't ye know it? He's just gone--
about half-an-hour ago, by the sun; for I've got no watch to
my name."

"Not--dead?" faltered Elizabeth-Jane.

"Yes, ma'am, he's gone!  He was kind-like to mother when she
wer here below, sending her the best ship-coal, and hardly
any ashes from it at all; and taties, and such-like that
were very needful to her.  I seed en go down street on the
night of your worshipful's wedding to the lady at yer side,
and I thought he looked low and faltering.  And I followed
en over Grey's Bridge, and he turned and zeed me, and said,
'You go back!' But I followed, and he turned again, and
said, 'Do you hear, sir? Go back!' But I zeed that he was
low, and I followed on still.  Then 'a said, 'Whittle, what
do ye follow me for when I've told ye to go back all these
times?' And I said, 'Because, sir, I see things be bad with
'ee, and ye wer kind-like to mother if ye wer rough to
me, and I would fain be kind-like to you.' Then he walked
on, and I followed; and he never complained at me no more.
We walked on like that all night; and in the blue o' the
morning, when 'twas hardly day, I looked ahead o' me, and I
zeed that he wambled, and could hardly drag along.  By the
time we had got past here, but I had seen that this house
was empty as I went by, and I got him to come back; and I
took down the boards from the windows, and helped him
inside.  'What, Whittle,' he said, 'and can ye really be
such a poor fond fool as to care for such a wretch as I!'
Then I went on further, and some neighbourly woodmen lent me
a bed, and a chair, and a few other traps, and we brought
'em here, and made him as comfortable as we could.  But he
didn't gain strength, for you see, ma'am, he couldn't eat--
no appetite at all--and he got weaker; and to-day he died.
One of the neighbours have gone to get a man to measure
him."

"Dear me--is that so!" said Farfrae.

As for Elizabeth, she said nothing.

"Upon the head of his bed he pinned a piece of paper, with
some writing upon it," continued Abel Whittle.  "But not
being a man o' letters, I can't read writing; so I don't
know what it is.  I can get it and show ye."

They stood in silence while he ran into the cottage;
returning in a moment with a crumpled scrap of paper.  On it
there was pencilled as follows:--


MICHAEL HENCHARD'S WILL

"That Elizabeth-Jane Farfrae be not told of my death, or
made to grieve on account of me.
  "& that I be not bury'd in consecrated ground.
  "& that no sexton be asked to toll the bell.
  "& that nobody is wished to see my dead body.
  "& that no murners walk behind me at my funeral.
  "& that no flours be planted on my grave,
  "& that no man remember me.
  "To this I put my name.

                                     MICHAEL HENCHARD


"What are we to do?" said Donald, when he had handed
the paper to her.

She could not answer distinctly.  "O Donald!" she cried at
last through her tears, "what bitterness lies there!  O I
would not have minded so much if it had not been for my
unkindness at that last parting!...But there's no altering--
so it must be."

What Henchard had written in the anguish of his dying was
respected as far as practicable by Elizabeth-Jane, though
less from a sense of the sacredness of last words, as such,
than from her independent knowledge that the man who wrote
them meant what he said.  She knew the directions to be a
piece of the same stuff that his whole life was made of, and
hence were not to be tampered with to give herself a
mournful pleasure, or her husband credit for large-
heartedness.

All was over at last, even her regrets for having
misunderstood him on his last visit, for not having searched
him out sooner, though these were deep and sharp for a good
while.  From this time forward Elizabeth-Jane found herself
in a latitude of calm weather, kindly and grateful in
itself, and doubly so after the Capharnaum in which some of
her preceding years had been spent.  As the lively and
sparkling emotions of her early married live cohered into an
equable serenity, the finer movements of her nature found
scope in discovering to the narrow-lived ones around her the
secret (as she had once learnt it) of making limited
opportunities endurable; which she deemed to consist in the
cunning enlargement, by a species of microscopic treatment,
of those minute forms of satisfaction that offer themselves
to everybody not in positive pain; which, thus handled, have
much of the same inspiring effect upon life as wider
interests cursorily embraced.

Her teaching had a reflex action upon herself, insomuch that
she thought she could perceive no great personal difference
between being respected in the nether parts of Casterbridge
and glorified at the uppermost end of the social world.  Her
position was, indeed, to a marked degree one that, in the
common phrase, afforded much to be thankful for.  That she
was not demonstratively thankful was no fault of hers.  Her
experience had been of a kind to teach her, rightly or
wrongly, that the doubtful honour of a brief transmit
through a sorry world hardly called for effusiveness, even
when the path was suddenly irradiated at some half-way point
by daybeams rich as hers.  But her strong sense that neither
she nor any human being deserved less than was given, did
not blind her to the fact that there were others receiving
less who had deserved much more.  And in being forced to
class herself among the fortunate she did not cease to
wonder at the persistence of the unforeseen, when the one to
whom such unbroken tranquility had been accorded in the
adult stage was she whose youth had seemed to teach that
happiness was but the occasional episode in a general drama
of pain.