of the chimney-piece, representing garlanded lyres, shields, and quivers, on either side of a draped ox-skull, and flanked by heads of Apollo and Diana in low relief.
‘I’ve not been always what I am now,’ continued Henchard, his firm deep voice being ever so little shaken. He was plainly under some strange influence which sometimes prompts men to confide to the new-found friend what they will not tell to the old. ‘I began life as a working hay-trusser, and when I was eighteen I married on the strength o’ my calling. Would you think me a married man?’
‘I heard in the town that you were a widower.’
‘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!’
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