The Mayor of Casterbridge
hired brougham, whilst he went across the country to a certain group of
wheat and barley ricks a few miles off, telling her the hour at which
he might be expected the same evening. This accounted for her trotting
out to meet him after their separation of four hours.
By a strenuous effort, after leaving Henchard she calmed herself in
readiness to receive Donald at High-Place Hall when he came on from his
lodgings. One supreme fact empowered her to this, the sense that, come
what would, she had secured him. Half-an-hour after her arrival he
walked in, and she met him with a relieved gladness, which a month’s
perilous absence could not have intensified.
“There is one thing I have not done; and yet it is important,” she said
earnestly, when she had finished talking about the adventure with the
bull. “That is, broken the news of our marriage to my dear
Elizabeth-Jane.”
“Ah, and you have not?” he said thoughtfully. “I gave her a lift from
the barn homewards; but I did not tell her either; for I thought she
might have heard of it in the town, and was keeping back her
congratulations from shyness, and all that.”
“She can hardly have heard of it. But I’ll find out; I’ll go to her
now. And, Donald, you don’t mind her living on with me just the same as
before? She is so quiet and unassuming.”
“O no, indeed I don’t,” Farfrae answered with, perhaps, a faint
awkwardness. “But I wonder if she would care to?”
“O yes!” said Lucetta eagerly. “I am sure she would like to. Besides,
poor thing, she has no other home.”
Farfrae looked at her and saw that she did not suspect the secret of
her more reserved friend. He liked her all the better for the
blindness. “Arrange as you like with her by all means,” he said. “It is
I who have come to your house, not you to mine.”
“I’ll run and speak to her,” said Lucetta.
When she got upstairs to Elizabeth-Jane’s room the latter had taken off
her out-door things, and was resting over a book. Lucetta found in a
moment that she had not yet learnt the news.
“I did not come down to you, Miss Templeman,” she said simply. “I was
coming to ask if you had quite recovered from your fright, but I found
you had a visitor. What are the bells ringing for, I wonder? And the
band, too, is playing. Somebody must be married; or else they are
practising for Christmas.”
Lucetta uttered a vague “Yes,” and seating herself by the other young
woman looked musingly at her. “What a lonely creature you are,” she
presently said; “never knowing what’s going on, or what people are
talking about everywhere with keen interest. You should get out, and
gossip about as other women do, and then you wouldn’t be obliged to ask
me a question of that kind. Well, now, I have something to tell you.”
Elizabeth-Jane said she was so glad, and made herself receptive.
“I must go rather a long way back,” said Lucetta, the difficulty of
explaining herself satisfactorily to the pondering one beside her
growing more apparent at each syllable. “You remember that trying case
of conscience I told you of some time ago—about the first lover and the
second lover?” She let out in jerky phrases a leading word or two of
the story she had told.
“O yes—I remember the story of _your friend_,” said Elizabeth drily,
regarding the irises of Lucetta’s eyes as though to catch their exact
shade. “The two lovers—the old one and the new: how she wanted to marry
the second, but felt she ought to marry the first; so that the good she
would have done she did not, and the evil that she would not, that she
did—exactly like the Apostle Paul.”
“O no; she didn’t do evil exactly!” said Lucetta hastily.
“But you said that she—or as I may say _you_”—answered Elizabeth,
dropping the mask, “were in honour and conscience bound to marry the
first?”
Lucetta’s blush at being seen through came and went again before she
replied anxiously, “You will never breathe this, will you,
Elizabeth-Jane?”
“Certainly not, if you say not.
“Then I will tell you that the case is more complicated—worse, in
fact—than it seemed in my story. I and the first man were thrown
together in a strange way, and felt that we ought to be united, as the
world had talked of us. He was a widower, as he supposed. He had not
heard of his first wife for many years. But the wife returned, and we
parted. She is now dead, and the husband comes paying me addresses
again, saying, ‘Now we’ll complete our purposes.’ But, Elizabeth-Jane,
all this amounts to a new courtship of me by him; I was absolved from
all vows by the return of the other woman.”
“Have you not lately renewed your promise?” said the younger with quiet
surmise. She had divined Man Number One.
“That was wrung from me by a threat.”
“Yes, it was. But I think when any one gets coupled up with a man in
the past so unfortunately as you have done she ought to become his wife
if she can, even if she were not the sinning party.”
Lucetta’s countenance lost its sparkle. “He turned out to be a man I
should be afraid to marry,” she pleaded. “Really afraid! And it was not
till after my renewed promise that I knew it.”
“Then there is only one course left to honesty. You must remain a
single woman.”
“But think again! Do consider——”
“I am certain,” interrupted her companion hardily. “I have guessed very
well who the man is. My father; and I say it is him or nobody for you.”
Any suspicion of impropriety was to Elizabeth-Jane like a red rag to a
bull. Her craving for correctness of procedure was, indeed, almost
vicious. Owing to her early troubles with regard to her mother a
semblance of irregularity had terrors for her which those whose names
are safeguarded from suspicion know nothing of. “You ought to marry Mr.
Henchard or nobody—certainly not another man!” she went on with a
quivering lip in whose movement two passions shared.
“I don’t admit that!” said Lucetta passionately.
“Admit it or not, it is true!”
Lucetta covered her eyes with her right hand, as if she could plead no
more, holding out her left to Elizabeth-Jane.
“Why, you _have_ married him!” cried the latter, jumping up with
pleasure after a glance at Lucetta’s fingers. “When did you do it? Why
did you not tell me, instead of teasing me like this? How very
honourable of you! He did treat my mother badly once, it seems, in a
moment of intoxication. And it is true that he is stern sometimes. But
you will rule him entirely, I am sure, with your beauty and wealth and
accomplishments. You are the woman he will adore, and we shall all
three be happy together now!”
“O, my Elizabeth-Jane!” cried Lucetta distressfully. “’Tis somebody
else that I have married! I was so desperate—so afraid of being forced
to anything else—so afraid of revelations that would quench his love
for me, that I resolved to do it offhand, come what might, and purchase
a week of happiness at any cost!”
“You—have—married Mr. Farfrae!” cried Elizabeth-Jane, in Nathan tones
Lucetta bowed. She had recovered herself.
“The bells are ringing on that account,” she said. “My husband is
downstairs. He will live here till a more suitable house is ready for
us; and I have told him that I want you to stay with me just as
before.”
“Let me think of it alone,” the girl quickly replied, corking up the
turmoil of her feeling with grand control.
“You shall. I am sure we shall be happy together.”
Lucetta departed to join Donald below, a vague uneasiness floating over
her joy at seeing him quite at home there. Not on account of her friend
Elizabeth did she feel it: for of the bearings of Elizabeth-Jane’s
emotions she had not the least suspicion; but on Henchard’s alone.
Now the instant decision of Susan Henchard’s daughter was to dwell in
that house no more. Apart from her estimate of the propriety of
Lucetta’s conduct, Farfrae had been so nearly her avowed lover that she
felt she could not abide there.
It was still early in the evening when she hastily put on her things
and went out. In a few minutes, knowing the ground, she had found a
suitable lodging, and arranged to enter it that night. Returning and
entering noiselessly she took off her pretty dress and arrayed herself
in a plain one, packing up the other to keep as her best; for she would
have to be very economical now. She wrote a note to leave for Lucetta,
who was closely shut up in the drawing-room with Farfrae; and then
Elizabeth-Jane called a man with a wheel-barrow; and seeing her boxes
put into it she trotted off down the street to her rooms. They were in
the street in which Henchard lived, and almost opposite his door.
Here she sat down and considered the means of subsistence. The little
annual sum settled on her by her stepfather would keep body and soul
together. A wonderful skill in netting of all sorts—acquired in
childhood by making seines in Newson’s home—might serve her in good
stead; and her studies, which were pursued unremittingly, might serve
her in still better.
By this time the marriage that had taken place was known throughout
Casterbridge; had been discussed noisily on kerbstones, confidentially
behind counters, and jovially at the Three Mariners. Whether Farfrae
would sell his business and set up for a gentleman on his wife’s money,
or whether he would show independence enough to stick to his trade in
spite of his brilliant alliance, was a great point of interest.
XXXI.
The retort of the furmity-woman before the magistrates had spread; and
in four-and-twenty hours there was not a person in Casterbridge who
remained unacquainted with the story of Henchard’s mad freak at
Weydon-Priors Fair, long years before. The amends he had made in after
life were lost sight of in the dramatic glare of the original act. Had
the incident been well known of old and always, it might by this time
have grown to be lightly regarded as the rather tall wild oat, but
well-nigh the single one, of a young man with whom the steady and
mature (if somewhat headstrong) burgher of to-day had scarcely a point
in common. But the act having lain as dead and buried ever since, the
interspace of years was unperceived; and the black spot of his youth
wore the aspect of a recent crime.
Small as the police-court incident had been in itself, it formed the
edge or turn in the incline of Henchard’s fortunes. On that day—almost
at that minute—he passed the ridge of prosperity and honour, and began
to descend rapidly on the other side. It was strange how soon he sank
in esteem. Socially he had received a startling fillip downwards; and,
having already lost commercial buoyancy from rash transactions, the
velocity of his descent in both aspects became accelerated every hour.
He now gazed more at the pavements and less at the house-fronts when he
walked about; more at the feet and leggings of men, and less into the
pupils of their eyes with the blazing regard which formerly had made
them blink.
New events combined to undo him. It had been a bad year for others
besides himself, and the heavy failure of a debtor whom he had trusted
generously completed the overthrow of his tottering credit. And now, in
his desperation, he failed to preserve that strict correspondence
between bulk and sample which is the soul of commerce in grain. For
this, one of his men was mainly to blame; that worthy, in his great
unwisdom, having picked over the sample of an enormous quantity of
second-rate corn which Henchard had in hand, and removed the pinched,
blasted, and smutted grains in great numbers. The produce if honestly
offered would have created no scandal; but the blunder of
misrepresentation, coming at such a moment, dragged Henchard’s name
into the ditch.
The details of his failure were of the ordinary kind. One day
Elizabeth-Jane was passing the King’s Arms, when she saw people