The Mayor of Casterbridge
fervid that she shrank somewhat, notwithstanding that she knew him so
well.
“I am greatly obliged to you for all that,” said she, rather with an
air of speaking ritual. The stint of reciprocal feeling was perceived,
and Henchard showed chagrin at once—nobody was more quick to show that
than he.
“You may be obliged or not for’t. Though the things I say may not have
the polish of what you’ve lately learnt to expect for the first time in
your life, they are real, my lady Lucetta.”
“That’s rather a rude way of speaking to me,” pouted Lucetta, with
stormy eyes.
“Not at all!” replied Henchard hotly. “But there, there, I don’t wish
to quarrel with ’ee. I come with an honest proposal for silencing your
Jersey enemies, and you ought to be thankful.”
“How can you speak so!” she answered, firing quickly. “Knowing that my
only crime was the indulging in a foolish girl’s passion for you with
too little regard for correctness, and that I was what I call innocent
all the time they called me guilty, you ought not to be so cutting! I
suffered enough at that worrying time, when you wrote to tell me of
your wife’s return and my consequent dismissal, and if I am a little
independent now, surely the privilege is due to me!”
“Yes, it is,” he said. “But it is not by what is, in this life, but by
what appears, that you are judged; and I therefore think you ought to
accept me—for your own good name’s sake. What is known in your native
Jersey may get known here.”
“How you keep on about Jersey! I am English!”
“Yes, yes. Well, what do you say to my proposal?”
For the first time in their acquaintance Lucetta had the move; and yet
she was backward. “For the present let things be,” she said with some
embarrassment. “Treat me as an acquaintance, and I’ll treat you as one.
Time will—” She stopped; and he said nothing to fill the gap for
awhile, there being no pressure of half acquaintance to drive them into
speech if they were not minded for it.
“That’s the way the wind blows, is it?” he said at last grimly, nodding
an affirmative to his own thoughts.
A yellow flood of reflected sunlight filled the room for a few
instants. It was produced by the passing of a load of newly trussed hay
from the country, in a waggon marked with Farfrae’s name. Beside it
rode Farfrae himself on horseback. Lucetta’s face became—as a woman’s
face becomes when the man she loves rises upon her gaze like an
apparition.
A turn of the eye by Henchard, a glance from the window, and the secret
of her inaccessibility would have been revealed. But Henchard in
estimating her tone was looking down so plumb-straight that he did not
note the warm consciousness upon Lucetta’s face.
“I shouldn’t have thought it—I shouldn’t have thought it of women!” he
said emphatically by-and-by, rising and shaking himself into activity;
while Lucetta was so anxious to divert him from any suspicion of the
truth that she asked him to be in no hurry. Bringing him some apples
she insisted upon paring one for him.
He would not take it. “No, no; such is not for me,” he said drily, and
moved to the door. At going out he turned his eye upon her.
“You came to live in Casterbridge entirely on my account,” he said.
“Yet now you are here you won’t have anything to say to my offer!”
He had hardly gone down the staircase when she dropped upon the sofa
and jumped up again in a fit of desperation. “I will love him!” she
cried passionately; “as for _him_—he’s hot-tempered and stern, and it
would be madness to bind myself to him knowing that. I won’t be a slave
to the past—I’ll love where I choose!”
Yet having decided to break away from Henchard one might have supposed
her capable of aiming higher than Farfrae. But Lucetta reasoned
nothing: she feared hard words from the people with whom she had been
earlier associated; she had no relatives left; and with native
lightness of heart took kindly to what fate offered.
Elizabeth-Jane, surveying the position of Lucetta between her two
lovers from the crystalline sphere of a straightforward mind, did not
fail to perceive that her father, as she called him, and Donald Farfrae
became more desperately enamoured of her friend every day. On Farfrae’s
side it was the unforced passion of youth. On Henchard’s the
artificially stimulated coveting of maturer age.
The pain she experienced from the almost absolute obliviousness to her
existence that was shown by the pair of them became at times half
dissipated by her sense of its humourousness. When Lucetta had pricked
her finger they were as deeply concerned as if she were dying; when she
herself had been seriously sick or in danger they uttered a
conventional word of sympathy at the news, and forgot all about it
immediately. But, as regarded Henchard, this perception of hers also
caused her some filial grief; she could not help asking what she had
done to be neglected so, after the professions of solicitude he had
made. As regarded Farfrae, she thought, after honest reflection, that
it was quite natural. What was she beside Lucetta?—as one of the
“meaner beauties of the night,” when the moon had risen in the skies.
She had learnt the lesson of renunciation, and was as familiar with the
wreck of each day’s wishes as with the diurnal setting of the sun. If
her earthly career had taught her few book philosophies it had at least
well practised her in this. Yet her experience had consisted less in a
series of pure disappointments than in a series of substitutions.
Continually it had happened that what she had desired had not been
granted her, and that what had been granted her she had not desired. So
she viewed with an approach to equanimity the now cancelled days when
Donald had been her undeclared lover, and wondered what unwished-for
thing Heaven might send her in place of him.
XXVI.
It chanced that on a fine spring morning Henchard and Farfrae met in
the chestnut-walk which ran along the south wall of the town. Each had
just come out from his early breakfast, and there was not another soul
near. Henchard was reading a letter from Lucetta, sent in answer to a
note from him, in which she made some excuse for not immediately
granting him a second interview that he had desired.
Donald had no wish to enter into conversation with his former friend on
their present constrained terms; neither would he pass him in scowling
silence. He nodded, and Henchard did the same. They receded from each
other several paces when a voice cried “Farfrae!” It was Henchard’s,
who stood regarding him.
“Do you remember,” said Henchard, as if it were the presence of the
thought and not of the man which made him speak, “do you remember my
story of that second woman—who suffered for her thoughtless intimacy
with me?”
“I do,” said Farfrae.
“Do you remember my telling ’ee how it all began and how it ended?
“Yes.”
“Well, I have offered to marry her now that I can; but she won’t marry
me. Now what would you think of her—I put it to you?”
“Well, ye owe her nothing more now,” said Farfrae heartily.
“It is true,” said Henchard, and went on.
That he had looked up from a letter to ask his questions completely
shut out from Farfrae’s mind all vision of Lucetta as the culprit.
Indeed, her present position was so different from that of the young
woman of Henchard’s story as of itself to be sufficient to blind him
absolutely to her identity. As for Henchard, he was reassured by
Farfrae’s words and manner against a suspicion which had crossed his
mind. They were not those of a conscious rival.
Yet that there was rivalry by some one he was firmly persuaded. He
could feel it in the air around Lucetta, see it in the turn of her pen.
There was an antagonistic force in exercise, so that when he had tried
to hang near her he seemed standing in a refluent current. That it was
not innate caprice he was more and more certain. Her windows gleamed as
if they did not want him; her curtains seem to hang slily, as if they
screened an ousting presence. To discover whose presence that
was—whether really Farfrae’s after all, or another’s—he exerted himself
to the utmost to see her again; and at length succeeded.
At the interview, when she offered him tea, he made it a point to
launch a cautious inquiry if she knew Mr. Farfrae.
O yes, she knew him, she declared; she could not help knowing almost
everybody in Casterbridge, living in such a gazebo over the centre and
arena of the town.
“Pleasant young fellow,” said Henchard.
“Yes,” said Lucetta.
“We both know him,” said kind Elizabeth-Jane, to relieve her
companion’s divined embarrassment.
There was a knock at the door; literally, three full knocks and a
little one at the end.
“That kind of knock means half-and-half—somebody between gentle and
simple,” said the corn-merchant to himself. “I shouldn’t wonder
therefore if it is he.” In a few seconds surely enough Donald walked
in.
Lucetta was full of little fidgets and flutters, which increased
Henchard’s suspicions without affording any special proof of their
correctness. He was well-nigh ferocious at the sense of the queer
situation in which he stood towards this woman. One who had reproached
him for deserting her when calumniated, who had urged claims upon his
consideration on that account, who had lived waiting for him, who at
the first decent opportunity had come to ask him to rectify, by making
her his, the false position into which she had placed herself for his
sake; such she had been. And now he sat at her tea-table eager to gain
her attention, and in his amatory rage feeling the other man present to
be a villain, just as any young fool of a lover might feel.
They sat stiffly side by side at the darkening table, like some Tuscan
painting of the two disciples supping at Emmaus. Lucetta, forming the
third and haloed figure, was opposite them; Elizabeth-Jane, being out
of the game, and out of the group, could observe all from afar, like
the evangelist who had to write it down: that there were long spaces of
taciturnity, when all exterior circumstances were subdued to the touch
of spoons and china, the click of a heel on the pavement under the
window, the passing of a wheelbarrow or cart, the whistling of the
carter, the gush of water into householders’ buckets at the town-pump
opposite, the exchange of greetings among their neighbours, and the
rattle of the yokes by which they carried off their evening supply.
“More bread-and-butter?” said Lucetta to Henchard and Farfrae equally,
holding out between them a plateful of long slices. Henchard took a
slice by one end and Donald by the other; each feeling certain he was
the man meant; neither let go, and the slice came in two.
“Oh—I am so sorry!” cried Lucetta, with a nervous titter. Farfrae tried
to laugh; but he was too much in love to see the incident in any but a
tragic light.
“How ridiculous of all three of them!” said Elizabeth to herself.
Henchard left the house with a ton of conjecture, though without a
grain of proof, that the counterattraction was Farfrae; and therefore
he would not make up his mind. Yet to Elizabeth-Jane it was plain as
the town-pump that Donald and Lucetta were incipient lovers. More than
once, in spite of her care, Lucetta had been unable to restrain her
glance from flitting across into Farfrae’s eyes like a bird to its
nest. But Henchard was constructed upon too large a scale to discern
such minutiæ as these by an evening light, which to him were as the
notes of an insect that lie above the compass of the human ear.
But he was disturbed. And the sense of occult rivalry in suitorship was
so much superadded to the palpable rivalry of their business lives. To
the coarse materiality of that rivalry it added an inflaming soul.
The thus vitalized antagonism took the form of action by Henchard