by Thomas Hardy
“It is because of Donald!” she sobbed.
“I don’t forbid you to marry him,” said Henchard. “Promise not to quite forget me when — — ” He meant when Newson should come.
She promised mechanically, in her agitation; and the same evening at dusk Henchard left the town, to whose development he had been one of the chief stimulants for many years. During the day he had bought a new tool-basket, cleaned up his old hay-knife and wimble, set himself up in fresh leggings, kneenaps and corduroys, and in other ways gone back to the working clothes of his young manhood, discarding for ever the shabby-genteel suit of cloth and rusty silk hat that since his decline had characterized him in the Casterbridge street as a man who had seen better days.
He went secretly and alone, not a soul of the many who had known him being aware of his departure. Elizabeth-Jane accompanied him as far as the second bridge on the highway — for the hour of her appointment with the unguessed visitor at Farfrae’s had not yet arrived — and parted from him with unfeigned wonder and sorrow, keeping him back a minute or two before finally letting him go. She watched his form diminish across the moor, the yellow rush-basket at his back moving up and down with each tread, and the creases behind his knees coming and going alternately till she could no longer see them. Though she did not know it Henchard formed at this moment much the same picture as he had presented when entering Casterbridge for the first time nearly a quarter of a century before; except, to be sure, that the serious addition to his years had considerably lessened the spring to his stride, that his state of hopelessness had weakened him, and imparted to his shoulders, as weighted by the basket, a perceptible bend.
He went on till he came to the first milestone, which stood in the bank, half way up a steep hill. He rested his basket on the top of the stone, placed his elbows on it, and gave way to a convulsive twitch, which was worse than a sob, because it was so hard and so dry.
“If I had only got her with me — if I only had!” he said. “Hard work would be nothing to me then! But that was not to be. I — Cain — go alone as I deserve — an outcast and a vagabond. But my punishment is not greater than I can bear!”
He sternly subdued his anguish, shouldered his basket, and went on.
Elizabeth, in the meantime, had breathed him a sigh, recovered her equanimity, and turned her face to Casterbridge. Before she had reached the first house she was met in her walk by Donald Farfrae. This was evidently not their first meeting that day; they joined hands without ceremony, and Farfrae anxiously asked, “And is he gone — and did you tell him? — I mean of the other matter — not of ours.”
“He is gone; and I told him all I knew of your friend. Donald, who is he?”
“Well, well, dearie; you will know soon about that. And Mr. Henchard will hear of it if he does not go far.”
“He will go far — he’s bent upon getting out of sight and sound!”
She walked beside her lover, and when they reached the Crossways, or Bow, turned with him into Corn Street instead of going straight on to her own door. At Farfrae’s house they stopped and went in.
Farfrae flung open the door of the ground-floor sitting-room, saying, “There he is waiting for you,” and Elizabeth entered. In the arm-chair sat the broad-faced genial man who had called on Henchard on a memorable morning between one and two years before this time, and whom the latter had seen mount the coach and depart within half-an-hour of his arrival. It was Richard Newson. The meeting with the light-hearted father from whom she had been separated half-a-dozen years, as if by death, need hardly be detailed. It was an affecting one, apart from the question of paternity. Henchard’s departure was in a moment explained. When the true facts came to be handled the difficulty of restoring her to her old belief in Newson was not so great as might have seemed likely, for Henchard’s conduct itself was a proof that those facts were true. Moreover, she had grown up under Newson’s paternal care; and even had Henchard been her father in nature, this father in early domiciliation might almost have carried the point against him, when the incidents of her parting with Henchard had a little worn off.
Newson’s pride in what she had grown up to be was more than he could express. He kissed her again and again.
“I’ve saved you the trouble to come and meet me — ha-ha!” said Newson. “The fact is that Mr. Farfrae here, he said, ‘Come up and stop with me for a day or two, Captain Newson, and I’ll bring her round.’ ‘Faith,’ says I, ‘so I will’; and here I am.”
“Well, Henchard is gone,” said Farfrae, shutting the door. “He has done it all voluntarily, and, as I gather from Elizabeth, he has been very nice with her. I was got rather uneasy; but all is as it should be, and we will have no more deefficulties at all.”
“Now, that’s very much as I thought,” said Newson, looking into the face of each by turns. “I said to myself, ay, a hundred times, when I tried to get a peep at her unknown to herself — ’Depend upon it, ‘tis best that I should live on quiet for a few days like this till something turns up for the better.’ I now know you are all right, and what can I wish for more?”
“Well, Captain Newson, I will be glad to see ye here every day now, since it can do no harm,” said Farfrae. “And what I’ve been thinking is that the wedding may as well be kept under my own roof, the house being large, and you being in lodgings by yourself — so that a great deal of trouble and expense would be saved ye? — and ‘tis a convenience when a couple’s married not to hae far to go to get home!”
“With all my heart,” said Captain Newson; “since, as ye say, it can do no harm, now poor Henchard’s gone; though I wouldn’t have done it otherwise, or put myself in his way at all; for I’ve already in my lifetime been an intruder into his family quite as far as politeness can be expected to put up with. But what do the young woman say herself about it? Elizabeth, my child, come and hearken to what we be talking about, and not bide staring out o’ the window as if ye didn’t hear.’
“Donald and you must settle it,” murmured Elizabeth, still keeping up a scrutinizing gaze at some small object in the street.
“Well, then,” continued Newson, turning anew to Farfrae with a face expressing thorough entry into the subject, “that’s how we’ll have it. And, Mr. Farfrae, as you provide so much, and houseroom, and all that, I’ll do my part in the drinkables, and see to the rum and schiedam — maybe a dozen jars will be sufficient? — as many of the folk will be ladies, and perhaps they won’t drink hard enough to make a high average in the reckoning? But you know best. I’ve provided for men and shipmates times enough, but I’m as ignorant as a child how many glasses of grog a woman, that’s not a drinking woman, is expected to consume at these ceremonies?”
“Oh, none — we’ll no want much of that — O no!” said Farfrae, shaking his head with appalled gravity. “Do you leave all to me.”
When they had gone a little further in these particulars Newson, leaning back in his chair and smiling reflectively at the ceiling, said, “I’ve never told ye, or have I, Mr. Farfrae, how Henchard put me off the scent that time?”
He expressed ignorance of what the Captain alluded to.
“Ah, I thought I hadn’t. I resolved that I would not, I remember, not to hurt the man’s name. But now he’s gone I can tell ye. Why, I came to Casterbridge nine or ten months before that day last week that I found ye out. I had been here twice before then. The first time I passed through the town on my way westward, not knowing Elizabeth lived here. Then hearing at some place — I forget where — that a man of the name of Henchard had been mayor here, I came back, and called at his house one morning. The old rascal! — he said Elizabeth-Jane had died years ago.”
Elizabeth now gave earnest heed to his story.
“Now, it never crossed my mind that the man was selling me a packet,” continued Newson. “And, if you’ll believe me, I was that upset, that I went back to the coach that had brought me, and took passage onward without lying in the town half-an-hour. Ha-ha! — ’twas a good joke, and
well carried out, and I give the man credit for’t!”
Elizabeth-Jane was amazed at the intelligence. “A joke? — O no!” she cried. “Then he kept you from me, father, all those months, when you might have been here?”
The father admitted that such was the case.
“He ought not to have done it!” said Farfrae.
Elizabeth sighed. “I said I would never forget him. But O! I think I ought to forget him now!”
Newson, like a good many rovers and sojourners among strange men and strange moralities, failed to perceive the enormity of Henchard’s crime, notwithstanding that he himself had been the chief sufferer therefrom. Indeed, the attack upon the absent culprit waxing serious, he began to take Henchard’s part.
“Well, ‘twas not ten words that he said, after all,” Newson pleaded. “And how could he know that I should be such a simpleton as to believe him? ‘Twas as much my fault as his, poor fellow!”
“No,” said Elizabeth-Jane firmly, in her revulsion of feeling. “He knew your disposition — you always were so trusting, father; I’ve heard my mother say so hundreds of times — and he did it to wrong you. After weaning me from you these five years by saying he was my father, he should not have done this.”
Thus they conversed; and there was nobody to set before Elizabeth any extenuation of the absent one’s deceit. Even had he been present Henchard might scarce have pleaded it, so little did he value himself or his good name.
“Well, well — never mind — it is all over and past,” said Newson good-naturedly. “Now, about this wedding again.”
CHAPTER 44.
Meanwhile, the man of their talk had pursued his solitary way eastward till weariness overtook him, and he looked about for a place of rest. His heart was so exacerbated at parting from the girl that he could not face an inn, or even a household of the most humble kind; and entering a field he lay down under a wheatrick, feeling no want of food. The very heaviness of his soul caused him to sleep profoundly.
The bright autumn sun shining into his eyes across the stubble awoke him the next morning early. He opened his basket and ate for his breakfast what he had packed for his supper; and in doing so overhauled the remainder of his kit. Although everything he brought necessitated carriage at his own back, he had secreted among his tools a few of Elizabeth-Jane’s cast-off belongings, in the shape of gloves, shoes, a scrap of her handwriting, and the like, and in his pocket he carried a curl of her hair. Having looked at these things he closed them up again, and went onward.
During five consecutive days Henchard’s rush basket rode along upon his shoulder between the highway hedges, the new yellow of the rushes catching the eye of an occasional field-labourer as he glanced through the quickset, together with the wayfarer’s hat and head, and down-turned face, over which the twig shadows moved in endless procession. It now became apparent that the direction of his journey was Weydon Priors, which he reached on the afternoon of the sixth day.
The renowned hill whereon the annual fair had been held for so many generations was now bare of human beings, and almost of aught besides. A few sheep grazed thereabout, but these ran off when Henchard halted upon the summit. He deposited his basket upon the turf, and looked about with sad curiosity; till he discovered the road by which his wife and himself had entered on the upland so memorable to both, five-and-twenty years before.
“Yes, we came up that way,” he said, after ascertaining his bearings. “She was carrying the baby, and I was reading a ballet-sheet. Then we crossed about here — she so sad and weary, and I speaking to her hardly at all, because of my cursed pride and mortification at being poor. Then we saw the tent — that must have stood more this way.” He walked to another spot, it was not really where the tent had stood but it seemed so to him. “Here we went in, and here we sat down. I faced this way. Then I drank, and committed my crime. It must have been just on that very pixy-ring that she was standing when she said her last words to me before going off with him; I can hear their sound now, and the sound of her sobs: ‘O Mike! I’ve lived with thee all this while, and had nothing but temper. Now I’m no more to ‘ee — I’ll try my luck elsewhere.’“
He experienced not only the bitterness of a man who finds, in looking back upon an ambitious course, that what he has sacrificed in sentiment was worth as much as what he has gained in substance; but the superadded bitterness of seeing his very recantation nullified. He had been sorry for all this long ago; but his attempts to replace ambition by love had been as fully foiled as his ambition itself. His wronged wife had foiled them by a fraud so grandly simple as to be almost a virtue. It was an odd sequence that out of all this tampering with social law came that flower of Nature, Elizabeth. Part of his wish to wash his hands of life arose from his perception of its contrarious inconsistencies — of Nature’s jaunty readiness to support unorthodox social principles.
He intended to go on from this place — visited as an act of penance — into another part of the country altogether. But he could not help thinking of Elizabeth, and the quarter of the horizon in which she lived. Out of this it happened that the centrifugal tendency imparted by weariness of the world was counteracted by the centripetal influence of his love for his stepdaughter. As a consequence, instead of following a straight course yet further away from Casterbridge, Henchard gradually, almost unconsciously, deflected from that right line of his first intention; till, by degrees, his wandering, like that of the Canadian woodsman, became part of a circle of which Casterbridge formed the centre. In ascending any particular hill he ascertained the bearings as nearly as he could by means of the sun, moon, or stars, and settled in his mind the exact direction in which Casterbridge and Elizabeth-Jane lay. Sneering at himself for his weakness he yet every hour — nay, every few minutes — conjectured her actions for the time being — her sitting down and rising up, her goings and comings, till thought of Newson’s and Farfrae’s counter-influence would pass like a cold blast over a pool, and efface her image. And then he would say to himself, “O you fool! All this about a daughter who is no daughter of thine!”
At length he obtained employment at his own occupation of hay-trusser, work of that sort being in demand at this autumn time. The scene of his hiring was a pastoral farm near the old western highway, whose course was the channel of all such communications as passed between the busy centres of novelty and the remote Wessex boroughs. He had chosen the neighbourhood of this artery from a sense that, situated here, though at a distance of fifty miles, he was virtually nearer to her whose welfare was so dear than he would be at a roadless spot only half as remote.
And thus Henchard found himself again on the precise standing which he had occupied a quarter of a century before. Externally there was nothing to hinder his making another start on the upward slope, and by his new lights achieving higher things than his soul in its half-formed state had been able to accomplish. But the ingenious machinery contrived by the Gods for reducing human possibilities of amelioration to a minimum — which arranges that wisdom to do shall come pari passu with the departure of zest for doing — stood in the way of all that. He had no wish to make an arena a second time of a world that had become a mere painted scene to him.
Very often, as his hay-knife crunched down among the sweet-smelling grassy stems, he would survey mankind and say to himself: “Here and everywhere be folk dying before their time like frosted leaves, though wanted by their families, the country, and the world; while I, an outcast, an encumberer of the ground, wanted by nobody, and despised by all, live on against my will!”
He often kept an eager ear upon the conversation of those who passed along the road — not from a general curiosity by any means — but in the hope that among these travellers between Casterbridge and London some would, sooner or later, speak of the former place. The distance, however, was too great to lend much probability to his desire; and the highest result of his attention to wayside words was that he did indeed hear the name “Casterbridge” uttered one day by the driver
of a road-waggon. Henchard ran to the gate of the field he worked in, and hailed the speaker, who was a stranger.
“Yes — I’ve come from there, maister,” he said, in answer to Henchard’s inquiry. “I trade up and down, ye know; though, what with this travelling without horses that’s getting so common, my work will soon be done.”
“Anything moving in the old place, mid I ask?”
“All the same as usual.”
“I’ve heard that Mr. Farfrae, the late mayor, is thinking of getting married. Now is that true or not?”
“I couldn’t say for the life o’ me. O no, I should think not.”
“But yes, John — you forget,” said a woman inside the waggon-tilt. “What were them packages we carr’d there at the beginning o’ the week? Surely they said a wedding was coming off soon — on Martin’s Day?”
The man declared he remembered nothing about it; and the waggon went on jangling over the hill.
Henchard was convinced that the woman’s memory served her well. The date was an extremely probable one, there being no reason for delay on either side. He might, for that matter, write and inquire of Elizabeth; but his instinct for sequestration had made the course difficult. Yet before he left her she had said that for him to be absent from her wedding was not as she wished it to be.
The remembrance would continually revive in him now that it was not Elizabeth and Farfrae who had driven him away from them, but his own haughty sense that his presence was no longer desired. He had assumed the return of Newson without absolute proof that the Captain meant to return; still less that Elizabeth-Jane would welcome him; and with no proof whatever that if he did return he would stay. What if he had been mistaken in his views; if there had been no necessity that his own absolute separation from her he loved should be involved in these untoward incidents? To make one more attempt to be near her: to go back, to see her, to plead his cause before her, to ask forgiveness for his fraud, to endeavour strenuously to hold his own in her love; it was worth the risk of repulse, ay, of life itself.