الفصل الفصل 3 · Chapter III

The highroad into the village of Weydon-Priors was again carpeted with

dust. The trees had put on as of yore their aspect of dingy green, and

where the Henchard family of three had once walked along, two persons

not unconnected with the family walked now.

The scene in its broad aspect had so much of its previous character,

even to the voices and rattle from the neighbouring village down, that

it might for that matter have been the afternoon following the

previously recorded episode. Change was only to be observed in details;

but here it was obvious that a long procession of years had passed by.

One of the two who walked the road was she who had figured as the young

wife of Henchard on the previous occasion; now her face had lost much

of its rotundity; her skin had undergone a textural change; and though

her hair had not lost colour it was considerably thinner than

heretofore. She was dressed in the mourning clothes of a widow. Her

companion, also in black, appeared as a well-formed young woman about

eighteen, completely possessed of that ephemeral precious essence

youth, which is itself beauty, irrespective of complexion or contour.

A glance was sufficient to inform the eye that this was Susan

Henchard’s grown-up daughter. While life’s middle summer had set its

hardening mark on the mother’s face, her former spring-like

specialities were transferred so dexterously by Time to the second

figure, her child, that the absence of certain facts within her

mother’s knowledge from the girl’s mind would have seemed for the

moment, to one reflecting on those facts, to be a curious imperfection

in Nature’s powers of continuity.

They walked with joined hands, and it could be perceived that this was

the act of simple affection. The daughter carried in her outer hand a

withy basket of old-fashioned make; the mother a blue bundle, which

contrasted oddly with her black stuff gown.

Reaching the outskirts of the village they pursued the same track as

formerly, and ascended to the fair. Here, too it was evident that the

years had told. Certain mechanical improvements might have been noticed

in the roundabouts and high-fliers, machines for testing rustic

strength and weight, and in the erections devoted to shooting for nuts.

But the real business of the fair had considerably dwindled. The new

periodical great markets of neighbouring towns were beginning to

interfere seriously with the trade carried on here for centuries. The

pens for sheep, the tie-ropes for horses, were about half as long as

they had been. The stalls of tailors, hosiers, coopers, linen-drapers,

and other such trades had almost disappeared, and the vehicles were far

less numerous. The mother and daughter threaded the crowd for some

little distance, and then stood still.

“Why did we hinder our time by coming in here? I thought you wished to

get onward?” said the maiden.

“Yes, my dear Elizabeth-Jane,” explained the other. “But I had a fancy

for looking up here.”

“Why?”

“It was here I first met with Newson—on such a day as this.”

“First met with father here? Yes, you have told me so before. And now

he’s drowned and gone from us!” As she spoke the girl drew a card from

her pocket and looked at it with a sigh. It was edged with black, and

inscribed within a design resembling a mural tablet were the words, “In

affectionate memory of Richard Newson, mariner, who was unfortunately

lost at sea, in the month of November 184—, aged forty-one years.”

“And it was here,” continued her mother, with more hesitation, “that I

last saw the relation we are going to look for—Mr. Michael Henchard.”

“What is his exact kin to us, mother? I have never clearly had it told

me.”

“He is, or was—for he may be dead—a connection by marriage,” said her

mother deliberately.

“That’s exactly what you have said a score of times before!” replied

the young woman, looking about her inattentively. “He’s not a near

relation, I suppose?”

“Not by any means.”

“He was a hay-trusser, wasn’t he, when you last heard of him?

“He was.”

“I suppose he never knew me?” the girl innocently continued.

Mrs. Henchard paused for a moment, and answered uneasily, “Of course

not, Elizabeth-Jane. But come this way.” She moved on to another part

of the field.

“It is not much use inquiring here for anybody, I should think,” the

daughter observed, as she gazed round about. “People at fairs change

like the leaves of trees; and I daresay you are the only one here

to-day who was here all those years ago.”

“I am not so sure of that,” said Mrs. Newson, as she now called

herself, keenly eyeing something under a green bank a little way off.

“See there.”

The daughter looked in the direction signified. The object pointed out

was a tripod of sticks stuck into the earth, from which hung a

three-legged crock, kept hot by a smouldering wood fire beneath. Over

the pot stooped an old woman haggard, wrinkled, and almost in rags. She

stirred the contents of the pot with a large spoon, and occasionally

croaked in a broken voice, “Good furmity sold here!”

It was indeed the former mistress of the furmity tent—once thriving,

cleanly, white-aproned, and chinking with money—now tentless, dirty,

owning no tables or benches, and having scarce any customers except two

small whity-brown boys, who came up and asked for “A ha’p’orth,

please—good measure,” which she served in a couple of chipped yellow

basins of commonest clay.

“She was here at that time,” resumed Mrs. Newson, making a step as if

to draw nearer.

“Don’t speak to her—it isn’t respectable!” urged the other.

“I will just say a word—you, Elizabeth-Jane, can stay here.”

The girl was not loth, and turned to some stalls of coloured prints

while her mother went forward. The old woman begged for the latter’s

custom as soon as she saw her, and responded to Mrs. Henchard-Newson’s

request for a pennyworth with more alacrity than she had shown in

selling six-pennyworths in her younger days. When the _soi-disant_

widow had taken the basin of thin poor slop that stood for the rich

concoction of the former time, the hag opened a little basket behind

the fire, and looking up slily, whispered, “Just a thought o’ rum in

it?—smuggled, you know—say two penn’orth—’twill make it slip down like

cordial!”

Her customer smiled bitterly at this survival of the old trick, and

shook her head with a meaning the old woman was far from translating.

She pretended to eat a little of the furmity with the leaden spoon

offered, and as she did so said blandly to the hag, “You’ve seen better

days?”

“Ah, ma’am—well ye may say it!” responded the old woman, opening the

sluices of her heart forthwith. “I’ve stood in this fair-ground, maid,

wife, and widow, these nine-and-thirty years, and in that time have

known what it was to do business with the richest stomachs in the land!

Ma’am you’d hardly believe that I was once the owner of a great

pavilion-tent that was the attraction of the fair. Nobody could come,

nobody could go, without having a dish of Mrs. Goodenough’s furmity. I

knew the clergy’s taste, the dandy gent’s taste; I knew the town’s

taste, the country’s taste. I even knowed the taste of the coarse

shameless females. But Lord’s my life—the world’s no memory;

straightforward dealings don’t bring profit—’tis the sly and the

underhand that get on in these times!”

Mrs. Newson glanced round—her daughter was still bending over the

distant stalls. “Can you call to mind,” she said cautiously to the old

woman, “the sale of a wife by her husband in your tent eighteen years

ago to-day?”

The hag reflected, and half shook her head. “If it had been a big thing

I should have minded it in a moment,” she said. “I can mind every

serious fight o’ married parties, every murder, every manslaughter,

even every pocket-picking—leastwise large ones—that ’t has been my lot

to witness. But a selling? Was it done quiet-like?”

“Well, yes. I think so.”

The furmity woman half shook her head again. “And yet,” she said, “I

do. At any rate, I can mind a man doing something o’ the sort—a man in

a cord jacket, with a basket of tools; but, Lord bless ye, we don’t

gi’e it head-room, we don’t, such as that. The only reason why I can

mind the man is that he came back here to the next year’s fair, and

told me quite private-like that if a woman ever asked for him I was to

say he had gone to—where?—Casterbridge—yes—to Casterbridge, said he.

But, Lord’s my life, I shouldn’t ha’ thought of it again!”

Mrs. Newson would have rewarded the old woman as far as her small means

afforded had she not discreetly borne in mind that it was by that

unscrupulous person’s liquor her husband had been degraded. She briefly

thanked her informant, and rejoined Elizabeth, who greeted her with,

“Mother, do let’s get on—it was hardly respectable for you to buy

refreshments there. I see none but the lowest do.”

“I have learned what I wanted, however,” said her mother quietly. “The

last time our relative visited this fair he said he was living at

Casterbridge. It is a long, long way from here, and it was many years

ago that he said it, but there I think we’ll go.”

With this they descended out of the fair, and went onward to the

village, where they obtained a night’s lodging.