บทที่ บทที่ 42 · Chapter XLII

But the emotional conviction that he was in Somebody’s hand began to

die out of Henchard’s breast as time slowly removed into distance the

event which had given that feeling birth. The apparition of Newson

haunted him. He would surely return.

Yet Newson did not arrive. Lucetta had been borne along the churchyard

path; Casterbridge had for the last time turned its regard upon her,

before proceeding to its work as if she had never lived. But Elizabeth

remained undisturbed in the belief of her relationship to Henchard, and

now shared his home. Perhaps, after all, Newson was gone for ever.

In due time the bereaved Farfrae had learnt the, at least, proximate

cause of Lucetta’s illness and death, and his first impulse was

naturally enough to wreak vengeance in the name of the law upon the

perpetrators of the mischief. He resolved to wait till the funeral was

over ere he moved in the matter. The time having come he reflected.

Disastrous as the result had been, it was obviously in no way foreseen

or intended by the thoughtless crew who arranged the motley procession.

The tempting prospect of putting to the blush people who stand at the

head of affairs—that supreme and piquant enjoyment of those who writhe

under the heel of the same—had alone animated them, so far as he could

see; for he knew nothing of Jopp’s incitements. Other considerations

were also involved. Lucetta had confessed everything to him before her

death, and it was not altogether desirable to make much ado about her

history, alike for her sake, for Henchard’s, and for his own. To regard

the event as an untoward accident seemed, to Farfrae, truest

consideration for the dead one’s memory, as well as best philosophy.

Henchard and himself mutually forbore to meet. For Elizabeth’s sake the

former had fettered his pride sufficiently to accept the small seed and

root business which some of the Town Council, headed by Farfrae, had

purchased to afford him a new opening. Had he been only personally

concerned Henchard, without doubt, would have declined assistance even

remotely brought about by the man whom he had so fiercely assailed. But

the sympathy of the girl seemed necessary to his very existence; and on

her account pride itself wore the garments of humility.

Here they settled themselves; and on each day of their lives Henchard

anticipated her every wish with a watchfulness in which paternal regard

was heightened by a burning jealous dread of rivalry. Yet that Newson

would ever now return to Casterbridge to claim her as a daughter there

was little reason to suppose. He was a wanderer and a stranger, almost

an alien; he had not seen his daughter for several years; his affection

for her could not in the nature of things be keen; other interests

would probably soon obscure his recollections of her, and prevent any

such renewal of inquiry into the past as would lead to a discovery that

she was still a creature of the present. To satisfy his conscience

somewhat Henchard repeated to himself that the lie which had retained

for him the coveted treasure had not been deliberately told to that

end, but had come from him as the last defiant word of a despair which

took no thought of consequences. Furthermore he pleaded within himself

that no Newson could love her as he loved her, or would tend her to his

life’s extremity as he was prepared to do cheerfully.

Thus they lived on in the shop overlooking the churchyard, and nothing

occurred to mark their days during the remainder of the year. Going out

but seldom, and never on a marketday, they saw Donald Farfrae only at

rarest intervals, and then mostly as a transitory object in the

distance of the street. Yet he was pursuing his ordinary avocations,

smiling mechanically to fellow-tradesmen, and arguing with

bargainers—as bereaved men do after a while.

Time, “in his own grey style,” taught Farfrae how to estimate his

experience of Lucetta—all that it was, and all that it was not. There

are men whose hearts insist upon a dogged fidelity to some image or

cause thrown by chance into their keeping, long after their judgment

has pronounced it no rarity—even the reverse, indeed, and without them

the band of the worthy is incomplete. But Farfrae was not of those. It

was inevitable that the insight, briskness, and rapidity of his nature

should take him out of the dead blank which his loss threw about him.

He could not but perceive that by the death of Lucetta he had exchanged

a looming misery for a simple sorrow. After that revelation of her

history, which must have come sooner or later in any circumstances, it

was hard to believe that life with her would have been productive of

further happiness.

But as a memory, nothwithstanding such conditions, Lucetta’s image

still lived on with him, her weaknesses provoking only the gentlest

criticism, and her sufferings attenuating wrath at her concealments to

a momentary spark now and then.

By the end of a year Henchard’s little retail seed and grain shop, not

much larger than a cupboard, had developed its trade considerably, and

the stepfather and daughter enjoyed much serenity in the pleasant,

sunny corner in which it stood. The quiet bearing of one who brimmed

with an inner activity characterized Elizabeth-Jane at this period. She

took long walks into the country two or three times a week, mostly in

the direction of Budmouth. Sometimes it occurred to him that when she

sat with him in the evening after those invigorating walks she was

civil rather than affectionate; and he was troubled; one more bitter

regret being added to those he had already experienced at having, by

his severe censorship, frozen up her precious affection when originally

offered.

She had her own way in everything now. In going and coming, in buying

and selling, her word was law.

“You have got a new muff, Elizabeth,” he said to her one day quite

humbly.

“Yes; I bought it,” she said.

He looked at it again as it lay on an adjoining table. The fur was of a

glossy brown, and, though he was no judge of such articles, he thought

it seemed an unusually good one for her to possess.

“Rather costly, I suppose, my dear, was it not?” he hazarded.

“It was rather above my figure,” she said quietly. “But it is not

showy.”

“O no,” said the netted lion, anxious not to pique her in the least.

Some little time after, when the year had advanced into another spring,

he paused opposite her empty bedroom in passing it. He thought of the

time when she had cleared out of his then large and handsome house in

Corn Street, in consequence of his dislike and harshness, and he had

looked into her chamber in just the same way. The present room was much

humbler, but what struck him about it was the abundance of books lying

everywhere. Their number and quality made the meagre furniture that

supported them seem absurdly disproportionate. Some, indeed many, must

have been recently purchased; and though he encouraged her to buy in

reason, he had no notion that she indulged her innate passion so

extensively in proportion to the narrowness of their income. For the

first time he felt a little hurt by what he thought her extravagance,

and resolved to say a word to her about it. But, before he had found

the courage to speak an event happened which set his thoughts flying in

quite another direction.

The busy time of the seed trade was over, and the quiet weeks that

preceded the hay-season had come—setting their special stamp upon

Casterbridge by thronging the market with wood rakes, new waggons in

yellow, green, and red, formidable scythes, and pitchforks of prong

sufficient to skewer up a small family. Henchard, contrary to his wont,

went out one Saturday afternoon towards the market-place from a curious

feeling that he would like to pass a few minutes on the spot of his

former triumphs. Farfrae, to whom he was still a comparative stranger,

stood a few steps below the Corn Exchange door—a usual position with

him at this hour—and he appeared lost in thought about something he was

looking at a little way off.

Henchard’s eyes followed Farfrae’s, and he saw that the object of his

gaze was no sample-showing farmer, but his own stepdaughter, who had

just come out of a shop over the way. She, on her part, was quite

unconscious of his attention, and in this was less fortunate than those

young women whose very plumes, like those of Juno’s bird, are set with

Argus eyes whenever possible admirers are within ken.

Henchard went away, thinking that perhaps there was nothing significant

after all in Farfrae’s look at Elizabeth-Jane at that juncture. Yet he

could not forget that the Scotchman had once shown a tender interest in

her, of a fleeting kind. Thereupon promptly came to the surface that

idiosyncrasy of Henchard’s which had ruled his courses from the

beginning and had mainly made him what he was. Instead of thinking that

a union between his cherished stepdaughter and the energetic thriving

Donald was a thing to be desired for her good and his own, he hated the

very possibility.

Time had been when such instinctive opposition would have taken shape

in action. But he was not now the Henchard of former days. He schooled

himself to accept her will, in this as in other matters, as absolute

and unquestionable. He dreaded lest an antagonistic word should lose

for him such regard as he had regained from her by his devotion,

feeling that to retain this under separation was better than to incur

her dislike by keeping her near.

But the mere thought of such separation fevered his spirit much, and in

the evening he said, with the stillness of suspense: “Have you seen Mr.

Farfrae to-day, Elizabeth?”

Elizabeth-Jane started at the question; and it was with some confusion

that she replied “No.”

“Oh—that’s right—that’s right.... It was only that I saw him in the

street when we both were there.” He was wondering if her embarrassment

justified him in a new suspicion—that the long walks which she had

latterly been taking, that the new books which had so surprised him,

had anything to do with the young man. She did not enlighten him, and

lest silence should allow her to shape thoughts unfavourable to their

present friendly relations, he diverted the discourse into another

channel.

Henchard was, by original make, the last man to act stealthily, for

good or for evil. But the _solicitus timor_ of his love—the dependence

upon Elizabeth’s regard into which he had declined (or, in another

sense, to which he had advanced)—denaturalized him. He would often

weigh and consider for hours together the meaning of such and such a

deed or phrase of hers, when a blunt settling question would formerly

have been his first instinct. And now, uneasy at the thought of a

passion for Farfrae which should entirely displace her mild filial

sympathy with himself, he observed her going and coming more narrowly.

There was nothing secret in Elizabeth-Jane’s movements beyond what

habitual reserve induced, and it may at once be owned on her account

that she was guilty of occasional conversations with Donald when they

chanced to meet. Whatever the origin of her walks on the Budmouth Road,

her return from those walks was often coincident with Farfrae’s

emergence from Corn Street for a twenty minutes’ blow on that rather

windy highway—just to winnow the seeds and chaff out of him before

sitting down to tea, as he said. Henchard became aware of this by going

to the Ring, and, screened by its enclosure, keeping his eye upon the

road till he saw them meet. His face assumed an expression of extreme

anguish.

“Of her, too, he means to rob me!” he whispered. “But he has the right.

I do not wish to interfere.”

The meeting, in truth, was of a very innocent kind, and matters were by

no means so far advanced between the young people as Henchard’s jealous

grief inferred. Could he have heard such conversation as passed he

would have been enlightened thus much:—

_He_.—“You like walking this way, Miss Henchard—and is it not so?”

(uttered in his undulatory accents, and with an appraising, pondering

gaze at her).

_She_.—“O yes. I have chosen this road latterly. I have no great reason

for it.”

_He_.—“But that may make a reason for others.”

_She_ (reddening).—“I don’t know that. My reason, however, such as it

is, is that I wish to get a glimpse of the sea every day.”

_He_.—“Is it a secret why?”

_She_ ( reluctantly ).—“Yes.”

_He_ (with the pathos of one of his native ballads).—“Ah, I doubt there

will be any good in secrets! A secret cast a deep shadow over my life.

And well you know what it was.”

Elizabeth admitted that she did, but she refrained from confessing why

the sea attracted her. She could not herself account for it fully, not

knowing the secret possibly to be that, in addition to early marine

associations, her blood was a sailor’s.

“Thank you for those new books, Mr. Farfrae,” she added shyly. “I

wonder if I ought to accept so many!”

“Ay! why not? It gives me more pleasure to get them for you, than you

to have them!”

“It cannot.”

They proceeded along the road together till they reached the town, and

their paths diverged.

Henchard vowed that he would leave them to their own devices, put

nothing in the way of their courses, whatever they might mean. If he

were doomed to be bereft of her, so it must be. In the situation which

their marriage would create he could see no _locus standi_ for himself

at all. Farfrae would never recognize him more than superciliously; his

poverty ensured that, no less than his past conduct. And so Elizabeth

would grow to be a stranger to him, and the end of his life would be

friendless solitude.

With such a possibility impending he could not help watchfulness.

Indeed, within certain lines, he had the right to keep an eye upon her

as his charge. The meetings seemed to become matters of course with

them on special days of the week.

At last full proof was given him. He was standing behind a wall close

to the place at which Farfrae encountered her. He heard the young man

address her as “Dearest Elizabeth-Jane,” and then kiss her, the girl

looking quickly round to assure herself that nobody was near.

When they were gone their way Henchard came out from the wall, and

mournfully followed them to Casterbridge. The chief looming trouble in

this engagement had not decreased. Both Farfrae and Elizabeth-Jane,

unlike the rest of the people, must suppose Elizabeth to be his actual

daughter, from his own assertion while he himself had the same belief;

and though Farfrae must have so far forgiven him as to have no

objection to own him as a father-in-law, intimate they could never be.

Thus would the girl, who was his only friend, be withdrawn from him by

degrees through her husband’s influence, and learn to despise him.

Had she lost her heart to any other man in the world than the one he

had rivalled, cursed, wrestled with for life in days before his spirit

was broken, Henchard would have said, “I am content.” But content with

the prospect as now depicted was hard to acquire.

There is an outer chamber of the brain in which thoughts unowned,

unsolicited, and of noxious kind, are sometimes allowed to wander for a

moment prior to being sent off whence they came. One of these thoughts

sailed into Henchard’s ken now.

Suppose he were to communicate to Farfrae the fact that his betrothed

was not the child of Michael Henchard at all—legally, nobody’s child;

how would that correct and leading townsman receive the information? He

might possibly forsake Elizabeth-Jane, and then she would be her

step-sire’s own again.

Henchard shuddered, and exclaimed, “God forbid such a thing! Why should

I still be subject to these visitations of the devil, when I try so

hard to keep him away?”