The Mayor of Casterbridge
she felt about life and its surroundings—that they were a tragical
rather than a comical thing; that though one could be gay on occasion,
moments of gaiety were interludes, and no part of the actual drama. It
was extraordinary how similar their views were.
Though it was still early the young Scotchman expressed his wish to
retire, whereupon the landlady whispered to Elizabeth to run upstairs
and turn down his bed. She took a candlestick and proceeded on her
mission, which was the act of a few moments only. When, candle in hand,
she reached the top of the stairs on her way down again, Mr. Farfrae
was at the foot coming up. She could not very well retreat; they met
and passed in the turn of the staircase.
She must have appeared interesting in some way—not-withstanding her
plain dress—or rather, possibly, in consequence of it, for she was a
girl characterized by earnestness and soberness of mien, with which
simple drapery accorded well. Her face flushed, too, at the slight
awkwardness of the meeting, and she passed him with her eyes bent on
the candle-flame that she carried just below her nose. Thus it happened
that when confronting her he smiled; and then, with the manner of a
temporarily light-hearted man, who has started himself on a flight of
song whose momentum he cannot readily check, he softly tuned an old
ditty that she seemed to suggest—
“As I came in by my bower door,
As day was waxin’ wearie,
Oh wha came tripping down the stair
But bonnie Peg my dearie.”
Elizabeth-Jane, rather disconcerted, hastened on; and the Scotchman’s
voice died away, humming more of the same within the closed door of his
room.
Here the scene and sentiment ended for the present. When soon after,
the girl rejoined her mother, the latter was still in thought—on quite
another matter than a young man’s song.
“We’ve made a mistake,” she whispered (that the Scotchman might not
overhear). “On no account ought ye to have helped serve here to-night.
Not because of ourselves, but for the sake of _him_. If he should
befriend us, and take us up, and then find out what you did when
staying here, ’twould grieve and wound his natural pride as Mayor of
the town.”
Elizabeth, who would perhaps have been more alarmed at this than her
mother had she known the real relationship, was not much disturbed
about it as things stood. Her “he” was another man than her poor
mother’s. “For myself,” she said, “I didn’t at all mind waiting a
little upon him. He’s so respectable, and educated—far above the rest
of ’em in the inn. They thought him very simple not to know their grim
broad way of talking about themselves here. But of course he didn’t
know—he was too refined in his mind to know such things!” Thus she
earnestly pleaded.
Meanwhile, the “he” of her mother was not so far away as even they
thought. After leaving the Three Mariners he had sauntered up and down
the empty High Street, passing and repassing the inn in his promenade.
When the Scotchman sang his voice had reached Henchard’s ears through
the heart-shaped holes in the window-shutters, and had led him to pause
outside them a long while.
“To be sure, to be sure, how that fellow does draw me!” he had said to
himself. “I suppose ’tis because I’m so lonely. I’d have given him a
third share in the business to have stayed!”
IX.
When Elizabeth-Jane opened the hinged casement next morning the mellow
air brought in the feel of imminent autumn almost as distinctly as if
she had been in the remotest hamlet. Casterbridge was the complement of
the rural life around, not its urban opposite. Bees and butterflies in
the cornfields at the top of the town, who desired to get to the meads
at the bottom, took no circuitous course, but flew straight down High
Street without any apparent consciousness that they were traversing
strange latitudes. And in autumn airy spheres of thistledown floated
into the same street, lodged upon the shop fronts, blew into drains,
and innumerable tawny and yellow leaves skimmed along the pavement, and
stole through people’s doorways into their passages with a hesitating
scratch on the floor, like the skirts of timid visitors.
Hearing voices, one of which was close at hand, she withdrew her head
and glanced from behind the window-curtains. Mr. Henchard—now habited
no longer as a great personage, but as a thriving man of business—was
pausing on his way up the middle of the street, and the Scotchman was
looking from the window adjoining her own. Henchard it appeared, had
gone a little way past the inn before he had noticed his acquaintance
of the previous evening. He came back a few steps, Donald Farfrae
opening the window further.
“And you are off soon, I suppose?” said Henchard upwards.
“Yes—almost this moment, sir,” said the other. “Maybe I’ll walk on till
the coach makes up on me.”
“Which way?”
“The way ye are going.”
“Then shall we walk together to the top o’ town?”
“If ye’ll wait a minute,” said the Scotchman.
In a few minutes the latter emerged, bag in hand. Henchard looked at
the bag as at an enemy. It showed there was no mistake about the young
man’s departure. “Ah, my lad,” he said, “you should have been a wise
man, and have stayed with me.”
“Yes, yes—it might have been wiser,” said Donald, looking
microscopically at the houses that were furthest off. “It is only
telling ye the truth when I say my plans are vague.”
They had by this time passed on from the precincts of the inn, and
Elizabeth-Jane heard no more. She saw that they continued in
conversation, Henchard turning to the other occasionally, and
emphasizing some remark with a gesture. Thus they passed the King’s
Arms Hotel, the Market House, St. Peter’s churchyard wall, ascending to
the upper end of the long street till they were small as two grains of
corn; when they bent suddenly to the right into the Bristol Road, and
were out of view.
“He was a good man—and he’s gone,” she said to herself. “I was nothing
to him, and there was no reason why he should have wished me good-bye.”
The simple thought, with its latent sense of slight, had moulded itself
out of the following little fact: when the Scotchman came out at the
door he had by accident glanced up at her; and then he had looked away
again without nodding, or smiling, or saying a word.
“You are still thinking, mother,” she said, when she turned inwards.
“Yes; I am thinking of Mr. Henchard’s sudden liking for that young man.
He was always so. Now, surely, if he takes so warmly to people who are
not related to him at all, may he not take as warmly to his own kin?”
While they debated this question a procession of five large waggons
went past, laden with hay up to the bedroom windows. They came in from
the country, and the steaming horses had probably been travelling a
great part of the night. To the shaft of each hung a little board, on
which was painted in white letters, “Henchard, corn-factor and
hay-merchant.” The spectacle renewed his wife’s conviction that, for
her daughter’s sake, she should strain a point to rejoin him.
The discussion was continued during breakfast, and the end of it was
that Mrs. Henchard decided, for good or for ill, to send Elizabeth-Jane
with a message to Henchard, to the effect that his relative Susan, a
sailor’s widow, was in the town; leaving it to him to say whether or
not he would recognize her. What had brought her to this determination
were chiefly two things. He had been described as a lonely widower; and
he had expressed shame for a past transaction of his life. There was
promise in both.
“If he says no,” she enjoined, as Elizabeth-Jane stood, bonnet on,
ready to depart; “if he thinks it does not become the good position he
has reached to in the town, to own—to let us call on him as—his distant
kinfolk, say, ‘Then, sir, we would rather not intrude; we will leave
Casterbridge as quietly as we have come, and go back to our own
country.’ ...I almost feel that I would rather he did say so, as I have
not seen him for so many years, and we are so—little allied to him!”
“And if he say yes?” inquired the more sanguine one.
“In that case,” answered Mrs. Henchard cautiously, “ask him to write me
a note, saying when and how he will see us—or _me_.”
Elizabeth-Jane went a few steps towards the landing. “And tell him,”
continued her mother, “that I fully know I have no claim upon him—that
I am glad to find he is thriving; that I hope his life may be long and
happy—there, go.” Thus with a half-hearted willingness, a smothered
reluctance, did the poor forgiving woman start her unconscious daughter
on this errand.
It was about ten o’clock, and market-day, when Elizabeth paced up the
High Street, in no great hurry; for to herself her position was only
that of a poor relation deputed to hunt up a rich one. The front doors
of the private houses were mostly left open at this warm autumn time,
no thought of umbrella stealers disturbing the minds of the placid
burgesses. Hence, through the long, straight, entrance passages thus
unclosed could be seen, as through tunnels, the mossy gardens at the
back, glowing with nasturtiums, fuchsias, scarlet geraniums, “bloody
warriors,” snapdragons, and dahlias, this floral blaze being backed by
crusted grey stone-work remaining from a yet remoter Casterbridge than
the venerable one visible in the street. The old-fashioned fronts of
these houses, which had older than old-fashioned backs, rose sheer from
the pavement, into which the bow windows protruded like bastions,
necessitating a pleasing _chassez-déchassez_ movement to the
time-pressed pedestrian at every few yards. He was bound also to evolve
other Terpsichorean figures in respect of door-steps, scrapers,
cellar-hatches, church buttresses, and the overhanging angles of walls
which, originally unobtrusive, had become bow-legged and knock-kneed.
In addition to these fixed obstacles which spoke so cheerfully of
individual unrestraint as to boundaries, movables occupied the path and
roadway to a perplexing extent. First the vans of the carriers in and
out of Casterbridge, who hailed from Mellstock, Weatherbury, The
Hintocks, Sherton-Abbas, Kingsbere, Overcombe, and many other towns and
villages round. Their owners were numerous enough to be regarded as a
tribe, and had almost distinctiveness enough to be regarded as a race.
Their vans had just arrived, and were drawn up on each side of the
street in close file, so as to form at places a wall between the
pavement and the roadway. Moreover every shop pitched out half its
contents upon trestles and boxes on the kerb, extending the display
each week a little further and further into the roadway, despite the
expostulations of the two feeble old constables, until there remained
but a tortuous defile for carriages down the centre of the street,
which afforded fine opportunities for skill with the reins. Over the
pavement on the sunny side of the way hung shopblinds so constructed as
to give the passenger’s hat a smart buffet off his head, as from the
unseen hands of Cranstoun’s Goblin Page, celebrated in romantic lore.
Horses for sale were tied in rows, their forelegs on the pavement,
their hind legs in the street, in which position they occasionally
nipped little boys by the shoulder who were passing to school. And any
inviting recess in front of a house that had been modestly kept back
from the general line was utilized by pig-dealers as a pen for their
stock.
The yeomen, farmers, dairymen, and townsfolk, who came to transact
business in these ancient streets, spoke in other ways than by
articulation. Not to hear the words of your interlocutor in
metropolitan centres is to know nothing of his meaning. Here the face,
the arms, the hat, the stick, the body throughout spoke equally with