Hope Republican, Volume 2, Number 52, Hope, Bartholomew County, 19 April 1894 — Page 6

the mm immmtKi BY THOMAS HARDYCHAPTER XL1II—Continued.

He went on till he came to the first milestone, which stood in the bank, half-way up a steep hill. He rested his basket on the top of the stone, placed his elbows on it, and pave way to a convulsive twitch, which was worse than a sob, because it was so hard and so dry. “If I had only got her with me — if I only had!” he said. “Hard work would be nothing to me tbm! But that was not to be. I—Cain —go alone as I deserve -an outcast and a vagabond. But my punishment is not greater than I can bear!” He sternly subdued his anguish, shouldered his basket, and went on. Elizabeth Jane in the meantime had breathed him a sigh, and turned her face to Caster bridge. Before she had reached the first house she was met in her walk by Donald Farfrae. This was evidently not their first meeting that day; they joined hands without ceremony, and Farfrae anxiously asked. “And he is gone—and did you tel'l him? I mean of the other matter -not of ours.” “He is gone. But i did not tell him. I could not 'do it? “Well, well, dearie; you may know best about that. But he’ll hear of it if he does not go far.” “He will go far; he's bent upon getting out of sight and sound.” She walked beside her lover, and when they reached the Town Pump turned with him into Corns treet instead of going straight on to her own door. At Farfrae's house they stopped and went in. Farfrae flung open the door of the ground-floor sitting room, saying, “There he is waiting for you,” and Elizabeth Jane entered. In the armchair sat the broad-faced, genial man who had called on Henchard on a memorable morning between one and two years before this time, and whom the latter had seen mount the coach and depart within half an hour of his arrival. It was Richard Newsom “At last I’ve saved 'ee the trouble to come and meet me —ha! ha!” said Newson. “The fact is that Mr. Farfrae here, he said, ‘Come up and stop with me for a day or two, Newson, and -I'll bring her round.’ ’Faith,’ says I, ‘so I will,’ and here I am.” “Well, Henchard is gone,” said Farfrae, shutting the door. “He has done it all voluntarily, and, as I gather from Elizabeth Jane, he has been very nice with her I was rather uneasy; but a-11 is as it should be, and we will have no more difficulties at all.” “Now that's very much as I thought,” said Newson, looking into the face of each by turns. ’T said to myself, aye, a hundred times, when I’ve been living on in my Budmouth lodgings, and I said it to Elizabeth —didn't I, Elizabeth?—at my meetings with her on the road, ‘Depend upon it, ’tis best that I should live on quiet like this tlil something turns up for the better. I now see ye two or three times a week,’ says I, ‘and we have these pleasant walks, and what can I wish for more? I should not be happier if I were residing with ye publicly; and Henchard, after all, has more legal claim upon ye.' ’Twas very good of her,” he added, turning and addressing Elizabeth in the third person, “to come out so regularly as she did. Whatever the weather, if she’d agreed to meet me, there she was upon the road without fail.” “And all the while I was supposed to be the culprit who dragged her out into the freezing and blawing,” said Farfrae; “though knowing full well myself I was not —only meeting her on the way back sae humbly. Well, Mr. Newson, I will be glad to see ye here every day now, since it can do no harm. And what I’ve been thinking is that the wedding may as well be kept up under my own roof, the house being large and you being in lodgings yerself —so that a great deal of trouble and expense would be saved ye —and ’tis a convenience when a couple’s married not to hae far to go to get home.”

“With all my heart,”- said Mr. Newson; “since, as you say, it can do no harm, now poor Henehard's gone; though I wouldn’t ha’ done it otherwise, or put myself in his way at all; for I’ve already in my lifetime been an intruder into his family quite as far as politeness can bo expected to put up with. But what does the young woman say herself about it? Elizabeth, my child, come and hearken to what we be talking about, and not bide staring out o’ window as if ye didn t hear. “Donald and you must settle it,” murmured Elizabeth, still keeping up a scrutinizing gaze at some small object in the street, blushing very much, nevertheless. “Well, then,” continued Newson, turning anew to Farfrae, with a face expressing thorough entry into the subject; “that’s how well have it.

And, Mr. Farfrae, as you provide so much, and house room, and dll that, I'll do my part in the drinkables, and see to the schcidam and rum —maybe a dozen jars will be sufficient, as many of the folk will be ladies, and perhaps they won’t drinkhard enough to make a high average in the reckoning. But you know best. I’ve provided for men and shipmates times enough, but I’m as ignorant as a child how many glasses of grog a woman is expected to consume at these ceremonies.” “Oh, none —we shan’t want much of that —oh, no.” said Farfrae, shaking his head with respectable gravity. “Do you leave all to me.” When they had gone a little further in these particulars Newson, lean'-Tg back in his chair, and smiling reflectively at the ceiling, said; “I’ve never told ye, —or have I? — Mr. Farfrae and Elizabeth, how Henchard put me off the scent that time.” They expressed their ignorance of what he alluded to. “Ah! I thought I hadn’t. I resolved that I wouldn't, I remember, not to hurt the man’s feelings. But now he’s gone, I can tell ye. Why, I came to Casterbridge nine or ten months before that day I found ye out. I bad been here twice before then. The first time I passed through the town on my way westward, not knowing Elizabeth lived here. Then, hearing at some place- I forget where—that a man of the name of Henchard had been mayor here, I came back’ and called at his house one morning. The joker! he said Elizabeth Jane had died years ago.” Elizabeth now gave earnest heed to hi-s story. “Now it never crossed my mind that the man was selling me a packet,” continued Newson. “And, if you’ll believe me, I was that upset that I went back to the coach that had brought me, and took passage onward without tarrying more than half an hour! Ha! ha! ’twas a good joke, and well carried out, and I give the man credit for’t.” Elizabeth Jane was amazed at the intelligence. “A joke? Oh, no. What a bad maul v ’ she cried. “Then he kept you from me, father, all those months, when you might have been here?” The father admitted that such was the case. “He ought not to have done it,” said Farfrae. “I never heard of such a thing,” said Elizabeth Jane. ‘ ‘That's enough. He's a bad man. I can forget him now.” Newson, like a good many rovers and sojourners among strange men and strange moralities, failed to perceive the enormity of Henchard’s crime, notwithstanding that he himself had been the chief sufferer therefrom. Indeed the attack upon the absent culprit waxing violent, he began to take Hen chard’s part. “Well, ’twas not ten words that he said, after all,” Newson pleaded. “And how could he know that I should be such a simpleton as to believe him? ’Twas as much ;ny fault as his, poor fellow!” “No,” said Elizabeth Jane, firmly. “He knew your honest disposition—you always were so trusting, father; I’ve heard my mother say so hundreds of times—and he did it to wrong you. After weaning me from you these five years by saying he was my father, he should not have done this. I can never forgive him, and I’m glad he’s gone.” “Well, never mind: it is all over and past,” said Newson, good naturedly. “Now about this wedding again.”

CHAPTER XLIV. Meanwhile the man of their talk had pursued his solitary way eastward till weariness overtook him, and he looked about for a place of rest. His heart was so exacerbated at parting from the girl that he could not face an inn or even a household of the most humble kind; and entering a field, ho lay down under a wheat-rick, feeling no want of food. The very heaviness of his soul caused him to sleep profoundly. The bright autumn sun shining into his eyes across the stubble awoke him the next morning early. He opened his basket and eat for his breakfast what he had packed for his supper, and in doing so overhauled the remainder of his kit. Although everything he brought necessitated carriage at his own back, he had secreted among his tools a few of Elizabeth Jane's cast-off belongings, in the shape of gloves, shoes, a scrap of her handwriting, and the like; and in his pocket he carried a curl of her hair. Having looked at these things he closed them up again and went onward. During five consecutive days Henchard’s rush basket rode along upon his shoulders between the high-

way hedges, the new yellow of the rushes catching the eye of an occasional field laborer as be glanced over the quickset, together with the wayfarer’s hat and head, and downturned face, over which the twig shadows moved in endless procession. It now became apparent that the direction of his journey was Woydon Priors, which he reached on the afternoon of the sixth day. The renowned hill, whereon the annual fair had been held for so many generations, was now bare of human beings, and almost of aught beside. A few sheep grazed thereabout, and these ran off when Henchard halted upon the summit. He deposited his basket upon the turf, and looked about with sad curiosity, till he discovered the road by which his wife and himself had entered on the upland, so memorable to both, two or threeand twenty years before. “Yes, we came up that way,” he said, after ascertaining his bearings. “She was carrying the baby, and I was reading a ballad sheet. Then we crossed about here —she so sad and wearing, and I speaking to her hardly at all, because of my cursed pride and mortification at being poor. Then we saw the tent —that must have stood this way.” He walked to another spot; it was not really where the tent had stood, but it seemed so to him. “Here we went in, and here we sat down, I faced this way. Then I drank and committed my crime. It must have been just on that very pixy-ring that she was standing when she said her last words to me before going off with him. I can hear their sound now, and the sound of her sobs: “Oh, Mike, I’ve lived with thee all this while, and had nothing but temper. Now I’m no more to ’oo — I’ll try my luck elsewhere.” He experienced not only the bitterness of a man who finds, in looking back upon an ambitious course, that what he has sacrificed in sentiment was worth as much as what he had gained in substance, but the superadded bitterness of seeing his very recantation nullified. He had been sorry for all this long ago: but his attempts to replace ambition by love bad been as fully foiled as his ambition itself. His wronged wife had foiled them by a fraud so grandly simple as to be almost a virtue. It was an odd sequence that out of all this wronging came that flower of Natu-re, Elizabeth. Part of his wish to wash his hands of life arose from his perceptions of such contrariovv, inconsistencies —of Nature’s jaunty readiness to support bad social principles. He intended to go On from this as an act of pennace — into another part of the country altogether. But he could not help thinking of Elizabeth, and the quarter of the horizon in which she lay. Out of this it happened that the centrifugal tendency imparted by weariness of the world was counteracted by the centripetal influence of his love for his stepdaughter. As a consequence, instead of following a straight course yet further away from Casterbridge in his search for employment, Henchard gradually, almost unconsciously, deflected from that right line of his first intention, till, by degrees, his path, like that of the Canadian woodsman, became part of a- circle, of which Casterbridge formed the long-distant center.

In ascending any particular hill he I ascertained the bearings as nearly as he could by means of the sun, moon, or stars, and settled in his mind the ; exact direction in which Casterbridge and Elizabeth Jane lay/ Sneering at himself for his weakness/, he yet every hour —nay every, few i minutes —conjectured her actions for [ the time being—her sitting down and ! rising up, her goings and comings, till thought of Farfrae’s counter-in-fluence would pass like a cold blast J over a pool, and efface her image. And then he would say of himself, “Oh, you fool! All this about a daughter who is no daughter of thine!” At length he o’. tained employment at his old occupation of hay trusser. work of that sort being in demand at this autumn time. The scepe of his hiring was a pastoral farm near the old western highway, whose course was the channel of all such communications as passed between the busy centers of novelty and the remote Wessex boroughs. He had chose.i the neighborhood of this artery from a sense that situated here, though at a distance of fifty miles, he was virtually nearer to her whose welfare was so dear than he would be at a roadless spot only half as remote.

! And thus Henchard found himself attain on the precise standing' which he had occupied five and twentyyears before. Externally there was nothing to hinder his making another start on the upward slope, and fey his new lights achieving higher things than his soul in its halfformed state had been able to accomplish. But the ingenious machinery contrived by the gods for reducing human possibilities of amelioration to a minimum—which arranges that wisdom to do snail come pari passu with the departure of zest for doing—stood in the way

of all that. He had no wish to make an arena a second time of a world that had become a more painted scene to him. Very often, as his knife grunched down among the sweet-smelling grassy stems, he would survey mankind, and say to himself, “Here and everywhere are folk dying before their time like frosted leaves, though wanted by the world, the country, and their own families as badly as can be, while I, an outcast, and an incurahaance, wanted by nobody, live on, and can’t die if 1 try.” He often kept an eager ear upon 1 the conversation of those who passed along the road, not from a general curiosity by any means, but in the hope that among these travelers to and from Casterbridge. some would sooner or later speak of that place. The distance, however, was too great to lend much probability to his desire, and the highest result of his attention to wayside words was that he did, indeed, hear the name of “Casterbridge” uttered one day by the driver of a road-wagon. Henchard ran to the gate of the field he worked in, and hailed the speaker, who was a stranger. “Yes, I’ve come from there, maistor,” he said, in answer to Henchard’s inquiry. “I trade up and down, ye know, though what this traveling without horses, that’s getting so common, my work will soon be done.”

“Anything moving in the old place, may I ask?” “All the same as usual." “I’ve heard that Mr. Farfrae, the late mayor, is thinking of getting married. Now, is that true or not?” “I couldn’t say for the life o’ mo. ] Oh, no; I should think not.” “But, yes, John; you forget,’’said ; a woman inside the wagon-tilt, i “What were those packages we took ' there at the beginning of the week? Surely they said a wedding was coming off soon —on Martin’s Day.” T*ae man declared he remembered \ nothing about it, and the man went ' on jaggling over the hill. Henchard was convinced that the! woman's memory served her well. ! The date was an extremely probable ! one, there being no reason for delay on either side. He might, for that matter, write and inquire of Elizabeth, but his instinct for sequestration had made the com'se difficult. Yet before he had left her she had said that for him to be absent from her wedding was not as she wished it to be. The remembrance would continually revive in him now that it was not Elizabeth and Farfrae who had driven him away from them, but his own haughty sense that his presence was no longer desired. What if he had been mistaken in his views? —if there had been no necessity that his own absolute separation from her should be involved in the incident of her marriage? He proceeded to draw a picture of the alternative—himself living like a fangless lion about back rooms of a house in which his stepdaughter was mistress; an inoffensive old man, tenderly smiled on by Elizabeth, and good-naturedly tolerated by her husband. It was terrible to his pride to descend so low; and yet, for the girl’s sake, he might put up with anything, even from Farfrae; even snubbings and masterful tongue scourgings. The privilege of being in the house she occupied would almost outweigh the personal humiliation.

But how to initiate this reversal of all his former resolves, without causing husband and wife to despise | him for his inconsistency, was a question which made him tremble | and brood. Ho cut and cut his trusses two j days more, and then he concladed j his hesitancies by a sudden impassioned resolve to go to the wedding festivity. Neither writing nor message would be expected from him. She had regretted his determination j to be absent —his unexpected presence would fill the little unsatisfied corner that would probably have place in her just heart without him. To intrude as little of his person ality as possible upon a gay event with which that personality could show nothing in keeping, he decided not to make his appearance till evening, when stiffness would have worn off, and the question who was or was not present had become a matter of indifference. Not wishing to be in Casterbridge an hour earlier than the time planned, he started on foot two mornings before St. Martin’s tide, allowing himself about sixteen miles to perform for each of the three daj r s’ journey, reckoning the wedding day as one. There was only one town of any importance along his course, and here he stopped on the second night, not only to rest, but to prepare himself for the next evening. Having no clothes but the working suit he stood in -now stained and distorted by their two months of hard usage—he entered a shop and made some purchases which should put him, externally, at any rate, a little in harmony with the prevailing tone of the morrow. A rough

yet respectable. coat and hat, a new shirt and neckcloth, were the chief of these; and having satisfied himself that in appearance at least he would not now offend her, he proceeded to the more interesting particular of buying her some present. What should that present be? He walked up and down the street, regarding dubiously the display in the shop windows from a gloomy sense that what he might most like to give her would be beyond his miserable pocket. A caged goldfinch met his eye; the cage was a plain and small one, the shop humble, and he concluded that he could afford tho modest sum asked —afford it or not he would have % somehow. A sheet of newspaper was tied round the bird’s wire prison, and with tho wrapped-up cage in his hand, Henchard sought a lodging for the night. Next day he set out upon the last stage, and was soon within the district which had been his training ground in by-gone years. Part of the distance he traveled by carrier, seating himself in the darkest corner at the back of that trader’s van; and as the other passengers, mainly women going ' short journeys, mounted and alighted in front of Henchard, they talked over much local news, not the least portion of this being tho wedding then in course of celebration at the town they were nearing. It appeared that the town band had been hired, and lest their convivial instincts should get the better of their skill, the further step had been taken of engaging the string band from Budmouth, so that there would be a reserve to fall back upon in case of : need.

He heard, however, but few particulars beyond those known to him already, the incident of deepest interest in the ride being the soft pealing of the Casterbridge bells, which reached the traveler’s ears while the van paused on the top of the hill to have the drag lowered. The time was just after twelve o’clock. Those notes were a signal that all had gone well; that there had been no slip ’twixt cup and lip in this case; that Elizabeth Jane and Donald Farfrae were man and wife. Henchard did not care to ride any further with his chattering companions after hearing this sound. Indeed, it quite unmanned him; and not wishing to arrive in Casterbridge till evening, he alighted here with his bundle and bird cage, and was soon left as a lonely figure on the broad white highway. It was the hill on which he had waited to meet Farfrae, nearly two years earlier, to tell him of the serious illness of his wife Lucetta. The nlace was unchanged; the same larches sighed the same notes; but Farfrae had another wife, and, as Henohard knew, a better one. He only hoped that Elizabeth Jane had obtained a better home than had been hers at the former time. He passed the remainder of the day in a curious high-strung condition, unable to do much but think of the approaching meeting with her, and sadly satirize himself for his emotions thereon, as a Samson shorn. Such an innovation on Casterbridge customs as a I flitting of bridegroom and bride 1 from the town immediately after the ! ceremony was not likely; but it j it should have taken place he should , wait till their return. To assure himself on this point he asked a | market man when near the town it the newly married couple had gone away, and was promptly informed | that they had not; they were at that ’ hour, according to all accounts, entertaining a houseful of guests at I the>r home on Corn Street.

Henchard dusted his boots, washed his hands at the riverside, and proceeded up the town. He need have made no inquiries beforehand, for on drawing near Farfrae’s residence, it was plain to the least observant that festivity prevailed within, and that Donald himself shared it, his voice being distinctly audible in the street, giving expression to a song of his native country. Idlers were standing on the pavement in front; and, wishing to escape the notice of theSe, Henchard passed quickly on to the door. It was wide open; the hall was lighted extravagantly, and people were going up and down stairs. His courage failed him; to enter, footsore, laden, and poorlv dressed, into the midst of such resplendency was to bring needless humiliation upon her he loved, if not to court repulse from her husband. Accordingly he went around into the back street that he knew so well, and entered the garden, and came quietly into the house through the kitchen, temporarily depositing the bird and cage under a bush outside to lessen the awkwardness of his arrival. Solitude and sadness had so erholHated Henchard that he now feared circumstances he would former!v have scorned, and he began to wish that he had not taken upon himself to arrive at such a juncture. However, his progress was made unexpectedly easy by his discovering alone in the kitchen an elderly woman who seemed to be acting as