The Mayor of Casterbridge

Chapter 19

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 s*x 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 step-daughter! 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.