The Mayor of Casterbridge

‘Ah, yes—you would naturally have heard that. Well, I lost my wife nineteen years ago or so—by my own fault … This is how it came about. One summer evening I was travelling for employment, and she was walking at my side, carrying the baby, our only child. We came to a booth in a country fair. I was a drinking man at that time.’

Henchard paused a moment, threw himself back so that his elbow rested on the table, his forehead being shaded by his hand, which, however, did not hide the marks of introspective inflexibility on his features as he narrated in fullest details the incidents of the transaction with the sailor. The tinge of indifference which had at first been visible in the Scotchman now disappeared.

Henchard went on to describe his attempts to find his wife; the oath he swore; the solitary life he led during the years which followed. ‘I have kept my oath for nineteen years,’ he went on; ‘I have risen to what you see me now.’

‘Ay!’

‘Well—no wife could I hear of in all that time; and being by nature something of a woman-hater, I have found it no hardship to keep mostly at a distance from the sex. No wife could I hear of, I say, till this very day. And now—she has come back.’

‘Come back, has she!’

‘This morning—this very morning. And what’s to be done?’

‘Can ye no’ take her and live with her, and make some amends?’

‘That’s what I’ve planned and proposed. But, Farfrae,’ said Henchard gloomily, ‘by doing right with Susan I wrong another innocent woman.’

‘Ye don’t say that?’

‘In the nature of things, Farfrae, it is almost impossible that a man of my sorts should have the good fortune to tide through twenty years o’ life without making more blunders than one. It has been my custom for many years to run across to Jersey in the way of business, particularly in the potato and root season. I do a large trade wi’ them in that line. Well, one autumn when stopping there I fell quite ill, and in my illness I sank into one of those gloomy fits I sometimes suffer from, on account o’ the loneliness of my domestic life, when the world seems to have the blackness of hell, and, like Job, I could curse the day that gave me birth.’

‘Ah, no, I never feel like it,’ said Farfrae.

‘Then pray to God that you never may, young man. While in this state I was taken pity on by a woman—a young lady I should call her, for she was of good family, well bred, and well educated—the daughter of some harum-scarum military officer who had got into difficulties, and has his pay sequestrated. He was dead now, and her mother too, and she was as lonely as I. This young creature was staying at the boarding-house where I happened to have my lodging; and when I was pulled down she took upon herself to nurse me. Heaven knows why, for I wasn’t worth it. But being together in the same house, and her feelings warm, we got naturally intimate. I won’t go into particulars of what our relations were. It is enough to say that we honestly meant to marry. There arose a scandal, which did me no harm, but was of course the ruin to her. Though, Farfrae, between you and me, as man and man, I solemnly declare that philandering with womankind has neither been my vice nor my virtue. She was terribly careless of appearances, and I was perhaps more, because o’ my dreary state; and it was through this that the scandal arose. At last I was well and came away. When I was gone she suffered much on my account, and didn’t forget to tell me so in letters one after another; till, latterly, I felt I owed her something, and thought that, as I had not heard of Susan for so long, I would make this other one the only return I could make, and ask her if she would run the risk of Susan being alive (very slight as I believed) and marry me, such as I was. She jumped for joy, and we should no doubt soon have been married—but, behold, Susan appears!’

Donald showed his deep concern at a complication so far beyond the degree of his simple experiences.

‘Now see what injury a man may cause around him! Even after that wrong-doing at the fair when I was young, if I had never been so selfish as to let this giddy girl devote herself to me over at Jersey, to the injury of her name, all might now be well. Yet, as it stands, I must bitterly disappoint one of these women; and it is the second. My first duty is to Susan—there’s no doubt about that.’

‘They are both in a very melancholy position, and that’s true!’ murmured Donald.

‘They are! For myself I don’t care—’twill all end one way. But these two.’ Henchard paused in reverie. ‘I feel I should like to treat the second, no less than the first, as kindly as a man can in such a case.’

‘Ah, well, it cannot be helped!’ said the other, with philosophic woefulness. ‘You mun write to the young lady, and in your letter you must put it plain and honest that it turns out she cannet be your wife, the first having come back; that ye cannet see her more; and that—ye wish her weel.’

‘That won’t do. ’Od seize it, I must do a little more than that! I must—though she did always brag about her rich uncle or rich aunt, and her expectations from ’em—I must send a useful sum of money to her, I suppose—just as a little recompense, poor girl … Now, will you help me in this, and draw up an explanation to her of all I’ve told ye, breaking it as gently as you can? I’m so bad at letters.’

‘And I will.’

‘Now, I haven’t told you quite all yet. My wife Susan has my daughter with her—the baby that was in her arms at the fair; and this girl knows nothing of me beyond that I am some sort of relation by marriage. She has grown up in the belief that the sailor to whom I made over her mother, and who is now dead, was her father, and her mother’s husband. What her mother has always felt, she and I together feel now—that we can’t proclaim our disgrace to the girl by letting her know the truth. Now what would you do?—I want your advice.’

‘I think I’d run the risk, and tell her the truth. She’ll forgive ye both.’

‘Never!’ said Henchard. ‘I am not going to let her know the truth. Her mother and I be going to marry again; and it will not only help us to keep our child’s respect, but it will be more proper. Susan looks upon herself as the sailor’s widow, and won’t think o’ living with me as formerly without another religious ceremony—and she’s right.’

Farfrae thereupon said no more. The letter to the young Jersey woman was carefully framed by him, and the interview ended, Henchard saying, as the Scotchman left, ‘I feel it a great relief, Farfrae, to tell some friend o’ this! You see now that the Mayor of Casterbridge is not so thriving in his mind as it seems he might be from the state of his pocket.’

‘I do. And I’m sorry for ye!’ said Farfrae.

When he had gone Henchard copied the letter, and, enclosing a cheque, took it to the post-office, from which he walked back thoughtfully.

‘Can it be that it will go off so easily!’ he said. ‘Poor thing—God knows! Now then, to make amends to Susan!’

CHAPTER 13 (#ulink_5adf7b92-e1d0-55e2-9a87-2b1acffc7a44)

The cottage which Michael Henchard hired for his wife Susan under her name of Newson—in pursuance of their plan—was in the upper or western part of the town, near the Roman wall, and the avenue which overshadowed it. The evening sun seemed to shine more yellowly there than anywhere else this autumn—stretching its rays, as the hours grew later, under the lowest sycamore boughs, and steeping the ground-floor of the dwelling, with its green shutters, in the substratum of radiance which the foliage screened from the upper parts. Beneath these sycamores on the town walls could be seen from the sitting-room the tumuli and earth forts of the distant uplands; making it altogether a pleasant spot, with the usual touch of melancholy that a past-marked prospect lends.

As soon as the mother and daughter were comfortably installed, with a white-aproned servant and all complete, Henchard paid them a visit, and remained to tea. During the entertainment Elizabeth was carefully hoodwinked by the very general tone of the conversation that prevailed—a proceeding which seemed to afford some humour to Henchard, though his wife was not particularly happy in it. The visit was repeated again and again with business-like determination by the Mayor, who seemed to have schooled himself into a course of strict mechanical rightness towards this woman of prior claim, at any expense to the later one and to his own sentiments.

One afternoon the daughter was not indoors when Henchard came, and he said drily. ‘This is a very good opportunity for me to ask you to name the happy day, Susan.’

The poor woman smiled faintly; she did not enjoy pleasantries on a situation into which she had entered solely for the sake of her girl’s reputation. She liked them so little, indeed, that there was room for wonder why she had countenanced deception at all, and had not bravely let the girl know her history. But the flesh is weak; and the true explanation came in due course.

‘O Michael!’ she said, ‘I am afraid all this is taking up your time and giving trouble—when I did not expect any such thing!’ And she looked at him and at his dress as a man of affluence, and at the furniture he had provided for the room—ornate and lavish to her eyes.

‘Not at all,’ said Henchard, in rough benignity. ‘This is only a cottage—it costs me next to nothing. And as to taking up my time’—here his red and black visage kindled with satisfaction—‘I’ve a splendid fellow to superintend my business now—a man whose like I’ve never been able to lay hands on before. I shall soon be able to leave everything to him, and have more time to call my own than I’ve had for these last twenty years.’

Henchard’s visits here grew so frequent and so regular that it soon became whispered, and then openly discussed, in Casterbridge that the masterful, coercive Mayor of the town was captured and enervated by the genteel widow Mrs Newson. His well-known haughty indifference to the society of womankind, his silent avoidance of converse with the sex, contributed a piquancy to what would otherwise have been an unromantic matter enough. That such a poor fragile woman should be his choice was inexplicable, except on the ground that the engagement was a family affair in which sentimental passion had no place; for it was known that they were related in some way. Mrs Henchard was so pale that the boys called her ‘The Ghost’. Sometimes Henchard overheard this epithet when they passed together along the Walks—as the avenues on the walls were named—at which his face would darken with an expression of destructiveness towards the speakers ominous to see; but he said nothing.

He pressed on the preparations for his union, or rather reunion, with this pale creature in a dogged, unflinching spirit which did credit to his conscientiousness. Nobody would have conceived from his outward demeanour that there was no amatory fire or pulse of romance acting as stimulant to the bustle going on in his gaunt, great house; nothing but three large resolves—one, to make amends to his neglected Susan; another, to provide a comfortable home for Elizabeth-Jane under his paternal eye; and a third, to castigate himself with the thorns which these restitutory acts brought in their train; among them the lowering of his dignity in public opinion by marrying so comparatively humble a woman.

Susan Henchard entered a carriage for the first time in her life when she stepped into the plain brougham which drew up at the door on the wedding-day to take her and Elizabeth-Jane to church. It was a windless morning of warm November rain, which floated down like meal, and lay in a powdery form on the nap of hats and coats. Few people had gathered round he church door though they were well packed within. The Scotchman, who assisted as groomsman, was of course, the only one present, beyond the chief actors, who knew the true situation of the contracting parties. He, however, was too inexperienced, too thoughtful, too judicial, too strongly conscious of the serious side of the business, to enter into the scene in its dramatic aspect. That required the special genius of Christopher Coney, Solomon Longways, Buzzford, and their fellows. But they knew nothing of the secret; though, as the time for coming out of church drew on, they gathered on the pavement adjoining, and expounded the subject according to their lights.

‘’Tis five-and-forty years since I had my settlement in this here town,’ said Coney; ‘but daze me if ever I see a man wait so long before to take so little! There’s a chance even for thee after this, Nance Mockridge.’ The remark was addressed to a woman who stood behind his shoulder—the same who had exhibited Henchard’s bad bread in public when Elizabeth and her mother entered Casterbridge.

Be cust if I’d marry any such as he, or thee either,’ replied that lady. ‘As for thee, Christopher, we know what ye be, and the less said the better. And as for he—well, there—(lowering her voice) ’tis said ’a was a poor parish ’prentice—I wouldn’t say it for all the world—but ’a was a poor parish ’prentice, that began life wi’ no more belonging to ’en than a carrion crow.’

‘And now he’s worth ever so much a minute,’ murmured Longways. ‘When a man is said to be worth so much a minute, he’s a man to be considered!’

Turning, he saw a circular disc reticulated with creases, and recognized the smiling countenance of the fat woman who had asked for another song at the Three Mariners. ‘Well, Mother Cuxsom,’ he said, ‘how’s this? Here’s Mrs Newson, a mere skellinton, has got another husband to keep her, while a woman of your tonnage have not.’

‘I have not. Nor another to beat me … Ah, yes, Cuxsom’s gone, and so shall leather breeches!’

‘Yes; with the blessing of God leather breeches shall go.’

‘Tisn’t worth my old while to think of another husband,’ continued Mrs Cuxsom. ‘And yet I’ll lay my life I’m as respectable born as she.’

‘True; your mother was a very good woman—I can mind her. She were rewarded by the Agricultural Society for having begot the greatest number of healthy children without parish assistance, and other virtuous marvels.’

‘’Twas that that kept us so low upon the ground—that great hungry family.’

‘Ay. Where the pigs be many the wash runs thin.’

‘And dostn’t mind how mother would sing, Christopher?’ continued Mrs Cuxsom, kindling at the retrospection; ‘and how we went with her to the party at Mellstock, do ye mind?—at old Dame Ledlow’s, farmer Shiner’s aunt, do ye mind?—she we used to call Toad-skin, because her face were so yaller and freckled, do ye mind?’

‘I do, hee-hee, I do!’ said Christopher Coney.

‘And well do I—for I was getting up husband-high at that time—one-half girl, and t’other half woman, as one may say. And canst mind’—she prodded Solomon’s shoulder with her finger-tip, while her eyes twinkled between the crevices of their lids—‘canst mind the sherry-wine, and zilver-snuffers, and Joan Dummett was took bad when we were coming home, and Jack Griggs was forced to carry her through the mud; and how ’a let her fall in Dairyman Sweetapple’s cow-barton, and we had to clane her gown wi’ grass—never such a mess as ’a were in?’