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If you, as one of those refugee householders, came in from business after dark – and this was the business time here – you stealthily crossed the moor, approached the border of the aforesaid brook, and whistled opposite the house to which you belonged. A shape thereupon made its appearance on the other side bearing the bridge on end against the sky; it was lowered; you crossed, and a hand helped you to land yourself, together with the pheasants and hares gathered from neighbouring manors. You sold them slily the next morning, and the day after you stood before the magistrates with the eyes of all your sympathizing neighbours concentrated on your back. You disappeared for a time; then you were again found quietly living in Mixen Lane.
Walking along the lane at dusk the stranger was struck by two or three peculiar features therein. One was an intermittent rumbling from the back premises of the inn half-way up; this meant a skittle alley. Another was the extensive prevalence of whistling in the various domiciles – a piped note of some kind coming from nearly every open door. Another was the frequency of white aprons over dingy gowns among the women around the doorways. A white apron is a suspicious vesture in situations where spotlessness is difficult; moreover, the industry and cleanliness which the white apron expressed were belied by the postures and gaits of the women who wore it – their knuckles being mostly on their hips (an attitude which lent them the aspect of two-handled mugs), and their shoulders against door-posts; while there was a curious alacrity in the turn of each honest woman’s head upon her neck and in the twirl of her honest eyes, at any noise resembling a masculine footfall along the lane.
Yet amid so much that was bad needy respectability also found a home. Under some of the roofs abode pure and virtuous souls whose presence there was due to the iron hand of necessity, and to that alone. Families from decayed villages – families of that once bulky, but now nearly extinct, section of village society called “liviers,” or lifeholders – copyholders and others, whose roof-trees had fallen for some reason or other, compelling them to quit the rural spot that had been their home for generations – came here, unless they chose to lie under a hedge by the wayside.
The inn called Peter’s Finger was the church of Mixen Lane.
It was centrally situate, as such places should be, and bore about the same social relation to the Three Mariners as the latter bore to the King’s Arms. At first sight the inn was so respectable as to be puzzling. The front door was kept shut, and the step was so clean that evidently but few persons entered over its sanded surface. But at the corner of the public-house was an alley, a mere slit, dividing it from the next building. Half-way up the alley was a narrow door, shiny and paintless from the rub of infinite hands and shoulders. This was the actual entrance to the inn.
A pedestrian would be seen abstractedly passing along Mixen Lane; and then, in a moment, he would vanish, causing the gazer to blink like Ashton at the disappearance of Ravenswood. That abstracted pedestrian had edged into the slit by the adroit fillip of his person sideways; from the slit he edged into the tavern by a similar exercise of skill.
The company at the Three Mariners were persons of quality in comparison with the company which gathered here; though it must be admitted that the lowest fringe of the Mariner’s party touched the crest of Peter’s at points. Waifs and strays of all sorts loitered about here. The landlady was a virtuous woman who years ago had been unjustly sent to gaol as an accessory to something or other after the fact. She underwent her twelvemonth, and had worn a martyr’s countenance ever since, except at times of meeting the constable who apprehended her, when she winked her eye.
To this house Jopp and his acquaintances had arrived. The settles on which they sat down were thin and tall, their tops being guyed by pieces of twine to hooks in the ceiling; for when the guests grew boisterous the settles would rock and overturn without some such security. The thunder of bowls echoed from the backyard; swingels hung behind the blower of the chimney; and ex-poachers and ex-gamekeepers, whom squires had persecuted without a cause, sat elbowing each other – men who in past times had met in fights under the moon, till lapse of sentences on the one part, and loss of favour and expulsion from service on the other, brought them here together to a common level, where they sat calmly discussing old times.
“Dost mind how you could jerk a trout ashore with a bramble, and not ruffle the stream, Charl?” a deposed keeper was saying. “‘Twas at that I caught ‘ee once, if you can mind?”
“That I can. But the worst larry for me was that pheasant business at Yalbury Wood. Your wife swore false that time, Joe – O, by Gad, she did – there’s no denying it.”
“How was that?” asked Jopp.
“Why – Joe closed wi’ me, and we rolled down together, close to his garden hedge. Hearing the noise, out ran his wife with the oven pyle, and it being dark under the trees she couldn’t see which was uppermost. ‘Where beest thee, Joe, under or top?’ she screeched. ‘O – under, by Gad!’ says he. She then began to rap down upon my skull, back, and ribs with the pyle till we’d roll over again. ‘Where beest now, dear Joe, under or top?’ she’d scream again. By George, ‘twas through her I was took! And then when we got up in hall she sware that the cock pheasant was one of her rearing, when ‘twas not your bird at all, Joe; ‘twas Squire Brown’s bird – that’s whose ‘twas – one that we’d picked off as we passed his wood, an hour afore. It did hurt my feelings to be so wronged!.. Ah well – ‘tis over now.”
“I might have had ‘ee days afore that,” said the keeper. “I was within a few yards of ‘ee dozens of times, with a sight more of birds than that poor one.”
“Yes – ‘tis not our greatest doings that the world gets wind of,” said the furmity-woman, who, lately settled in this purlieu, sat among the rest. Having travelled a great deal in her time she spoke with cosmopolitan largeness of idea. It was she who presently asked Jopp what was the parcel he kept so snugly under his arm.
“Ah, therein lies a grand secret,” said Jopp. “It is the passion of love. To think that a woman should love one man so well, and hate another so unmercifully.”
“Who’s the object of your meditation, sir?”
“One that stands high in this town. I’d like to shame her! Upon my life, ‘twould be as good as a play to read her love-letters, the proud piece of silk and wax-work! For ‘tis her love-letters that I’ve got here.”
“Love letters? then let’s hear ‘em, good soul,” said Mother Cuxsom. “Lord, do ye mind, Richard, what fools we used to be when we were younger? Getting a schoolboy to write ours for us; and giving him a penny, do ye mind, not to tell other folks what he’d put inside, do ye mind?”
By this time Jopp had pushed his finger under the seals, and unfastened the letters, tumbling them over and picking up one here and there at random, which he read aloud. These passages soon began to uncover the secret which Lucetta had so earnestly hoped to keep buried, though the epistles, being allusive only, did not make it altogether plain.
“Mrs. Farfrae wrote that!” said Nance Mockridge. “‘Tis a humbling thing for us, as respectable women, that one of the same sex could do it. And now she’s avowed herself to another man!”
“So much the better for her,” said the aged furmity-woman. “Ah, I saved her from a real bad marriage, and she’s never been the one to thank me.”
“I say, what a good foundation for a skimmity-ride,” said Nance.
“True,” said Mrs. Cuxsom, reflecting. “‘Tis as good a ground for a skimmity-ride as ever I knowed; and it ought not to be wasted. The last one seen in Casterbridge must have been ten years ago, if a day.”
At this moment there was a shrill whistle, and the landlady said to the man who had been called Charl, “‘Tis Jim coming in. Would ye go and let down the bridge for me?”
Without replying Charl and his comrade Joe rose, and receiving a lantern from her went out at the back door and down the garden-path, which ended abruptly at the edge of the stream already mentioned. Beyond the stream was the open moor, from which a clammy breeze smote upon their faces as they advanced. Taking up the board that had lain in readiness one of them lowered it across the water, and the instant its further end touched the ground footsteps entered upon it, and there appeared from the shade a stalwart man with straps round his knees, a double-barrelled gun under his arm and some birds slung up behind him. They asked him if he had had much luck.
“Not much,” he said indifferently. “All safe inside?”
Receiving a reply in the affirmative he went on inwards, the others withdrawing the bridge and beginning to retreat in his rear. Before, however, they had entered the house a cry of “Ahoy” from the moor led them to pause.
The cry was repeated. They pushed the lantern into an outhouse, and went back to the brink of the stream.
“Ahoy – is this the way to Casterbridge?” said some one from the other side.
“Not in particular,” said Charl. “There’s a river afore ‘ee.”
“I don’t care – here’s for through it!” said the man in the moor. “I’ve had travelling enough for to-day.”
“Stop a minute, then,” said Charl, finding that the man was no enemy. “Joe, bring the plank and lantern; here’s somebody that’s lost his way. You should have kept along the turnpike road, friend, and not have strook across here.”
“I should – as I see now. But I saw a light here, and says I to myself, that’s an outlying house, depend on’t.”
The plank was now lowered; and the stranger’s form shaped itself from the darkness. He was a middle-aged man, with hair and whiskers prematurely grey, and a broad and genial face. He had crossed on the plank without hesitation, and seemed to see nothing odd in the transit. He thanked them, and walked between them up the garden. “What place is this?” he asked, when they reached the door.
“A public-house.”
“Ah, perhaps it will suit me to put up at. Now then, come in and wet your whistle at my expense for the lift over you have given me.”
They followed him into the inn, where the increased light exhibited him as one who would stand higher in an estimate by the eye than in one by the ear. He was dressed with a certain clumsy richness – his coat being furred, and his head covered by a cap of seal-skin, which, though the nights were chilly, must have been warm for the daytime, spring being somewhat advanced. In his hand he carried a small mahogany case, strapped, and clamped with brass.
Apparently surprised at the kind of company which confronted him through the kitchen door, he at once abandoned his idea of putting up at the house; but taking the situation lightly, he called for glasses of the best, paid for them as he stood in the passage, and turned to proceed on his way by the front door. This was barred, and while the landlady was unfastening it the conversation about the skimmington was continued in the sitting-room, and reached his ears.
“What do they mean by a ‘skimmity-ride’?” he asked.
“O, sir!” said the landlady, swinging her long earrings with deprecating modesty; “‘tis a’ old foolish thing they do in these parts when a man’s wife is – well, not too particularly his own. But as a respectable householder I don’t encourage it.
“Still, are they going to do it shortly? It is a good sight to see, I suppose?”
“Well, sir!” she simpered. And then, bursting into naturalness, and glancing from the corner of her eye, “‘Tis the funniest thing under the sun! And it costs money.”
“Ah! I remember hearing of some such thing. Now I shall be in Casterbridge for two or three weeks to come, and should not mind seeing the performance. Wait a moment.” He turned back, entered the sitting-room, and said, “Here, good folks; I should like to see the old custom you are talking of, and I don’t mind being something towards it – take that.” He threw a sovereign on the table and returned to the landlady at the door, of whom, having inquired the way into the town, he took his leave.
“There were more where that one came from,” said Charl when the sovereign had been taken up and handed to the landlady for safe keeping. “By George! we ought to have got a few more while we had him here.”
“No, no,” answered the landlady. “This is a respectable house, thank God! And I’ll have nothing done but what’s honourable.”
“Well,” said Jopp; “now we’ll consider the business begun, and will soon get it in train.”
“We will!” said Nance. “A good laugh warms my heart more than a cordial, and that’s the truth on’t.”
Jopp gathered up the letters, and it being now somewhat late he did not attempt to call at Farfrae’s with them that night. He reached home, sealed them up as before, and delivered the parcel at its address next morning. Within an hour its contents were reduced to ashes by Lucetta, who, poor soul! was inclined to fall down on her knees in thankfulness that at last no evidence remained of the unlucky episode with Henchard in her past. For though hers had been rather the laxity of inadvertence than of intention, that episode, if known, was not the less likely to operate fatally between herself and her husband.
37
Such was the state of things when the current affairs of Casterbridge were interrupted by an event of such magnitude that its influence reached to the lowest social stratum there, stirring the depths of its society simultaneously with the preparations for the skimmington. It was one of those excitements which, when they move a country town, leave permanent mark upon its chronicles, as a warm summer permanently marks the ring in the tree-trunk corresponding to its date.
A Royal Personage was about to pass through the borough on his course further west, to inaugurate an immense engineering work out that way. He had consented to halt half-an-hour or so in the town, and to receive an address from the corporation of Casterbridge, which, as a representative centre of husbandry, wished thus to express its sense of the great services he had rendered to agricultural science and economics, by his zealous promotion of designs for placing the art of farming on a more scientific footing.
Royalty had not been seen in Casterbridge since the days of the third King George, and then only by candlelight for a few minutes, when that monarch, on a night-journey, had stopped to change horses at the King’s Arms. The inhabitants therefore decided to make a thorough fete carillonee of the unwonted occasion. Half-an-hour’s pause was not long, it is true; but much might be done in it by a judicious grouping of incidents, above all, if the weather were fine.
The address was prepared on parchment by an artist who was handy at ornamental lettering, and was laid on with the best gold-leaf and colours that the sign-painter had in his shop. The Council had met on the Tuesday before the appointed day, to arrange the details of the procedure. While they were sitting, the door of the Council Chamber standing open, they heard a heavy footstep coming up the stairs. It advanced along the passage, and Henchard entered the room, in clothes of frayed and threadbare shabbiness, the very clothes which he had used to wear in the primal days when he had sat among them.
“I have a feeling,” he said, advancing to the table and laying his hand upon the green cloth, “that I should like to join ye in this reception of our illustrious visitor. I suppose I could walk with the rest?”
Embarrassed glances were exchanged by the Council and Grower nearly ate the end of his quill-pen off, so gnawed he it during the silence. Farfrae the young Mayor, who by virtue of his office sat in the large chair, intuitively caught the sense of the meeting, and as spokesman was obliged to utter it, glad as he would have been that the duty should have fallen to another tongue.
“I hardly see that it would be proper, Mr. Henchard,” said he. “The Council are the Council, and as ye are no longer one of the body, there would be an irregularity in the proceeding. If ye were included, why not others?”
“I have a particular reason for wishing to assist at the ceremony.”
Farfrae looked round. “I think I have expressed the feeling of the Council,” he said.
“Yes, yes,” from Dr. Bath, Lawyer Long, Alderman Tubber, and several more.
“Then I am not to be allowed to have anything to do with it officially?”
“I am afraid so; it is out of the question, indeed. But of course you can see the doings full well, such as they are to be, like the rest of the spectators.”
Henchard did not reply to that very obvious suggestion, and, turning on his heel, went away.
It had been only a passing fancy of his, but opposition crystallized it into a determination. “I’ll welcome his Royal Highness, or nobody shall!” he went about saying. “I am not going to be sat upon by Farfrae, or any of the rest of the paltry crew! You shall see.”
The eventful morning was bright, a full-faced sun confronting early window-gazers eastward, and all perceived (for they were practised in weather-lore) that there was permanence in the glow. Visitors soon began to flock in from county houses, villages, remote copses, and lonely uplands, the latter in oiled boots and tilt bonnets, to see the reception, or if not to see it, at any rate to be near it. There was hardly a workman in the town who did not put a clean shirt on. Solomon Longways, Christopher Coney, Buzzford, and the rest of that fraternity, showed their sense of the occasion by advancing their customary eleven o’clock pint to half-past ten; from which they found a difficulty in getting back to the proper hour for several days.
Henchard had determined to do no work that day. He primed himself in the morning with a glass of rum, and walking down the street met Elizabeth-Jane, whom he had not seen for a week. “It was lucky,” he said to her, “my twenty-one years had expired before this came on, or I should never have had the nerve to carry it out.”
“Carry out what?” said she, alarmed.
“This welcome I am going to give our Royal visitor.”
She was perplexed. “Shall we go and see it together?” she said.
“See it! I have other fish to fry. You see it. It will be worth seeing!”
She could do nothing to elucidate this, and decked herself out with a heavy heart. As the appointed time drew near she got sight again of her stepfather. She thought he was going to the Three Mariners; but no, he elbowed his way through the gay throng to the shop of Woolfrey, the draper. She waited in the crowd without.
In a few minutes he emerged, wearing, to her surprise, a brilliant rosette, while more surprising still, in his hand he carried a flag of somewhat homely construction, formed by tacking one of the small Union Jacks, which abounded in the town to-day, to the end of a deal wand – probably the roller from a piece of calico. Henchard rolled up his flag on the doorstep, put it under his arm, and went down the street.
Suddenly the taller members of the crowd turned their heads, and the shorter stood on tiptoe. It was said that the Royal cortege approached. The railway had stretched out an arm towards Casterbridge at this time, but had not reached it by several miles as yet; so that the intervening distance, as well as the remainder of the journey, was to be traversed by road in the old fashion. People thus waited – the county families in their carriages, the masses on foot – and watched the far-stretching London highway to the ringing of bells and chatter of tongues.
From the background Elizabeth-Jane watched the scene. Some seats had been arranged from which ladies could witness the spectacle, and the front seat was occupied by Lucetta, the Mayor’s wife, just at present. In the road under her eyes stood Henchard. She appeared so bright and pretty that, as it seemed, he was experiencing the momentary weakness of wishing for her notice. But he was far from attractive to a woman’s eye, ruled as that is so largely by the superficies of things. He was not only a journeyman, unable to appear as he formerly had appeared, but he disdained to appear as well as he might. Everybody else, from the Mayor to the washerwoman, shone in new vesture according to means; but Henchard had doggedly retained the fretted and weather-beaten garments of bygone years.
Hence, alas, this occurred: Lucetta’s eyes slid over him to this side and to that without anchoring on his features – as gaily dressed women’s eyes will too often do on such occasions. Her manner signified quite plainly that she meant to know him in public no more.
But she was never tired of watching Donald, as he stood in animated converse with his friends a few yards off, wearing round his young neck the official gold chain with great square links, like that round the Royal unicorn. Every trifling emotion that her husband showed as he talked had its reflex on her face and lips, which moved in little duplicates to his. She was living his part rather than her own, and cared for no one’s situation but Farfrae’s that day.
At length a man stationed at the furthest turn of the high road, namely, on the second bridge of which mention has been made, gave a signal, and the Corporation in their robes proceeded from the front of the Town Hall to the archway erected at the entrance to the town. The carriages containing the Royal visitor and his suite arrived at the spot in a cloud of dust, a procession was formed, and the whole came on to the Town Hall at a walking pace.
This spot was the centre of interest. There were a few clear yards in front of the Royal carriage, sanded; and into this space a man stepped before any one could prevent him. It was Henchard. He had unrolled his private flag, and removing his hat he staggered to the side of the slowing vehicle, waving the Union Jack to and fro with his left hand while he blandly held out his right to the Illustrious Personage.
All the ladies said with bated breath, “O, look there!” and Lucetta was ready to faint. Elizabeth-Jane peeped through the shoulders of those in front, saw what it was, and was terrified; and then her interest in the spectacle as a strange phenomenon got the better of her fear.
Farfrae, with Mayoral authority, immediately rose to the occasion. He seized Henchard by the shoulder, dragged him back, and told him roughly to be off. Henchard’s eyes met his, and Farfrae observed the fierce light in them despite his excitement and irritation. For a moment Henchard stood his ground rigidly; then by an unaccountable impulse gave way and retired. Farfrae glanced to the ladies’ gallery, and saw that his Calphurnia’s cheek was pale.
“Why – it is your husband’s old patron!” said Mrs. Blowbody, a lady of the neighbourhood who sat beside Lucetta.
“Patron!” said Donald’s wife with quick indignation.
“Do you say the man is an acquaintance of Mr. Farfrae’s?” observed Mrs. Bath, the physician’s wife, a new-comer to the town through her recent marriage with the doctor.
“He works for my husband,” said Lucetta.
“Oh – is that all? They have been saying to me that it was through him your husband first got a footing in Casterbridge. What stories people will tell!”
“They will indeed. It was not so at all. Donald’s genius would have enabled him to get a footing anywhere, without anybody’s help! He would have been just the same if there had been no Henchard in the world!”
It was partly Lucetta’s ignorance of the circumstances of Donald’s arrival which led her to speak thus, partly the sensation that everybody seemed bent on snubbing her at this triumphant time. The incident had occupied but a few moments, but it was necessarily witnessed by the Royal Personage, who, however, with practised tact affected not to have noticed anything unusual. He alighted, the Mayor advanced, the address was read; the Illustrious Personage replied, then said a few words to Farfrae, and shook hands with Lucetta as the Mayor’s wife. The ceremony occupied but a few minutes, and the carriages rattled heavily as Pharaoh’s chariots down Corn Street and out upon the Budmouth Road, in continuation of the journey coastward.
In the crowd stood Coney, Buzzford, and Longways “Some difference between him now and when he zung at the Dree Mariners,” said the first. “‘Tis wonderful how he could get a lady of her quality to go snacks wi’ en in such quick time.”