Chương Chương 25 · Chapter XXV

The next phase of the supersession of Henchard in Lucetta’s heart was

an experiment in calling on her performed by Farfrae with some apparent

trepidation. Conventionally speaking he conversed with both Miss

Templeman and her companion; but in fact it was rather that Elizabeth

sat invisible in the room. Donald appeared not to see her at all, and

answered her wise little remarks with curtly indifferent monosyllables,

his looks and faculties hanging on the woman who could boast of a more

Protean variety in her phases, moods, opinions, and also principles,

than could Elizabeth. Lucetta had persisted in dragging her into the

circle; but she had remained like an awkward third point which that

circle would not touch.

Susan Henchard’s daughter bore up against the frosty ache of the

treatment, as she had borne up under worse things, and contrived as

soon as possible to get out of the inharmonious room without being

missed. The Scotchman seemed hardly the same Farfrae who had danced

with her and walked with her in a delicate poise between love and

friendship—that period in the history of a love when alone it can be

said to be unalloyed with pain.

She stoically looked from her bedroom window, and contemplated her fate

as if it were written on the top of the church-tower hard by. “Yes,”

she said at last, bringing down her palm upon the sill with a pat:

“_He_ is the second man of that story she told me!”

All this time Henchard’s smouldering sentiments towards Lucetta had

been fanned into higher and higher inflammation by the circumstances of

the case. He was discovering that the young woman for whom he once felt

a pitying warmth which had been almost chilled out of him by

reflection, was, when now qualified with a slight inaccessibility and a

more matured beauty, the very being to make him satisfied with life.

Day after day proved to him, by her silence, that it was no use to

think of bringing her round by holding aloof; so he gave in, and called

upon her again, Elizabeth-Jane being absent.

He crossed the room to her with a heavy tread of some awkwardness, his

strong, warm gaze upon her—like the sun beside the moon in comparison

with Farfrae’s modest look—and with something of a hail-fellow bearing,

as, indeed, was not unnatural. But she seemed so transubstantiated by

her change of position, and held out her hand to him in such cool

friendship, that he became deferential, and sat down with a perceptible

loss of power. He understood but little of fashion in dress, yet enough

to feel himself inadequate in appearance beside her whom he had

hitherto been dreaming of as almost his property. She said something

very polite about his being good enough to call. This caused him to

recover balance. He looked her oddly in the face, losing his awe.

“Why, of course I have called, Lucetta,” he said. “What does that

nonsense mean? You know I couldn’t have helped myself if I had

wished—that is, if I had any kindness at all. I’ve called to say that I

am ready, as soon as custom will permit, to give you my name in return

for your devotion and what you lost by it in thinking too little of

yourself and too much of me; to say that you can fix the day or month,

with my full consent, whenever in your opinion it would be seemly: you

know more of these things than I.”

“It is full early yet,” she said evasively.

“Yes, yes; I suppose it is. But you know, Lucetta, I felt directly my

poor ill-used Susan died, and when I could not bear the idea of

marrying again, that after what had happened between us it was my duty

not to let any unnecessary delay occur before putting things to rights.

Still, I wouldn’t call in a hurry, because—well, you can guess how this

money you’ve come into made me feel.” His voice slowly fell; he was

conscious that in this room his accents and manner wore a roughness not

observable in the street. He looked about the room at the novel

hangings and ingenious furniture with which she had surrounded herself.

“Upon my life I didn’t know such furniture as this could be bought in

Casterbridge,” he said.

“Nor can it be,” said she. “Nor will it till fifty years more of

civilization have passed over the town. It took a waggon and four

horses to get it here.”

“H’m. It looks as if you were living on capital.”

“O no, I am not.”

“So much the better. But the fact is, your setting up like this makes

my beaming towards you rather awkward.”

“Why?”

An answer was not really needed, and he did not furnish one. “Well,” he

went on, “there’s nobody in the world I would have wished to see enter

into this wealth before you, Lucetta, and nobody, I am sure, who will

become it more.” He turned to her with congratulatory admiration so

fervid that she shrank somewhat, notwithstanding that she knew him so

well.

“I am greatly obliged to you for all that,” said she, rather with an

air of speaking ritual. The stint of reciprocal feeling was perceived,

and Henchard showed chagrin at once—nobody was more quick to show that

than he.

“You may be obliged or not for’t. Though the things I say may not have

the polish of what you’ve lately learnt to expect for the first time in

your life, they are real, my lady Lucetta.”

“That’s rather a rude way of speaking to me,” pouted Lucetta, with

stormy eyes.

“Not at all!” replied Henchard hotly. “But there, there, I don’t wish

to quarrel with ’ee. I come with an honest proposal for silencing your

Jersey enemies, and you ought to be thankful.”

“How can you speak so!” she answered, firing quickly. “Knowing that my

only crime was the indulging in a foolish girl’s passion for you with

too little regard for correctness, and that I was what I call innocent

all the time they called me guilty, you ought not to be so cutting! I

suffered enough at that worrying time, when you wrote to tell me of

your wife’s return and my consequent dismissal, and if I am a little

independent now, surely the privilege is due to me!”

“Yes, it is,” he said. “But it is not by what is, in this life, but by

what appears, that you are judged; and I therefore think you ought to

accept me—for your own good name’s sake. What is known in your native

Jersey may get known here.”

“How you keep on about Jersey! I am English!”

“Yes, yes. Well, what do you say to my proposal?”

For the first time in their acquaintance Lucetta had the move; and yet

she was backward. “For the present let things be,” she said with some

embarrassment. “Treat me as an acquaintance, and I’ll treat you as one.

Time will—” She stopped; and he said nothing to fill the gap for

awhile, there being no pressure of half acquaintance to drive them into

speech if they were not minded for it.

“That’s the way the wind blows, is it?” he said at last grimly, nodding

an affirmative to his own thoughts.

A yellow flood of reflected sunlight filled the room for a few

instants. It was produced by the passing of a load of newly trussed hay

from the country, in a waggon marked with Farfrae’s name. Beside it

rode Farfrae himself on horseback. Lucetta’s face became—as a woman’s

face becomes when the man she loves rises upon her gaze like an

apparition.

A turn of the eye by Henchard, a glance from the window, and the secret

of her inaccessibility would have been revealed. But Henchard in

estimating her tone was looking down so plumb-straight that he did not

note the warm consciousness upon Lucetta’s face.

“I shouldn’t have thought it—I shouldn’t have thought it of women!” he

said emphatically by-and-by, rising and shaking himself into activity;

while Lucetta was so anxious to divert him from any suspicion of the

truth that she asked him to be in no hurry. Bringing him some apples

she insisted upon paring one for him.

He would not take it. “No, no; such is not for me,” he said drily, and

moved to the door. At going out he turned his eye upon her.

“You came to live in Casterbridge entirely on my account,” he said.

“Yet now you are here you won’t have anything to say to my offer!”

He had hardly gone down the staircase when she dropped upon the sofa

and jumped up again in a fit of desperation. “I will love him!” she

cried passionately; “as for _him_—he’s hot-tempered and stern, and it

would be madness to bind myself to him knowing that. I won’t be a slave

to the past—I’ll love where I choose!”

Yet having decided to break away from Henchard one might have supposed

her capable of aiming higher than Farfrae. But Lucetta reasoned

nothing: she feared hard words from the people with whom she had been

earlier associated; she had no relatives left; and with native

lightness of heart took kindly to what fate offered.

Elizabeth-Jane, surveying the position of Lucetta between her two

lovers from the crystalline sphere of a straightforward mind, did not

fail to perceive that her father, as she called him, and Donald Farfrae

became more desperately enamoured of her friend every day. On Farfrae’s

side it was the unforced passion of youth. On Henchard’s the

artificially stimulated coveting of maturer age.

The pain she experienced from the almost absolute obliviousness to her

existence that was shown by the pair of them became at times half

dissipated by her sense of its humourousness. When Lucetta had pricked

her finger they were as deeply concerned as if she were dying; when she

herself had been seriously sick or in danger they uttered a

conventional word of sympathy at the news, and forgot all about it

immediately. But, as regarded Henchard, this perception of hers also

caused her some filial grief; she could not help asking what she had

done to be neglected so, after the professions of solicitude he had

made. As regarded Farfrae, she thought, after honest reflection, that

it was quite natural. What was she beside Lucetta?—as one of the

“meaner beauties of the night,” when the moon had risen in the skies.

She had learnt the lesson of renunciation, and was as familiar with the

wreck of each day’s wishes as with the diurnal setting of the sun. If

her earthly career had taught her few book philosophies it had at least

well practised her in this. Yet her experience had consisted less in a

series of pure disappointments than in a series of substitutions.

Continually it had happened that what she had desired had not been

granted her, and that what had been granted her she had not desired. So

she viewed with an approach to equanimity the now cancelled days when

Donald had been her undeclared lover, and wondered what unwished-for

thing Heaven might send her in place of him.