Her husband regarded the paper as if it were a window-pane through
which he saw for miles. His lips twitched, and he seemed to compress
his frame, as if to bear better. His usual habit was not to consider
whether destiny were hard upon him or not—the shape of his ideals in
cases of affliction being simply a moody “I am to suffer, I perceive.”
“This much scourging, then, it is for me.” But now through his
passionate head there stormed this thought—that the blasting disclosure
was what he had deserved.
His wife’s extreme reluctance to have the girl’s name altered from
Newson to Henchard was now accounted for fully. It furnished another
illustration of that honesty in dishonesty which had characterized her
in other things.
He remained unnerved and purposeless for near a couple of hours; till
he suddenly said, “Ah—I wonder if it is true!”
He jumped up in an impulse, kicked off his slippers, and went with a
candle to the door of Elizabeth-Jane’s room, where he put his ear to
the keyhole and listened. She was breathing profoundly. Henchard softly
turned the handle, entered, and shading the light, approached the
bedside. Gradually bringing the light from behind a screening curtain
he held it in such a manner that it fell slantwise on her face without
shining on her eyes. He steadfastly regarded her features.
They were fair: his were dark. But this was an unimportant preliminary.
In sleep there come to the surface buried genealogical facts, ancestral
curves, dead men’s traits, which the mobility of daytime animation
screens and overwhelms. In the present statuesque repose of the young
girl’s countenance Richard Newson’s was unmistakably reflected. He
could not endure the sight of her, and hastened away.
Misery taught him nothing more than defiant endurance of it. His wife
was dead, and the first impulse for revenge died with the thought that
she was beyond him. He looked out at the night as at a fiend. Henchard,
like all his kind, was superstitious, and he could not help thinking
that the concatenation of events this evening had produced was the
scheme of some sinister intelligence bent on punishing him. Yet they
had developed naturally. If he had not revealed his past history to
Elizabeth he would not have searched the drawer for papers, and so on.
The mockery was, that he should have no sooner taught a girl to claim
the shelter of his paternity than he discovered her to have no kinship
with him.
This ironical sequence of things angered him like an impish trick from
a fellow-creature. Like Prester John’s, his table had been spread, and
infernal harpies had snatched up the food. He went out of the house,
and moved sullenly onward down the pavement till he came to the bridge
at the bottom of the High Street. Here he turned in upon a bypath on
the river bank, skirting the north-eastern limits of the town.
These precincts embodied the mournful phases of Casterbridge life, as
the south avenues embodied its cheerful moods. The whole way along here
was sunless, even in summer time; in spring, white frosts lingered here
when other places were steaming with warmth; while in winter it was the
seed-field of all the aches, rheumatisms, and torturing cramps of the
year. The Casterbridge doctors must have pined away for want of
sufficient nourishment but for the configuration of the landscape on
the north-eastern side.
The river—slow, noiseless, and dark—the Schwarzwasser of
Casterbridge—ran beneath a low cliff, the two together forming a
defence which had rendered walls and artificial earthworks on this side
unnecessary. Here were ruins of a Franciscan priory, and a mill
attached to the same, the water of which roared down a back-hatch like
the voice of desolation. Above the cliff, and behind the river, rose a
pile of buildings, and in the front of the pile a square mass cut into
the sky. It was like a pedestal lacking its statue. This missing
feature, without which the design remained incomplete, was, in truth,
the corpse of a man, for the square mass formed the base of the
gallows, the extensive buildings at the back being the county gaol. In
the meadow where Henchard now walked the mob were wont to gather
whenever an execution took place, and there to the tune of the roaring
weir they stood and watched the spectacle.
The exaggeration which darkness imparted to the glooms of this region
impressed Henchard more than he had expected. The lugubrious harmony of
the spot with his domestic situation was too perfect for him, impatient
of effects, scenes, and adumbrations. It reduced his heartburning to
melancholy, and he exclaimed, “Why the deuce did I come here!” He went
on past the cottage in which the old local hangman had lived and died,
in times before that calling was monopolized over all England by a
single gentleman; and climbed up by a steep back lane into the town.
For the sufferings of that night, engendered by his bitter
disappointment, he might well have been pitied. He was like one who had
half fainted, and could neither recover nor complete the swoon. In
words he could blame his wife, but not in his heart; and had he obeyed
the wise directions outside her letter this pain would have been spared
him for long—possibly for ever, Elizabeth-Jane seeming to show no
ambition to quit her safe and secluded maiden courses for the
speculative path of matrimony.
The morning came after this night of unrest, and with it the necessity
for a plan. He was far too self-willed to recede from a position,
especially as it would involve humiliation. His daughter he had
asserted her to be, and his daughter she should always think herself,
no matter what hyprocrisy it involved.
But he was ill-prepared for the first step in this new situation. The
moment he came into the breakfast-room Elizabeth advanced with open
confidence to him and took him by the arm.
“I have thought and thought all night of it,” she said frankly. “And I
see that everything must be as you say. And I am going to look upon you
as the father that you are, and not to call you Mr. Henchard any more.
It is so plain to me now. Indeed, father, it is. For, of course, you
would not have done half the things you have done for me, and let me
have my own way so entirely, and bought me presents, if I had only been
your stepdaughter! He—Mr. Newson—whom my poor mother married by such a
strange mistake” (Henchard was glad that he had disguised matters
here), “was very kind—O so kind!” (she spoke with tears in her eyes);
“but that is not the same thing as being one’s real father after all.
Now, father, breakfast is ready!” she said cheerfully.
Henchard bent and kissed her cheek. The moment and the act he had
prefigured for weeks with a thrill of pleasure; yet it was no less than
a miserable insipidity to him now that it had come. His reinstation of
her mother had been chiefly for the girl’s sake, and the fruition of
the whole scheme was such dust and ashes as this.