Rensselaer Semi-Weekly Republican, Volume 20, Number 56, Rensselaer, Jasper County, 17 March 1899 — THE MAYOR OF CASTERBRIDGE [ARTICLE+ILLUSTRATION]

THE MAYOR OF CASTERBRIDGE

BY THOMAS HARDY

CHAPTER XXlll.—(Continued.) ■x Henchard went down the street till he I Came to Farfrae’s house, where he knoekB «d and left a message that he would be mgtad to see his employer at the granaries I as soon as he conveniently could come * there. Having done this, he proceeded | round to the back and entered the yard. He retired a few steps into a loft, and ■waited. From this elevated perch his eye aeould sweep the roofs roundabout, the upK per part of the luxurious chestnut trees, Know delicate in leaves t>f a week’s age, 1 and the drooping boughs of the limes, FarE|trae’s garden, and the green door leading Igtheref rom. In course of time —he could Knot say how long—that green door opened, ■ and Farfrae came through. He was dresspad as if for a journey. The low light of K the nearing evening caught his head and | face when he emerged from the shadow [of the wall, warming them to a complexf ion of flame-color. Henchard watched him I with his mouth firmly set, the squareness I Of his jaw and the verticality of his proI file being unduly marked. K Farfrae came on with one hand in his | ! pocket, and humming a tune in a way which told that the words were most in I ' his mind. They were those of the song he [ had sung when he arrived, years before, | at the King of Prussia, a poor young man, I adventuring for life and fortune, and scarcely knowing whitherward: I “And here’s a hand, my trusty fiere, And gie a hand o' thine.” • Nothing moved Henchard like an old mel;ody. He sunk back. “No; I can't do it,” :he gasped. “Why does the infernal fool begin that now?” ■ At length Farfrae was silent, and Henchard looked out of the loft door. “Will ■ye come up here?” he said. “Ay, man,” said Farfrae. “I couldn’t ( aee ye. What’s amiss?” H A nmiute later Henchard heard his feet ‘..on the lowest ladder. He heard him land > «n the first floor, ascend and land on the second, begin the ascent to the third. And then his head rose through the trap behind. E “What are you doing up here at this time?” he asked, coming forward. “Why ' didn’t ye take your holiday like the rest ■of the men?” He spoke in a tone which bad just severity enough in it to Show that be remembered the untoward event of the forenoon. Henchard said nothing; but, going back, be closed the stair hatchway, and stamped epon it so that it went tight into its frame; he next turned to the wondering young man, who by this time observed that one •f Henchard’s arms was bound to Eis side. "Now,” said Henchard, quietly, “we Stand face to sac to man. Your money and your fine wife no longer lift ye above me as they did but now, and my poverty does not press me down.” “What does it all mean?” asked FarI frae, simply. “Wait a bit, my lad. You should have | thought twice before you affronted to ex- | frenii ty a man who had nothing to lose, f I’ve borne your rivalry, which ruined me, end your snubbing, which humbled me; but your hustling, that disgraced me, I ' won’t stand!” Farfrae warmed a little at this. “Ye d I no business there,” he said. “As much as any one among ye. What, ■ you forward stripling, tell a man of my ‘ age he’d no business there?” The angerI vein swelled in his forehead as he spoke. “You insulted royalty, Henchard; and ' *twas my duty, as the chief magistrate, to •top ye.” I “Now this is the case,” said Henchard, grimly. “Here be we, in this foursquare loft, to finish out that little wrestle you began this morning. There’s the door, forty foot above ground. One of us two puts the other out by that door— the master bides inside. If he likes, he may go down afterward and give the alarm that the other has fallen out by accident —or he may tell the truth—that’s his busiI ness. As the strongest man, I’ve tied one’ I arm to take no advantage of ye. D’ye understand? Then here’s at ’ee!” - < There was no time for Farfrae to do aught but one thing—to close with Henchard immediately, for the latter had come on at once. It was a wrestling < match, the object of each being to give his antagonist a back fall, and on Henehsrd’R part unquestionably, that it should be through the door. By a fearful whirl Henchard brought Donald dangerously near the precipice; I seeing his position, the Scotchman for the ' first time locked himself to his adversary, I and all efforts of that infuriated Prince of Darkness —as he might have been called from his appearance just now —were in- [ adequate to lift or loosen him for a time. By an extraordinary effort he succeeded I at last, though not until they had got far I back again from the fatal door. In doing M Henchard contrived to turn Farfrae a complete somersault. Had Henchard’s other arm been free, it would have been all over with Farfrae then. But again ’ he regained his feet, wrenching Henchard’s arm considerably, and causing him sharp pain, as could be seen from the twitching of his face. He instantly delivered the ounger man an annihilating turn by the left forehip, as it is expressed, and following up his advantage thrust him | toward the door, never loosening hie hold i:, till Farfrae’s fair head was hanging »jver I the window sill, and his arm dangling L down outside the wall. : "Now,” said Henchard, between his f gasps, “this is the end of what you began morning. Your life is in my hands.” "Then take it,” said Farfrae. “You’ve |,irisbed to long.” Henchard looked down upon him in si- | lence, and their eyes met. “Oh, Farfrae g'—that’s not true!” he said, bitterly, g "Heaven is my witness that no man ever £ loved another as I did thee at one time. S And now—though I came here to kill ’ee, I cannot hurt thee. Go and give me in charge—do what you will—l care nothing I for what comes of me.” He withdrew to the back part of the toft, and flung himself into a corner upon sacks in the abandonment of remorse. Farfrae regarded him in silence; ; then went to the hatch and descended gh&rough it till Jost to view. Henchard Uould fain have recalled him, but his

tongue failed in its task, and the young man’s stops died on his ear. Here he’ stayed till the thin shades thickened to opaque obscurity, and the loft door became an oblong gray light—the only visible shape around. At length he arose, shook the dust from his clothes wearily, felt his way to the hatch, and gropingly descended the steps till he stood in the yard. “He thought highly of me once,” he murmured. “Now he’ll hate me and despise me forever!” He became possessed by an overpowering wish to see Farfrae again that night, and by some desperate pleading attempt the well-nigh impossible task of winning pardon for his late mad attack. But as he walked toward Farfrae’s door, he recalled the unheeded doings in the yard while he had lain above in a sort of stupor. Farfrae he remembered had gone to the stable and put the horse into the gig. He must have come prepared for a journey when he first arrived in the yard, unsuspecting enmity; and he must have driven off without saying a word to any one on what had occurred between themselves. Henchard walked about the streets and outskirts of the town, lingering here and there till he reached the stone bridge—an accustomed halting place with him now. While leaning thus upon the parapet, his listless attention was aw’akened by sounds of an unaccustomed kind from the town quarter. They were a confusion of rhythmical noises, to which the streets added yet more confusion by incumbering them with echoes. His first incurious thought, that the clangor arose from the town band, engaged in an attempt to round off a memorable day by a burst of evening harmony, was contradicted by Certain peculiarities of reverberation. But inexplicability did not rouse him to more than a cursory heedfulness; his sense of degradation was too strong for the admission of foreign ideas; and he leaned against the parapet as before.

CHAPTER XXIV. It was about eight o’clock, and Lucetta was sitting in the drawing room alone. Night had set in for more than half an hour, but she had not had the candles lighted, for when Farfrae was away she preferred waiting for him by the firelight, and, if it were not too cold, keeping one of the window sashes a little way open, that the sound of his wheels might reach her ears early. She was leaning back in her chair in a more hopeful mood than she had enjoyed since her marriage. The day had been such a success; and the temporary uneasiness which Henchard’s show of effrontery had wrought in her disappeared with the quiet disappearance of Henchard himself under her husband’s reproof. The floating evidences of her void marriage with him had been destroyed, and she really seemed to have no cause for fear. The reverie in which these and other subjects mingled was disturbed by a hubbub in the distance, that increased moment by moment. It did not greatly surprise her, the afternoon having been given up to recreation by a majority of the populace. But her attention was at once riveted to the matter by the voice of a maid servant next door, who spoke from an upper window across the street to some other maid even more elevated than she. “Which way be they going now?” inquired the first, with interest. “I can’t be sure for a moment,” said the second, “because of the maker’s chimbley. Oh, yes—l can see ’em. Well, I declare —I declare!” “"What, what?” from the first, more enthusiastically. “They are coming up Corn street, after all! They sit back to back!” “What—two of ’em —are there two figures ?” “Yes. Two images on a donkey, back to back, their elbows tied to one another’s. She’s facing the head, and he’s facing the tail.” “Is it meant for anybody in particular?” “Well—it may be. The man has got on a blue coat and kerseymere leggings; he has black whiskers and a reddish face. ’Tis a stuffed figure with a mask.” The din was increasing now—then it lessened a little. “There —I shan’t see, after all!” cried the disappointed first maid. “They have gone into a back street—that’s all,” said the one who occupied the enviable position in the attic. “There—now I have got ’em all endways nicely.” “What’s the woman like? Just say, and I can tell in a moment if ’tis meant for one I’ve in mind.” “My—why—tis dressed just as she was dressed when she sat in the front seat at the time the play actors came to the Town Hall!” Lucetta started to her feet, and almost at the instant the door of the room was quickly and softly opened. Elizabeth Jane advanced into the firelight. “I have come to see you,” she said, breathlessly. “I did not stop to knock—forgive me. I see you have not shut your shutters, and the window is open.” Long before this time Henchard, weary of his ruminations on the bridge, had repaired toward the town. When he stood at the bottom of the street a procession burst upon his view, in the act of turning out of an alley just above him. The lanterns, horns and multitude startled him; he saw the mounted images, and knew what it all meant. They crossed the way, entered another street and disappeared. He turned back a few steps and was lost in grave reflection, finally wending his way homeward by the obscure riverside path. Unable to rest there, he went to his step-daughter’s lodging, and was told that Elizabeth Jane had gone to Mrs. Farfrae's. Like one acting in obedience to a charm, and with a nameless apprehension, he followed in the same direction, in the hope of meeting her, the roisterers having vanished. Disappointed in this, he gave the gentlest of pulls to the doorbell and then learned particulars of what had occurred, together with the doctor’s imperative orders that Farfrae should be brought home. Lucetta’a life seemed at that moment to

depend upon her husband’s return. Henchard, in a state of bitter anxiety and contrition, determined to seek Farfrae himself. To this end he hastened down the town, ran along the eastern road over the moor, up the hill beyond, and thus onward in the moderate darkness of this spring night. Presently there came the sound of light wheels whetting their felloes against the newly stoned patches of road, accompanied by the distant glimmer of lights. He knew it was Farfrae’s gig, from an indescribable personality in its noise, the vehicle having been his own till bought by the Scotchman at the sale of his effects. Henchard thereupon descended the hill on its farther side, meeting the gig as its driver slackened speed at the foot of the incline. It was a point in the highway at which the road to Mellistock branched off from the homeward direction. By diverging to that village, as he had intended to do, Farfrae might probably delay his return by a couple of hours. It soon appeared that his intention was to do so still, the light swerving toward the by-road. Farfrae’s off gig-lamp flashed in Henchard’s face. At the same time Farfrae discerned his late antagonist. “Farfrae—Mr. Farfrae!” cried the breathless Henchard, holding up his hand. Farfrae allowed the horse to turn sevtral steps into the branch lane before he pulled up. He then drew rein, and said “Yes?” over his shoulder, as one would toward a pronounced enemy. “Come back to Casterbridge at once!” Henchard said. “There’s something wrong at your house —requiring your return. I’ve run all the way here on purpose to tell ’ee!” Farfrae was silent, and at his silence Henchard’s soul sank within him. Why had he not before this thought of what was only too obvious? He who, four hours earlier, had enticed Farfrae into a deadly wrestle, stood now in the darkness of late night-time, on a lonely road, at a point where it plunged into a cutting through a wood; he invited the man, whom on the first occasion he had let off, to enter that wood, when his purposed way was across an open upland, where there was at least a better opportunity of guarding himself from attack. Henchard could almost feel this view of things in course of passage through Farfrae’s mind. “I have to go to Mellstock,” said Farfrae, coldly, as he loosened his rein to move on. “But,” implored Henchard, “the matter is more serious than your business at Mellstock. It is—your wife. She is ill. I can tell you particulars as we go along.” The very agitation and hesitancy of Henchard increased Farfrae’s suspicion that this was a ruse to decoy him into the wood, where might be effectually compassed what, from policy or want of nerve, Henchard had failed to do earlier in the day. He started the horse. “I know what you think,” deprecated Henchard, running after, almost bowed down with despair as he perceived the monstrous image of unscrupulous villainy that he had assumed in his former friend’s eyes. “But I am not what you think!” he cried hoarsely. “Believe me, Farfrae; I have come entirely on your own and your wife’s account. She is in danger. I know no more; and they want you to come. Oh, Farfrae, don’t mistrust me —I am a wretched man; but my heart is true to you still!” Farfrae, however, did distrust him utterly. He had left his wife not long ago in perfect health; and Henchard’s treachery was more credible than his story. He had in his time heard bitter ironies from Henchard’s lips, and these might be ironies now. He quickened the horse’s pace, and had soon risen into tEe open country lying between there and Mellstock, Henchard’s spasmodic run after him lending yet more substance to his thought of evil purposes. The gig and its driver lessened against the sky in Henchard’s eyes; his exertions for Farfrae’s good had been in vain. Over this repentant sinner, at least, there was to be no joy in heaven. He cursed himself life a less scrupulous Job, as a vehement man will do when he loses self-re-spect, the last mental prop under poverty. To this he had come after a time of emotional darkness, of which the adjoining woodland shade afforded inadequate illustration. Presently he began to walk back again along the way by which he had come. Farfrae should at all events have no reason for delay upon the road by seeing him there when he took his journey homeward later on.

CHAPTER XXV.

Henchard went home. He lighted his fire and sat abstractedly beside it. He had not sat there long when a gentle footstep approached the house and entered the passage, a finger tapping lightly at the door. Henchard’s face brightened, for he knew the motions to be Elizabeth’s. She came into his room, looking pale and sad. “Have you heard?” she asked. “Mrs. Farfrae? She is—dead! Yes, indeed—about an hour ago.” “I know it. I have but lately come from there. You must be tired with sitting up. Go and rest in the other room.” To please her father and herself the lonely girl did as he bade her, and lay down on a sort of couch which Henchard had rigged up out of a settle in the adjoining room. She could hear him moving about in his preparations, but her mind ran most strongly on Lucetta, whose death, in such fullness of life and amid such cheerful hopes of maternity, was appallingly unexpected. Presently she fell asleep. Meanwhile her step-father in the outer room had set the breakfast in readiness; but finding that she dozed he would not call her; he waited on, looking into the fire and keeping the kettle boiling with housewifely care. t.s if it were an honor to have her in his house. In truth, a great change had come over him with regard to her, and he was developing the dream of a future lighted by her filial presence, as though that way alone conld happiness lie. - ■ He was disturbed by another knock at the door, and rose to open it, rather deprecating a call from anybody just then. A stoutly built man stood on the doorstep, with an alien, unfamiliar air about his figure and bearing—an air which might have been called colonial by people of cosmopolitan experience. Henchard nodded and looked inquiry. “Good morning, good morning,” said the stranger, with profuse heartiness. “Is it Mr. Henchard I am talking to?” “My name is Henchard.” “Then I caught ye at home—that’s right- Morning’s the time for business, says I. Can I have a few words with ’eeF “By all means,” Henchard answered, showing the way in.

“You may remember me?” said his via* itor, seating himself. Henchard observed him indifferently and shook his head. “Well—perhaps you may not. My name is Newson.” Henchard’s face and eyes seemed to die. The other did not notice it. “I know the name well,” Henchard said at last, looking on the floor. “I make no doubt of that. Well, the fact is, I’ve been looking for ye this fortnight past. I went through Casterbridge on my way to Weydon Priors, and when I got there they told me you had some years before been living at Casterbridge. Back came I again, and by long and by late I got here by coach, ten minutes ago. ‘He lives down by the mill,’ says they. So here I am. Now —that transaction between us some twenty years agone—’tis that I’ve called about. ’Twas a curious business. I was younger then than lam now, and perhaps the less said about it, in one sense, the better.” “Curious business? ’Twas worse than curious. I cannot even allow that I’m the man you met then. I was not in my senses, and a man’s senses are himself.” “We were young and thoughtless,” said Newson. “However, I’ve come to mend matters rather than open arguments. Poor Susan—hers was a strange experience.” “It was.” “She was a warm-hearted, homespun woman. She was not what they call shrewd or sharp at all —better she had been.” “She was not.” “As you in all likelihood know, she was simple-minded enough to think that the sale was binding. She was as guiltless o’ wrong-doing in that particular as a saint in the clouds.” “I know it, I know it. I found it out directly,” said Henchard, still with averted eyes. “There lay the sting o’t to me. If she had known the truth she would never have left me. Never! But how should she be expected to know? What advantages had she? None. She could write her own name, and no more.” (To be continued.)