The Mayor of Casterbridge
wheels and a tramp of horses ruling the sound as earlier, there was
nothing but the shuffle of many feet. All the implements were gone; all
the farmers; all the moneyed class. The character of the town’s trading
had changed from bulk to multiplicity and pence were handled now as
pounds had been handled earlier in the day.
Lucetta and Elizabeth looked out upon this, for though it was night and
the street lamps were lighted, they had kept their shutters unclosed.
In the faint blink of the fire they spoke more freely.
“Your father was distant with you,” said Lucetta.
“Yes.” And having forgotten the momentary mystery of Henchard’s seeming
speech to Lucetta she continued, “It is because he does not think I am
respectable. I have tried to be so more than you can imagine, but in
vain! My mother’s separation from my father was unfortunate for me. You
don’t know what it is to have shadows like that upon your life.”
Lucetta seemed to wince. “I do not—of that kind precisely,” she said,
“but you may feel a—sense of disgrace—shame—in other ways.”
“Have you ever had any such feeling?” said the younger innocently.
“O no,” said Lucetta quickly. “I was thinking of—what happens sometimes
when women get themselves in strange positions in the eyes of the world
from no fault of their own.”
“It must make them very unhappy afterwards.”
“It makes them anxious; for might not other women despise them?”
“Not altogether despise them. Yet not quite like or respect them.”
Lucetta winced again. Her past was by no means secure from
investigation, even in Casterbridge. For one thing Henchard had never
returned to her the cloud of letters she had written and sent him in
her first excitement. Possibly they were destroyed; but she could have
wished that they had never been written.
The rencounter with Farfrae and his bearings towards Lucetta had made
the reflective Elizabeth more observant of her brilliant and amiable
companion. A few days afterwards, when her eyes met Lucetta’s as the
latter was going out, she somehow knew that Miss Templeman was
nourishing a hope of seeing the attractive Scotchman. The fact was
printed large all over Lucetta’s cheeks and eyes to any one who could
read her as Elizabeth-Jane was beginning to do. Lucetta passed on and
closed the street door.
A seer’s spirit took possession of Elizabeth, impelling her to sit down
by the fire and divine events so surely from data already her own that
they could be held as witnessed. She followed Lucetta thus mentally—saw
her encounter Donald somewhere as if by chance—saw him wear his special
look when meeting women, with an added intensity because this one was
Lucetta. She depicted his impassioned manner; beheld the indecision of
both between their lothness to separate and their desire not to be
observed; depicted their shaking of hands; how they probably parted
with frigidity in their general contour and movements, only in the
smaller features showing the spark of passion, thus invisible to all
but themselves. This discerning silent witch had not done thinking of
these things when Lucetta came noiselessly behind her and made her
start.
It was all true as she had pictured—she could have sworn it. Lucetta
had a heightened luminousness in her eye over and above the advanced
colour of her cheeks.
“You’ve seen Mr. Farfrae,” said Elizabeth demurely.
“Yes,” said Lucetta. “How did you know?”
She knelt down on the hearth and took her friend’s hands excitedly in
her own. But after all she did not say when or how she had seen him or
what he had said.
That night she became restless; in the morning she was feverish; and at
breakfast-time she told her companion that she had something on her
mind—something which concerned a person in whom she was interested
much. Elizabeth was earnest to listen and sympathize.
“This person—a lady—once admired a man much—very much,” she said
tentatively.
“Ah,” said Elizabeth-Jane.
“They were intimate—rather. He did not think so deeply of her as she
did of him. But in an impulsive moment, purely out of reparation, he
proposed to make her his wife. She agreed. But there was an unsuspected
hitch in the proceedings; though she had been so far compromised with
him that she felt she could never belong to another man, as a pure
matter of conscience, even if she should wish to. After that they were
much apart, heard nothing of each other for a long time, and she felt
her life quite closed up for her.”
“Ah—poor girl!”
“She suffered much on account of him; though I should add that he could
not altogether be blamed for what had happened. At last the obstacle
which separated them was providentially removed; and he came to marry
her.”
“How delightful!”
“But in the interval she—my poor friend—had seen a man, she liked
better than him. Now comes the point: Could she in honour dismiss the
first?”
“A new man she liked better—that’s bad!”
“Yes,” said Lucetta, looking pained at a boy who was swinging the town
pump-handle. “It is bad! Though you must remember that she was forced
into an equivocal position with the first man by an accident—that he
was not so well educated or refined as the second, and that she had
discovered some qualities in the first that rendered him less desirable
as a husband than she had at first thought him to be.”
“I cannot answer,” said Elizabeth-Jane thoughtfully. “It is so
difficult. It wants a Pope to settle that!”
“You prefer not to perhaps?” Lucetta showed in her appealing tone how
much she leant on Elizabeth’s judgment.
“Yes, Miss Templeman,” admitted Elizabeth. “I would rather not say.”
Nevertheless, Lucetta seemed relieved by the simple fact of having
opened out the situation a little, and was slowly convalescent of her
headache. “Bring me a looking-glass. How do I appear to people?” she
said languidly.
“Well—a little worn,” answered Elizabeth, eyeing her as a critic eyes a
doubtful painting; fetching the glass she enabled Lucetta to survey
herself in it, which Lucetta anxiously did.
“I wonder if I wear well, as times go!” she observed after a while.
“Yes—fairly.
“Where am I worst?”
“Under your eyes—I notice a little brownness there.”
“Yes. That is my worst place, I know. How many years more do you think
I shall last before I get hopelessly plain?”
There was something curious in the way in which Elizabeth, though the
younger, had come to play the part of experienced sage in these
discussions. “It may be five years,” she said judicially. “Or, with a
quiet life, as many as ten. With no love you might calculate on ten.”
Lucetta seemed to reflect on this as on an unalterable, impartial
verdict. She told Elizabeth-Jane no more of the past attachment she had
roughly adumbrated as the experiences of a third person; and Elizabeth,
who in spite of her philosophy was very tender-hearted, sighed that
night in bed at the thought that her pretty, rich Lucetta did not treat
her to the full confidence of names and dates in her confessions. For
by the “she” of Lucetta’s story Elizabeth had not been beguiled.
XXV.
The next phase of the supersession of Henchard in Lucetta’s heart was
an experiment in calling on her performed by Farfrae with some apparent
trepidation. Conventionally speaking he conversed with both Miss
Templeman and her companion; but in fact it was rather that Elizabeth
sat invisible in the room. Donald appeared not to see her at all, and
answered her wise little remarks with curtly indifferent monosyllables,
his looks and faculties hanging on the woman who could boast of a more
Protean variety in her phases, moods, opinions, and also principles,
than could Elizabeth. Lucetta had persisted in dragging her into the
circle; but she had remained like an awkward third point which that
circle would not touch.
Susan Henchard’s daughter bore up against the frosty ache of the
treatment, as she had borne up under worse things, and contrived as
soon as possible to get out of the inharmonious room without being
missed. The Scotchman seemed hardly the same Farfrae who had danced
with her and walked with her in a delicate poise between love and
friendship—that period in the history of a love when alone it can be
said to be unalloyed with pain.
She stoically looked from her bedroom window, and contemplated her fate
as if it were written on the top of the church-tower hard by. “Yes,”
she said at last, bringing down her palm upon the sill with a pat:
“_He_ is the second man of that story she told me!”
All this time Henchard’s smouldering sentiments towards Lucetta had
been fanned into higher and higher inflammation by the circumstances of
the case. He was discovering that the young woman for whom he once felt
a pitying warmth which had been almost chilled out of him by
reflection, was, when now qualified with a slight inaccessibility and a
more matured beauty, the very being to make him satisfied with life.
Day after day proved to him, by her silence, that it was no use to
think of bringing her round by holding aloof; so he gave in, and called
upon her again, Elizabeth-Jane being absent.
He crossed the room to her with a heavy tread of some awkwardness, his
strong, warm gaze upon her—like the sun beside the moon in comparison
with Farfrae’s modest look—and with something of a hail-fellow bearing,
as, indeed, was not unnatural. But she seemed so transubstantiated by
her change of position, and held out her hand to him in such cool
friendship, that he became deferential, and sat down with a perceptible
loss of power. He understood but little of fashion in dress, yet enough
to feel himself inadequate in appearance beside her whom he had
hitherto been dreaming of as almost his property. She said something
very polite about his being good enough to call. This caused him to
recover balance. He looked her oddly in the face, losing his awe.
“Why, of course I have called, Lucetta,” he said. “What does that
nonsense mean? You know I couldn’t have helped myself if I had
wished—that is, if I had any kindness at all. I’ve called to say that I
am ready, as soon as custom will permit, to give you my name in return
for your devotion and what you lost by it in thinking too little of
yourself and too much of me; to say that you can fix the day or month,
with my full consent, whenever in your opinion it would be seemly: you
know more of these things than I.”
“It is full early yet,” she said evasively.
“Yes, yes; I suppose it is. But you know, Lucetta, I felt directly my
poor ill-used Susan died, and when I could not bear the idea of
marrying again, that after what had happened between us it was my duty
not to let any unnecessary delay occur before putting things to rights.
Still, I wouldn’t call in a hurry, because—well, you can guess how this
money you’ve come into made me feel.” His voice slowly fell; he was
conscious that in this room his accents and manner wore a roughness not
observable in the street. He looked about the room at the novel
hangings and ingenious furniture with which she had surrounded herself.
“Upon my life I didn’t know such furniture as this could be bought in
Casterbridge,” he said.
“Nor can it be,” said she. “Nor will it till fifty years more of
civilization have passed over the town. It took a waggon and four
horses to get it here.”
“H’m. It looks as if you were living on capital.”
“O no, I am not.”
“So much the better. But the fact is, your setting up like this makes
my beaming towards you rather awkward.”
“Why?”
An answer was not really needed, and he did not furnish one. “Well,” he
went on, “there’s nobody in the world I would have wished to see enter
into this wealth before you, Lucetta, and nobody, I am sure, who will
become it more.” He turned to her with congratulatory admiration so