The Mayor of Casterbridge

Chapter 14

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

mediaeval 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 viva 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."