The Mayor of Casterbridge
on past the cottage in which the old local hangman had lived and died,
in times before that calling was monopolized over all England by a
single gentleman; and climbed up by a steep back lane into the town.
For the sufferings of that night, engendered by his bitter
disappointment, he might well have been pitied. He was like one who had
half fainted, and could neither recover nor complete the swoon. In
words he could blame his wife, but not in his heart; and had he obeyed
the wise directions outside her letter this pain would have been spared
him for long—possibly for ever, Elizabeth-Jane seeming to show no
ambition to quit her safe and secluded maiden courses for the
speculative path of matrimony.
The morning came after this night of unrest, and with it the necessity
for a plan. He was far too self-willed to recede from a position,
especially as it would involve humiliation. His daughter he had
asserted her to be, and his daughter she should always think herself,
no matter what hyprocrisy it involved.
But he was ill-prepared for the first step in this new situation. The
moment he came into the breakfast-room Elizabeth advanced with open
confidence to him and took him by the arm.
“I have thought and thought all night of it,” she said frankly. “And I
see that everything must be as you say. And I am going to look upon you
as the father that you are, and not to call you Mr. Henchard any more.
It is so plain to me now. Indeed, father, it is. For, of course, you
would not have done half the things you have done for me, and let me
have my own way so entirely, and bought me presents, if I had only been
your stepdaughter! He—Mr. Newson—whom my poor mother married by such a
strange mistake” (Henchard was glad that he had disguised matters
here), “was very kind—O so kind!” (she spoke with tears in her eyes);
“but that is not the same thing as being one’s real father after all.
Now, father, breakfast is ready!” she said cheerfully.
Henchard bent and kissed her cheek. The moment and the act he had
prefigured for weeks with a thrill of pleasure; yet it was no less than
a miserable insipidity to him now that it had come. His reinstation of
her mother had been chiefly for the girl’s sake, and the fruition of
the whole scheme was such dust and ashes as this.
XX.
Of all the enigmas which ever confronted a girl there can have been
seldom one like that which followed Henchard’s announcement of himself
to Elizabeth as her father. He had done it in an ardour and an
agitation which had half carried the point of affection with her; yet,
behold, from the next morning onwards his manner was constrained as she
had never seen it before.
The coldness soon broke out into open chiding. One grievous failing of
Elizabeth’s was her occasional pretty and picturesque use of dialect
words—those terrible marks of the beast to the truly genteel.
It was dinner-time—they never met except at meals—and she happened to
say when he was rising from table, wishing to show him something, “If
you’ll bide where you be a minute, father, I’ll get it.”
“‘Bide where you be,’” he echoed sharply, “Good God, are you only fit
to carry wash to a pig-trough, that ye use such words as those?”
She reddened with shame and sadness.
“I meant ‘Stay where you are,’ father,” she said, in a low, humble
voice. “I ought to have been more careful.”
He made no reply, and went out of the room.
The sharp reprimand was not lost upon her, and in time it came to pass
that for “fay” she said “succeed”; that she no longer spoke of
“dumbledores” but of “humble bees”; no longer said of young men and
women that they “walked together,” but that they were “engaged”; that
she grew to talk of “greggles” as “wild hyacinths”; that when she had
not slept she did not quaintly tell the servants next morning that she
had been “hag-rid,” but that she had “suffered from indigestion.”
These improvements, however, are somewhat in advance of the story.
Henchard, being uncultivated himself, was the bitterest critic the fair
girl could possibly have had of her own lapses—really slight now, for
she read omnivorously. A gratuitous ordeal was in store for her in the
matter of her handwriting. She was passing the dining-room door one
evening, and had occasion to go in for something. It was not till she
had opened the door that she knew the Mayor was there in the company of
a man with whom he transacted business.
“Here, Elizabeth-Jane,” he said, looking round at her, “just write down
what I tell you—a few words of an agreement for me and this gentleman
to sign. I am a poor tool with a pen.”
“Be jowned, and so be I,” said the gentleman.
She brought forward blotting-book, paper, and ink, and sat down.
“Now then—‘An agreement entered into this sixteenth day of
October’—write that first.”
She started the pen in an elephantine march across the sheet. It was a
splendid round, bold hand of her own conception, a style that would
have stamped a woman as Minerva’s own in more recent days. But other
ideas reigned then: Henchard’s creed was that proper young girls wrote
ladies’-hand—nay, he believed that bristling characters were as innate
and inseparable a part of refined womanhood as sex itself. Hence when,
instead of scribbling, like the Princess Ida,—
“In such a hand as when a field of corn
Bows all its ears before the roaring East,”
Elizabeth-Jane produced a line of chain-shot and sand-bags, he reddened
in angry shame for her, and, peremptorily saying, “Never mind—I’ll
finish it,” dismissed her there and then.
Her considerate disposition became a pitfall to her now. She was, it
must be admitted, sometimes provokingly and unnecessarily willing to
saddle herself with manual labours. She would go to the kitchen instead
of ringing, “Not to make Phoebe come up twice.” She went down on her
knees, shovel in hand, when the cat overturned the coal-scuttle;
moreover, she would persistently thank the parlour-maid for everything,
till one day, as soon as the girl was gone from the room, Henchard
broke out with, “Good God, why dostn’t leave off thanking that girl as
if she were a goddess-born! Don’t I pay her a dozen pound a year to do
things for ’ee?” Elizabeth shrank so visibly at the exclamation that he
became sorry a few minutes after, and said that he did not mean to be
rough.
These domestic exhibitions were the small protruding needlerocks which
suggested rather than revealed what was underneath. But his passion had
less terror for her than his coldness. The increasing frequency of the
latter mood told her the sad news that he disliked her with a growing
dislike. The more interesting that her appearance and manners became
under the softening influences which she could now command, and in her
wisdom did command, the more she seemed to estrange him. Sometimes she
caught him looking at her with a louring invidiousness that she could
hardly bear. Not knowing his secret it was cruel mockery that she
should for the first time excite his animosity when she had taken his
surname.
But the most terrible ordeal was to come. Elizabeth had latterly been
accustomed of an afternoon to present a cup of cider or ale and
bread-and-cheese to Nance Mockridge, who worked in the yard wimbling
hay-bonds. Nance accepted this offering thankfully at first; afterwards
as a matter of course. On a day when Henchard was on the premises he
saw his stepdaughter enter the hay-barn on this errand; and, as there
was no clear spot on which to deposit the provisions, she at once set
to work arranging two trusses of hay as a table, Mockridge meanwhile
standing with her hands on her hips, easefully looking at the
preparations on her behalf.
“Elizabeth, come here!” said Henchard; and she obeyed.
“Why do you lower yourself so confoundedly?” he said with suppressed
passion. “Haven’t I told you o’t fifty times? Hey? Making yourself a
drudge for a common workwoman of such a character as hers! Why, ye’ll
disgrace me to the dust!”
Now these words were uttered loud enough to reach Nance inside the barn
door, who fired up immediately at the slur upon her personal character.
Coming to the door she cried regardless of consequences, “Come to that,
Mr. Henchard, I can let ’ee know she’ve waited on worse!”
“Then she must have had more charity than sense,” said Henchard.
“O no, she hadn’t. ’Twere not for charity but for hire; and at a
public-house in this town!”
“It is not true!” cried Henchard indignantly.
“Just ask her,” said Nance, folding her naked arms in such a manner
that she could comfortably scratch her elbows.
Henchard glanced at Elizabeth-Jane, whose complexion, now pink and
white from confinement, lost nearly all of the former colour. “What
does this mean?” he said to her. “Anything or nothing?”
“It is true,” said Elizabeth-Jane. “But it was only—”
“Did you do it, or didn’t you? Where was it?”
“At the Three Mariners; one evening for a little while, when we were
staying there.”
Nance glanced triumphantly at Henchard, and sailed into the barn; for
assuming that she was to be discharged on the instant she had resolved
to make the most of her victory. Henchard, however, said nothing about
discharging her. Unduly sensitive on such points by reason of his own
past, he had the look of one completely ground down to the last
indignity. Elizabeth followed him to the house like a culprit; but when
she got inside she could not see him. Nor did she see him again that
day.
Convinced of the scathing damage to his local repute and position that
must have been caused by such a fact, though it had never before
reached his own ears, Henchard showed a positive distaste for the
presence of this girl not his own, whenever he encountered her. He
mostly dined with the farmers at the market-room of one of the two
chief hotels, leaving her in utter solitude. Could he have seen how she
made use of those silent hours he might have found reason to reserve
his judgment on her quality. She read and took notes incessantly,
mastering facts with painful laboriousness, but never flinching from
her self-imposed task. She began the study of Latin, incited by the
Roman characteristics of the town she lived in. “If I am not
well-informed it shall be by no fault of my own,” she would say to
herself through the tears that would occasionally glide down her peachy
cheeks when she was fairly baffled by the portentous obscurity of many
of these educational works.
Thus she lived on, a dumb, deep-feeling, great-eyed creature, construed
by not a single contiguous being; quenching with patient fortitude her
incipient interest in Farfrae, because it seemed to be one-sided,
unmaidenly, and unwise. True, that for reasons best known to herself,
she had, since Farfrae’s dismissal, shifted her quarters from the back
room affording a view of the yard (which she had occupied with such
zest) to a front chamber overlooking the street; but as for the young
man, whenever he passed the house he seldom or never turned his head.
Winter had almost come, and unsettled weather made her still more
dependent upon indoor resources. But there were certain early winter
days in Casterbridge—days of firmamental exhaustion which followed
angry south-westerly tempests—when, if the sun shone, the air was like
velvet. She seized on these days for her periodical visits to the spot
where her mother lay buried—the still-used burial-ground of the old
Roman-British city, whose curious feature was this, its continuity as a
place of sepulture. Mrs. Henchard’s dust mingled with the dust of women
who lay ornamented with glass hair-pins and amber necklaces, and men
who held in their mouths coins of Hadrian, Posthumus, and the
Constantines.
Half-past ten in the morning was about her hour for seeking this spot—a