Part 8 (1/2)

9.

When Elizabeth-Jane opened the hinged cas.e.m.e.nt next morning the mellow air brought in the feel of imminent autumn almost as distinctly as if she had been in the remotest hamlet. Casterbridge was the complement of the rural life around, not its urban opposite. Bees and b.u.t.terflies in the cornfields at the top of the town, who desired to get to the meads at the bottom, took no circuitous course, but flew straight down High Street without any apparent consciousness that they were traversing strange lat.i.tudes. And in autumn airy spheres of thistledown floated into the same street, lodged upon the shop fronts, blew into drains, and innumerable tawny and yellow leaves skimmed along the pavement, and stole through people's doorways into their pa.s.sages with a hesitating scratch on the floor, like the skirts of timid visitors.

Hearing voices, one of which was close at hand, she withdrew her head and glanced from behind the window-curtains. Mr. Henchard--now habited no longer as a great personage, but as a thriving man of business--was pausing on his way up the middle of the street, and the Scotchman was looking from the window adjoining her own. Henchard it appeared, had gone a little way past the inn before he had noticed his acquaintance of the previous evening. He came back a few steps, Donald Farfrae opening the window further.

”And you are off soon, I suppose?” said Henchard upwards.

”Yes--almost this moment, sir,” said the other. ”Maybe I'll walk on till the coach makes up on me.”

”Which way?”

”The way ye are going.”

”Then shall we walk together to the top o' town?”

”If ye'll wait a minute,” said the Scotchman.

In a few minutes the latter emerged, bag in hand. Henchard looked at the bag as at an enemy. It showed there was no mistake about the young man's departure. ”Ah, my lad,” he said, ”you should have been a wise man, and have stayed with me.”

”Yes, yes--it might have been wiser,” said Donald, looking microscopically at the houses that were furthest off. ”It is only telling ye the truth when I say my plans are vague.”

They had by this time pa.s.sed on from the precincts of the inn, and Elizabeth-Jane heard no more. She saw that they continued in conversation, Henchard turning to the other occasionally, and emphasizing some remark with a gesture. Thus they pa.s.sed the King's Arms Hotel, the Market House, St. Peter's churchyard wall, ascending to the upper end of the long street till they were small as two grains of corn; when they bent suddenly to the right into the Bristol Road, and were out of view.

”He was a good man--and he's gone,” she said to herself. ”I was nothing to him, and there was no reason why he should have wished me good-bye.”

The simple thought, with its latent sense of slight, had moulded itself out of the following little fact: when the Scotchman came out at the door he had by accident glanced up at her; and then he had looked away again without nodding, or smiling, or saying a word.

”You are still thinking, mother,” she said, when she turned inwards.

”Yes; I am thinking of Mr. Henchard's sudden liking for that young man.

He was always so. Now, surely, if he takes so warmly to people who are not related to him at all, may he not take as warmly to his own kin?”

While they debated this question a procession of five large waggons went past, laden with hay up to the bedroom windows. They came in from the country, and the steaming horses had probably been travelling a great part of the night. To the shaft of each hung a little board, on which was painted in white letters, ”Henchard, corn-factor and hay-merchant.”

The spectacle renewed his wife's conviction that, for her daughter's sake, she should strain a point to rejoin him.

The discussion was continued during breakfast, and the end of it was that Mrs. Henchard decided, for good or for ill, to send Elizabeth-Jane with a message to Henchard, to the effect that his relative Susan, a sailor's widow, was in the town; leaving it to him to say whether or not he would recognize her. What had brought her to this determination were chiefly two things. He had been described as a lonely widower; and he had expressed shame for a past transaction of his life. There was promise in both.

”If he says no,” she enjoined, as Elizabeth-Jane stood, bonnet on, ready to depart; ”if he thinks it does not become the good position he has reached to in the town, to own--to let us call on him as--his distant kinfolk, say, 'Then, sir, we would rather not intrude; we will leave Casterbridge as quietly as we have come, and go back to our own country.'...I almost feel that I would rather he did say so, as I have not seen him for so many years, and we are so--little allied to him!”

”And if he say yes?” inquired the more sanguine one.

”In that case,” answered Mrs. Henchard cautiously, ”ask him to write me a note, saying when and how he will see us--or ME.”

Elizabeth-Jane went a few steps towards the landing. ”And tell him,”

continued her mother, ”that I fully know I have no claim upon him--that I am glad to find he is thriving; that I hope his life may be long and happy--there, go.” Thus with a half-hearted willingness, a smothered reluctance, did the poor forgiving woman start her unconscious daughter on this errand.

It was about ten o'clock, and market-day, when Elizabeth paced up the High Street, in no great hurry; for to herself her position was only that of a poor relation deputed to hunt up a rich one. The front doors of the private houses were mostly left open at this warm autumn time, no thought of umbrella stealers disturbing the minds of the placid burgesses. Hence, through the long, straight, entrance pa.s.sages thus unclosed could be seen, as through tunnels, the mossy gardens at the back, glowing with nasturtiums, fuchsias, scarlet geraniums, ”b.l.o.o.d.y warriors,” snapdragons, and dahlias, this floral blaze being backed by crusted grey stone-work remaining from a yet remoter Casterbridge than the venerable one visible in the street. The old-fas.h.i.+oned fronts of these houses, which had older than old-fas.h.i.+oned backs, rose sheer from the pavement, into which the bow windows protruded like bastions, necessitating a pleasing cha.s.sez-decha.s.sez movement to the time-pressed pedestrian at every few yards. He was bound also to evolve other Terpsich.o.r.ean figures in respect of door-steps, sc.r.a.pers, cellar-hatches, church b.u.t.tresses, and the overhanging angles of walls which, originally un.o.btrusive, had become bow-legged and knock-kneed.

In addition to these fixed obstacles which spoke so cheerfully of individual unrestraint as to boundaries, movables occupied the path and roadway to a perplexing extent. First the vans of the carriers in and out of Casterbridge, who hailed from Mellstock, Weatherbury, The Hintocks, Sherton-Abbas, Kingsbere, Overcombe, and many other towns and villages round. Their owners were numerous enough to be regarded as a tribe, and had almost distinctiveness enough to be regarded as a race.

Their vans had just arrived, and were drawn up on each side of the street in close file, so as to form at places a wall between the pavement and the roadway. Moreover every shop pitched out half its contents upon trestles and boxes on the kerb, extending the display each week a little further and further into the roadway, despite the expostulations of the two feeble old constables, until there remained but a tortuous defile for carriages down the centre of the street, which afforded fine opportunities for skill with the reins. Over the pavement on the sunny side of the way hung s...o...b..inds so constructed as to give the pa.s.senger's hat a smart buffet off his head, as from the unseen hands of Cranstoun's Goblin Page, celebrated in romantic lore.