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A glance was sufficient to inform the eye that this was Susan Henchard’s grown-up daughter. While life’s middle summer had set its hardening mark on the mother’s face, her former spring-like specialities were transferred so dexterously by Time to the second figure, her child, that the absence of certain facts within her mother’s knowledge from the girl’s mind would have seemed for the moment, to one reflecting on those facts, to be a curious imperfection in Nature’s powers of continuity.
They walked with joined hands, and it could be perceived that this was the act of simple affection. The daughter carried in her outer hand a withy basket of old-fashioned make; the mother a blue bundle, which contrasted oddly with her black stuff gown.
Reaching the outskirts of the village they pursued the same track as formerly, and ascended to the fair. Here, too, it was evident that the years had told. Certain mechanical improvements might have been noticed in the roundabouts and high-fliers, machines for testing rustic strength and weight, and in the erections devoted to shooting for nuts. But the real business of the fair had considerably dwindled. The new periodical great markets of neighbouring towns were beginning to interfere seriously with the trade carried on here for centuries. The pens for sheep, the tie-ropes for horses, were about half as long as they had been. The stalls of tailors, hosiers, coopers, linen-drapers, and other such trades had almost disappeared, and the vehicles were far less numerous. The mother and daughter threaded the crowd for some little distance, and then stood still.
‘Why did we hinder our time by coming in here? I thought you wished to get onward?’ said the maiden.
‘Yes, my dear Elizabeth-Jane,’ exclaimed the other. ‘But I had a fancy for looking up here.’
‘Why?’
‘It was here I first met with Newson—on such a day as this.’
‘First met with father here? Yes, you have told me so before. And now he’s drowned and gone from us!’ As she spoke the girl drew a card from her pocket and looked at it with a sigh. It was edged with black, and inscribed within a design resembling a mural tablet were the words, ‘In affectionate memory of Richard Newson, mariner, who was unfortunately lost at sea, in the month of November 184-, aged forty-one years.’
‘And it was here,’ continued her mother, with more hesitation, ‘that I last saw the relation we are going to look for—Mr Michael Henchard.’
‘What is his exact kin to us, mother? I have never clearly had it told me.’
‘He is, or was—for he may be dead—a connection by marriage,’ said her mother deliberately.
‘That’s exactly what you have said a score of times before!’ replied the young woman, looking about her inattentively. ‘He’s not a near relation, I suppose?’
‘Not by any means.’
‘He was a hay-trusser, wasn’t he, when you last heard of him?’
‘He was.’
‘I suppose he never knew me?’ the girl innocently continued.
Mrs Henchard paused for a moment, and answered uneasily, ‘Of course not, Elizabeth-Jane. But come this way.’ She moved on to another part of the field.
‘It is not much use inquiring here for anybody, I should think,’ the daughter observed, as she gazed round about. ‘People at fairs change like the leaves of trees; and I daresay you are the only one here today who was here all those years ago.’
‘I am not so sure of that,’ said Mrs Newson, as she now called herself, keenly eyeing something under a green bank a little way off. ‘See there.’
The daughter looked in the direction signified. The object pointed out was a tripod of sticks stuck into the earth, from which hung a three-legged crock, kept hot by a smouldering wood fire beneath. Over the pot stooped an old woman, haggard, wrinkled, and almost in rags. She stirred the contents of the pot with a large spoon, and occasionally croaked in a broken voice, ‘Good furmity sold here!’
It was indeed the former mistress of the furmity tent—once thriving, cleanly, white-aproned, and chinking with money—now tentless, dirty, owning no tables or benches, and having scarce any customers except two small whity-brown boys, who came up and asked for ‘A ha’p’orth, please—good measure’, which she served in a couple of chipped yellow basins of commonest clay.
‘She was here at that time,’ resumed Mrs Newson, making a step as if to draw nearer.
‘Don’t speak to her—it isn’t respectable!’ urged the other.
‘I will just say a word—you, Elizabeth-Jane, can stay here.’
The girl was not loth, and turned to some stalls of coloured prints while her mother went forward. The old woman begged for the latter’s custom as soon as she saw her, and responded to Mrs Henchard-Newson’s request for a pennyworth with more alacrity than she had shown in selling sixpennyworth in her younger days. When the soi-disant widow had taken the basin of thin poor slop that stood for the rich concoction of the former time, the hag opened a little basket behind the fire, and looking up slily, whispered, ‘Just a thought o’ rum in it?—smuggled, you know—say two penn’orth—’twill make it slip down like cordial!’
Her customer smiled bitterly at this survival of the old trick, and shook her head with a meaning the old woman was far from translating. She pretended to eat a little of the furmity with the leaden spoon offered, and as she did so said blandly to the hag, ‘You’ve seen better days?’
‘Ah, ma’am—well ye may say it!’ responded the old woman, opening the sluices of her heart forthwith. ‘I’ve stood in this fairground, maid, wife, and widow, these nine-and-thirty year, and in that time have known what it was to do business with the richest stomachs in the land! Ma’am you’d hardly believe that I was once the owner of a great pavilion-tent that was the attraction of the fair. Nobody could come, nobody could go, without having a dish of Mrs Goodenough’s furmity. I knew the clergy’s taste, and the dandy gent’s taste; I knew the town’s taste, the country’s taste. I even knowed the taste of the coarse shameless females. But Lord’s my life—the world’s no memory; straightforward dealings don’t bring profit—’tis the sly and the underhand that get on in these times!’
Mrs Newson glanced round—her daughter was still bending over the distant stalls. ‘Can you call to mind,’ she said cautiously to the old woman, ‘the sale of a wife by her husband in your tent eighteen years ago today?’
The hag reflected, and half shook her head. ‘If it had been a big thing I should have minded it in a moment,’ she said. ‘I can mind every serious fight o’ married parties, every murder, every manslaughter, even every pocket-picking—leastwise large ones—that ‘t has been my lot to witness. But a selling? Was it done quiet-like?’
‘Well, yes. I think so.’
The furmity woman half shook her head again. ‘And yet,’ she said, ‘I do. At any rate, I can mind a man doing something o’ the sort—a man in a cord jacket, with a basket of tools; but, Lord bless ye, we don’t gi’e it head-room, we don’t, such as that. The only reason why I can mind that man is that he came back here to the next year’s fair, and told me quite private-like that if a woman ever asked for him I was to say he had gone to—where? Casterbridge—yes—to Casterbridge, said he. But, Lord’s my life, I shouldn’t ha’ thought of it again!’
Mrs Newson would have rewarded the old woman as far as her small means afforded had she not discreetly borne in mind that it was by that unscrupulous person’s liquor her husband had been degraded. She briefly thanked her informant, and rejoined Elizabeth, who greeted her with, ‘Mother, do let’s go on—it was hardly respectable for you to buy refreshment there. I see none but the lowest do.’
‘I have learned what I wanted, however,’ said her mother quietly. ‘The last time our relative visited this fair he said he was living at Casterbridge. It is a long, long way from here, and it was many years ago that he said it; but there I think we’ll go.’
With this they descended out of the fair, and went onward to the village, where they obtained a night’s lodging.
CHAPTER 4 (#ulink_4774ecf5-a478-5dfd-ae9b-0ff750fc4594)
Henchard’s wife acted for the best, but she had involved herself in difficulties. A hundred times she had been upon the point of telling her daughter Elizabeth-Jane the true story of her life, the tragical crisis of which had been the transaction at Weydon Fair, when she was not much older than the girl now beside her. But she had refrained. An innocent maiden had thus grown up in the belief that the relations between the genial sailor and her mother were the ordinary ones that they had always appeared to be. The risk of endangering a child’s strong affection by disturbing ideas which had grown with her growth was to Mrs Henchard too fearful a thing to contemplate. It had seemed, indeed, folly to think of making Elizabeth-Jane wise.
But Susan Henchard’s fear of losing her dearly loved daughter’s heart by a revelation had little to do with any sense of wrong-doing on her own part. Her simplicity—the original ground of Henchard’s contempt for her—had allowed her to live on in the conviction that Newson had acquired a morally real and justifiable right to her by his purchase—though the exact bearings and legal limits of that right were vague. It may seem strange to sophisticated minds that a sane young matron could believe in the seriousness of such a transfer; and were there not numerous other instances of the same belief the thing might scarcely be credited. But she was by no means the first peasant woman who had religiously adhered to her purchaser, as too many rural records show.
The history of Susan Henchard’s adventures in the interim can be told in two or three sentences. Absolutely helpless she had been taken off to Canada, where they had lived several years without any great worldly success, though she worked as hard as any woman could to keep their cottage cheerful and well-provided. When Elizabeth-Jane was about twelve years old the three returned to England, and settled at Falmouth, where Newson made a living for a few years as boatman and general handy shoreman.
He then engaged in the Newfoundland trade, and it was during this period that Susan had an awakening. A friend to whom she confided her history ridiculed her grave acceptance of her position; and all was over with her peace of mind. When Newson came home at the end of one winter he saw that the delusion he had so carefully sustained had vanished for ever.
There was then a time of sadness, in which she told him her doubts if she could live with him longer. Newson left home again on the Newfoundland trade when the season came round. The vague news of his loss at sea a little later on solved a problem which had become torture to her meek conscience. She saw him no more.
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. One day, a month or so after receiving intelligence of Newson’s death off the Bank of Newfoundland, when the girl was about eighteen, she was sitting on a willow chair in the cottage they still occupied, working twine into nets for the fishermen. Her mother was in a back corner of the same room, engaged in the same labour; and dropping the heavy wood needle she was filling she surveyed her daughter thoughtfully. The sun shone in at the door upon the young woman’s head and hair, which was worn loose, so that the rays streamed into its depths as into a hazel copse. Her face, though somewhat wan and incomplete, possessed the raw materials of beauty in a promising degree. 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.
The sight of the girl made her mother sad—not vaguely, but by logical inference. They both were still in that strait-waistcoat of poverty from which she had tried so many times to be delivered for the girl’s sake. The woman had long perceived how zealously and constantly the young mind of her companion was struggling for enlargement; and yet now, in her eighteenth year, it still remained but little unfolded. The desire—sober and repressed—of Elizabeth-Jane’s heart was indeed to see, to hear, and to understand. How could she become a woman of wider knowledge, higher repute—‘better’, as she termed it—this was her constant inquiry of her mother. She sought further into things than other girls in her position ever did, and her mother groaned as she felt she could not aid in the search.
The sailor, drowned or no, was probably now lost to them; and Susan’s staunch, religious adherence to him as her husband in principle, till her views had been disturbed by enlightenment, was demanded no more. She asked herself whether the present moment, now that she was a free woman again, were not as opportune a one as she would find in a world where everything had been so inopportune, for making a desperate effort to advance Elizabeth. To pocket her pride and search for the first husband seemed, wisely or not, the best initiatory step. He had possibly drunk himself into his tomb. But he might, on the other hand, have had too much sense to do so; for in her time with him he had been given to bouts only, and was not a habitual drunkard.
At any rate, the propriety of returning to him, if he lived, was unquestionable, The awkwardness of searching for him lay in enlightening Elizabeth, a proceeding which her mother could not endure to contemplate. She finally resolved to undertake the search without confiding to the girl her former relations with Henchard, leaving it to him if they found him to take what steps he might choose to that end. This will account for their conversation at the fair and the half-informed state in which Elizabeth was led onward.
In this attitude they proceeded on their journey, trusting solely to the dim light afforded of Henchard’s whereabouts by the furmity woman. The strictest economy was indispensable. Sometimes they might have been seen on foot, sometimes on farmers’ waggons, sometimes in carriers’ vans; and thus they drew near to Casterbridge. Elizabeth-Jane discovered to her alarm that her mother’s health was not what it once had been, and there was ever and anon in her talk that renunciatory tone which showed that, but for the girl, she would not be very sorry to quit a life she was growing thoroughly weary of.
It was on a Friday evening, near the middle of September, and just before dusk, that they reached the summit of a hill within a mile of the place they sought. There were high-banked hedges to the coach-road here, and they mounted upon the green turf within, and sat down. The spot commanded a full view of the town and its environs.
‘What an old-fashioned place it seems to be!’ said Elizabeth-Jane, while her silent mother mused on other things than topography. ‘It is huddled all together; and it is shut in by a square wall of trees, like a plot of garden ground by a box-edging.’
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.
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. To the level eye of humanity it stood as an indistinct mass behind a dense stockade of limes and chestnuts, set in the midst of miles of rotund down and concave field. The mass became gradually dissected by the vision into towers, gables, chimneys, and casements, the highest glazings shining bleared and bloodshot with the coppery fire they caught from the belt of sunlit cloud in the west.
From the centre of each side of this tree-bound square ran avenues east, west, and south into the wide expanse of cornland and coomb to the distance of a mile or so. It was by one of these avenues that the pedestrians were about to enter. Before they had risen to proceed two men passed outside the hedge, engaged in argumentative conversation.
‘Why, surely,’ said Elizabeth, as they receded, ‘those men mentioned the name of Henchard in their talk—the name of our relative?’
‘I thought so too,’ said Mrs Newson.
‘That seems a hint to us that he is still here.’
‘Yes.’
‘Shall I run after them, and ask them about him—’
‘No, no, no! Not for the world just yet. He may be in the workhouse, or in the stocks, for all we know.’
‘Dear me—why should you think that, mother?’
‘’Twas just something to say—that’s all! But we must make private inquiries.’
Having sufficiently rested they proceeded on their way at even-fall. 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. As soon as they had wandered about they could see that the stockade of gnarled trees which framed in Casterbridge was itself an avenue, standing on a low green bank or escarpment, with a ditch yet visible without. Within the avenue and bank was a wall more or less discontinuous, and within the wall were packed the abodes of the burghers.
Though the two women did not know it these external features were but the ancient defences of the town, planted as a promenade.
The lamplights now glimmered through the engirdling trees, conveying a sense of great snugness and comfort inside, and rendering at the same time the unlighted country without strangely solitary and vacant in aspect, considering its nearness to life. The difference between burgh and champaign was increased, too, by sounds which now reached them above others—the notes of a brass band. The travellers returned into the High Street, where there were timber houses with overhanging storeys, whose small-paned lattices were screened by dimity curtains on a drawing-string, and under whose barge-boards old cobwebs waved in the breeze. There were houses of brick-nogging, which derived their chief support from those adjoining. There were slate roofs patched with tiles, and tile roofs patched with slate, with occasionally a roof of thatch.
(#ulink_88481bbc-6599-52fe-a527-de7d789f582c)
The agricultural and pastoral character of the people upon whom the town depended for its existence was shown by the class of objects displayed in the shop windows. Scythes, reap-hooks, sheep-shears, bill-hooks, spades, mattocks, and hoes at the ironmonger’s; bee-hives, butter-firkins, churns, milking stools and pails, hay-rakes, field-flagons, and seed-lips at the cooper’s; cart-ropes and plough-harness at the saddler’s; carts, wheel-barrows, and mill-gear at the wheelwright’s and machinist’s; horse-embrocations at the chemist’s; at the glover’s and leather-cutter’s, hedging-gloves, thatchers’ kneecaps, ploughman’s leggings, villagers’ pattens and clogs.
They came to a grizzled church, whose massive square tower rose unbroken into the darkening sky, the lower parts being illuminated by the nearest lamps sufficiently to show how completely the mortar from the joints of the stonework had been nibbled out by time and weather, which had planted in the crevices thus made little tufts of stone-crop and grass almost as far up as the very battlements. From this tower the clock struck eight, and thereupon a bell began to toll with a peremptory clang. The curfew was still rung in Casterbridge, and it was utilized by the inhabitants as a signal for shutting their shops. No sooner did the deep notes of the bell throb between the house-fronts than a clatter of shutters arose from the whole length of the High Street. In a few minutes business at Casterbridge was ended for the day.
Other clocks struck eight from time to time—one gloomily from the gaol, another from the gable of an almshouse, with a preparative creak of machinery, more audible than the note of the bell; a row of tall, varnished case-clocks from the interior of a clock-maker’s shop joined in one after another just as the shutters were enclosing them, like a row of actors delivering their final speeches before the fall of the curtain; then chimes were heard stammering out the Sicilian Mariners’ Hymn
(#ulink_37d93b75-1616-5c79-abf2-81ac8ca645c3), so that chronologists of the advanced school were appreciably on their way to the next hour before the whole business of the old one was satisfactorily wound up.
In an open space before the church walked a woman with her gown-sleeves rolled up so high that the edge of her underlinen was visible, and her skirt tucked up through her pocket hole. She carried a loaf under her arm from which she was pulling pieces of bread, and handing them to some other women who walked with her; which pieces they nibbled critically. The sight reminded Mrs Henchard-Newson and her daughter that they had an appetite; and they inquired of the woman for the nearest baker’s.
‘Ye may as well look for manna-food as good bread in Casterbridge just now,’ she said, after directing them. ‘They can blare 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.’
‘And less good beer than swipes,’ said a man with his hands in his pockets.
‘How does it happen there’s no good bread?’ asked Mrs Henchard.
‘Oh, ’tis the corn-factor—he’s the man that our millers and bakers all deal wi’, and he has sold ’em growed wheat, which they didn’t know was growed, so they say, till the dough ran all over the ovens like quicksilver; so that the loaves be as flat as toads, and like suet pudden inside. I’ve been a wife, and I’ve been a mother, and I never see such unprincipled bread in Casterbridge as this before.—But you must be a real stranger here not to know what’s made all the poor volks’ insides plim like blowed bladders this week?’ ‘I am,’ said Elizabeth’s mother shyly.
Not wishing to be observed further till she knew more of her future in this place, she withdrew with her daughter from the speaker’s side. Getting a couple of biscuits at the shop indicated as a temporary substitute for a meal, they next bent their steps instinctively to where the music was playing.
* (#ulink_b5198c27-6a66-5053-95cb-4d6d733b365e) Most of these old houses have now been pulled down (1912).
* (#ulink_731dc1a9-4d33-57e3-a379-84ff78005ad8) These chimes, like those of other country churches, have been silenced for many years.
CHAPTER 5 (#ulink_c018ddea-19be-57e3-82c5-e4a473e38061)
A few score yards brought them to the spot where the town band was now shaking the window-panes with the strains of ‘The Roast Beef of Old England’.
The building before whose doors they had pitched their music-stands was the chief hotel in Casterbridge—namely, the King’s Arms. A spacious bow-window projected into the street over the main portico, and from the open sashes came the babble of voices, the jingle of glasses, and the drawing of corks. The blinds, moreover, being left unclosed, the whole interior of this room could be surveyed from the top of a flight of stone steps to the road-waggon office opposite, for which reason a knot of idlers had gathered there.
‘We might, perhaps, after all, make a few inquiries about—our relation Mr Henchard,’ whispered Mrs Newson who, since her entry into Casterbridge had seemed strangely weak and agitated. ‘And this, I think, would be a good place for trying it—just to ask, you know, how he stands in the town—if he is here, as I think he must be. You, Elizabeth-Jane, had better be the one to do it. I’m too worn out to do anything—pull down your fall first.’
She sat down upon the lowest step, and Elizabeth-Jane obeyed her directions and stood among the idlers.
‘What’s going on tonight?’ asked the girl, after singling out an old man and standing by him long enough to acquire a neighbourly right to converse.
‘Well, ye must be a stranger sure,’ said the old man, without taking his eyes from the window. ‘Why, ’tis a great public dinner of the gentle-people and such like leading volk—wi’ the Mayor in the chair. As we plainer fellows bain’t invited, they leave the winder-shutters open that we may get jist a sense o’t out here. If you mount the steps you can see ’em. That’s Mr Henchard, the Mayor, at the end of the table, a facing ye; and that’s the Council men right and left … Ah, lots of them when they begun life were no more than I be now!’
‘Henchard!’ said Elizabeth-Jane, surprised, but by no means suspecting the whole force of the revelation. She ascended to the top of the steps.
Her mother, though her head was bowed, had already caught from the inn-window tones that strangely riveted her attention before the old man’s words, ‘Mr Henchard, the Mayor’, reached her ears. She arose, and stepped up to her daughter’s side as soon as she could do so without showing exceptional eagerness.
The interior of the hotel dining-room was spread out before her, with its tables, and glass, and plate, and inmates. Facing the window, in the chair of dignity, sat a man about forty years of age; of heavy frame, large features, and commanding voice; his general build being rather coarse than compact. He had a rich complexion, which verged on swarthiness, a flashing black eye, and dark, bushy brows and hair. When he indulged in an occasional loud laugh at some remark among the guests, his large mouth parted so far back as to show to the rays of the chandelier a full score or more of the two-and-thirty sound white teeth that he obviously still could boast of.
That laugh was not encouraging to strangers; and hence it may have been well that it was rarely heard. 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. Elizabeth, encumbered with no recollections as her mother was, regarded him with nothing more than the keen curiosity and interest which the discovery of such unexpected social standing in the long-sought relative naturally begot. He was dressed in an old-fashioned evening suit, an expanse of frilled shirt showing on his broad breast; jewelled studs, and a heavy gold chain. Three glasses stood at his right hand; but, to his wife’s surprise, the two for wine were empty, while the third, a tumbler, was half full of water.
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 waggon-office doorway to which the steps gave access, the shadow from it conveniently hiding her features. She forgot her daughter till a touch from Elizabeth-Jane aroused her. ‘Have you seen him, mother?’ whispered the girl.
‘Yes, yes,’ answered her companion hastily. ‘I have seen him, and it is enough for me! Now I only want to go—pass away—die.’
‘Why—O what?’ She drew closer, and whispered in her mother’s ear, ‘Does he seem to you not likely to befriend us? I thought he looked a generous man. What a gentleman he is, isn’t he? And how his diamond studs shine! How strange that you should have said he might be in the stocks, or in the workhouse, or dead! Did ever anything go more by contraries! Why do you feel so afraid of him? I am not at all; I’ll call upon him—he can but say he don’t own such remote kin.’
‘I don’t know at all—I can’t tell what to set about. I feel so down.’
‘Don’t be that, mother, now we have got here and all! Rest there where you be a little while—I will look on and find out more about him.’
‘I don’t think I can ever meet Mr Henchard. He is not how I thought he would be—he overpowers me! I don’t wish to see him any more.’
‘But wait a little time and consider.’
Elizabeth-Jane had never been so much interested in anything in her life as in their present position, partly from the natural elation she felt at discovering herself akin to a coach; and she gazed again at the scene. The younger guests were talking and eating with animation; their elders were searching for titbits, and sniffing and grunting over their plates like sows nuzzling for acorns. Three drinks seemed to be sacred to the company—port, sherry, and rum; outside which old-established trinity few or no palates ranged.
A row of ancient rummers with ground figures on their sides, and each primed with a spoon, was now placed down the table, and these were promptly filled with grog at such high temperatures as to raise serious considerations for the articles exposed to its vapours. But Elizabeth-Jane noticed that, though this filling went on with great promptness up and down the table, nobody filled the Mayor’s glass, who still drank large quantities of water from the tumbler behind the clump of crystal vessels intended for wine and spirits.
‘They don’t fill Mr Henchard’s wine-glasses,’ she ventured to say to her elbow acquaintance, the old man.
‘Ah, no; don’t ye know him to be the celebrated abstaining worthy of that name? He scorns all tempting liquors; never touches nothing. O yes, he’ve strong qualities that way. I have heard tell that he swore a gospel oath in by-gone times, and has bode by it ever since. So they don’t press him, knowing it would be unbecoming in the face of that; for yer gospel oaths is a serious thing.’
Another elderly man, hearing this discourse, now joined in by inquiring, ‘How much longer have he got to suffer from it, Solomon Longways?’
‘Another two year, they say. I don’t know the why and the wherefore of his fixing such a time, for ’a never has told anybody. But ’tis exactly two calendar years longer, they say. A powerful mind to hold out so long!’
