The Mayor of Casterbridge
Casterbridge for two or three weeks to come, and should not mind seeing
the performance. Wait a moment.” He turned back, entered the
sitting-room, and said, “Here, good folks; I should like to see the old
custom you are talking of, and I don’t mind being something towards
it—take that.” He threw a sovereign on the table and returned to the
landlady at the door, of whom, having inquired the way into the town,
he took his leave.
“There were more where that one came from,” said Charl when the
sovereign had been taken up and handed to the landlady for safe
keeping. “By George! we ought to have got a few more while we had him
here.”
“No, no,” answered the landlady. “This is a respectable house, thank
God! And I’ll have nothing done but what’s honourable.”
“Well,” said Jopp; “now we’ll consider the business begun, and will
soon get it in train.”
“We will!” said Nance. “A good laugh warms my heart more than a
cordial, and that’s the truth on’t.”
Jopp gathered up the letters, and it being now somewhat late he did not
attempt to call at Farfrae’s with them that night. He reached home,
sealed them up as before, and delivered the parcel at its address next
morning. Within an hour its contents were reduced to ashes by Lucetta,
who, poor soul! was inclined to fall down on her knees in thankfulness
that at last no evidence remained of the unlucky episode with Henchard
in her past. For though hers had been rather the laxity of inadvertence
than of intention, that episode, if known, was not the less likely to
operate fatally between herself and her husband.
XXXVII.
Such was the state of things when the current affairs of Casterbridge
were interrupted by an event of such magnitude that its influence
reached to the lowest social stratum there, stirring the depths of its
society simultaneously with the preparations for the skimmington. It
was one of those excitements which, when they move a country town,
leave permanent mark upon its chronicles, as a warm summer permanently
marks the ring in the tree-trunk corresponding to its date.
A Royal Personage was about to pass through the borough on his course
further west, to inaugurate an immense engineering work out that way.
He had consented to halt half-an-hour or so in the town, and to receive
an address from the corporation of Casterbridge, which, as a
representative centre of husbandry, wished thus to express its sense of
the great services he had rendered to agricultural science and
economics, by his zealous promotion of designs for placing the art of
farming on a more scientific footing.
Royalty had not been seen in Casterbridge since the days of the third
King George, and then only by candlelight for a few minutes, when that
monarch, on a night-journey, had stopped to change horses at the King’s
Arms. The inhabitants therefore decided to make a thorough _fête
carillonée_ of the unwonted occasion. Half-an-hour’s pause was not
long, it is true; but much might be done in it by a judicious grouping
of incidents, above all, if the weather were fine.
The address was prepared on parchment by an artist who was handy at
ornamental lettering, and was laid on with the best gold-leaf and
colours that the sign-painter had in his shop. The Council had met on
the Tuesday before the appointed day, to arrange the details of the
procedure. While they were sitting, the door of the Council Chamber
standing open, they heard a heavy footstep coming up the stairs. It
advanced along the passage, and Henchard entered the room, in clothes
of frayed and threadbare shabbiness, the very clothes which he had used
to wear in the primal days when he had sat among them.
“I have a feeling,” he said, advancing to the table and laying his hand
upon the green cloth, “that I should like to join ye in this reception
of our illustrious visitor. I suppose I could walk with the rest?”
Embarrassed glances were exchanged by the Council and Grower nearly ate
the end of his quill-pen off, so gnawed he it during the silence.
Farfrae the young Mayor, who by virtue of his office sat in the large
chair, intuitively caught the sense of the meeting, and as spokesman
was obliged to utter it, glad as he would have been that the duty
should have fallen to another tongue.
“I hardly see that it would be proper, Mr. Henchard,” said he. “The
Council are the Council, and as ye are no longer one of the body, there
would be an irregularity in the proceeding. If ye were included, why
not others?”
“I have a particular reason for wishing to assist at the ceremony.”
Farfrae looked round. “I think I have expressed the feeling of the
Council,” he said.
“Yes, yes,” from Dr. Bath, Lawyer Long, Alderman Tubber, and several
more.
“Then I am not to be allowed to have anything to do with it
officially?”
“I am afraid so; it is out of the question, indeed. But of course you
can see the doings full well, such as they are to be, like the rest of
the spectators.”
Henchard did not reply to that very obvious suggestion, and, turning on
his heel, went away.
It had been only a passing fancy of his, but opposition crystallized it
into a determination. “I’ll welcome his Royal Highness, or nobody
shall!” he went about saying. “I am not going to be sat upon by
Farfrae, or any of the rest of the paltry crew! You shall see.”
The eventful morning was bright, a full-faced sun confronting early
window-gazers eastward, and all perceived (for they were practised in
weather-lore) that there was permanence in the glow. Visitors soon
began to flock in from county houses, villages, remote copses, and
lonely uplands, the latter in oiled boots and tilt bonnets, to see the
reception, or if not to see it, at any rate to be near it. There was
hardly a workman in the town who did not put a clean shirt on. Solomon
Longways, Christopher Coney, Buzzford, and the rest of that fraternity,
showed their sense of the occasion by advancing their customary eleven
o’clock pint to half-past ten; from which they found a difficulty in
getting back to the proper hour for several days.
Henchard had determined to do no work that day. He primed himself in
the morning with a glass of rum, and walking down the street met
Elizabeth-Jane, whom he had not seen for a week. “It was lucky,” he
said to her, “my twenty-one years had expired before this came on, or I
should never have had the nerve to carry it out.”
“Carry out what?” said she, alarmed.
“This welcome I am going to give our Royal visitor.”
She was perplexed. “Shall we go and see it together?” she said.
“See it! I have other fish to fry. You see it. It will be worth
seeing!”
She could do nothing to elucidate this, and decked herself out with a
heavy heart. As the appointed time drew near she got sight again of her
stepfather. She thought he was going to the Three Mariners; but no, he
elbowed his way through the gay throng to the shop of Woolfrey, the
draper. She waited in the crowd without.
In a few minutes he emerged, wearing, to her surprise, a brilliant
rosette, while more surprising still, in his hand he carried a flag of
somewhat homely construction, formed by tacking one of the small Union
Jacks, which abounded in the town to-day, to the end of a deal
wand—probably the roller from a piece of calico. Henchard rolled up his
flag on the doorstep, put it under his arm, and went down the street.
Suddenly the taller members of the crowd turned their heads, and the
shorter stood on tiptoe. It was said that the Royal _cortège_
approached. The railway had stretched out an arm towards Casterbridge
at this time, but had not reached it by several miles as yet; so that
the intervening distance, as well as the remainder of the journey, was
to be traversed by road in the old fashion. People thus waited—the
county families in their carriages, the masses on foot—and watched the
far-stretching London highway to the ringing of bells and chatter of
tongues.
From the background Elizabeth-Jane watched the scene. Some seats had
been arranged from which ladies could witness the spectacle, and the
front seat was occupied by Lucetta, the Mayor’s wife, just at present.
In the road under her eyes stood Henchard. She appeared so bright and
pretty that, as it seemed, he was experiencing the momentary weakness
of wishing for her notice. But he was far from attractive to a woman’s
eye, ruled as that is so largely by the superficies of things. He was
not only a journeyman, unable to appear as he formerly had appeared,
but he disdained to appear as well as he might. Everybody else, from
the Mayor to the washerwoman, shone in new vesture according to means;
but Henchard had doggedly retained the fretted and weather-beaten
garments of bygone years.
Hence, alas, this occurred: Lucetta’s eyes slid over him to this side
and to that without anchoring on his features—as gaily dressed women’s
eyes will too often do on such occasions. Her manner signified quite
plainly that she meant to know him in public no more.
But she was never tired of watching Donald, as he stood in animated
converse with his friends a few yards off, wearing round his young neck
the official gold chain with great square links, like that round the
Royal unicorn. Every trifling emotion that her husband showed as he
talked had its reflex on her face and lips, which moved in little
duplicates to his. She was living his part rather than her own, and
cared for no one’s situation but Farfrae’s that day.
At length a man stationed at the furthest turn of the high road,
namely, on the second bridge of which mention has been made, gave a
signal, and the Corporation in their robes proceeded from the front of
the Town Hall to the archway erected at the entrance to the town. The
carriages containing the Royal visitor and his suite arrived at the
spot in a cloud of dust, a procession was formed, and the whole came on
to the Town Hall at a walking pace.
This spot was the centre of interest. There were a few clear yards in
front of the Royal carriage, sanded; and into this space a man stepped
before any one could prevent him. It was Henchard. He had unrolled his
private flag, and removing his hat he staggered to the side of the
slowing vehicle, waving the Union Jack to and fro with his left hand
while he blandly held out his right to the Illustrious Personage.
All the ladies said with bated breath, “O, look there!” and Lucetta was
ready to faint. Elizabeth-Jane peeped through the shoulders of those in
front, saw what it was, and was terrified; and then her interest in the
spectacle as a strange phenomenon got the better of her fear.
Farfrae, with Mayoral authority, immediately rose to the occasion. He
seized Henchard by the shoulder, dragged him back, and told him roughly
to be off. Henchard’s eyes met his, and Farfrae observed the fierce
light in them despite his excitement and irritation. For a moment
Henchard stood his ground rigidly; then by an unaccountable impulse
gave way and retired. Farfrae glanced to the ladies’ gallery, and saw
that his Calphurnia’s cheek was pale.
“Why—it is your husband’s old patron!” said Mrs. Blowbody, a lady of
the neighbourhood who sat beside Lucetta.
“Patron!” said Donald’s wife with quick indignation.
“Do you say the man is an acquaintance of Mr. Farfrae’s?” observed Mrs.
Bath, the physician’s wife, a new-comer to the town through her recent
marriage with the doctor.
“He works for my husband,” said Lucetta.
“Oh—is that all? They have been saying to me that it was through him
your husband first got a footing in Casterbridge. What stories people
will tell!”
“They will indeed. It was not so at all. Donald’s genius would have
enabled him to get a footing anywhere, without anybody’s help! He would
have been just the same if there had been no Henchard in the world!”