Kabanata Kabanata 44 · Chapter XLIV

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.

But how to initiate this reversal of all his former resolves without

causing husband and wife to despise him for his inconsistency was a

question which made him tremble and brood.

He cut and cut his trusses two days more, and then he concluded his

hesitancies by a sudden reckless determination to go to the wedding

festivity. Neither writing nor message would be expected of him. She

had regretted his decision to be absent—his unanticipated presence

would fill the little unsatisfied corner that would probably have place

in her just heart without him.

To intrude as little of his personality as possible upon a gay event

with which that personality could show nothing in keeping, he decided

not to make his appearance till evening—when stiffness would have worn

off, and a gentle wish to let bygones be bygones would exercise its

sway in all hearts.

He started on foot, two mornings before St. Martin’s-tide, allowing

himself about sixteen miles to perform for each of the three days’

journey, reckoning the wedding-day as one. There were only two towns,

Melchester and Shottsford, of any importance along his course, and at

the latter he stopped on the second night, not only to rest, but to

prepare himself for the next evening.

Possessing no clothes but the working suit he stood in—now stained and

distorted by their two months of hard usage, he entered a shop to make

some purchases which should put him, externally at any rate, a little

in harmony with the prevailing tone of the morrow. A rough yet

respectable coat and hat, a new shirt and neck-cloth, were the chief of

these; and having satisfied himself that in appearance at least he

would not now offend her, he proceeded to the more interesting

particular of buying her some present.

What should that present be? He walked up and down the street,

regarding dubiously the display in the shop windows, from a gloomy

sense that what he might most like to give her would be beyond his

miserable pocket. At length a caged goldfinch met his eye. The cage was

a plain and small one, the shop humble, and on inquiry he concluded he

could afford the modest sum asked. A sheet of newspaper was tied round

the little creature’s wire prison, and with the wrapped up cage in his

hand Henchard sought a lodging for the night.

Next day he set out upon the last stage, and was soon within the

district which had been his dealing ground in bygone years. Part of the

distance he travelled by carrier, seating himself in the darkest corner

at the back of that trader’s van; and as the other passengers, mainly

women going short journeys, mounted and alighted in front of Henchard,

they talked over much local news, not the least portion of this being

the wedding then in course of celebration at the town they were

nearing. It appeared from their accounts that the town band had been

hired for the evening party, and, lest the convivial instincts of that

body should get the better of their skill, the further step had been

taken of engaging the string band from Budmouth, so that there would be

a reserve of harmony to fall back upon in case of need.

He heard, however, but few particulars beyond those known to him

already, the incident of the deepest interest on the journey being the

soft pealing of the Casterbridge bells, which reached the travellers’

ears while the van paused on the top of Yalbury Hill to have the drag

lowered. The time was just after twelve o’clock.

Those notes were a signal that all had gone well; that there had been

no slip ’twixt cup and lip in this case; that Elizabeth-Jane and Donald

Farfrae were man and wife.

Henchard did not care to ride any further with his chattering

companions after hearing this sound. Indeed, it quite unmanned him; and

in pursuance of his plan of not showing himself in Casterbridge street

till evening, lest he should mortify Farfrae and his bride, he alighted

here, with his bundle and bird-cage, and was soon left as a lonely

figure on the broad white highway.

It was the hill near which he had waited to meet Farfrae, almost two

years earlier, to tell him of the serious illness of his wife Lucetta.

The place was unchanged; the same larches sighed the same notes; but

Farfrae had another wife—and, as Henchard knew, a better one. He only

hoped that Elizabeth-Jane had obtained a better home than had been hers

at the former time.

He passed the remainder of the afternoon in a curious highstrung

condition, unable to do much but think of the approaching meeting with

her, and sadly satirize himself for his emotions thereon, as a Samson

shorn. Such an innovation on Casterbridge customs as a flitting of

bridegroom and bride from the town immediately after the ceremony, was

not likely, but if it should have taken place he would wait till their

return. To assure himself on this point he asked a market-man when near

the borough if the newly-married couple had gone away, and was promptly

informed that they had not; they were at that hour, according to all

accounts, entertaining a houseful of guests at their home in Corn

Street.

Henchard dusted his boots, washed his hands at the riverside, and

proceeded up the town under the feeble lamps. He need have made no

inquiries beforehand, for on drawing near Farfrae’s residence it was

plain to the least observant that festivity prevailed within, and that

Donald himself shared it, his voice being distinctly audible in the

street, giving strong expression to a song of his dear native country

that he loved so well as never to have revisited it. Idlers were

standing on the pavement in front; and wishing to escape the notice of

these Henchard passed quickly on to the door.

It was wide open, the hall was lighted extravagantly, and people were

going up and down the stairs. His courage failed him; to enter

footsore, laden, and poorly dressed into the midst of such resplendency

was to bring needless humiliation upon her he loved, if not to court

repulse from her husband. Accordingly he went round into the street at

the back that he knew so well, entered the garden, and came quietly

into the house through the kitchen, temporarily depositing the bird and

cage under a bush outside, to lessen the awkwardness of his arrival.

Solitude and sadness had so emolliated Henchard that he now feared

circumstances he would formerly have scorned, and he began to wish that

he had not taken upon himself to arrive at such a juncture. However,

his progress was made unexpectedly easy by his discovering alone in the

kitchen an elderly woman who seemed to be acting as provisional

housekeeper during the convulsions from which Farfrae’s establishment

was just then suffering. She was one of those people whom nothing

surprises, and though to her, a total stranger, his request must have

seemed odd, she willingly volunteered to go up and inform the master

and mistress of the house that “a humble old friend” had come.

On second thought she said that he had better not wait in the kitchen,

but come up into the little back-parlour, which was empty. He thereupon

followed her thither, and she left him. Just as she got across the

landing to the door of the best parlour a dance was struck up, and she

returned to say that she would wait till that was over before

announcing him—Mr. and Mrs. Farfrae having both joined in the figure.

The door of the front room had been taken off its hinges to give more

space, and that of the room Henchard sat in being ajar, he could see

fractional parts of the dancers whenever their gyrations brought them

near the doorway, chiefly in the shape of the skirts of dresses and

streaming curls of hair; together with about three-fifths of the band

in profile, including the restless shadow of a fiddler’s elbow, and the

tip of the bass-viol bow.

The gaiety jarred upon Henchard’s spirits; and he could not quite

understand why Farfrae, a much-sobered man, and a widower, who had had

his trials, should have cared for it all, notwithstanding the fact that

he was quite a young man still, and quickly kindled to enthusiasm by

dance and song. That the quiet Elizabeth, who had long ago appraised

life at a moderate value, and who knew in spite of her maidenhood that

marriage was as a rule no dancing matter, should have had zest for this

revelry surprised him still more. However, young people could not be

quite old people, he concluded, and custom was omnipotent.

With the progress of the dance the performers spread out somewhat, and

then for the first time he caught a glimpse of the once despised

daughter who had mastered him, and made his heart ache. She was in a

dress of white silk or satin, he was not near enough to say which—snowy

white, without a tinge of milk or cream; and the expression of her face

was one of nervous pleasure rather than of gaiety. Presently Farfrae

came round, his exuberant Scotch movement making him conspicuous in a

moment. The pair were not dancing together, but Henchard could discern

that whenever the chances of the figure made them the partners of a

moment their emotions breathed a much subtler essence than at other

times.

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.