The Mayor of Casterbridge
time when the town avenues were deserted as the avenues of Karnac.
Business had long since passed down them into its daily cells, and
Leisure had not arrived there. So Elizabeth-Jane walked and read, or
looked over the edge of the book to think, and thus reached the
churchyard.
There, approaching her mother’s grave she saw a solitary dark figure in
the middle of the gravel-walk. This figure, too, was reading; but not
from a book: the words which engrossed it being the inscription on Mrs.
Henchard’s tombstone. The personage was in mourning like herself, was
about her age and size, and might have been her wraith or double, but
for the fact that it was a lady much more beautifully dressed than she.
Indeed, comparatively indifferent as Elizabeth-Jane was to dress,
unless for some temporary whim or purpose, her eyes were arrested by
the artistic perfection of the lady’s appearance. Her gait, too, had a
flexuousness about it, which seemed to avoid angularity. It was a
revelation to Elizabeth that human beings could reach this stage of
external development—she had never suspected it. She felt all the
freshness and grace to be stolen from herself on the instant by the
neighbourhood of such a stranger. And this was in face of the fact that
Elizabeth could now have been writ handsome, while the young lady was
simply pretty.
Had she been envious she might have hated the woman; but she did not do
that—she allowed herself the pleasure of feeling fascinated. She
wondered where the lady had come from. The stumpy and practical walk of
honest homeliness which mostly prevailed there, the two styles of dress
thereabout, the simple and the mistaken, equally avouched that this
figure was no Casterbridge woman’s, even if a book in her hand
resembling a guide-book had not also suggested it.
The stranger presently moved from the tombstone of Mrs. Henchard, and
vanished behind the corner of the wall. Elizabeth went to the tomb
herself; beside it were two footprints distinct in the soil, signifying
that the lady had stood there a long time. She returned homeward,
musing on what she had seen, as she might have mused on a rainbow or
the Northern Lights, a rare butterfly or a cameo.
Interesting as things had been out of doors, at home it turned out to
be one of her bad days. Henchard, whose two years’ mayoralty was
ending, had been made aware that he was not to be chosen to fill a
vacancy in the list of aldermen; and that Farfrae was likely to become
one of the Council. This caused the unfortunate discovery that she had
played the waiting-maid in the town of which he was Mayor to rankle in
his mind yet more poisonously. He had learnt by personal inquiry at the
time that it was to Donald Farfrae—that treacherous upstart—that she
had thus humiliated herself. And though Mrs. Stannidge seemed to attach
no great importance to the incident—the cheerful souls at the Three
Mariners having exhausted its aspects long ago—such was Henchard’s
haughty spirit that the simple thrifty deed was regarded as little less
than a social catastrophe by him.
Ever since the evening of his wife’s arrival with her daughter there
had been something in the air which had changed his luck. That dinner
at the King’s Arms with his friends had been Henchard’s Austerlitz: he
had had his successes since, but his course had not been upward. He was
not to be numbered among the aldermen—that Peerage of burghers—as he
had expected to be, and the consciousness of this soured him to-day.
“Well, where have you been?” he said to her with offhand laconism.
“I’ve been strolling in the Walks and churchyard, father, till I feel
quite leery.” She clapped her hand to her mouth, but too late.
This was just enough to incense Henchard after the other crosses of the
day. “I _won’t_ have you talk like that!” he thundered. “‘Leery,’
indeed. One would think you worked upon a farm! One day I learn that
you lend a hand in public-houses. Then I hear you talk like a
clodhopper. I’m burned, if it goes on, this house can’t hold us two.”
The only way of getting a single pleasant thought to go to sleep upon
after this was by recalling the lady she had seen that day, and hoping
she might see her again.
Meanwhile Henchard was sitting up, thinking over his jealous folly in
forbidding Farfrae to pay his addresses to this girl who did not belong
to him, when if he had allowed them to go on he might not have been
encumbered with her. At last he said to himself with satisfaction as he
jumped up and went to the writing-table: “Ah! he’ll think it means
peace, and a marriage portion—not that I don’t want my house to be
troubled with her, and no portion at all!” He wrote as follows:—
Sir,—On consideration, I don’t wish to interfere with your courtship of
Elizabeth-Jane, if you care for her. I therefore withdraw my objection;
excepting in this—that the business be not carried on in my
house.—Yours,
M. HENCHARD.
Mr. Farfrae.
The morrow, being fairly fine, found Elizabeth-Jane again in the
churchyard, but while looking for the lady she was startled by the
apparition of Farfrae, who passed outside the gate. He glanced up for a
moment from a pocket-book in which he appeared to be making figures as
he went; whether or not he saw her he took no notice, and disappeared.
Unduly depressed by a sense of her own superfluity she thought he
probably scorned her; and quite broken in spirit sat down on a bench.
She fell into painful thought on her position, which ended with her
saying quite loud, “O, I wish I was dead with dear mother!”
Behind the bench was a little promenade under the wall where people
sometimes walked instead of on the gravel. The bench seemed to be
touched by something, she looked round, and a face was bending over
her, veiled, but still distinct, the face of the young woman she had
seen yesterday.
Elizabeth-Jane looked confounded for a moment, knowing she had been
overheard, though there was pleasure in her confusion. “Yes, I heard
you,” said the lady, in a vivacious voice, answering her look. “What
can have happened?”
“I don’t—I can’t tell you,” said Elizabeth, putting her hand to her
face to hide a quick flush that had come.
There was no movement or word for a few seconds; then the girl felt
that the young lady was sitting down beside her.
“I guess how it is with you,” said the latter. “That was your mother.”
She waved her hand towards the tombstone. Elizabeth looked up at her as
if inquiring of herself whether there should be confidence. The lady’s
manner was so desirous, so anxious, that the girl decided there should
be confidence. “It was my mother,” she said, “my only friend.”
“But your father, Mr. Henchard. He is living?”
“Yes, he is living,” said Elizabeth-Jane.
“Is he not kind to you?”
“I’ve no wish to complain of him.”
“There has been a disagreement?”
“A little.”
“Perhaps you were to blame,” suggested the stranger.
“I was—in many ways,” sighed the meek Elizabeth. “I swept up the coals
when the servants ought to have done it; and I said I was leery;—and he
was angry with me.”
The lady seemed to warm towards her for that reply. “Do you know the
impression your words give me?” she said ingenuously. “That he is a
hot-tempered man—a little proud—perhaps ambitious; but not a bad man.”
Her anxiety not to condemn Henchard while siding with Elizabeth was
curious.
“O no; certainly not _bad_,” agreed the honest girl. “And he has not
even been unkind to me till lately—since mother died. But it has been
very much to bear while it has lasted. All is owing to my defects, I
daresay; and my defects are owing to my history.”
“What is your history?”
Elizabeth-Jane looked wistfully at her questioner. She found that her
questioner was looking at her, turned her eyes down; and then seemed
compelled to look back again. “My history is not gay or attractive,”
she said. “And yet I can tell it, if you really want to know.”
The lady assured her that she did want to know; whereupon
Elizabeth-Jane told the tale of her life as she understood it, which
was in general the true one, except that the sale at the fair had no
part therein.
Contrary to the girl’s expectation her new friend was not shocked. This
cheered her; and it was not till she thought of returning to that home
in which she had been treated so roughly of late that her spirits fell.
“I don’t know how to return,” she murmured. “I think of going away. But
what can I do? Where can I go?”
“Perhaps it will be better soon,” said her friend gently. “So I would
not go far. Now what do you think of this: I shall soon want somebody
to live in my house, partly as housekeeper, partly as companion; would
you mind coming to me? But perhaps—”
“O yes,” cried Elizabeth, with tears in her eyes. “I would, indeed—I
would do anything to be independent; for then perhaps my father might
get to love me. But, ah!”
“What?”
“I am no accomplished person. And a companion to you must be that.”
“O, not necessarily.”
“Not? But I can’t help using rural words sometimes, when I don’t mean
to.”
“Never mind, I shall like to know them.”
“And—O, I know I shan’t do!”—she cried with a distressful laugh. “I
accidentally learned to write round hand instead of ladies’-hand. And,
of course, you want some one who can write that?”
“Well, no.”
“What, not necessary to write ladies’-hand?” cried the joyous
Elizabeth.
“Not at all.”
“But where do you live?”
“In Casterbridge, or rather I shall be living here after twelve o’clock
to-day.”
Elizabeth expressed her astonishment.
“I have been staying at Budmouth for a few days while my house was
getting ready. The house I am going into is that one they call
High-Place Hall—the old stone one looking down the lane to the market.
Two or three rooms are fit for occupation, though not all: I sleep
there to-night for the first time. Now will you think over my proposal,
and meet me here the first fine day next week, and say if you are still
in the same mind?”
Elizabeth, her eyes shining at this prospect of a change from an
unbearable position, joyfully assented; and the two parted at the gate
of the churchyard.
XXI.
As a maxim glibly repeated from childhood remains practically unmarked
till some mature experience enforces it, so did this High-Place Hall
now for the first time really show itself to Elizabeth-Jane, though her
ears had heard its name on a hundred occasions.
Her mind dwelt upon nothing else but the stranger, and the house, and
her own chance of living there, all the rest of the day. In the
afternoon she had occasion to pay a few bills in the town and do a
little shopping when she learnt that what was a new discovery to
herself had become a common topic about the streets. High-Place Hall
was undergoing repair; a lady was coming there to live shortly; all the
shop-people knew it, and had already discounted the chance of her being
a customer.
Elizabeth-Jane could, however, add a capping touch to information so
new to her in the bulk. The lady, she said, had arrived that day.
When the lamps were lighted, and it was yet not so dark as to render
chimneys, attics, and roofs invisible, Elizabeth, almost with a lover’s
feeling, thought she would like to look at the outside of High-Place
Hall. She went up the street in that direction.
The Hall, with its grey _façade_ and parapet, was the only residence of
its sort so near the centre of the town. It had, in the first place,
the characteristics of a country mansion—birds’ nests in its chimneys,
damp nooks where fungi grew and irregularities of surface direct from
Nature’s trowel. At night the forms of passengers were patterned by the
lamps in black shadows upon the pale walls.
This evening motes of straw lay around, and other signs of the premises