Chương Chương 19 · Chapter XIX

Henchard and Elizabeth sat conversing by the fire. It was three weeks

after Mrs. Henchard’s funeral, the candles were not lighted, and a

restless, acrobatic flame, poised on a coal, called from the shady

walls the smiles of all shapes that could respond—the old pier-glass,

with gilt columns and huge entablature, the picture-frames, sundry

knobs and handles, and the brass rosette at the bottom of each riband

bell-pull on either side of the chimney-piece.

“Elizabeth, do you think much of old times?” said Henchard.

“Yes, sir; often,” she said.

“Who do you put in your pictures of ’em?”

“Mother and father—nobody else hardly.”

Henchard always looked like one bent on resisting pain when

Elizabeth-Jane spoke of Richard Newson as “father.” “Ah! I am out of

all that, am I not?” he said.... “Was Newson a kind father?”

“Yes, sir; very.”

Henchard’s face settled into an expression of stolid loneliness which

gradually modulated into something softer. “Suppose I had been your

real father?” he said. “Would you have cared for me as much as you

cared for Richard Newson?”

“I can’t think it,” she said quickly. “I can think of no other as my

father, except my father.”

Henchard’s wife was dissevered from him by death; his friend and helper

Farfrae by estrangement; Elizabeth-Jane by ignorance. It seemed to him

that only one of them could possibly be recalled, and that was the

girl. His mind began vibrating between the wish to reveal himself to

her and the policy of leaving well alone, till he could no longer sit

still. He walked up and down, and then he came and stood behind her

chair, looking down upon the top of her head. He could no longer

restrain his impulse. “What did your mother tell you about me—my

history?” he asked.

“That you were related by marriage.”

“She should have told more—before you knew me! Then my task would not

have been such a hard one.... Elizabeth, it is I who am your father,

and not Richard Newson. Shame alone prevented your wretched parents

from owning this to you while both of ’em were alive.”

The back of Elizabeth’s head remained still, and her shoulders did not

denote even the movements of breathing. Henchard went on: “I’d rather

have your scorn, your fear, anything than your ignorance; ’tis that I

hate! Your mother and I were man and wife when we were young. What you

saw was our second marriage. Your mother was too honest. We had thought

each other dead—and—Newson became her husband.”

This was the nearest approach Henchard could make to the full truth. As

far as he personally was concerned he would have screened nothing; but

he showed a respect for the young girl’s sex and years worthy of a

better man.

When he had gone on to give details which a whole series of slight and

unregarded incidents in her past life strangely corroborated; when, in

short, she believed his story to be true, she became greatly agitated,

and turning round to the table flung her face upon it weeping.

“Don’t cry—don’t cry!” said Henchard, with vehement pathos, “I can’t

bear it, I won’t bear it. I am your father; why should you cry? Am I so

dreadful, so hateful to ’ee? Don’t take against me, Elizabeth-Jane!” he

cried, grasping her wet hand. “Don’t take against me—though I was a

drinking man once, and used your mother roughly—I’ll be kinder to you

than _he_ was! I’ll do anything, if you will only look upon me as your

father!”

She tried to stand up and comfort him trustfully; but she could not;

she was troubled at his presence, like the brethren at the avowal of

Joseph.

“I don’t want you to come to me all of a sudden,” said Henchard in

jerks, and moving like a great tree in a wind. “No, Elizabeth, I don’t.

I’ll go away and not see you till to-morrow, or when you like, and then

I’ll show ’ee papers to prove my words. There, I am gone, and won’t

disturb you any more.... ’Twas I that chose your name, my daughter;

your mother wanted it Susan. There, don’t forget ’twas I gave you your

name!” He went out at the door and shut her softly in, and she heard

him go away into the garden. But he had not done. Before she had moved,

or in any way recovered from the effect of his disclosure, he

reappeared.

“One word more, Elizabeth,” he said. “You’ll take my surname now—hey?

Your mother was against it, but it will be much more pleasant to me.

’Tis legally yours, you know. But nobody need know that. You shall take

it as if by choice. I’ll talk to my lawyer—I don’t know the law of it

exactly; but will you do this—let me put a few lines into the newspaper

that such is to be your name?”

“If it is my name I must have it, mustn’t I?” she asked.

“Well, well; usage is everything in these matters.”

“I wonder why mother didn’t wish it?”

“Oh, some whim of the poor soul’s. Now get a bit of paper and draw up a

paragraph as I shall tell you. But let’s have a light.”

“I can see by the firelight,” she answered. “Yes—I’d rather.”

“Very well.”

She got a piece of paper, and bending over the fender wrote at his

dictation words which he had evidently got by heart from some

advertisement or other—words to the effect that she, the writer,

hitherto known as Elizabeth-Jane Newson, was going to call herself

Elizabeth-Jane Henchard forthwith. It was done, and fastened up, and

directed to the office of the _Casterbridge Chronicle_.

“Now,” said Henchard, with the blaze of satisfaction that he always

emitted when he had carried his point—though tenderness softened it

this time—“I’ll go upstairs and hunt for some documents that will prove

it all to you. But I won’t trouble you with them till to-morrow.

Good-night, my Elizabeth-Jane!”

He was gone before the bewildered girl could realize what it all meant,

or adjust her filial sense to the new center of gravity. She was

thankful that he had left her to herself for the evening, and sat down

over the fire. Here she remained in silence, and wept—not for her

mother now, but for the genial sailor Richard Newson, to whom she

seemed doing a wrong.

Henchard in the meantime had gone upstairs. Papers of a domestic nature

he kept in a drawer in his bedroom, and this he unlocked. Before

turning them over he leant back and indulged in reposeful thought.

Elizabeth was his at last and she was a girl of such good sense and

kind heart that she would be sure to like him. He was the kind of man

to whom some human object for pouring out his heart upon—were it

emotive or were it choleric—was almost a necessity. The craving for his

heart for the re-establishment of this tenderest human tie had been

great during his wife’s lifetime, and now he had submitted to its

mastery without reluctance and without fear. He bent over the drawer

again, and proceeded in his search.

Among the other papers had been placed the contents of his wife’s

little desk, the keys of which had been handed to him at her request.

Here was the letter addressed to him with the restriction, “_Not to be

opened till Elizabeth-Jane’s wedding-day_.”

Mrs. Henchard, though more patient than her husband, had been no

practical hand at anything. In sealing up the sheet, which was folded

and tucked in without an envelope, in the old-fashioned way, she had

overlaid the junction with a large mass of wax without the requisite

under-touch of the same. The seal had cracked, and the letter was open.

Henchard had no reason to suppose the restriction one of serious

weight, and his feeling for his late wife had not been of the nature of

deep respect. “Some trifling fancy or other of poor Susan’s, I

suppose,” he said; and without curiosity he allowed his eyes to scan

the letter:—

MY DEAR MICHAEL,—For the good of all three of us I have kept one thing

a secret from you till now. I hope you will understand why; I think you

will; though perhaps you may not forgive me. But, dear Michael, I have

done it for the best. I shall be in my grave when you read this, and

Elizabeth-Jane will have a home. Don’t curse me Mike—think of how I was

situated. I can hardly write it, but here it is. Elizabeth-Jane is not

your Elizabeth-Jane—the child who was in my arms when you sold me. No;

she died three months after that, and this living one is my other

husband’s. I christened her by the same name we had given to the first,

and she filled up the ache I felt at the other’s loss. Michael, I am

dying, and I might have held my tongue; but I could not. Tell her

husband of this or not, as you may judge; and forgive, if you can, a

woman you once deeply wronged, as she forgives you.

SUSAN HENCHARD

Her husband regarded the paper as if it were a window-pane through

which he saw for miles. His lips twitched, and he seemed to compress

his frame, as if to bear better. His usual habit was not to consider

whether destiny were hard upon him or not—the shape of his ideals in

cases of affliction being simply a moody “I am to suffer, I perceive.”

“This much scourging, then, it is for me.” But now through his

passionate head there stormed this thought—that the blasting disclosure

was what he had deserved.

His wife’s extreme reluctance to have the girl’s name altered from

Newson to Henchard was now accounted for fully. It furnished another

illustration of that honesty in dishonesty which had characterized her

in other things.

He remained unnerved and purposeless for near a couple of hours; till

he suddenly said, “Ah—I wonder if it is true!”

He jumped up in an impulse, kicked off his slippers, and went with a

candle to the door of Elizabeth-Jane’s room, where he put his ear to

the keyhole and listened. She was breathing profoundly. Henchard softly

turned the handle, entered, and shading the light, approached the

bedside. Gradually bringing the light from behind a screening curtain

he held it in such a manner that it fell slantwise on her face without

shining on her eyes. He steadfastly regarded her features.

They were fair: his were dark. But this was an unimportant preliminary.

In sleep there come to the surface buried genealogical facts, ancestral

curves, dead men’s traits, which the mobility of daytime animation

screens and overwhelms. In the present statuesque repose of the young

girl’s countenance Richard Newson’s was unmistakably reflected. He

could not endure the sight of her, and hastened away.

Misery taught him nothing more than defiant endurance of it. His wife

was dead, and the first impulse for revenge died with the thought that

she was beyond him. He looked out at the night as at a fiend. Henchard,

like all his kind, was superstitious, and he could not help thinking

that the concatenation of events this evening had produced was the

scheme of some sinister intelligence bent on punishing him. Yet they

had developed naturally. If he had not revealed his past history to

Elizabeth he would not have searched the drawer for papers, and so on.

The mockery was, that he should have no sooner taught a girl to claim

the shelter of his paternity than he discovered her to have no kinship

with him.

This ironical sequence of things angered him like an impish trick from

a fellow-creature. Like Prester John’s, his table had been spread, and

infernal harpies had snatched up the food. He went out of the house,

and moved sullenly onward down the pavement till he came to the bridge

at the bottom of the High Street. Here he turned in upon a bypath on

the river bank, skirting the north-eastern limits of the town.

These precincts embodied the mournful phases of Casterbridge life, as

the south avenues embodied its cheerful moods. The whole way along here

was sunless, even in summer time; in spring, white frosts lingered here

when other places were steaming with warmth; while in winter it was the

seed-field of all the aches, rheumatisms, and torturing cramps of the

year. The Casterbridge doctors must have pined away for want of

sufficient nourishment but for the configuration of the landscape on

the north-eastern side.

The river—slow, noiseless, and dark—the Schwarzwasser of

Casterbridge—ran beneath a low cliff, the two together forming a

defence which had rendered walls and artificial earthworks on this side

unnecessary. Here were ruins of a Franciscan priory, and a mill

attached to the same, the water of which roared down a back-hatch like

the voice of desolation. Above the cliff, and behind the river, rose a

pile of buildings, and in the front of the pile a square mass cut into

the sky. It was like a pedestal lacking its statue. This missing

feature, without which the design remained incomplete, was, in truth,

the corpse of a man, for the square mass formed the base of the

gallows, the extensive buildings at the back being the county gaol. In

the meadow where Henchard now walked the mob were wont to gather

whenever an execution took place, and there to the tune of the roaring

weir they stood and watched the spectacle.

The exaggeration which darkness imparted to the glooms of this region

impressed Henchard more than he had expected. The lugubrious harmony of

the spot with his domestic situation was too perfect for him, impatient

of effects, scenes, and adumbrations. It reduced his heartburning to

melancholy, and he exclaimed, “Why the deuce did I come here!” He went

on past the cottage in which the old local hangman had lived and died,

in times before that calling was monopolized over all England by a

single gentleman; and climbed up by a steep back lane into the town.

For the sufferings of that night, engendered by his bitter

disappointment, he might well have been pitied. He was like one who had

half fainted, and could neither recover nor complete the swoon. In

words he could blame his wife, but not in his heart; and had he obeyed

the wise directions outside her letter this pain would have been spared

him for long—possibly for ever, Elizabeth-Jane seeming to show no

ambition to quit her safe and secluded maiden courses for the

speculative path of matrimony.

The morning came after this night of unrest, and with it the necessity

for a plan. He was far too self-willed to recede from a position,

especially as it would involve humiliation. His daughter he had

asserted her to be, and his daughter she should always think herself,

no matter what hyprocrisy it involved.

But he was ill-prepared for the first step in this new situation. The

moment he came into the breakfast-room Elizabeth advanced with open

confidence to him and took him by the arm.

“I have thought and thought all night of it,” she said frankly. “And I

see that everything must be as you say. And I am going to look upon you

as the father that you are, and not to call you Mr. Henchard any more.

It is so plain to me now. Indeed, father, it is. For, of course, you

would not have done half the things you have done for me, and let me

have my own way so entirely, and bought me presents, if I had only been

your stepdaughter! He—Mr. Newson—whom my poor mother married by such a

strange mistake” (Henchard was glad that he had disguised matters

here), “was very kind—O so kind!” (she spoke with tears in her eyes);

“but that is not the same thing as being one’s real father after all.

Now, father, breakfast is ready!” she said cheerfully.

Henchard bent and kissed her cheek. The moment and the act he had

prefigured for weeks with a thrill of pleasure; yet it was no less than

a miserable insipidity to him now that it had come. His reinstation of

her mother had been chiefly for the girl’s sake, and the fruition of

the whole scheme was such dust and ashes as this.