The Mayor of Casterbridge quotes

but his taciturnity was unbroken, and the woman enjoyed no society whatever from his presence.

Virtually she walked the highway alone, save for the child she bore.

Sometimes the man’s bent elbow almost touched her shoulder, for she kept as close to his side as was possible without actual contact, but she seemed to have no idea of taking his arm, nor he of offering it;

When she looked down sideways to the girl she became pretty, and even handsome, particularly that in the action her features caught slantwise the rays of the strongly coloured sun, which made transparencies of her eyelids and nostrils and set fire on her lips.

When she plodded on in the shade of the hedge, silently thinking, she had the hard, half-apathetic expression of one who deems anything possible at the hands of Time and Chance except, perhaps, fair play.

The first phase was the work of Nature, the second probably of civilization.

When she plodded on in the shade of the hedge, silently thinking, she had the hard, half-apathetic expression of one who deems anything possible at the hands of Time and Chance except, perhaps, fair play.

The first phase was the work of Nature, the second probably of civilization.

That the man and woman were husband and wife, and the parents of the girl in arms there could be little doubt.

That the man and woman were husband and wife, and the parents of the girl in arms there could be little doubt.

No other than such relationship would have accounted for the atmosphere of stale familiarity which the trio carried along with them like a nimbus as they moved down the road.

The wife mostly kept her eyes fixed ahead, though with little interest—the scene for that matter being one that might have been matched at almost any spot in any county in England at this time of the year;

“Ay. ’Tis Fair Day.

Though what you hear now is little more than the clatter and scurry of getting away the money o’ children and fools, for the real business is done earlier than this.

I’ve been working within sound o’t all day, but I didn’t go up—not I. ’Twas no business of mine.”

The fuddled young husband stared for a few seconds at this unexpected praise of his wife, half in doubt of the wisdom of his own attitude towards the possessor of such qualities. But he speedily lapsed into his former conviction, and said harshly—

“Well, then, now is your chance; I am open to an offer for this gem o’ creation.”

She turned to her husband and murmured, “Michael, you have talked this nonsense in public places before. A joke is a joke, but you may make it once too often, mind!”

He rose and walked to the entrance with the careful tread of one conscious of his alcoholic load. Some others followed, and they stood looking into the twilight.

The difference between the peacefulness of inferior nature and the wilful hostilities of mankind was very apparent at this place.

In contrast with the harshness of the act just ended within the tent was the sight of several horses crossing their necks and rubbing each other lovingly as they waited in patience to be harnessed for the homeward journey.

The sun had recently set, and the west heaven was hung with rosy cloud, which seemed permanent, yet slowly changed. To watch it was like looking at some grand feat of stagery from a darkened auditorium.

In presence of this scene after the other there was a natural instinct to abjure man as the blot on an otherwise kindly universe; till it was remembered that all terrestrial conditions were intermittent, and that mankind might some night be innocently sleeping when these quiet objects were raging loud.

“Where do the sailor live?” asked a spectator, when they had vainly gazed around.

he exclaimed. “Well, I must walk about till I find her. … Seize her, why didn’t she know better than bring me into this disgrace!” he roared out. “She wasn’t queer if I was. ’Tis like Susan to show such idiotic simplicity.

Meek⁠—that meekness has done me more harm than the bitterest temper!

”

Of Henchard they heard nothing.

To the liege subjects of Labour, the England of those days was a continent, and a mile a geographical degree.

Elizabeth-Jane developed early into womanliness.

There was an under-handsomeness in it, struggling to reveal itself through the provisional curves of immaturity, and the casual disfigurements that resulted from the straitened circumstances of their lives.

She was handsome in the bone, hardly as yet handsome in the flesh.

She possibly might never be fully handsome, unless the carking accidents of her daily existence could be evaded before the mobile parts of her countenance had settled to their final mould.

Its squareness was, indeed, the characteristic which most struck the eye in this antiquated borough, the borough of Casterbridge—at that time, recent as it was, untouched by the faintest sprinkle of modernism.

It was compact as a box of dominoes.

It had no suburbs—in the ordinary sense. Country and town met at a mathematical line.

It was compact as a box of dominoes. It had no suburbs—in the ordinary sense.

Country and town met at a mathematical line.

To birds of the more soaring kind Casterbridge must have appeared on this fine evening as a mosaic-work of subdued reds, browns, greys, and crystals, held together by a rectangular frame of deep green.

Having sufficiently rested they proceeded on their way at evenfall.

The dense trees of the avenue rendered the road dark as a tunnel, though the open land on each side was still under a faint daylight; in other words, they passed down a midnight between two gloamings.

The features of the town had a keen interest for Elizabeth’s mother, now that the human side came to the fore.

… their trumpets and thump their drums, and have their roaring dinners”—waving her hand towards a point further along the street, where the brass band could be seen standing in front of an illuminated building—“but we must needs be put-to for want of a wholesome crust.

There’s less good bread than good beer in Casterbridge now.

”

Many theories might have been built upon it. It fell in well with conjectures of a temperament which would have no pity for weakness, but would be ready to yield ungrudging admiration to greatness and strength.

Its producer’s personal goodness, if he had any, would be of a very fitful cast⁠—an occasional almost oppressive generosity rather than a mild and constant kindness.

Susan Henchard’s husband—in law, at least—sat before them, matured in shape, stiffened in line, exaggerated in traits; disciplined, thought-marked—in a word, older.

When last she had seen him he was sitting in a corduroy jacket, fustian waistcoat and breeches, and tanned leather leggings, with a basin of hot furmity before him.

Time, the magician, had wrought much here.

Watching him, and thus thinking of past days, she became so moved that she shrank back against the jamb of the wagon-office doorway to which the steps gave access, the shadow from it conveniently hiding her features.

Henchard’s face darkened.

There was temper under the thin bland surface⁠—the temper which, artificially intensified, had banished a wife nearly a score of years before.

“You must make allowances for the accidents of a large business,” he said. “You must bear in mind that the weather just at the harvest of that corn was worse than we have known it for years.

Henchard’s face had become still more stern at these interruptions, and he drank from his tumbler of water as if to calm himself or gain time. Instead of vouchsafing a direct reply, he stiffly observed—

“If anybody will tell me how to turn grown wheat into wholesome wheat I’ll take it back with pleasure. But it can’t be done.”

Henchard was not to be drawn again. Having said this, he sat down.

I am on my way to Bristol—from there to the other side of the warrld, to try my fortune in the great wheat-growing districts of the West! I have some inventions useful to the trade, and there is no scope for developing them heere.”

“To America⁠—well, well,” said Henchard, in a tone of disappointment, so strong as to make itself felt like a damp atmosphere.

“And yet I could have sworn you were the man!”

Casterbridge had sentiment—Casterbridge had romance; but this stranger’s sentiment was of differing quality.

Or rather, perhaps, the difference was mainly superficial; he was to them like the poet of a new school who takes his contemporaries by storm; who is not really new, but is the first to articulate what all his listeners have felt, though but dumbly till then.

The silent landlord came and leant over the settle while the young man sang; and even Mrs.

Bees and butterflies in the cornfields at the top of the town, who desired to get to the meads at the bottom, took no circuitous course, but flew straight down High Street without any apparent consciousness that they were traversing strange latitudes.

And in autumn airy spheres of thistledown floated into the same street, lodged upon the shop fronts, blew into drains; and innumerable tawny and yellow leaves skimmed along the pavement, and stole through people’s doorways into their passages with a hesitating scratch on the floor, like the skirts of timid visitors.

Hearing voices, one of which was close at hand, she withdrew her head and glanced from behind the window-curtains. Mr.

a sense of tediousness announced itself in a lowering of the person by spreading the knees to a lozenge-shaped aperture and contorting the arms.

Chicanery, subterfuge, had hardly a place in the streets of this honest borough to all appearance; and it was said that the lawyers in the Court House hard by occasionally threw in strong arguments for the other side out of pure generosity (though apparently by mischance) when advancing their own.

Thus Casterbridge was in most respects but the pole, focus, or nerve-knot of the surrounding country life;

He took her hand at parting, and held it so warmly that she, who had known so little friendship, was much affected, and tears rose to her aerial-grey eyes.

The instant that she was gone Henchard’s state showed itself more distinctly; having shut the door he sat in his dining-room stiffly erect, gazing at the opposite wall as if he read his history there.

“Begad!” he suddenly exclaimed, jumping up. “I didn’t think of that. Perhaps these are impostors—and Susan and the child dead after all!”

The Ring at Casterbridge was merely the local name of one of the finest Roman Amphitheatres, if not the very finest, remaining in Britain.

Casterbridge announced old Rome in every street, alley, and precinct.

It looked Roman, bespoke the art of Rome, concealed dead men of Rome.

The Amphitheatre was a huge circular enclosure, with a notch at opposite extremities of its diameter north and south.

From its sloping internal form it might have been called the spittoon of the Jötuns.

It was to Casterbridge what the ruined Coliseum is to modern Rome, and was nearly of the same magnitude. The dusk of evening was the proper hour at which a true impression of this suggestive place could be received.

Melancholy, impressive, lonely, yet accessible from every part of the town, the historic circle was the frequent spot for appointments of a furtive kind. Intrigues were arranged there; tentative meetings were there experimented after divisions and feuds.

But one kind of appointment⁠—in itself the most common of any⁠—seldom had place in the Amphitheatre: that of happy lovers.

Why, seeing that it was preeminently an airy, accessible, and sequestered spot for interviews, the cheerfullest form of those occurrences never took kindly to the soil of the ruin, would be a curious inquiry. Perhaps it was because its associations had about them something sinister.

that for scores of years the town-gallows had stood at one corner; that in 1705 a woman who had murdered her husband was half-strangled and then burnt there in the presence of ten thousand spectators.

Tradition reports that at a certain stage of the burning her heart burst and leapt out of her body, to the terror of them all, and that not one of those ten thousand people ever cared particularly for hot roast after that.

In addition to these old tragedies, pugilistic encounters almost to the death had come off down to recent dates in that secluded arena, entirely invisible to the outside world save by climbing to the top of the enclosure, which few townspeople in the daily round …

They met in the middle of the arena. Neither spoke just at first—there was no necessity for speech—and the poor woman leant against Henchard, who supported her in his arms.

“I don’t drink,” he said in a low, halting, apologetic voice. “You hear, Susan?⁠—I don’t drink now⁠—I haven’t since that night.”

Those were his first words.

“Never mind—all in good time,” said he.

“Judge me by my future works⁠—goodbye!”

He retreated, and stood at the upper side of the Amphitheatre while his wife passed out through the lower way, and descended under the trees to the town.

“It is odd,” said Henchard, “that two men should meet as we have done on a purely business ground, and that at the end of the first day I should wish to speak to ’ee on a family matter.

But, damn it all, I am a lonely man, Farfrae: I have nobody else to speak to; and why shouldn’t I tell it to ’ee?

”

“I’ve not been always what I am now,” continued Henchard, his firm deep voice being ever so little shaken.

He was plainly under that strange influence which sometimes prompts men to confide to the newfound friend what they will not tell to the old.

“I began life as a working hay-trusser, and when I was eighteen I married on the strength o’ my calling. Would you think me a married man?”

“

Ay. Where the pigs be many the wash runs thin.

”

Perhaps, too, her grey, thoughtful eyes revealed an arch gaiety sometimes; but this was infrequent; the sort of wisdom which looked from their pupils did not readily keep company with these lighter moods.

Like all people who have known rough times, lightheartedness seemed to her too irrational and inconsequent to be indulged in except as a reckless dram now and then; for she had been too early habituated to anxious reasoning to drop the habit suddenly.

She felt none of those ups and downs of spirit which beset so many people without cause; never—to paraphrase a recent poet—never a gloom in Elizabeth-Jane’s soul but she well knew how it came there;

Like all people who have known rough times, lightheartedness seemed to her too irrational and inconsequent to be indulged in except as a reckless dram now and then; for she had been too early habituated to anxious reasoning to drop the habit suddenly.

She felt none of those ups and downs of spirit which beset so many people without cause; never⁠—to paraphrase a recent poet⁠—never a gloom in Elizabeth-Jane’s soul but she well knew how it came there; and her present cheerfulness was fairly proportionate to her solid guarantees for the same.

It might have been supposed that, given a girl rapidly becoming good-looking, comfortably circumstanced, and for the first time in her life commanding ready money, she would go and make a fool of herself by dress. But no.

But no. The reasonableness of almost everything that Elizabeth did was nowhere more conspicuous than in this question of clothes.

To keep in the rear of opportunity in matters of indulgence is as valuable a habit as to keep abreast of opportunity in matters of enterprise.

This unsophisticated girl did it by an innate perceptiveness that was almost genius. Thus she refrained from bursting out like a water-flower that spring, and clothing herself in puffings and knickknacks, as most of the Casterbridge girls would have done in her circumstances.

This unsophisticated girl did it by an innate perceptiveness that was almost genius. Thus she refrained from bursting out like a water-flower that spring, and clothing herself in puffings and knickknacks, as most of the Casterbridge girls would have done in her circumstances.

Her triumph was tempered by circumspection; she had still that field-mouse fear of the coulter of destiny despite fair promise, which is common among the thoughtful who have suffered early from poverty and oppression.

“I won’t be too gay on any account,” she would say to herself. “It would be tempting Providence to hurl mother and me down, and afflict us again as He used to do.”

Casterbridge, as has been hinted, was a place deposited in the block upon a cornfield. There was no suburb in the modern sense, or transitional intermixture of town and down.

It stood, with regard to the wide fertile land adjoining, clean-cut and distinct, like a chessboard on a green tablecloth.

The farmer’s boy could sit under his barley-mow and pitch a stone into the office-window of the town-clerk; reapers at work among the sheaves nodded to acquaintances standing on the pavement-corner;

She formed curious resolves on checking gay fancies in the matter of clothes, because it was inconsistent with her past life to blossom gaudily the moment she had become possessed of money.

But nothing is more insidious than the evolution of wishes from mere fancies, and of wants from mere wishes.

Henchard gave Elizabeth-Jane a box of delicately-tinted gloves one spring day. She wanted to wear them to show her appreciation of his kindness, but she had no bonnet that would harmonize. As an artistic indulgence she thought she would have such a bonnet.

It was now absolutely necessary to finish; she ordered the requisite article, and found that she had no sunshade to go with the dress. In for a penny in for a pound; she bought the sunshade, and the whole structure was at last complete.

Everybody was attracted, and some said that her bygone simplicity was the art that conceals art, the “delicate imposition” of Rochefoucauld; she had produced an effect, a contrast, and it had been done on purpose.

As a matter of fact this was not true, but it had its result; for as soon as Casterbridge thought her artful it thought her worth notice.

Friendship between man and man; what a rugged strength there was in it, as evinced by these two.

And yet the seed that was to lift the foundation of this friendship was at that moment taking root in a chink of its structure.

It was about six o’clock; the men were dropping off homeward one by one. The last to leave was a round-shouldered, blinking young man of nineteen or twenty, whose mouth fell ajar on the slightest provocation, seemingly because there was no chin to support it.

“Come,” said Donald quietly, “a man o’ your position should ken better, sir! It is tyrannical and no worthy of you.”

“ ’Tis not tyrannical!” murmured Henchard, like a sullen boy. “It is to make him remember!”

He presently added, in a tone of one bitterly hurt: “Why did you speak to me before them like that, Farfrae? You might have stopped till we were alone. Ah—I know why!

“Ah, as their father is dead I won’t go on with such as that. How could I forget?”

“Do you care so very much about hurting folks’ feelings?” observed Henchard with a half sneer. “You do, I know⁠—especially mine!”

“I am sorry if I have hurt yours, sir,” replied Donald, standing still, with a second expression of the same sentiment in the regretfulness of his face. “Why should you say it—think it?”

It was in the town-hall, after a council meeting, that he first became aware of Farfrae’s coup for establishing himself independently in the town; and his voice might have been heard as far as the town-pump expressing his feelings to his fellow councilmen.

These tones showed that, though under a long reign of self-control he had become Mayor and churchwarden and whatnot, there was still the same unruly volcanic stuff beneath the rind of Michael Henchard as when he had sold his wife at Weydon Fair.

“Well, he’s a friend of mine, and I’m a friend of his—or if we are not, what are we? ’Od send, if I’ve not been his friend, who has, I should like to know? Didn’t he come here without a sound shoe to his voot?

But such a scheme for buying over a rival had nothing to recommend it to the Mayor’s headstrong faculties. With all domestic finesse of that kind he was hopelessly at variance.

Loving a man or hating him, his diplomacy was as wrongheaded as a buffalo’s; and his wife had not ventured to suggest the course which she, for many reasons, would have welcomed gladly.

Meanwhile Donald Farfrae had opened the gates of commerce on his own account at a spot on Durnover Hill—as far as possible from Henchard’s stores, and with every intention of keeping clear of his former friend and employer’s customers.

“Well, and Martha did it, and buried the ounce pennies in the garden. But if ye’ll believe words, that man, Christopher Coney, went and dug ’em up, and spent ’em at the Three Mariners.

‘Faith,’ he said, ‘why should death rob life o’ fourpence? Death’s not of such good report that we should respect ’en to that extent,’ says he.

”

“Well, poor soul; she’s helpless to hinder that or anything now,” answered Mother Cuxsom. “

And all her shining keys will be took from her, and her cupboards opened; and little things a’ didn’t wish seen, anybody will see; and her wishes and ways will all be as nothing!

”

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.

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.

Though he was not a fortune-hunter, the possibility that Lucetta had been sublimed into a lady of means by some munificent testament on the part of this relative lent a charm to her image which it might not otherwise have acquired.

He was getting on towards the dead level of middle age, when material things increasingly possess the mind.

But Henchard was not left long in suspense.

In her poverty she had met with repulse from the society to which she had belonged, and she had no great zest for renewing an attempt upon it now.

Her heart longed for some ark into which it could fly and be at rest. Rough or smooth she did not care so long as it was warm.

Farfrae was shown out, it having entirely escaped him that he had called to see Elizabeth. Lucetta at the window watched him threading the maze of farmers and farmers’ men.

The message was taken down, and she heard the door close.

Lucetta had come to Casterbridge to quicken Henchard’s feelings with regard to her. She had quickened them, and now she was indifferent to the achievement.

Her morning view of Elizabeth-Jane as a disturbing element changed, and she no longer felt strongly the necessity of getting rid of the girl for her stepfather’s sake.

There was something curious in the way in which Elizabeth, though the younger, had come to play the part of experienced sage in these discussions. “It may be five years,” she said judicially. “Or, with a quiet life, as many as ten.

With no love you might calculate on ten.

”

Elizabeth-Jane, surveying the position of Lucetta between her two lovers from the crystalline sphere of a straightforward mind, did not fail to perceive that her father, as she called him, and Donald Farfrae became more desperately enamoured of her friend every day.

On Farfrae’s side it was the unforced passion of youth. On Henchard’s the artificially stimulated coveting of maturer 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 humourousness.

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 learnt 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 practised her in this. Yet her experience had consisted less in a series of pure disappointments than in a series of substitutions.

If her earthly career had taught her few book philosophies it had at least well practised 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 Donald had been her undeclared lover, and wondered what unwished-for thing Heaven might send her in place of him.

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.

“As one can be in a world where all’s unsure.

’Twill be more like living in Revelations this autumn than in England.

Shall I sketch it out for ye in a scheme?”

All these transformations, lovely to the outsider, to the wrongheaded corn-dealer were terrible. He was reminded of what he had well known before, that a man might gamble upon the square green areas of fields as readily as upon those of a cardroom.

Henchard had backed bad weather, and apparently lost. He had mistaken the turn of the flood for the turn of the ebb.

His dealings had been so extensive that settlement could not long be postponed, and to settle he was obliged to sell off corn that he had bought only a few weeks before at figures higher by many shillings a quarter.

From that day and hour it was clear that there was not to be so successful an ingathering after all. If Henchard had only waited long enough he might at least have avoided loss though he had not made a profit.

But the momentum of his character knew no patience.

At this turn of the scales he remained silent. The movements of his mind seemed to tend to the thought that some power was working against him.

Afterwards she was passing by the corn-stores and hay-barns which had been the headquarters of his business. She knew that he ruled there no longer; but it was with amazement that she regarded the familiar gateway.

A smear of decisive lead-coloured paint had been laid on to obliterate Henchard’s name, though its letters dimly loomed through like ships in a fog.

Over these, in fresh white, spread the name of Farfrae.

and ’tis better for us than ’twas—though I shouldn’t say that to you as a daughter-law. We work harder, but we bain’t made afeard now. It was fear made my few poor hairs so thin!

No busting out, no slamming of doors, no meddling with yer eternal soul and all that; and though ’tis a shilling a week less I’m the richer man; for what’s all the world if yer mind is always in a larry, Miss Henchet?

”

The masonry of the top was clamped with iron at each joint; since it had been no uncommon thing for desperate men to wrench the coping off and throw it down the river, in reckless defiance of the magistrates.

For to this pair of bridges gravitated all the failures of the town; those who had failed in business, in love, in sobriety, in crime.

Why the unhappy hereabout usually chose the bridges for their meditations in preference to a railing, a gate, or a stile, was not so clear.

Their hands were mostly kept in their pockets; they wore a leather strap round their hips or knees, and boots that required a great deal of lacing, but seemed never to get any.

Instead of sighing at their adversities they spat, and instead of saying the iron had entered into their souls, they said they were down on their luck.

Jopp in his time of distress had often stood here; so had Mother Cuxsom, Christopher Coney, and poor Abel Whittle.

“What—give it to me for nothing?” said Henchard. “But you paid the creditors for it!”

“Ah, yes; but maybe it’s worth more to you than it is to me.”

Henchard was a little moved. “I—sometimes think I’ve wronged ’ee!” he said, in tones which showed the disquietude that the night shades hid in his face. He shook Farfrae abruptly by the hand, and hastened away as if unwilling to betray himself further.

To avoid the contingency of being recognized she veiled herself, and slipped out of the house quickly.

The sun was resting on the hill like a drop of blood on an eyelid by the time she had got up the road opposite the amphitheatre, which she speedily entered.

The interior was shadowy, and emphatic of the absence of every living thing.

Though the upper part of Durnover was mainly composed of a curious congeries of barns and farmsteads, there was a less picturesque side to the parish. This was Mixen Lane, now in great part pulled down.

Mixen Lane was the Adullam of all the surrounding villages.

It was the hiding-place of those who were in distress, and in debt, and trouble of every kind.

Farm-labourers and other peasants, who combined a little poaching with their farming, and a little brawling and bibbing with their poaching, found themselves sooner or later in Mixen Lane.

Rural mechanics too idle to mechanize, rural servants too rebellious to serve, drifted or were forced into Mixen Lane.

The lane and its surrounding thicket of thatched cottages stretched out like a spit into the moist and misty lowland. Much that was sad, much that was low, some things that were baneful, could be seen in Mixen Lane.

… section of village society called “liviers,” or lifeholders—copyholders and others, whose rooftrees 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.

And here’s a hand, my trusty fiere, And gie’s a hand o’ thine.

Nothing moved Henchard like an old melody.

He sank back. “No; I can’t do it!” he gasped. “Why does the infernal fool begin that now!”

“You insulted Royalty, Henchard; and ’twas my duty, as the chief magistrate, to stop you.”

“Royalty be damned,” said Henchard. “I am as loyal as you, come to that!”

“I am not here to argue. Wait till you cool doon, wait till you cool; and you will see things the same way as I do.”

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 to attempt the well-nigh impossible task of winning pardon for his late mad attack.

She turned in some surprise at his presence, and did not answer for an instant or two. Recognizing him, she said,

“Because they may knock as loud as they will; she will never hear it any more.”

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 I am 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.”

Despite this natural solution of the mystery Henchard no less regarded it as an intervention that the figure should have been floating there. Elizabeth-Jane heard him say,

“Who is such a reprobate as I! And yet it seems that even I be in Somebody’s hand!”

Yet he was pursuing his ordinary avocations, smiling mechanically to fellow-tradesmen, and arguing with bargainers—as bereaved men do after a while.

Time, “in his own grey style,” taught Farfrae how to estimate his experience of Lucetta⁠—all that it was, and all that it was not.

There are men whose hearts insist upon a dogged fidelity to some image or cause, thrown by chance into their keeping, long after their judgment has pronounced it no rarity—even the reverse, indeed; and without them the band of the worthy is incomplete.

… liberal use of the conventional declaration that a great sensation was caused by the prospective event, that all the gossips’ tongues were set wagging thereby, and so on, even though such a declaration might lend some éclat to the career of our poor only heroine.

When all has been said about busy rumourers, a superficial and temporary thing is the interest of anybody in affairs which do not directly touch them.

It would be a truer representation to say that Casterbridge (ever excepting the nineteen young ladies) looked up for a moment at the news, and withdrawing its attention, went on labouring and victualling, bringing up its children, and burying its dead, without caring a tittle …

“If I had only got her with me—if I only had!” he said.

“Hard work would be nothing to me then! 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.

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 he lay down under a wheatrick, 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 ate for his breakfast what he had packed for his supper; and in doing so overhauled the remainder of his kit.

Very often, as his hay-knife crunched down among the sweet-smelling grassy stems, he would survey mankind and say to himself:

“Here and everywhere be folk dying before their time like frosted leaves, though wanted by their families, the country, and the world; while I, an outcast, an encumberer of the ground, wanted by nobody, and despised by all, live on against my will!”

He often kept an eager ear upon the conversation of those who passed along the road—not from a general curiosity by any means—but in the hope that among these travellers between Casterbridge and London some would, sooner or later, speak of the former place.