The Mayor of Casterbridge
By degrees Henchard became aware that the measure was trod by some one
who out-Farfraed Farfrae in saltatory intenseness. This was strange,
and it was stranger to find that the eclipsing personage was
Elizabeth-Jane’s partner. The first time that Henchard saw him he was
sweeping grandly round, his head quivering and low down, his legs in
the form of an X and his back towards the door. The next time he came
round in the other direction, his white waist-coat preceding his face,
and his toes preceding his white waistcoat. That happy face—Henchard’s
complete discomfiture lay in it. It was Newson’s, who had indeed come
and supplanted him.
Henchard pushed to the door, and for some seconds made no other
movement. He rose to his feet, and stood like a dark ruin, obscured by
“the shade from his own soul up-thrown.”
But he was no longer the man to stand these reverses unmoved. His
agitation was great, and he would fain have been gone, but before he
could leave the dance had ended, the housekeeper had informed
Elizabeth-Jane of the stranger who awaited her, and she entered the
room immediately.
“Oh—it is—Mr. Henchard!” she said, starting back.
“What, Elizabeth?” he cried, as he seized her hand. “What do you
say?—_Mr._ Henchard? Don’t, don’t scourge me like that! Call me
worthless old Henchard—anything—but don’t ’ee be so cold as this! O my
maid—I see you have another—a real father in my place. Then you know
all; but don’t give all your thought to him! Do ye save a little room
for me!”
She flushed up, and gently drew her hand away. “I could have loved you
always—I would have, gladly,” she said. “But how can I when I know you
have deceived me so—so bitterly deceived me! You persuaded me that my
father was not my father—allowed me to live on in ignorance of the
truth for years; and then when he, my warm-hearted real father, came to
find me, cruelly sent him away with a wicked invention of my death,
which nearly broke his heart. O how can I love as I once did a man who
has served us like this!”
Henchard’s lips half parted to begin an explanation. But he shut them
up like a vice, and uttered not a sound. How should he, there and then,
set before her with any effect the palliatives of his great faults—that
he had himself been deceived in her identity at first, till informed by
her mother’s letter that his own child had died; that, in the second
accusation, his lie had been the last desperate throw of a gamester who
loved her affection better than his own honour? Among the many
hindrances to such a pleading not the least was this, that he did not
sufficiently value himself to lessen his sufferings by strenuous appeal
or elaborate argument.
Waiving, therefore, his privilege of self-defence, he regarded only his
discomposure. “Don’t ye distress yourself on my account,” he said, with
proud superiority. “I would not wish it—at such a time, too, as this. I
have done wrong in coming to ’ee—I see my error. But it is only for
once, so forgive it. I’ll never trouble ’ee again, Elizabeth-Jane—no,
not to my dying day! Good-night. Good-bye!”
Then, before she could collect her thoughts, Henchard went out from her
rooms, and departed from the house by the back way as he had come; and
she saw him no more.
XLV.
It was about a month after the day which closed as in the last chapter.
Elizabeth-Jane had grown accustomed to the novelty of her situation,
and the only difference between Donald’s movements now and formerly was
that he hastened indoors rather more quickly after business hours than
he had been in the habit of doing for some time.
Newson had stayed in Casterbridge three days after the wedding party
(whose gaiety, as might have been surmised, was of his making rather
than of the married couple’s), and was stared at and honoured as became
the returned Crusoe of the hour. But whether or not because
Casterbridge was difficult to excite by dramatic returns and
disappearances through having been for centuries an assize town, in
which sensational exits from the world, antipodean absences, and such
like, were half-yearly occurrences, the inhabitants did not altogether
lose their equanimity on his account. On the fourth morning he was
discovered disconsolately climbing a hill, in his craving to get a
glimpse of the sea from somewhere or other. The contiguity of salt
water proved to be such a necessity of his existence that he preferred
Budmouth as a place of residence, notwithstanding the society of his
daughter in the other town. Thither he went, and settled in lodgings in
a green-shuttered cottage which had a bow-window, jutting out
sufficiently to afford glimpses of a vertical strip of blue sea to any
one opening the sash, and leaning forward far enough to look through a
narrow lane of tall intervening houses.
Elizabeth-Jane was standing in the middle of her upstairs parlour,
critically surveying some re-arrangement of articles with her head to
one side, when the housemaid came in with the announcement, “Oh, please
ma’am, we know now how that bird-cage came there.”
In exploring her new domain during the first week of residence, gazing
with critical satisfaction on this cheerful room and that, penetrating
cautiously into dark cellars, sallying forth with gingerly tread to the
garden, now leaf-strewn by autumn winds, and thus, like a wise
field-marshal, estimating the capabilities of the site whereon she was
about to open her housekeeping campaign—Mrs. Donald Farfrae had
discovered in a screened corner a new bird-cage, shrouded in newspaper,
and at the bottom of the cage a little ball of feathers—the dead body
of a goldfinch. Nobody could tell her how the bird and cage had come
there, though that the poor little songster had been starved to death
was evident. The sadness of the incident had made an impression on her.
She had not been able to forget it for days, despite Farfrae’s tender
banter; and now when the matter had been nearly forgotten it was again
revived.
“Oh, please ma’am, we know how the bird-cage came there. That farmer’s
man who called on the evening of the wedding—he was seen wi’ it in his
hand as he came up the street; and ’tis thoughted that he put it down
while he came in with his message, and then went away forgetting where
he had left it.”
This was enough to set Elizabeth thinking, and in thinking she seized
hold of the idea, at one feminine bound, that the caged bird had been
brought by Henchard for her as a wedding gift and token of repentance.
He had not expressed to her any regrets or excuses for what he had done
in the past; but it was a part of his nature to extenuate nothing, and
live on as one of his own worst accusers. She went out, looked at the
cage, buried the starved little singer, and from that hour her heart
softened towards the self-alienated man.
When her husband came in she told him her solution of the bird-cage
mystery; and begged Donald to help her in finding out, as soon as
possible, whither Henchard had banished himself, that she might make
her peace with him; try to do something to render his life less that of
an outcast, and more tolerable to him. Although Farfrae had never so
passionately liked Henchard as Henchard had liked him, he had, on the
other hand, never so passionately hated in the same direction as his
former friend had done, and he was therefore not the least indisposed
to assist Elizabeth-Jane in her laudable plan.
But it was by no means easy to set about discovering Henchard. He had
apparently sunk into the earth on leaving Mr. and Mrs. Farfrae’s door.
Elizabeth-Jane remembered what he had once attempted; and trembled.
But though she did not know it Henchard had become a changed man since
then—as far, that is, as change of emotional basis can justify such a
radical phrase; and she needed not to fear. In a few days Farfrae’s
inquiries elicited that Henchard had been seen by one who knew him
walking steadily along the Melchester highway eastward, at twelve
o’clock at night—in other words, retracing his steps on the road by
which he had come.
This was enough; and the next morning Farfrae might have been
discovered driving his gig out of Casterbridge in that direction,
Elizabeth-Jane sitting beside him, wrapped in a thick flat fur—the
victorine of the period—her complexion somewhat richer than formerly,
and an incipient matronly dignity, which the serene Minerva-eyes of one
“whose gestures beamed with mind” made becoming, settling on her face.
Having herself arrived at a promising haven from at least the grosser
troubles of her life, her object was to place Henchard in some similar
quietude before he should sink into that lower stage of existence which
was only too possible to him now.
After driving along the highway for a few miles they made further
inquiries, and learnt of a road-mender, who had been working
thereabouts for weeks, that he had observed such a man at the time
mentioned; he had left the Melchester coachroad at Weatherbury by a
forking highway which skirted the north of Egdon Heath. Into this road
they directed the horse’s head, and soon were bowling across that
ancient country whose surface never had been stirred to a finger’s
depth, save by the scratchings of rabbits, since brushed by the feet of
the earliest tribes. The tumuli these had left behind, dun and shagged
with heather, jutted roundly into the sky from the uplands, as though
they were the full breasts of Diana Multimammia supinely extended
there.
They searched Egdon, but found no Henchard. Farfrae drove onward, and
by the afternoon reached the neighbourhood of some extension of the
heath to the north of Anglebury, a prominent feature of which, in the
form of a blasted clump of firs on a summit of a hill, they soon passed
under. That the road they were following had, up to this point, been
Henchard’s track on foot they were pretty certain; but the
ramifications which now began to reveal themselves in the route made
further progress in the right direction a matter of pure guess-work,
and Donald strongly advised his wife to give up the search in person,
and trust to other means for obtaining news of her stepfather. They
were now a score of miles at least from home, but, by resting the horse
for a couple of hours at a village they had just traversed, it would be
possible to get back to Casterbridge that same day, while to go much
further afield would reduce them to the necessity of camping out for
the night, “and that will make a hole in a sovereign,” said Farfrae.
She pondered the position, and agreed with him.
He accordingly drew rein, but before reversing their direction paused a
moment and looked vaguely round upon the wide country which the
elevated position disclosed. While they looked a solitary human form
came from under the clump of trees, and crossed ahead of them. The
person was some labourer; his gait was shambling, his regard fixed in
front of him as absolutely as if he wore blinkers; and in his hand he
carried a few sticks. Having crossed the road he descended into a
ravine, where a cottage revealed itself, which he entered.
“If it were not so far away from Casterbridge I should say that must be
poor Whittle. ’Tis just like him,” observed Elizabeth-Jane.
“And it may be Whittle, for he’s never been to the yard these three
weeks, going away without saying any word at all; and I owing him for
two days’ work, without knowing who to pay it to.”
The possibility led them to alight, and at least make an inquiry at the
cottage. Farfrae hitched the reins to the gate-post, and they
approached what was of humble dwellings surely the humblest. The walls,
built of kneaded clay originally faced with a trowel, had been worn by
years of rain-washings to a lumpy crumbling surface, channelled and