The Mayor of Casterbridge
I’ve been grieved beyond everything by you—there’s something that
caused it.”
“By me?” she said, with deep concern. “What have I done?”
“I can’t tell you now. But if you’ll stop, and go on living as my
daughter, I’ll tell you all in time.”
But the proposal had come ten minutes too late. She was in the fly—was
already, in imagination, at the house of the lady whose manner had such
charms for her. “Father,” she said, as considerately as she could, “I
think it best for us that I go on now. I need not stay long; I shall
not be far away, and if you want me badly I can soon come back again.”
He nodded ever so slightly, as a receipt of her decision and no more.
“You are not going far, you say. What will be your address, in case I
wish to write to you? Or am I not to know?”
“Oh yes—certainly. It is only in the town—High-Place Hall!”
“Where?” said Henchard, his face stilling.
She repeated the words. He neither moved nor spoke, and waving her hand
to him in utmost friendliness she signified to the flyman to drive up
the street.
XXII.
We go back for a moment to the preceding night, to account for
Henchard’s attitude.
At the hour when Elizabeth-Jane was contemplating her stealthy
reconnoitring excursion to the abode of the lady of her fancy, he had
been not a little amazed at receiving a letter by hand in Lucetta’s
well-known characters. The self-repression, the resignation of her
previous communication had vanished from her mood; she wrote with some
of the natural lightness which had marked her in their early
acquaintance.
HIGH-PLACE HALL
MY DEAR MR. HENCHARD,—Don’t be surprised. It is for your good and mine,
as I hope, that I have come to live at Casterbridge—for how long I
cannot tell. That depends upon another; and he is a man, and a
merchant, and a Mayor, and one who has the first right to my
affections.
Seriously, _mon ami_, I am not so light-hearted as I may seem to be
from this. I have come here in consequence of hearing of the death
of your wife—whom you used to think of as dead so many years
before! Poor woman, she seems to have been a sufferer, though
uncomplaining, and though weak in intellect not an imbecile. I am
glad you acted fairly by her. As soon as I knew she was no more, it
was brought home to me very forcibly by my conscience that I ought
to endeavour to disperse the shade which my _étourderie_ flung over
my name, by asking you to carry out your promise to me. I hope you
are of the same mind, and that you will take steps to this end. As,
however, I did not know how you were situated, or what had happened
since our separation, I decided to come and establish myself here
before communicating with you.
You probably feel as I do about this. I shall be able to see you in
a day or two. Till then, farewell.—Yours,
LUCETTA.
_P.S._—I was unable to keep my appointment to meet you for a moment or
two in passing through Casterbridge the other day. My plans were
altered by a family event, which it will surprise you to hear of.
Henchard had already heard that High-Place Hall was being prepared for
a tenant. He said with a puzzled air to the first person he
encountered, “Who is coming to live at the Hall?”
“A lady of the name of Templeman, I believe, sir,” said his informant.
Henchard thought it over. “Lucetta is related to her, I suppose,” he
said to himself. “Yes, I must put her in her proper position,
undoubtedly.”
It was by no means with the oppression that would once have accompanied
the thought that he regarded the moral necessity now; it was, indeed,
with interest, if not warmth. His bitter disappointment at finding
Elizabeth-Jane to be none of his, and himself a childless man, had left
an emotional void in Henchard that he unconsciously craved to fill. In
this frame of mind, though without strong feeling, he had strolled up
the alley and into High-Place Hall by the postern at which Elizabeth
had so nearly encountered him. He had gone on thence into the court,
and inquired of a man whom he saw unpacking china from a crate if Miss
Le Sueur was living there. Miss Le Sueur had been the name under which
he had known Lucetta—or “Lucette,” as she had called herself at that
time.
The man replied in the negative; that Miss Templeman only had come.
Henchard went away, concluding that Lucetta had not as yet settled in.
He was in this interested stage of the inquiry when he witnessed
Elizabeth-Jane’s departure the next day. On hearing her announce the
address there suddenly took possession of him the strange thought that
Lucetta and Miss Templeman were one and the same person, for he could
recall that in her season of intimacy with him the name of the rich
relative whom he had deemed somewhat a mythical personage had been
given as Templeman. Though he was not a fortune-hunter, the possibility
that Lucetta had been sublimed into a lady of means by some munificent
testament on the part of this relative lent a charm to her image which
it might not otherwise have acquired. He was getting on towards the
dead level of middle age, when material things increasingly possess the
mind.
But Henchard was not left long in suspense. Lucetta was rather addicted
to scribbling, as had been shown by the torrent of letters after the
_fiasco_ in their marriage arrangements, and hardly had Elizabeth gone
away when another note came to the Mayor’s house from High-Place Hall.
“I am in residence,” she said, “and comfortable, though getting here
has been a wearisome undertaking. You probably know what I am going to
tell you, or do you not? My good Aunt Templeman, the banker’s widow,
whose very existence you used to doubt, much more her affluence, has
lately died, and bequeathed some of her property to me. I will not
enter into details except to say that I have taken her name—as a means
of escape from mine, and its wrongs.
“I am now my own mistress, and have chosen to reside in Casterbridge—to
be tenant of High-Place Hall, that at least you may be put to no
trouble if you wish to see me. My first intention was to keep you in
ignorance of the changes in my life till you should meet me in the
street; but I have thought better of this.
“You probably are aware of my arrangement with your daughter, and have
doubtless laughed at the—what shall I call it?—practical joke (in all
affection) of my getting her to live with me. But my first meeting with
her was purely an accident. Do you see, Michael, partly why I have done
it?—why, to give you an excuse for coming here as if to visit _her_,
and thus to form my acquaintance naturally. She is a dear, good girl,
and she thinks you have treated her with undue severity. You may have
done so in your haste, but not deliberately, I am sure. As the result
has been to bring her to me I am not disposed to upbraid you.—In haste,
yours always,
“LUCETTA.”
The excitement which these announcements produced in Henchard’s gloomy
soul was to him most pleasurable. He sat over his dining-table long and
dreamily, and by an almost mechanical transfer the sentiments which had
run to waste since his estrangement from Elizabeth-Jane and Donald
Farfrae gathered around Lucetta before they had grown dry. She was
plainly in a very coming-on disposition for marriage. But what else
could a poor woman be who had given her time and her heart to him so
thoughtlessly, at that former time, as to lose her credit by it?
Probably conscience no less than affection had brought her here. On the
whole he did not blame her.
“The artful little woman!” he said, smiling (with reference to
Lucetta’s adroit and pleasant manœuvre with Elizabeth-Jane).
To feel that he would like to see Lucetta was with Henchard to start
for her house. He put on his hat and went. It was between eight and
nine o’clock when he reached her door. The answer brought him was that
Miss Templeman was engaged for that evening; but that she would be
happy to see him the next day.
“That’s rather like giving herself airs!” he thought. “And considering
what we—” But after all, she plainly had not expected him, and he took
the refusal quietly. Nevertheless he resolved not to go next day.
“These cursed women—there’s not an inch of straight grain in ’em!” he
said.
Let us follow the train of Mr. Henchard’s thought as if it were a clue
line, and view the interior of High-Place Hall on this particular
evening.
On Elizabeth-Jane’s arrival she had been phlegmatically asked by an
elderly woman to go upstairs and take off her things. She replied with
great earnestness that she would not think of giving that trouble, and
on the instant divested herself of her bonnet and cloak in the passage.
She was then conducted to the first floor on the landing, and left to
find her way further alone.
The room disclosed was prettily furnished as a boudoir or small
drawing-room, and on a sofa with two cylindrical pillows reclined a
dark-haired, large-eyed, pretty woman, of unmistakably French
extraction on one side or the other. She was probably some years older
than Elizabeth, and had a sparkling light in her eye. In front of the
sofa was a small table, with a pack of cards scattered upon it faces
upward.
The attitude had been so full of abandonment that she bounded up like a
spring on hearing the door open.
Perceiving that it was Elizabeth she lapsed into ease, and came across
to her with a reckless skip that innate grace only prevented from being
boisterous.
“Why, you are late,” she said, taking hold of Elizabeth-Jane’s hands.
“There were so many little things to put up.”
“And you seem dead-alive and tired. Let me try to enliven you by some
wonderful tricks I have learnt, to kill time. Sit there and don’t
move.” She gathered up the pack of cards, pulled the table in front of
her, and began to deal them rapidly, telling Elizabeth to choose some.
“Well, have you chosen?” she asked flinging down the last card.
“No,” stammered Elizabeth, arousing herself from a reverie. “I forgot,
I was thinking of—you, and me—and how strange it is that I am here.”
Miss Templeman looked at Elizabeth-Jane with interest, and laid down
the cards. “Ah! never mind,” she said. “I’ll lie here while you sit by
me; and we’ll talk.”
Elizabeth drew up silently to the head of the sofa, but with obvious
pleasure. It could be seen that though in years she was younger than
her entertainer in manner and general vision she seemed more of the
sage. Miss Templeman deposited herself on the sofa in her former
flexuous position, and throwing her arm above her brow—somewhat in the
pose of a well-known conception of Titian’s—talked up at Elizabeth-Jane
invertedly across her forehead and arm.
“I must tell you something,” she said. “I wonder if you have suspected
it. I have only been mistress of a large house and fortune a little
while.”
“Oh—only a little while?” murmured Elizabeth-Jane, her countenance
slightly falling.
“As a girl I lived about in garrison towns and elsewhere with my
father, till I was quite flighty and unsettled. He was an officer in
the army. I should not have mentioned this had I not thought it best
you should know the truth.”
“Yes, yes.” She looked thoughtfully round the room—at the little square
piano with brass inlayings, at the window-curtains, at the lamp, at the
fair and dark kings and queens on the card-table, and finally at the
inverted face of Lucetta Templeman, whose large lustrous eyes had such
an odd effect upside down.
Elizabeth’s mind ran on acquirements to an almost morbid degree. “You
speak French and Italian fluently, no doubt,” she said. “I have not
been able to get beyond a wretched bit of Latin yet.”
“Well, for that matter, in my native isle speaking French does not go
for much. It is rather the other way.”