“I overheard your interview with my husband last night, and saw the drift of your revenge. The very thought of it crushes me! Have pity on a distressed woman! If you could see me you would relent. You do not know how anxiety has told upon me lately. I will be at the Ring at the time you leave work—just before the sun goes down. Please come that way. I cannot rest till I have seen you face to face, and heard from your mouth that you will carry this horse-play no further.”
To herself she said, on closing up her appeal: “If ever tears and pleadings have served the weak to fight the strong, let them do so now!”
With this view she made a toilette which differed from all she had ever attempted before. To heighten her natural attraction had hitherto been the unvarying endeavour of her adult life, and one in which she was no novice. But now she neglected this, and even proceeded to impair the natural presentation. Beyond a natural reason for her slightly drawn look, she had not slept all the previous night, and this had produced upon her pretty though slightly worn features the aspect of a countenance ageing prematurely from extreme sorrow. She selected—as much from want of spirit as design—her poorest, plainest and longest discarded attire.
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.
She was not disappointed in the fearful hope with which she awaited him. Henchard came over the top, descended and Lucetta waited breathlessly. But having reached the arena she saw a change in his bearing: he stood still at a little distance from her; she could not think why.
Nor could any one else have known. The truth was that in appointing this spot, and this hour, for the rendezvous, Lucetta had unwittingly backed up her entreaty by the strongest argument she could have used outside words, with this man of moods, glooms, and superstitions. Her figure in the midst of the huge enclosure, the unusual plainness of her dress, her attitude of hope and appeal, so strongly revived in his soul the memory of another illused woman who had stood there and thus in bygone days, and had now passed away into her rest, that he was unmanned, and his heart smote him for having attempted reprisals on one of a sex so weak. When he approached her, and before she had spoken a word, her point was half gained.
His manner as he had come down had been one of cynical carelessness; but he now put away his grim half-smile, and said in a kindly subdued tone, “Goodnight t’ye. Of course I in glad to come if you want me.”
“O, thank you,” she said apprehensively.
“I am sorry to see ‘ee looking so ill,” he stammered with unconcealed compunction.
She shook her head. “How can you be sorry,” she asked, “when you deliberately cause it?”
“What!” said Henchard uneasily. “Is it anything I have done that has pulled you down like that?”
“It is all your doing,” she said. “I have no other grief. My happiness would be secure enough but for your threats. O Michael! don’t wreck me like this! You might think that you have done enough! When I came here I was a young woman; now I am rapidly becoming an old one. Neither my husband nor any other man will regard me with interest long.”
Henchard was disarmed. His old feeling of supercilious pity for womankind in general was intensified by this suppliant appearing here as the double of the first. Moreover that thoughtless want of foresight which had led to all her trouble remained with poor Lucetta still; she had come to meet him here in this compromising way without perceiving the risk. Such a woman was very small deer to hunt; he felt ashamed, lost all zest and desire to humiliate Lucetta there and then, and no longer envied Farfrae his bargain. He had married money, but nothing more. Henchard was anxious to wash his hands of the game.
“Well, what do you want me to do?” he said gently. “I am sure I shall be very willing. My reading of those letters was only a sort of practical joke, and I revealed nothing.”
“To give me back the letters and any papers you may have that breathe of matrimony or worse.”
“So be it. Every scrap shall be yours….But, between you and me, Lucetta, he is sure to find out something of the matter, sooner or later.
“Ah!” she said with eager tremulousness; “but not till I have proved myself a faithful and deserving wife to him, and then he may forgive me everything!”
Henchard silently looked at her: he almost envied Farfrae such love as that, even now. “H’m—I hope so,” he said. “But you shall have the letters without fail. And your secret shall be kept. I swear it.”
“How good you are!—how shall I get them?”
He reflected, and said he would send them the next morning. “Now don’t doubt me,” he added. “I can keep my word.
36.
Returning from her appointment Lucetta saw a man waiting by the lamp nearest to her own door. When she stopped to go in he came and spoke to her. It was Jopp.
He begged her pardon for addressing her. But he had heard that Mr. Farfrae had been applied to by a neighbouring corn-merchant to recommend a working partner; if so he wished to offer himself. He could give good security, and had stated as much to Mr. Farfrae in a letter; but he would feel much obliged if Lucetta would say a word in his favour to her husband.
“It is a thing I know nothing about,” said Lucetta coldly.
“But you can testify to my trustworthiness better than anybody, ma’am,” said Jopp. “I was in Jersey several years, and knew you there by sight.”
“Indeed,” she replied. “But I knew nothing of you.”
“I think, ma’am, that a word or two from you would secure for me what I covet very much,” he persisted.
She steadily refused to have anything to do with the affair, and cutting him short, because of her anxiety to get indoors before her husband should miss her, left him on the pavement.
He watched her till she had vanished, and then went home. When he got there he sat down in the fireless chimney corner looking at the iron dogs, and the wood laid across them for heating the morning kettle. A movement upstairs disturbed him, and Henchard came down from his bedroom, where he seemed to have been rummaging boxes.
“I wish,” said Henchard, “you would do me a service, Jopp, now—tonight, I mean, if you can. Leave this at Mrs. Farfrae’s for her. I should take it myself, of course, but I don’t wish to be seen there.”
He handed a package in brown paper, sealed. Henchard had been as good as his word. Immediately on coming indoors he had searched over his few belongings, and every scrap of Lucetta’s writing that he possessed was here. Jopp indifferently expressed his willingness.
“Well, how have ye got on to-day?” his lodger asked. “Any prospect of an opening?”
“I am afraid not,” said Jopp, who had not told the other of his application to Farfrae.
“There never will be in Casterbridge,” declared Henchard decisively. “You must roam further afield.” He said good-night to Jopp, and returned to his own part of the house.
Jopp sat on till his eyes were attracted by the shadow of the candle-snuff on the wall, and looking at the original he found that it had formed itself into a head like a red-hot cauliflower. Henchard’s packet next met his gaze. He knew there had been something of the nature of wooing between Henchard and the now Mrs. Farfrae; and his vague ideas on the subject narrowed themselves down to these: Henchard had a parcel belonging to Mrs. Farfrae, and he had reasons for not returning that parcel to her in person. What could be inside it? So he went on and on till, animated by resentment at Lucetta’s haughtiness, as he thought it, and curiosity to learn if there were any weak sides to this transaction with Henchard, he examined the package. The pen and all its relations being awkward tools in Henchard’s hands he had affixed the seals without an impression, it never occurring to him that the efficacy of such a fastening depended on this. Jopp was far les
s of a tyro; he lifted one of the seals with his penknife, peeped in at the end thus opened, saw that the bundle consisted of letters; and, having satisfied himself thus far, sealed up the end again by simply softening the wax with the candle, and went off with the parcel as requested.
His path was by the riverside at the foot of the town. Coming into the light at the bridge which stood at the end of High Street he beheld lounging thereon Mother Cuxsom and Nance Mockridge.
“We be just going down Mixen Lane way, to look into Peter’s finger afore creeping to bed,” said Mrs. Cuxsom. “There’s a fiddle and tambourine going on there. Lord, what’s all the world—do ye come along too, Jopp—’twon’t hinder ye five minutes.”
Jopp had mostly kept himself out of this company, but present circumstances made him somewhat more reckless than usual, and without many words he decided to go to his destination that way.
Though the upper part of Durnover was mainly composed of a curious congeries of barns and farm-steads, 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. Vice ran freely in and out certain of the doors in the neighbourhood; recklessness dwelt under the roof with the crooked chimney; shame in some bow-windows; theft (in times of privation) in the thatched and mud-walled houses by the sallows. Even slaughter had not been altogether unknown here. In a block of cottages up an alley there might have been erected an altar to disease in years gone by. Such was Mixen Lane in the times when Henchard and Farfrae were Mayors.
Yet this mildewed leaf in the sturdy and flourishing Casterbridge plant lay close to the open country; not a hundred yards from a row of noble elms, and commanding a view across the moor of airy uplands and cornfields, and mansions of the great. A brook divided the moor from the tenements, and to outward view there was no way across it— no way to the houses but round about by the road. But under every householder’s stairs there was kept a mysterious plank nine inches wide; which plank was a secret bridge.
If you, as one of those refugee householders, came in from business after dark—and this was the business time here— you stealthily crossed the moor, approached the border of the aforesaid brook, and whistled opposite the house to which you belonged. A shape thereupon made its appearance on the other side bearing the bridge on end against the sky; it was lowered; you crossed, and a hand helped you to land yourself, together with the pheasants and hares gathered from neighbouring manors. You sold them slily the next morning, and the day after you stood before the magistrates with the eyes of all your sympathizing neighbours concentrated on your back. You disappeared for a time; then you were again found quietly living in Mixen Lane.
Walking along the lane at dusk the stranger was struck by two or three peculiar features therein. One was an intermittent rumbling from the back premises of the inn half-way up; this meant a skittle alley. Another was the extensive prevalence of whistling in the various domiciles—a piped note of some kind coming from nearly every open door. Another was the frequency of white aprons over dingy gowns among the women around the doorways. A white apron is a suspicious vesture in situations where spotlessness is difficult; moreover, the industry and cleanliness which the white apron expressed were belied by the postures and gaits of the women who wore it—their knuckles being mostly on their hips (an attitude which lent them the aspect of two-handled mugs), and their shoulders against doorposts; while there was a curious alacrity in the turn of each honest woman’s head upon her neck and in the twirl of her honest eyes, at any noise resembling a masculine footfall along the lane.
Yet amid so much that was bad needy respectability also found a home. Under some of the roofs abode pure and virtuous souls whose presence there was due to the iron hand of necessity, and to that alone. Families from decayed villages—families of that once bulky, but now nearly extinct, section of village society called “liviers,” or lifeholders—copyholders and others, whose roof-trees 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. The front door was kept shut, and the step was so clean that evidently but few persons entered over its sanded surface. But at the corner of the public-house was an alley, a mere slit, dividing it from the next building. Half-way up the alley was a narrow door, shiny and paintless from the rub of infinite hands and shoulders. This was the actual entrance to the inn.
A pedestrian would be seen abstractedly passing along Mixen Lane; and then, in a moment, he would vanish, causing the gazer to blink like Ashton at the disappearance of Ravenswood. That abstracted pedestrian had edged into the slit by the adroit fillip of his person sideways; from the slit he edged into the tavern by a similar exercise of skill.
The company at the Three Mariners were persons of quality in comparison with the company which gathered here; though it must be admitted that the lowest fringe of the Mariner’s party touched the crest of Peter’s at points. Waifs and strays of all sorts loitered about here. The landlady was a virtuous woman who years ago had been unjustly sent to gaol as an accessory to something or other after the fact. She underwent her twelvemonth, and had worn a martyr’s countenance ever since, except at times of meeting the constable who apprehended her, when she winked her eye.
To this house Jopp and his acquaintances had arrived. The settles on which they sat down were thin and tall, their tops being guyed by pieces of twine to hooks in the ceiling; for when the guests grew boisterous the settles would rock and overturn without some such security. The thunder of bowls echoed from the backyard; swingels hung behind the blower of the chimney; and ex-poachers and ex-gamekeepers, whom squires had persecuted without a cause, sat elbowing each other—men who in past times had met in fights under the moon, till lapse of sentences on the one part, and loss of favour and expulsion from service on the other, brought them here together to a common level, where they sat calmly discussing old times.
“Dost mind how you could jerk a trout ashore with a bramble, and not ruffle the stream, Charl?” a deposed keeper was saying. “‘Twas at that I caught ‘ee once, if you can mind?”
“That I can. But the worst larry for me was that pheasant business at Yalbury Wood. Your wife swore false that time, Joe—O, by Gad, she did—there’s no denying it.”
“How was that?” asked Jopp.
“Why—Joe closed wi’ me, and we rolled down together, close to his garden hedge. Hearing the noise, out ran his wife with the oven pyle, and it being dark under the trees she couldn’t see which was uppermost. ‘Where beest thee, Joe, under or top?’ she screeched. ‘O—under, by Gad!’ says he. She then began to rap down upon my skull, back, and ribs with the pyle till we’d roll over again. ‘Where beest now, dear Joe, under or top?’ she’d scream again. By George, ‘twas through her I was took! And then when we got up in hall she sware that the cock pheasant was one of her rearing, when ‘twas not your bird at all, Joe; ‘twas Squire Brown’s bird—that’s whose ‘twas—one that we’d picked off as we passed his wood, an hour afore. It did hurt my feelings to be so wronged!…Ah well??
?’tis over now.”
“I might have had ‘ee days afore that,” said the keeper. “I was within a few yards of ‘ee dozens of times, with a sight more of birds than that poor one.”
“Yes—’tis not our greatest doings that the world gets wind of,” said the furmity-woman, who, lately settled in this purlieu, sat among the rest. Having travelled a great deal in her time she spoke with cosmopolitan largeness of idea. It was she who presently asked Jopp what was the parcel he kept so snugly under his arm.
“Ah, therein lies a grand secret,” said Jopp. “It is the passion of love. To think that a woman should love one man so well, and hate another so unmercifully.”
“Who’s the object of your meditation, sir?”
“One that stands high in this town. I’d like to shame her! Upon my life, ‘twould be as good as a play to read her love-letters, the proud piece of silk and waxwork! For ‘tis her love-letters that I’ve got here.”
“Love letters? then let’s hear ‘em, good soul,” said Mother Cuxsom. “Lord, do ye mind, Richard, what fools we used to be when we were younger? Getting a schoolboy to write ours for us; and giving him a penny, do ye mind, not to tell other folks what he’d put inside, do ye mind?”
By this time Jopp had pushed his finger under the seals, and unfastened the letters, tumbling them over and picking up one here and there at random, which he read aloud. These passages soon began to uncover the secret which Lucetta had so earnestly hoped to keep buried, though the epistles, being allusive only, did not make it altogether plain.
“Mrs. Farfrae wrote that!” said Nance Mockridge. “‘Tis a humbling thing for us, as respectable women, that one of the same sex could do it. And now she’s avowed herself to another man!”
“So much the better for her,” said the aged furmity-woman. “Ah, I saved her from a real bad marriage, and she’s never been the one to thank me.”