The Mayor of Casterbridge
bustling in and out more than usual where there was no market. A
bystander informed her, with some surprise at her ignorance, that it
was a meeting of the Commissioners under Mr. Henchard’s bankruptcy. She
felt quite tearful, and when she heard that he was present in the hotel
she wished to go in and see him, but was advised not to intrude that
day.
The room in which debtor and creditors had assembled was a front one,
and Henchard, looking out of the window, had caught sight of
Elizabeth-Jane through the wire blind. His examination had closed, and
the creditors were leaving. The appearance of Elizabeth threw him into
a reverie, till, turning his face from the window, and towering above
all the rest, he called their attention for a moment more. His
countenance had somewhat changed from its flush of prosperity; the
black hair and whiskers were the same as ever, but a film of ash was
over the rest.
“Gentlemen,” he said, “over and above the assets that we’ve been
talking about, and that appear on the balance-sheet, there be these. It
all belongs to ye, as much as everything else I’ve got, and I don’t
wish to keep it from you, not I.” Saying this, he took his gold watch
from his pocket and laid it on the table; then his purse—the yellow
canvas moneybag, such as was carried by all farmers and dealers—untying
it, and shaking the money out upon the table beside the watch. The
latter he drew back quickly for an instant, to remove the hair-guard
made and given him by Lucetta. “There, now you have all I’ve got in the
world,” he said. “And I wish for your sakes ’twas more.”
The creditors, farmers almost to a man, looked at the watch, and at the
money, and into the street; when Farmer James Everdene of Weatherbury
spoke.
“No, no, Henchard,” he said warmly. “We don’t want that. ’Tis
honourable in ye; but keep it. What do you say, neighbours—do ye
agree?”
“Ay, sure: we don’t wish it at all,” said Grower, another creditor.
“Let him keep it, of course,” murmured another in the background—a
silent, reserved young man named Boldwood; and the rest responded
unanimously.
“Well,” said the senior Commissioner, addressing Henchard, “though the
case is a desperate one, I am bound to admit that I have never met a
debtor who behaved more fairly. I’ve proved the balance-sheet to be as
honestly made out as it could possibly be; we have had no trouble;
there have been no evasions and no concealments. The rashness of
dealing which led to this unhappy situation is obvious enough; but as
far as I can see every attempt has been made to avoid wronging
anybody.”
Henchard was more affected by this than he cared to let them perceive,
and he turned aside to the window again. A general murmur of agreement
followed the Commissioner’s words, and the meeting dispersed. When they
were gone Henchard regarded the watch they had returned to him.
“’Tisn’t mine by rights,” he said to himself. “Why the devil didn’t
they take it?—I don’t want what don’t belong to me!” Moved by a
recollection he took the watch to the maker’s just opposite, sold it
there and then for what the tradesman offered, and went with the
proceeds to one among the smaller of his creditors, a cottager of
Durnover in straitened circumstances, to whom he handed the money.
When everything was ticketed that Henchard had owned, and the auctions
were in progress, there was quite a sympathetic reaction in the town,
which till then for some time past had done nothing but condemn him.
Now that Henchard’s whole career was pictured distinctly to his
neighbours, and they could see how admirably he had used his one talent
of energy to create a position of affluence out of absolutely
nothing—which was really all he could show when he came to the town as
a journeyman hay-trusser, with his wimble and knife in his basket—they
wondered and regretted his fall.
Try as she might, Elizabeth could never meet with him. She believed in
him still, though nobody else did; and she wanted to be allowed to
forgive him for his roughness to her, and to help him in his trouble.
She wrote to him; he did not reply. She then went to his house—the
great house she had lived in so happily for a time—with its front of
dun brick, vitrified here and there and its heavy sash-bars—but
Henchard was to be found there no more. The ex-Mayor had left the home
of his prosperity, and gone into Jopp’s cottage by the Priory Mill—the
sad purlieu to which he had wandered on the night of his discovery that
she was not his daughter. Thither she went.
Elizabeth thought it odd that he had fixed on this spot to retire to,
but assumed that necessity had no choice. Trees which seemed old enough
to have been planted by the friars still stood around, and the back
hatch of the original mill yet formed a cascade which had raised its
terrific roar for centuries. The cottage itself was built of old stones
from the long dismantled Priory, scraps of tracery, moulded
window-jambs, and arch-labels, being mixed in with the rubble of the
walls.
In this cottage he occupied a couple of rooms, Jopp, whom Henchard had
employed, abused, cajoled, and dismissed by turns, being the
householder. But even here her stepfather could not be seen.
“Not by his daughter?” pleaded Elizabeth.
“By nobody—at present: that’s his order,” she was informed.
Afterwards she was passing by the corn-stores and hay-barns which had
been the headquarters of his business. She knew that he ruled there no
longer; but it was with amazement that she regarded the familiar
gateway. A smear of decisive lead-coloured paint had been laid on to
obliterate Henchard’s name, though its letters dimly loomed through
like ships in a fog. Over these, in fresh white, spread the name of
Farfrae.
Abel Whittle was edging his skeleton in at the wicket, and she said,
“Mr. Farfrae is master here?”
“Yaas, Miss Henchet,” he said, “Mr. Farfrae have bought the concern and
all of we work-folk with it; and ’tis better for us than ’twas—though I
shouldn’t say that to you as a daughter-law. We work harder, but we
bain’t made afeard now. It was fear made my few poor hairs so thin! No
busting out, no slamming of doors, no meddling with yer eternal soul
and all that; and though ’tis a shilling a week less I’m the richer
man; for what’s all the world if yer mind is always in a larry, Miss
Henchet?”
The intelligence was in a general sense true; and Henchard’s stores,
which had remained in a paralyzed condition during the settlement of
his bankruptcy, were stirred into activity again when the new tenant
had possession. Thenceforward the full sacks, looped with the shining
chain, went scurrying up and down under the cat-head, hairy arms were
thrust out from the different door-ways, and the grain was hauled in;
trusses of hay were tossed anew in and out of the barns, and the
wimbles creaked; while the scales and steel-yards began to be busy
where guess-work had formerly been the rule.
XXXII.
Two bridges stood near the lower part of Casterbridge town. The first,
of weather-stained brick, was immediately at the end of High Street,
where a diverging branch from that thoroughfare ran round to the
low-lying Durnover lanes; so that the precincts of the bridge formed
the merging point of respectability and indigence. The second bridge,
of stone, was further out on the highway—in fact, fairly in the
meadows, though still within the town boundary.
These bridges had speaking countenances. Every projection in each was
worn down to obtuseness, partly by weather, more by friction from
generations of loungers, whose toes and heels had from year to year
made restless movements against these parapets, as they had stood there
meditating on the aspect of affairs. In the case of the more friable
bricks and stones even the flat faces were worn into hollows by the
same mixed mechanism. The masonry of the top was clamped with iron at
each joint; since it had been no uncommon thing for desperate men to
wrench the coping off and throw it down the river, in reckless defiance
of the magistrates.
For to this pair of bridges gravitated all the failures of the town;
those who had failed in business, in love, in sobriety, in crime. Why
the unhappy hereabout usually chose the bridges for their meditations
in preference to a railing, a gate, or a stile, was not so clear.
There was a marked difference of quality between the personages who
haunted the near bridge of brick and the personages who haunted the far
one of stone. Those of lowest character preferred the former, adjoining
the town; they did not mind the glare of the public eye. They had been
of comparatively no account during their successes; and though they
might feel dispirited, they had no particular sense of shame in their
ruin. Their hands were mostly kept in their pockets; they wore a
leather strap round their hips or knees, and boots that required a
great deal of lacing, but seemed never to get any. Instead of sighing
at their adversities they spat, and instead of saying the iron had
entered into their souls they said they were down on their luck. Jopp
in his time of distress had often stood here; so had Mother Cuxsom,
Christopher Coney, and poor Abel Whittle.
The _misérables_ who would pause on the remoter bridge were of a
politer stamp. They included bankrupts, hypochondriacs, persons who
were what is called “out of a situation” from fault or lucklessness,
the inefficient of the professional class—shabby-genteel men, who did
not know how to get rid of the weary time between breakfast and dinner,
and the yet more weary time between dinner and dark. The eye of this
species were mostly directed over the parapet upon the running water
below. A man seen there looking thus fixedly into the river was pretty
sure to be one whom the world did not treat kindly for some reason or
other. While one in straits on the townward bridge did not mind who saw
him so, and kept his back to the parapet to survey the passers-by, one
in straits on this never faced the road, never turned his head at
coming footsteps, but, sensitive to his own condition, watched the
current whenever a stranger approached, as if some strange fish
interested him, though every finned thing had been poached out of the
river years before.
There and thus they would muse; if their grief were the grief of
oppression they would wish themselves kings; if their grief were
poverty, wish themselves millionaires; if sin, they would wish they
were saints or angels; if despised love, that they were some
much-courted Adonis of county fame. Some had been known to stand and
think so long with this fixed gaze downward that eventually they had
allowed their poor carcases to follow that gaze; and they were
discovered the next morning out of reach of their troubles, either here
or in the deep pool called Blackwater, a little higher up the river.
To this bridge came Henchard, as other unfortunates had come before
him, his way thither being by the riverside path on the chilly edge of
the town. Here he was standing one windy afternoon when Durnover church
clock struck five. While the gusts were bringing the notes to his ears
across the damp intervening flat a man passed behind him and greeted
Henchard by name. Henchard turned slightly and saw that the comer was
Jopp, his old foreman, now employed elsewhere, to whom, though he hated
him, he had gone for lodgings because Jopp was the one man in
Casterbridge whose observation and opinion the fallen corn-merchant
despised to the point of indifference.
Henchard returned him a scarcely perceptible nod, and Jopp stopped.
“He and she are gone into their new house to-day,” said Jopp.
“Oh,” said Henchard absently. “Which house is that?”
“Your old one.”
“Gone into my house?” And starting up Henchard added, “_My_ house of