Bab Bab 14 · Chapter XIV

A Martinmas summer of Mrs. Henchard’s life set in with her entry into

her husband’s large house and respectable social orbit; and it was as

bright as such summers well can be. Lest she should pine for deeper

affection than he could give he made a point of showing some semblance

of it in external action. Among other things he had the iron railings,

that had smiled sadly in dull rust for the last eighty years, painted a

bright green, and the heavy-barred, small-paned Georgian sash windows

enlivened with three coats of white. He was as kind to her as a man,

mayor, and churchwarden could possibly be. The house was large, the

rooms lofty, and the landings wide; and the two unassuming women

scarcely made a perceptible addition to its contents.

To Elizabeth-Jane the time was a most triumphant one. The freedom she

experienced, the indulgence with which she was treated, went beyond her

expectations. The reposeful, easy, affluent life to which her mother’s

marriage had introduced her was, in truth, the beginning of a great

change in Elizabeth. She found she could have nice personal possessions

and ornaments for the asking, and, as the mediæval saying puts it,

“Take, have, and keep, are pleasant words.” With peace of mind came

development, and with development beauty. Knowledge—the result of great

natural insight—she did not lack; learning, accomplishment—those, alas,

she had not; but as the winter and spring passed by her thin face and

figure filled out in rounder and softer curves; the lines and

contractions upon her young brow went away; the muddiness of skin which

she had looked upon as her lot by nature departed with a change to

abundance of good things, and a bloom came upon her cheek. Perhaps,

too, her grey, thoughtful eyes revealed an arch gaiety sometimes; but

this was infrequent; the sort of wisdom which looked from their pupils

did not readily keep company with these lighter moods. Like all people

who have known rough times, light-heartedness seemed to her too

irrational and inconsequent to be indulged in except as a reckless dram

now and then; for she had been too early habituated to anxious

reasoning to drop the habit suddenly. She felt none of those ups and

downs of spirit which beset so many people without cause; never—to

paraphrase a recent poet—never a gloom in Elizabeth-Jane’s soul but she

well knew how it came there; and her present cheerfulness was fairly

proportionate to her solid guarantees for the same.

It might have been supposed that, given a girl rapidly becoming

good-looking, comfortably circumstanced, and for the first time in her

life commanding ready money, she would go and make a fool of herself by

dress. But no. The reasonableness of almost everything that Elizabeth

did was nowhere more conspicuous than in this question of clothes. To

keep in the rear of opportunity in matters of indulgence is as valuable

a habit as to keep abreast of opportunity in matters of enterprise.

This unsophisticated girl did it by an innate perceptiveness that was

almost genius. Thus she refrained from bursting out like a water-flower

that spring, and clothing herself in puffings and knick-knacks, as most

of the Casterbridge girls would have done in her circumstances. Her

triumph was tempered by circumspection, she had still that field-mouse

fear of the coulter of destiny despite fair promise, which is common

among the thoughtful who have suffered early from poverty and

oppression.

“I won’t be too gay on any account,” she would say to herself. “It

would be tempting Providence to hurl mother and me down, and afflict us

again as He used to do.”

We now see her in a black silk bonnet, velvet mantle or silk spencer,

dark dress, and carrying a sunshade. In this latter article she drew

the line at fringe, and had it plain edged, with a little ivory ring

for keeping it closed. It was odd about the necessity for that

sunshade. She discovered that with the clarification of her complexion

and the birth of pink cheeks her skin had grown more sensitive to the

sun’s rays. She protected those cheeks forthwith, deeming spotlessness

part of womanliness.

Henchard had become very fond of her, and she went out with him more

frequently than with her mother now. Her appearance one day was so

attractive that he looked at her critically.

“I happened to have the ribbon by me, so I made it up,” she faltered,

thinking him perhaps dissatisfied with some rather bright trimming she

had donned for the first time.

“Ay—of course—to be sure,” he replied in his leonine way. “Do as you

like—or rather as your mother advises ye. ’Od send—I’ve nothing to say

to’t!”

Indoors she appeared with her hair divided by a parting that arched

like a white rainbow from ear to ear. All in front of this line was

covered with a thick encampment of curls; all behind was dressed

smoothly, and drawn to a knob.

The three members of the family were sitting at breakfast one day, and

Henchard was looking silently, as he often did, at this head of hair,

which in colour was brown—rather light than dark. “I thought

Elizabeth-Jane’s hair—didn’t you tell me that Elizabeth-Jane’s hair

promised to be black when she was a baby?” he said to his wife.

She looked startled, jerked his foot warningly, and murmured, “Did I?”

As soon as Elizabeth was gone to her own room Henchard resumed. “Begad,

I nearly forgot myself just now! What I meant was that the girl’s hair

certainly looked as if it would be darker, when she was a baby.”

“It did; but they alter so,” replied Susan.

“Their hair gets darker, I know—but I wasn’t aware it lightened ever?”

“O yes.” And the same uneasy expression came out on her face, to which

the future held the key. It passed as Henchard went on:

“Well, so much the better. Now Susan, I want to have her called Miss

Henchard—not Miss Newson. Lots o’ people do it already in

carelessness—it is her legal name—so it may as well be made her usual

name—I don’t like t’other name at all for my own flesh and blood. I’ll

advertise it in the Casterbridge paper—that’s the way they do it. She

won’t object.”

“No. O no. But—”

“Well, then, I shall do it,” he said, peremptorily. “Surely, if she’s

willing, you must wish it as much as I?”

“O yes—if she agrees let us do it by all means,” she replied.

Then Mrs. Henchard acted somewhat inconsistently; it might have been

called falsely, but that her manner was emotional and full of the

earnestness of one who wishes to do right at great hazard. She went to

Elizabeth-Jane, whom she found sewing in her own sitting-room upstairs,

and told her what had been proposed about her surname. “Can you

agree—is it not a slight upon Newson—now he’s dead and gone?”

Elizabeth reflected. “I’ll think of it, mother,” she answered.

When, later in the day, she saw Henchard, she adverted to the matter at

once, in a way which showed that the line of feeling started by her

mother had been persevered in. “Do you wish this change so very much,

sir?” she asked.

“Wish it? Why, my blessed fathers, what an ado you women make about a

trifle! I proposed it—that’s all. Now, ’Lizabeth-Jane, just please

yourself. Curse me if I care what you do. Now, you understand, don’t

’ee go agreeing to it to please me.”

Here the subject dropped, and nothing more was said, and nothing was

done, and Elizabeth still passed as Miss Newson, and not by her legal

name.

Meanwhile the great corn and hay traffic conducted by Henchard throve

under the management of Donald Farfrae as it had never thriven before.

It had formerly moved in jolts; now it went on oiled casters. The old

crude _vivâ voce_ system of Henchard, in which everything depended upon

his memory, and bargains were made by the tongue alone, was swept away.

Letters and ledgers took the place of “I’ll do’t,” and “you shall

hae’t”; and, as in all such cases of advance, the rugged

picturesqueness of the old method disappeared with its inconveniences.

The position of Elizabeth-Jane’s room—rather high in the house, so that

it commanded a view of the hay-stores and granaries across the

garden—afforded her opportunity for accurate observation of what went

on there. She saw that Donald and Mr. Henchard were inseparables. When

walking together Henchard would lay his arm familiarly on his manager’s

shoulder, as if Farfrae were a younger brother, bearing so heavily that

his slight frame bent under the weight. Occasionally she would hear a

perfect cannonade of laughter from Henchard, arising from something

Donald had said, the latter looking quite innocent and not laughing at

all. In Henchard’s somewhat lonely life he evidently found the young

man as desirable for comradeship as he was useful for consultations.

Donald’s brightness of intellect maintained in the corn-factor the

admiration it had won at the first hour of their meeting. The poor

opinion, and but ill-concealed, that he entertained of the slim

Farfrae’s physical girth, strength, and dash was more than

counterbalanced by the immense respect he had for his brains.

Her quiet eye discerned that Henchard’s tigerish affection for the

younger man, his constant liking to have Farfrae near him, now and then

resulted in a tendency to domineer, which, however, was checked in a

moment when Donald exhibited marks of real offence. One day, looking

down on their figures from on high, she heard the latter remark, as

they stood in the doorway between the garden and yard, that their habit

of walking and driving about together rather neutralized Farfrae’s

value as a second pair of eyes, which should be used in places where

the principal was not. “’Od damn it,” cried Henchard, “what’s all the

world! I like a fellow to talk to. Now come along and hae some supper,

and don’t take too much thought about things, or ye’ll drive me crazy.”

When she walked with her mother, on the other hand, she often beheld

the Scotchman looking at them with a curious interest. The fact that he

had met her at the Three Mariners was insufficient to account for it,

since on the occasions on which she had entered his room he had never

raised his eyes. Besides, it was at her mother more particularly than

at herself that he looked, to Elizabeth-Jane’s half-conscious,

simple-minded, perhaps pardonable, disappointment. Thus she could not

account for this interest by her own attractiveness, and she decided

that it might be apparent only—a way of turning his eyes that Mr.

Farfrae had.

She did not divine the ample explanation of his manner, without

personal vanity, that was afforded by the fact of Donald being the

depositary of Henchard’s confidence in respect of his past treatment of

the pale, chastened mother who walked by her side. Her conjectures on

that past never went further than faint ones based on things casually

heard and seen—mere guesses that Henchard and her mother might have

been lovers in their younger days, who had quarrelled and parted.

Casterbridge, as has been hinted, was a place deposited in the block

upon a corn-field. There was no suburb in the modern sense, or

transitional intermixture of town and down. It stood, with regard to

the wide fertile land adjoining, clean-cut and distinct, like a

chess-board on a green tablecloth. The farmer’s boy could sit under his

barley-mow and pitch a stone into the office-window of the town-clerk;

reapers at work among the sheaves nodded to acquaintances standing on

the pavement-corner; the red-robed judge, when he condemned a

sheep-stealer, pronounced sentence to the tune of Baa, that floated in

at the window from the remainder of the flock browsing hard by; and at

executions the waiting crowd stood in a meadow immediately before the

drop, out of which the cows had been temporarily driven to give the

spectators room.

The corn grown on the upland side of the borough was garnered by

farmers who lived in an eastern purlieu called Durnover. Here

wheat-ricks overhung the old Roman street, and thrust their eaves

against the church tower; green-thatched barns, with doorways as high

as the gates of Solomon’s temple, opened directly upon the main

thoroughfare. Barns indeed were so numerous as to alternate with every

half-dozen houses along the way. Here lived burgesses who daily walked

the fallow; shepherds in an intra-mural squeeze. A street of farmers’

homesteads—a street ruled by a mayor and corporation, yet echoing with

the thump of the flail, the flutter of the winnowing-fan, and the purr

of the milk into the pails—a street which had nothing urban in it

whatever—this was the Durnover end of Casterbridge.

Henchard, as was natural, dealt largely with this nursery or bed of

small farmers close at hand—and his waggons were often down that way.

One day, when arrangements were in progress for getting home corn from

one of the aforesaid farms, Elizabeth-Jane received a note by hand,

asking her to oblige the writer by coming at once to a granary on

Durnover Hill. As this was the granary whose contents Henchard was

removing, she thought the request had something to do with his

business, and proceeded thither as soon as she had put on her bonnet.

The granary was just within the farm-yard, and stood on stone staddles,

high enough for persons to walk under. The gates were open, but nobody

was within. However, she entered and waited. Presently she saw a figure

approaching the gate—that of Donald Farfrae. He looked up at the church

clock, and came in. By some unaccountable shyness, some wish not to

meet him there alone, she quickly ascended the step-ladder leading to

the granary door, and entered it before he had seen her. Farfrae

advanced, imagining himself in solitude, and a few drops of rain

beginning to fall he moved and stood under the shelter where she had

just been standing. Here he leant against one of the staddles, and gave

himself up to patience. He, too, was plainly expecting some one; could

it be herself? If so, why? In a few minutes he looked at his watch, and

then pulled out a note, a duplicate of the one she had herself

received.

This situation began to be very awkward, and the longer she waited the

more awkward it became. To emerge from a door just above his head and

descend the ladder, and show she had been in hiding there, would look

so very foolish that she still waited on. A winnowing machine stood

close beside her, and to relieve her suspense she gently moved the

handle; whereupon a cloud of wheat husks flew out into her face, and

covered her clothes and bonnet, and stuck into the fur of her

victorine. He must have heard the slight movement for he looked up, and

then ascended the steps.

“Ah—it’s Miss Newson,” he said as soon as he could see into the

granary. “I didn’t know you were there. I have kept the appointment,

and am at your service.”

“O Mr. Farfrae,” she faltered, “so have I. But I didn’t know it was you

who wished to see me, otherwise I—”

“I wished to see you? O no—at least, that is, I am afraid there may be

a mistake.”

“Didn’t you ask me to come here? Didn’t you write this?” Elizabeth held

out her note.

“No. Indeed, at no hand would I have thought of it! And for you—didn’t

you ask me? This is not your writing?” And he held up his.

“By no means.”

“And is that really so! Then it’s somebody wanting to see us both.

Perhaps we would do well to wait a little longer.”

Acting on this consideration they lingered, Elizabeth-Jane’s face being

arranged to an expression of preternatural composure, and the young

Scot, at every footstep in the street without, looking from under the

granary to see if the passer were about to enter and declare himself

their summoner. They watched individual drops of rain creeping down the

thatch of the opposite rick—straw after straw—till they reached the

bottom; but nobody came, and the granary roof began to drip.

“The person is not likely to be coming,” said Farfrae. “It’s a trick

perhaps, and if so, it’s a great pity to waste our time like this, and

so much to be done.”

“’Tis a great liberty,” said Elizabeth.

“It’s true, Miss Newson. We’ll hear news of this some day depend on’t,

and who it was that did it. I wouldn’t stand for it hindering myself;

but you, Miss Newson——”

“I don’t mind—much,” she replied.

“Neither do I.”

They lapsed again into silence. “You are anxious to get back to

Scotland, I suppose, Mr. Farfrae?” she inquired.

“O no, Miss Newson. Why would I be?”

“I only supposed you might be from the song you sang at the Three

Mariners—about Scotland and home, I mean—which you seemed to feel so

deep down in your heart; so that we all felt for you.”

“Ay—and I did sing there—I did—— But, Miss Newson”—and Donald’s voice

musically undulated between two semi-tones as it always did when he

became earnest—“it’s well you feel a song for a few minutes, and your

eyes they get quite tearful; but you finish it, and for all you felt

you don’t mind it or think of it again for a long while. O no, I don’t

want to go back! Yet I’ll sing the song to you wi’ pleasure whenever

you like. I could sing it now, and not mind at all?”

“Thank you, indeed. But I fear I must go—rain or no.”

“Ay! Then, Miss Newson, ye had better say nothing about this hoax, and

take no heed of it. And if the person should say anything to you, be

civil to him or her, as if you did not mind it—so you’ll take the

clever person’s laugh away.” In speaking his eyes became fixed upon her

dress, still sown with wheat husks. “There’s husks and dust on you.

Perhaps you don’t know it?” he said, in tones of extreme delicacy. “And

it’s very bad to let rain come upon clothes when there’s chaff on them.

It washes in and spoils them. Let me help you—blowing is the best.”

As Elizabeth neither assented nor dissented Donald Farfrae began

blowing her back hair, and her side hair, and her neck, and the crown

of her bonnet, and the fur of her victorine, Elizabeth saying, “O,

thank you,” at every puff. At last she was fairly clean, though

Farfrae, having got over his first concern at the situation, seemed in

no manner of hurry to be gone.

“Ah—now I’ll go and get ye an umbrella,” he said.

She declined the offer, stepped out and was gone. Farfrae walked slowly

after, looking thoughtfully at her diminishing figure, and whistling in

undertones, “As I came down through Cannobie.”