Hope Republican, Volume 2, Number 42, Hope, Bartholomew County, 8 February 1894 — Page 6

THE MITQR ffUfRHME BY THOMAS HARDYCHAPTER XXV — Continued.

“Why, dang it all, of course I have called, Lucetta,” he said. “What docs that nonsense mean? You know I couldn't have helped myself if I had wished—that is, if I had any conscience at all. I’ve called to say that I am ready, as soon as custom will permit, to be publicly married to you; to say that you can fix the day or month, with my full consent, whenever in your opinion it would be seemly; you know more of these things than I.” “It is fully early yet,” she said, evasively.

“Yes, yes; I suppose it is. Do you know, Lucetta, I felt directly my poor ill-used Susan died, and when I could not bear the idea of marrying again, that after what had happened between us it was my duty not to let any unnecessary delay occur before putting things to rights. Still, I wouldn’t call in a hurry, because —well, you can guess how this money you’ve come into made me feel.” His voice . slowly fell; ho was conscious that in this room his accents and manner wore a roughness not observable in the street. He looked about the room, at the novel hangings and ingenious furniture with which she had surrounded herself. “Upon my life I didn't know such furniture as this could be bought in ■Casterbridge,” he said. “Nor can it be,” said she. “Nor will it till fifty years more of civilisation have passed over the town. It took a wagon and four horses to get it here. ” “H’rn. The fact is, your setting up like this makes my bearings toward ye rather awkward.” “Why?” ! An answer was noo really needed, and he did not furnish one. “Well,” j he went on; “there’s nobody in the! world I would have wished to see | enter into this wealth before you, Lucetta; and nobody, I am sure, ■who will become it more.” He turned to her with congratulatory admiration so fervid that she shrunk somewhat, notwithstanding that she knew him so well.

“I am greatly obliged to you for all that,” said she, rather with an air of speaking ritual. The stint of reciprocal feeling was perceived, and Henchard showed chagrin at once — nobody was more quick to show that than he. ‘‘You may be obliged or not for ’t. Though the things I say may not j have the polish of what you’ve lately learned to expect for the first time in your life, they are real, my lady Lucetta.” “That’s rather rude." “Oh, no, no, tisn’t!” said Henchard, hotly. “But there, there, I don’t want to quarrel with ye. Why, for a man and wife to talk to one another like this!” We are not man and wife,” she answered, firing quickly. “If going to the registry don’t make us so, I should like to know what it doss make us.” Lucetta burst in passionately: “How can you speak so! Knowing that it proved to be void by her coming back, and that it was entirely on j your side that the blame lay which put me in so awkward ' a position, 'you ought to allow j me to look at it as I choose. I suf- 1 fered enough at that lonely, terrify-! mg time after! was sent back from joining you —not knowing what was; going to'happen to me. And if Ij am a little independent now, surely | ’the privilege is due to me.” “Yes, it is. It was a had job for! you,” ho said repentantly, “But! perhaps you’ll have, the justice to! own that I was as innocent as you.” “Yes, I believe you were," she said more calmly, “Then let us be quick and legalize your state by going through the service again as soon as we can; and so in spite of the mishap the first time, we shall wind up well at last. It is very odd.” he murmured, “that I, so little of a woman’s man as I be, ■should find it necessary to marry j two women twice over. Well, what do | you say?” For the first time in their aeqaint-1 ance Lucetta had the move; and yet] she was backward. “For the pres- j ■ent let things be,”'she said, with I some embarrassmen t; “Treat me as ! an acquaintance, and I’ll treat you! as one. Time will—” she stopped, and he said nothing to fill the gap for awhile, there being no pressure’of half acquaintance to drive them into speech if they were not minded for it. “That’s the way the wind blows, j is it?” he at last grimly, nodding an •affirmative to his own. thoughts. A yellow flood of reflected sunlight filled’ the jobm for a few instants. .It was produced by the passing of a load of newly-trussed hay from the country in anew wagon marked with Farfrae’s name. Beside it rode Farfrae himself. Lucetta’s face became

—as a woman’s face becomes when the man she loves rises upon her gaze like an apparition. A turn of the eye by Henchard, a glance from the window, and the secret of her inaccessibility would have been revealed. But Henchard in estimating her tone was looking down so plumb-straight that he did not note the warm consciousness upon Lucetta’s face. “I shouldn’t have thought it—I shouldn’t have thought it of woman!” he said, emphatically, by and by, rising and shaking himself into activity; while Lucetta was so anxious to divert him from any suspicion of the truth that she asked him to be in no hurry. Bringing him some apples, she insisted upon paring one for him. He would not take it. “No, no; such is not for me,” he said, dryly, and moved to the door. At going out he turned his eye upon her; there was an intent look in it. He had hardly gone down the staircase when she dropped upon the sofa and jumped up again in a fit of desperation. “I will love him!” she cried passionately; “as for him —he’s hot-tembered and stern, and it would be madness to bind myself to him, knowing that. I won’t be a slave to the past—I’ll love where I choosel” ****** Elizabeth Jane, surveying the position of Lucetta between her two lovers from that crystalline sphere of a dishonest mind, did not fail to perceive that her father, as she called him, and Donald Farfrae became more desperately enamored of her friend every day. On Farfrae’s side it was the unforced passion of youth. On Henchard’s the artificially stimulated coveting of rnaturer age. The pain she experienced from the almost absolute obliviousness to her existence that was shown by the pair of them became at times half dissipated by her sense of its humorousness. When Lucetta had pricked her finger they were as deeply concerned as if she were dying; when she herself had been serionsly sick or in danger they uttered a conventional word of sympathy at the news and forgot all about it immediotely. But, as regarded Henchard, this perception of hers also caused her some filial grief; she could not help asking what she had done to be neglected so, after the professions of solicitude he made. As regarded Farfrae, she thought, after honest reflection, that it was quite natural. What was she beside Lucetta? As one of the “meaner beauties of the night” when the moon had risen in the skies. She had learned the lesson of renunciation, and was as familiar with the wreck of each day’s wishes as with the diurnal setting of the sun. If her earthly career had taught her few book philosophies it had at least well practiced her in this. Yet her experience had consisted less in a series of pure disappointments than in a series of substitutions. Continually it had happened that what she had desired had not been granted her, and that what had been granted her she had not desired. So she viewed with an approach to equanimity the now cancelled days when Donaid had been her undeclared lover, and wondered what unwished- - for thing heaven might send her in place of him.

CHAPTER XXVI. It chanced that on a fine spring morning Henchard and Farfrae met in the chestnut walk which ran along the south wall of the town. Each had just come out from his early breakfast, and there was not another soul near. Henchard was reading a letter from Lucetta, sent in answer to a note from him, in which she made some excuse for not immediately granting him a second interview that be had desired. Honald had no wish to enter into conversation with his former friend on their present constrained terms; neither would he pass him scowling silence. Ho noddfed and Henchard did the same. They had receded from each other several paces when a voice cried. '"Farfrae!” It was Henchard’s who stood regarding hiin. “Do you remember." said Henchard as if it were the presence of the thought and not of the man which made him speak—“doyou remember me sending ’ee on the errand to that woman whose life was .much mixed up with mine?” „ “I do,” said Far'rae. “Do you remember me telling ’ee how it all began, and how it ended?” “Yes.” “Well, I have offered to marry her properly, now that I can, but she backs out. She won’t marry me, Isn’t that a conscienfce, hey? Now what would you think of her —I pm, it to ’ee?” “I think it shows no great sense

of propriety in her; indeed it shows very little,” said Farfrae, heartily, and in perfect good faith. “Well, ye owe her nothing more now.” “It is true,” said Henehard, and went on. That he had looked from a letter to ask his questions completely shut out from Farfrae’s mind all vision of Lucetta as the culprit. Indeed, her present position was so different from that of the young woman of Henchard's story as of itself to be sufficient to blind him absolutely to her identity. As for Henehard he was reassured by Farfrae’s words and manner against a suspicion which had crossed his mind. They were not those of a conscious rival. Yet that there was a rivalry by some one he was firmly persuaded. He could feel it in the air around Lucetta, see it in the turn of her pen. There was antagonistic force in exercise, so that when he had tried to hang near her he seemed standing in a refluent current. That it was innate caprice he was more and more certain. Her windows gleamed as if they did not want him; her curtains seemed to hang slyly, as if they screened an ousting presence. To discover whose presence that was —whether Parfrae's after all, or another’s —he exerted himself to the utmost to see her again, and at length succeeded. At the interview, when she offered him tea, he made it a point to launch a cautious inquiry if she knew Mr. Farfrae. Oh, yes! she knew him, she declared; she could not help knowing almost everybody in Casterbridge, living in such a gazebo over the center arena of the town. “Pleasant young fellow,” said Henehard. “Yes,” said Lucetta. “We both know him,” said kind Elizabeth Jane, to relieve her companion’s divined embarrassment. There was a knock at the door; literally, three full knocks, and a little one at the end. “That kind of a knock means half and half—somebody between gentle and simple,” said the corn-merchant to himself. “I shouldn’t wonder, therefore, if it is he.” In a few seconds, surely enough. Donald walked in. Lucetta was full of little fidgets and flutters, which increased Henchard’s suspicions without affording any special proof of their correctness. He wa-i well-nigh ferocious at the sense of the queer situation in which he stood toward this woman. One who had reproached him for unwittingly wronging her, who had urged claims upon his consideration on that account, who had lived waiting for him, who at the first decent moment had come to ask him to rectify the wrong: such she had been. And now he sat at her teatable eager to gain her attention, and in his amatory rage, feeling the other man present to be a villian, just as any young fool of a lover might feel. They sat stiffly side by side at the darkening table, like some Tuscan painting of the two disciples supping at Emmaus. Lucetta forming the third and chief figure, was opposite them;' Elizabeth Jane being out of the game, and out of the group, could observe from afar all things; that there were long spaces of taciturnity, when all exterior circumstances was subdued to the touch of spoons and china; the clink of a heel •on the pavement under the window, the passing of a wheelbarrow or cart, the whistle of the carter, the gush of water into householders’ buckets at the town-pump opposite; the exchange of, greetings among their neighbors, and the rattle of the yokes by which they carried off their evening supply. “More bread and butter?” said Lucetta to Henehard. and Farfrae equally, holding out between them a plateful of long slices. Henehard took a slice by one end and Donald by the other; each feeling certain he was the man meant; neither let go and the slice came in two. □ “Oh —I am so sorry!” cried Lucetta, with a titter. Farfrae tried to laugh; but he was too much in love to see the incident in any but a tragic light. “How ridiculous of all three of them!” said Elizabeth to herself. Henehard left the house with a ton of conjecture, though without a grain of proof, that the counter attraction was Farfrae, and therefore he would not make up his mind. Yet to Elizabeth Jane it was plain as the town pump that Donald and Lucetta were incipient lovers. More than once, in spite of her care, Lucetta had been unable to restrain her glance from flitting across into Farfrae’s eyes like a bird into its nest. But Henchard was constructed upon too largo a scale to discern such minutiae as these by an evening light, which to him were as the notes of a grasshopper that lie above the compass of the human car. But he was disturbed. And the sense of occult rivalry in suitorship was so much superadded to the palpable rivalry of their business lives. To the coarse materiality of that rivalry it added an inflaming soul.

The thus vitalized antagonism took the form of action by Henehard sending for Jopp, the manager originally displaced by Farfrae’s arrival. Henchard had frequently met this man about the streets, observed that his clothing spoke of neediness, heard that he lived on Mixen Lane —a back slum of the town, the pis-aller of Casterbridge domicilation —itself almost a proof that a man had reached a stage when he would not stick at trifles. Jopp came after dark by the gates of the store yard and felt his way through the hay and straw to the office, where Henehard sat in solitude awaiting him. “I am again out of a foreman,’ said the corn factor. “Are you in place?” . “Not as much as a beggar’s sir. “How much do you ask?” Jopp named his price, which was very moderate. “When can you come?” “At this hour and moment, sir,” said Jopp, who, standing hands pocketed at the street corners till the sun had faded the shoulders of his coat to a scarecrow green, had regularly watched Henehard in the market place, measured him and learned him, by virtue of the power which the still man has in his stillness of knowing the busy man better than he knows himself. Jopp, too, had had a convenient experience; he was the one in Casterbridge besides Henehard and the close lipped Elizabeth Jane who knew that Lucetta came truly from Jersey, but proximately from Bath. “I know Jersey, too, sir,” he said. “Was living there when you used to do business that way. Oh, yes—have often seen ye there. ” “Indeed! Very good. Then the thing is settled," The testimonials you showed me when you first tried for’t are sufficient.” That characters deterioate in time of need possibly did not occur to Henehard. Jopp said, “Thank you,” and stood more firmly in the consciousness that he officially belonged to that spot. “Now,” said Henehard, digging his strong eyes into Jopp’s face, “one thing is necessary to me as the biggest corn and hay dealer in these parts. The Scotchman who has taken the town trade so bold into his hands must be cut out. D’ye hear? We two can’t live s:de by side —that’s clear and certain.” “I’ve seen it all,” said Jopp. “By fair competition, I mean, of course,” Henehard continued. ‘‘But as hard, keen and unflinching as fair —rather more so. By such a desperate bid against him for the farmers’ custom as will drive him into the ground—starve him out. I’ve capital, mind ye and I can do it.” “I’m all that way of thinking,” said the new foreman. Jopp’s dislike of Farfrae as the man who had once usurped his place, while it made him a willing tool, made him, at the same time, commercially as unsafe a colleague as Henehard could have chosen.

“I sometimes think,” he added, “that he must have some glass that he can see next year in. He has such a knack of making everything bring him fortune.” “He’s deep beyond all honest men’s discerning; but we must have him shallower. We’ll undersell him and overbuy him, and so snuff him out.” They then entered into specific details of the process by which this could be, accomplished and parted at a late hour. Elizabeth Jane heard by accident that Jopp had been engaged by her stepfather. She was so fully convinced that he was not the right man for the place-that, at the risk of making Henchard angry, she expressed her apprehension to him when they met. But it was done to no purpose. Henchard shut her up with a sharp rebuff. The season’s weather seemed to favor their scheme. The time was in the years' immediately before foreign competition had revolutionized the trade in grain, when still, as in the earliest ages, the wheat quotations from month to month depended entirely upon the home harvest. A bad harvest, or the prospect of one, would double the price of corn in a few weeks, and the promise of a good yield would lower it as rapidly. Prices were like the roads of the period, steep in gradient reflecting in their phases the local conditions, without engineering, levelings or averages. The farmer’s income was ruled by the wheat crop within his own horizon, and the wheat crop by the. weather, Thus in person he became a sort of flesh barometer, with feelers always directed to the sky and wihd arOund him. The local atmosphere was everything to him,the atmospheres of other countries a matter of indifference. The people, too, who were not farmers, the rural multitude, saw in the god of the Weather a more important personage than they do now. Indeed, the feeling of the peasantry in this matter was'so intense as to be almost unrealizable in these equable days. Their impulse was well nigh to prostrate themselves in lamentation before untimely rains and tempests,

which came as the Alastor of thos# households whose crime it was to be poor. ,, After midsummer they watched the weathercocks as men waiting ia antechambers watch the lackey. Sur elated them, quiet rain sobered them. That aspect of the sky which they now regard as disagreeable they then beheld as furious. It was June, and the weather was very unfavorable. Casterbridge being, as it were, the bell-board on which all the adjacent hamlets and villages sounded their notes, was decidedly dull. Instead of new articles in the shop windows, those that had been rejected in the foregoing summer were brought out again; superseded reap-hoops, badly shaped rakes, shopworn ieggins, and timestiffened water tights reappeared, furnished up as near to new as possible. Henchard, backed by Jopp, read a disastrous garnering, and resolved to base his strategy against Farfrae upon that reading. But before acting he wished —what so many have wished —that he could know for certain what was at present only strong probability. He was superstitious —as such headstrong natures often are —and he nourished in his mind an idea bearing on the matter —an idea he shrunk from disclosing even to Jopp. In a lonely hamlet a few miles from the town—so lonely that what are called lonely villages were teeming by cornparrison—there lived a man of curious repute as a forecaster or weather prophet. The way te his house was crooked and miry, even difficult in the present unpropitious season. One evening when it was raining so heavily that ivy and laurel resounded like distant musketry, and an outdoor man could be excused for shrouding himself to his ears and eyes, such a shrouded figure on foot might have been perceived traveling in the direction of the hazel copse which dripped over the prophet’s cot. The turnpike road became a lane, the lane a cart-track, the cart-track a bridle-path, the bridle-path a footway, the footway overgrown. The solitary walker slipped here and there, and stumbled over the natural springs formed by the branches, till at length he reached the house, which, with its garden, was surrounded with a high, dense hedge. The cottage, comparatively a large one, had been built of mud by the occupier’s own hand, and thatched also by himself. Here he had always lived, and here it was presumed he would die. He existed on unseen supplies; for it was an anomalous thing that while there was hardly a soul in the neighborhood but affected to laugh at this man’s assertions, uttering the formula, “There’s nothing in ’em,” with full assuranefe on the surface of their faces, very tew of them were unbelievers in their speret hearts. Whenever they consulted him they did it “for fancy.” When they paid him they said, “Just a trifle for Christmas,” or “Candlemas,” as the case might be. He would have preferred more honesty in his clients, and less sham ridicule; but fundamental belief consoled him for superficial irony. As stated, he was enabled to live; people supported him with their backs turned. He was sometimes astonished that men could profess so little and believe so much at his house when at church they professed so much and believed so little. Behind his back he was called “ Wide-oh,” on account of his reputation; to his face, “Mr.” Fall. '

The hedge of his garden formed an arch over the entrance, ;ind a door was inserted as in a wall. Outside the door the tall traveler stopped bandaged his face with a handkerchief as if he were suffering from toothache, and went up the path. The window-shutters were not closed and he could see the prophet within, preparing his supper. In answer to the knock, Fall came to the door, candle in hand. The visitor stepped back a little from the light, and said, “Can I speak to ye?” in significant tones. The other invitation to come in was responded to by the country form, “This will do, thank ye,” after which the householder has no alternative but to come out. He placed the candle on the corner of the dresser, took his hat from the nail, and joined the stranger in the porch, shutting the door behind him. “I’ve long heard that you can —do things of a sort?” began” the other, repressing his individuality as much as he could. “May be so, Mr. Henchard,” said the weather-caster. “Ah—why do you call me that?” asked the visitor, with a start. “Because it's your name. Feeling you’d come, I’ve waited for ye; and thinking you might be leery from your walk, I laid two supper plates —look ye here.”. He threw open the door and disclosed the supper-table, at which appeared a second chair, knife and fork, plate and mug, as he had declared. Henchard remained in silence for a few moments, then throwing ofl I the disguise of frigidity which ha