The Mayor of Casterbridge: Chapters 1–10

The man was of fine figure, swarthy, and stern in aspect; and he showed in profile a facial angle so slightly inclined as to be almost perpendicular.

What was really peculiar, however, in this couple's progress, and would have attracted the attention of any casual observer otherwise disposed to overlook them, was the perfect silence they preserved.

The dull scrape of her large spoon was audible throughout the tent as she thus kept from burning the mixture of corn in the grain, flour, milk, raisins, currants, and what not, that composed the antiquated slop in which she dealt.

He found the concoction, thus strongly laced, much more to his satisfaction than it had been in its natural state.

At the end of the first basin the man had risen to serenity; at the second he was jovial; at the third, argumentative, at the fourth, the qualities signified by the shape of his face, the occasional clench of his mouth, and the fiery spark of his dark eye, began to tell in his conduct; he was overbearing—even brilliantly quarrelsome.

The ruin of good men by bad wives, and, more particularly, the frustration of many a promising youth's high aims and hopes and the extinction of his energies by an early imprudent marriage, was the theme.

The woman whispered; she was imploring and anxious: "Come, come, it is getting dark, and this nonsense won't do.

But with the demand and response of real cash the jovial frivolity of the scene departed.

He took the sailor's notes and deliberately folded them, and put them with the shillings in a high remote pocket, with an air of finality.

This second verification of his dim memories was enough; he knew now they were not dreams.

"I, Michael Henchard, on this morning of the sixteenth of September, do take an oath before God here in this solemn place that I will avoid all strong liquors for the space of twenty-one years to come, being a year for every year that I have lived.

By this time he had arrived at a seaport, and there he derived intelligence that persons answering somewhat to his description had emigrated a little time before.

Change was only to be observed in details; but here it was obvious that a long procession of years had passed by.

She was dressed in the mourning clothes of a widow.

A glance was sufficient to inform the eye that this was Susan Henchard's grown-up daughter.

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."

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.

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.

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.

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.

The awkwardness of searching for him lay in enlightening Elizabeth, a proceeding which her mother could not endure to contemplate.

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.

"Why, surely," said Elizabeth, as they receded, "those men mentioned the name of Henchard in their talk—the name of our relative?"

"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.

Knowing that in four-and-twenty months' time ye'll be out of your bondage, and able to make up for all you've suffered, by partaking without stint—why, it keeps a man up, no doubt."

Thereupon Elizabeth, being instructed by nods and motions from the taciturn landlord as to where she could find the different things, trotted up and down stairs with materials for her own and her parent's meal.

But I tell you, young man, if this holds good for the bulk, as it has done for the sample, you have saved my credit, stranger though you be.

I feel you would be invaluable to me—that needn't be said—and if you will bide and be my manager, I will make it worth your while."

If he should befriend us, and take us up, and then find out what you did when staying here, 'twould grieve and wound his natural pride as Mayor of the town."

The spectacle renewed his wife's conviction that, for her daughter's sake, she should strain a point to rejoin him.

"If he says no," she enjoined, as Elizabeth-Jane stood, bonnet on, ready to depart; "if he thinks it does not become the good position he has reached to in the town, to own—to let us call on him as—his distant kinfolk, say, 'Then, sir, we would rather not intrude; we will leave Casterbridge as quietly as we have come, and go back to our own country.'...I almost feel that I would rather he did say so, as I have not seen him for so many years, and we are so—little allied to him!"

All the venerable contrivances and confusions which delighted the eye by their quaintness, and in a measure reasonableness, in this rare old market-town, were metropolitan novelties to the unpractised eyes of Elizabeth-Jane, fresh from netting fish-seines in a seaside cottage.

Here the matter was settled over the breakfast, at which Henchard heaped the young Scotchman's plate to a prodigal fulness.

His wife had behaved kindly to him in return for his unkindness, and had never proclaimed her wrong to her child or to the world.

The amount was significant; it may tacitly have said to her that he bought her back again.