The Mayor of Casterbridge
after dark—and this was the business time here—you stealthily crossed
the moor, approached the border of the aforesaid brook, and whistled
opposite the house to which you belonged. A shape thereupon made its
appearance on the other side bearing the bridge on end against the sky;
it was lowered; you crossed, and a hand helped you to land yourself,
together with the pheasants and hares gathered from neighbouring
manors. You sold them slily the next morning, and the day after you
stood before the magistrates with the eyes of all your sympathizing
neighbours concentrated on your back. You disappeared for a time; then
you were again found quietly living in Mixen Lane.
Walking along the lane at dusk the stranger was struck by two or three
peculiar features therein. One was an intermittent rumbling from the
back premises of the inn half-way up; this meant a skittle alley.
Another was the extensive prevalence of whistling in the various
domiciles—a piped note of some kind coming from nearly every open door.
Another was the frequency of white aprons over dingy gowns among the
women around the doorways. A white apron is a suspicious vesture in
situations where spotlessness is difficult; moreover, the industry and
cleanliness which the white apron expressed were belied by the postures
and gaits of the women who wore it—their knuckles being mostly on their
hips (an attitude which lent them the aspect of two-handled mugs), and
their shoulders against door-posts; while there was a curious alacrity
in the turn of each honest woman’s head upon her neck and in the twirl
of her honest eyes, at any noise resembling a masculine footfall along
the lane.
Yet amid so much that was bad needy respectability also found a home.
Under some of the roofs abode pure and virtuous souls whose presence
there was due to the iron hand of necessity, and to that alone.
Families from decayed villages—families of that once bulky, but now
nearly extinct, section of village society called “liviers,” or
lifeholders—copyholders and others, whose roof-trees had fallen for
some reason or other, compelling them to quit the rural spot that had
been their home for generations—came here, unless they chose to lie
under a hedge by the wayside.
The inn called Peter’s Finger was the church of Mixen Lane.
It was centrally situate, as such places should be, and bore about the
same social relation to the Three Mariners as the latter bore to the
King’s Arms. At first sight the inn was so respectable as to be
puzzling. The front door was kept shut, and the step was so clean that
evidently but few persons entered over its sanded surface. But at the
corner of the public-house was an alley, a mere slit, dividing it from
the next building. Half-way up the alley was a narrow door, shiny and
paintless from the rub of infinite hands and shoulders. This was the
actual entrance to the inn.
A pedestrian would be seen abstractedly passing along Mixen Lane; and
then, in a moment, he would vanish, causing the gazer to blink like
Ashton at the disappearance of Ravenswood. That abstracted pedestrian
had edged into the slit by the adroit fillip of his person sideways;
from the slit he edged into the tavern by a similar exercise of skill.
The company at the Three Mariners were persons of quality in comparison
with the company which gathered here; though it must be admitted that
the lowest fringe of the Mariner’s party touched the crest of Peter’s
at points. Waifs and strays of all sorts loitered about here. The
landlady was a virtuous woman who years ago had been unjustly sent to
gaol as an accessory to something or other after the fact. She
underwent her twelvemonth, and had worn a martyr’s countenance ever
since, except at times of meeting the constable who apprehended her,
when she winked her eye.
To this house Jopp and his acquaintances had arrived. The settles on
which they sat down were thin and tall, their tops being guyed by
pieces of twine to hooks in the ceiling; for when the guests grew
boisterous the settles would rock and overturn without some such
security. The thunder of bowls echoed from the backyard; swingels hung
behind the blower of the chimney; and ex-poachers and ex-gamekeepers,
whom squires had persecuted without a cause, sat elbowing each
other—men who in past times had met in fights under the moon, till
lapse of sentences on the one part, and loss of favour and expulsion
from service on the other, brought them here together to a common
level, where they sat calmly discussing old times.
“Dost mind how you could jerk a trout ashore with a bramble, and not
ruffle the stream, Charl?” a deposed keeper was saying. “’Twas at that
I caught ’ee once, if you can mind?”
“That I can. But the worst larry for me was that pheasant business at
Yalbury Wood. Your wife swore false that time, Joe—O, by Gad, she
did—there’s no denying it.”
“How was that?” asked Jopp.
“Why—Joe closed wi’ me, and we rolled down together, close to his
garden hedge. Hearing the noise, out ran his wife with the oven pyle,
and it being dark under the trees she couldn’t see which was uppermost.
‘Where beest thee, Joe, under or top?’ she screeched. ‘O—under, by
Gad!’ says he. She then began to rap down upon my skull, back, and ribs
with the pyle till we’d roll over again. ‘Where beest now, dear Joe,
under or top?’ she’d scream again. By George, ’twas through her I was
took! And then when we got up in hall she sware that the cock pheasant
was one of her rearing, when ’twas not your bird at all, Joe; ’twas
Squire Brown’s bird—that’s whose ’twas—one that we’d picked off as we
passed his wood, an hour afore. It did hurt my feelings to be so
wronged!... Ah well—’tis over now.”
“I might have had ’ee days afore that,” said the keeper. “I was within
a few yards of ’ee dozens of times, with a sight more of birds than
that poor one.”
“Yes—’tis not our greatest doings that the world gets wind of,” said
the furmity-woman, who, lately settled in this purlieu, sat among the
rest. Having travelled a great deal in her time she spoke with
cosmopolitan largeness of idea. It was she who presently asked Jopp
what was the parcel he kept so snugly under his arm.
“Ah, therein lies a grand secret,” said Jopp. “It is the passion of
love. To think that a woman should love one man so well, and hate
another so unmercifully.”
“Who’s the object of your meditation, sir?”
“One that stands high in this town. I’d like to shame her! Upon my
life, ’twould be as good as a play to read her love-letters, the proud
piece of silk and wax-work! For ’tis her love-letters that I’ve got
here.”
“Love letters? then let’s hear ’em, good soul,” said Mother Cuxsom.
“Lord, do ye mind, Richard, what fools we used to be when we were
younger? Getting a schoolboy to write ours for us; and giving him a
penny, do ye mind, not to tell other folks what he’d put inside, do ye
mind?”
By this time Jopp had pushed his finger under the seals, and unfastened
the letters, tumbling them over and picking up one here and there at
random, which he read aloud. These passages soon began to uncover the
secret which Lucetta had so earnestly hoped to keep buried, though the
epistles, being allusive only, did not make it altogether plain.
“Mrs. Farfrae wrote that!” said Nance Mockridge. “’Tis a humbling thing
for us, as respectable women, that one of the same sex could do it. And
now she’s avowed herself to another man!”
“So much the better for her,” said the aged furmity-woman. “Ah, I saved
her from a real bad marriage, and she’s never been the one to thank
me.”
“I say, what a good foundation for a skimmity-ride,” said Nance.
“True,” said Mrs. Cuxsom, reflecting. “’Tis as good a ground for a
skimmity-ride as ever I knowed; and it ought not to be wasted. The last
one seen in Casterbridge must have been ten years ago, if a day.”
At this moment there was a shrill whistle, and the landlady said to the
man who had been called Charl, “’Tis Jim coming in. Would ye go and let
down the bridge for me?”
Without replying Charl and his comrade Joe rose, and receiving a
lantern from her went out at the back door and down the garden-path,
which ended abruptly at the edge of the stream already mentioned.
Beyond the stream was the open moor, from which a clammy breeze smote
upon their faces as they advanced. Taking up the board that had lain in
readiness one of them lowered it across the water, and the instant its
further end touched the ground footsteps entered upon it, and there
appeared from the shade a stalwart man with straps round his knees, a
double-barrelled gun under his arm and some birds slung up behind him.
They asked him if he had had much luck.
“Not much,” he said indifferently. “All safe inside?”
Receiving a reply in the affirmative he went on inwards, the others
withdrawing the bridge and beginning to retreat in his rear. Before,
however, they had entered the house a cry of “Ahoy” from the moor led
them to pause.
The cry was repeated. They pushed the lantern into an outhouse, and
went back to the brink of the stream.
“Ahoy—is this the way to Casterbridge?” said some one from the other
side.
“Not in particular,” said Charl. “There’s a river afore ’ee.”
“I don’t care—here’s for through it!” said the man in the moor. “I’ve
had travelling enough for to-day.”
“Stop a minute, then,” said Charl, finding that the man was no enemy.
“Joe, bring the plank and lantern; here’s somebody that’s lost his way.
You should have kept along the turnpike road, friend, and not have
strook across here.”
“I should—as I see now. But I saw a light here, and says I to myself,
that’s an outlying house, depend on’t.”
The plank was now lowered; and the stranger’s form shaped itself from
the darkness. He was a middle-aged man, with hair and whiskers
prematurely grey, and a broad and genial face. He had crossed on the
plank without hesitation, and seemed to see nothing odd in the transit.
He thanked them, and walked between them up the garden. “What place is
this?” he asked, when they reached the door.
“A public-house.”
“Ah, perhaps it will suit me to put up at. Now then, come in and wet
your whistle at my expense for the lift over you have given me.”
They followed him into the inn, where the increased light exhibited him
as one who would stand higher in an estimate by the eye than in one by
the ear. He was dressed with a certain clumsy richness—his coat being
furred, and his head covered by a cap of seal-skin, which, though the
nights were chilly, must have been warm for the daytime, spring being
somewhat advanced. In his hand he carried a small mahogany case,
strapped, and clamped with brass.
Apparently surprised at the kind of company which confronted him
through the kitchen door, he at once abandoned his idea of putting up
at the house; but taking the situation lightly, he called for glasses
of the best, paid for them as he stood in the passage, and turned to
proceed on his way by the front door. This was barred, and while the
landlady was unfastening it the conversation about the skimmington was
continued in the sitting-room, and reached his ears.
“What do they mean by a ‘skimmity-ride’?” he asked.
“O, sir!” said the landlady, swinging her long earrings with
deprecating modesty; “’tis a’ old foolish thing they do in these parts
when a man’s wife is—well, not too particularly his own. But as a
respectable householder I don’t encourage it.
“Still, are they going to do it shortly? It is a good sight to see, I
suppose?”
“Well, sir!” she simpered. And then, bursting into naturalness, and
glancing from the corner of her eye, “’Tis the funniest thing under the
sun! And it costs money.”
“Ah! I remember hearing of some such thing. Now I shall be in