"Elizabeth, do you think much of old times?" said Henchard.
"Yes, sir; often," she said.
"Who do you put in your pictures of 'em?"
"Mother and father--nobody else hardly."
Henchard always looked like one bent6 on resisting pain when Elizabeth-Jane spoke7 of Richard Newson as "father." "Ah! I am out of all that, am I not?" he said...."Was Newson a kind father?"
"Yes, sir; very."
Henchard's face settled into an expression of stolid8 loneliness which gradually modulated9 into something softer. "Suppose I had been your real father?" he said. "Would you have cared for me as much as you cared for Richard Newson?"
"I can't think it," she said quickly. "I can think of no other as my father, except my father."
Henchard's wife was dissevered from him by death; his friend and helper Farfrae by estrangement10; Elizabeth-Jane by ignorance. It seemed to him that only one of them could possibly be recalled, and that was the girl. His mind began vibrating between the wish to reveal himself to her and the policy of leaving well alone, till he could no longer sit still. He walked up and down, and then he came and stood behind her chair, looking down upon the top of her head. He could no longer restrain his impulse. "What did your mother tell you about me--my history?" he asked.
"That you were related by marriage."
"She should have told more--before you knew me! Then my task would not have been such a hard one....Elizabeth, it is I who am your father, and not Richard Newson. Shame alone prevented your wretched parents from owning this to you while both of 'em were alive."
The back of Elizabeth's head remained still, and her shoulders did not denote even the movements of breathing. Henchard went on: "I'd rather have your scorn, your fear, anything than your ignorance; 'tis that I hate! Your mother and I were man and wife when we were young. What you saw was our second marriage. Your mother was too honest. We had thought each other dead--and--Newson became her husband."
This was the nearest approach Henchard could make to the full truth. As far as he personally was concerned he would have screened nothing; but he showed a respect for the young girl's sex and years worthy11 of a better man.
When he had gone on to give details which a whole series of slight and unregarded incidents in her past life strangely corroborated12; when, in short, she believed his story to be true, she became greatly agitated13, and turning round to the table flung her face upon it weeping.
"Don't cry--don't cry!" said Henchard, with vehement14 pathos15, "I can't bear it, I won't bear it. I am your father; why should you cry? Am I so dreadful, so hateful to 'ee? Don't take against me, Elizabeth-Jane!" he cried, grasping her wet hand. "Don't take against me--though I was a drinking man once, and used your mother roughly--I'll be kinder to you than HE was! I'll do anything, if you will only look upon me as your father!"
She tried to stand up and comfort him trustfully; but she could not; she was troubled at his presence, like the brethren at the avowal17 of Joseph.
"I don't want you to come to me all of a sudden," said Henchard in jerks, and moving like a great tree in a wind. "No, Elizabeth, I don't. I'll go away and not see you till to-morrow, or when you like, and then I'll show 'ee papers to prove my words. There, I am gone, and won't disturb you any more....'Twas I that chose your name, my daughter; your mother wanted it Susan. There, don't forget 'twas I gave you your name!" He went out at the door and shut her softly in, and she heard him go away into the garden. But he had not done. Before she had moved, or in any way recovered from the effect of his disclosure, he reappeared.
"One word more, Elizabeth," he said. "You'll take my surname now--hey? Your mother was against it, but it will be much more pleasant to me. 'Tis legally yours, you know. But nobody need know that. You shall take it as if by choice. I'll talk to my lawyer--I don't know the law of it exactly; but will you do this--let me put a few lines into the newspaper that such is to be your name?"
"If it is my name I must have it, mustn't I?" she asked.
"Well, well; usage is everything in these matters."
"I wonder why mother didn't wish it?"
"Oh, some whim18 of the poor soul's. Now get a bit of paper and draw up a paragraph as I shall tell you. But let's have a light."
"I can see by the firelight," she answered. "Yes--I'd rather."
"Very well."
She got a piece of paper, and bending over the fender wrote at his dictation words which he had evidently got by heart from some advertisement or other--words to the effect that she, the writer, hitherto known as Elizabeth-Jane Newson, was going to call herself Elizabeth-Jane Henchard forthwith. It was done, and fastened up, and directed to the office of the Casterbridge Chronicle.
"Now," said Henchard, with the blaze of satisfaction that he always emitted when he had carried his point--though tenderness softened19 it this time--"I'll go upstairs and hunt for some documents that will prove it all to you. But I won't trouble you with them till to-morrow. Good-night, my Elizabeth-Jane!"
He was gone before the bewildered girl could realize what it all meant, or adjust her filial sense to the new center of gravity. She was thankful that he had left her to herself for the evening, and sat down over the fire. Here she remained in silence, and wept--not for her mother now, but for the genial20 sailor Richard Newson, to whom she seemed doing a wrong.
Henchard in the meantime had gone upstairs. Papers of a domestic nature he kept in a drawer in his bedroom, and this he unlocked. Before turning them over he leant back and indulged in reposeful21 thought. Elizabeth was his at last and she was a girl of such good sense and kind heart that she would be sure to like him. He was the kind of man to whom some human object for pouring out his heart upon--were it emotive or were it choleric--was almost a necessity. The craving23 for his heart for the re-establishment of this tenderest human tie had been great during his wife's lifetime, and now he had submitted to its mastery without reluctance24 and without fear. He bent over the drawer again, and proceeded in his search.
Among the other papers had been placed the contents of his wife's little desk, the keys of which had been handed to him at her request. Here was the letter addressed to him with the restriction25, "NOT TO BE OPENED TILL ELIZABETH-JANE'S WEDDING-DAY."
Mrs. Henchard, though more patient than her husband, had been no practical hand at anything. In sealing up the sheet, which was folded and tucked in without an envelope, in the old-fashioned way, she had overlaid the junction26 with a large mass of wax without the requisite27 under-touch of the same. The seal had cracked, and the letter was open. Henchard had no reason to suppose the restriction one of serious weight, and his feeling for his late wife had not been of the nature of deep respect. "Some trifling28 fancy or other of poor Susan's, I suppose," he said; and without curiosity he allowed his eyes to scan the letter:-
MY DEAR MICHAEL,--For the good of all three of us I have kept one thing a secret from you till now. I hope you will understand why; I think you will; though perhaps you may not forgive me. But, dear Michael, I have done it for the best. I shall be in my grave when you read this, and ElizabethJane will have a home. Don't curse me Mike--think of how I was situated29. I can hardly write it, but here it is. Elizabeth-Jane is not your Elizabeth-Jane--the child who was in my arms when you sold me. No; she died three months after that, and this living one is my other husband's. I christened her by the same name we had given to the first, and she filled up the ache I felt at the other's loss. Michael, I am dying, and I might have held my tongue; but I could not. Tell her husband of this or not, as you may judge; and forgive, if you can, a woman you once deeply wronged, as she forgives you.
SUSAN HENCHARD
Her husband regarded the paper as if it were a window-pane through which he saw for miles. His lips twitched30, and he seemed to compress his frame, as if to bear better. His usual habit was not to consider whether destiny were hard upon him or not--the shape of his ideals in cases of affliction being simply a moody31 "I am to suffer, I perceive." "This much scourging32, then, it is for me." But now through his passionate33 head there stormed this thought-that the blasting disclosure was what he had deserved.
His wife's extreme reluctance to have the girl's name altered from Newson to Henchard was now accounted for fully16. It furnished another illustration of that honesty in dishonesty which had characterized her in other things.
He remained unnerved and purposeless for near a couple of hours; till he suddenly said, "Ah--I wonder if it is true!"
He jumped up in an impulse, kicked off his slippers34, and went with a candle to the door of Elizabeth-Jane's room, where he put his ear to the keyhole and listened. She was breathing profoundly. Henchard softly turned the handle, entered, and shading the light, approached the bedside. Gradually bringing the light from behind a screening curtain he held it in such a manner that it fell slantwise on her face without shining on her eyes. He steadfastly35 regarded her features.
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 mobility36 of daytime animation37 screens and overwhelms. In the present statuesque repose22 of the young girl's countenance38 Richard Newson's was unmistakably reflected. He could not endure the sight of her, and hastened away.
Misery39 taught him nothing more than defiant40 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. Henchard, like all his kind, was superstitious41, and he could not help thinking that the concatenation of events this evening had produced was the scheme of some sinister42 intelligence bent on punishing him. Yet they had developed naturally. If he had not revealed his past history to Elizabeth he would not have searched the drawer for papers, and so on. The mockery was, that he should have no sooner taught a girl to claim the shelter of his paternity than he discovered her to have no kinship with him.
This ironical43 sequence of things angered him like an impish trick from a fellow-creature. Like Prester John's, his table had been spread, and infernal harpies had snatched up the food. He went out of the house, and moved sullenly44 onward45 down the pavement till he came to the bridge at the bottom of the High Street. Here he turned in upon a bypath on the river bank, skirting the north-eastern limits of the town.
These precincts embodied46 the mournful phases of Casterbridge life, as the south avenues embodied its cheerful moods. The whole way along here was sunless, even in summer time; in spring, white frosts lingered here when other places were steaming with warmth; while in winter it was the seed-field of all the aches, rheumatisms, and torturing cramps47 of the year. The Casterbridge doctors must have pined away for want of sufficient nourishment48 but for the configuration49 of the landscape on the north-eastern side.
The river--slow, noiseless, and dark--the Schwarzwasser of Casterbridge--ran beneath a low cliff, the two together forming a defence which had rendered walls and artificial earthworks on this side unnecessary. Here were ruins of a Franciscan priory, and a mill attached to the same, the water of which roared down a back-hatch like the voice of desolation. Above the cliff, and behind the river, rose a pile of buildings, and in the front of the pile a square mass cut into the sky. It was like a pedestal lacking its statue. This missing feature, without which the design remained incomplete, was, in truth, the corpse50 of a man, for the square mass formed the base of the gallows51, the extensive buildings at the back being the county gaol52. In the meadow where Henchard now walked the mob were wont53 to gather whenever an execution took place, and there to the tune54 of the roaring weir55 they stood and watched the spectacle.
The exaggeration which darkness imparted to the glooms of this region impressed Henchard more than he had expected. The lugubrious56 harmony of the spot with his domestic situation was too perfect for him, impatient of effects scenes, and adumbrations. It reduced his heartburning to melancholy57, and he exclaimed, "Why the deuce did I come here!" He went on past the cottage in which the old local hangman had lived and died, in times before that calling was monopolized58 over all England by a single gentleman; and climbed up by a steep back lane into the town.
For the sufferings of that night, engendered59 by his bitter disappointment, he might well have been pitied. He was like one who had half fainted, and could neither recover nor complete the swoon. In words he could blame his wife, but not in his heart; and had he obeyed the wise directions outside her letter this pain would have been spared him for long--possibly for ever, Elizabeth-Jane seeming to show no ambition to quit her safe and secluded60 maiden61 courses for the speculative62 path of matrimony.
The morning came after this night of unrest, and with it the necessity for a plan. He was far too self-willed to recede63 from a position, especially as it would involve humiliation64. His daughter he had asserted her to be, and his daughter she should always think herself, no matter what hyprocrisy it involved.
But he was ill-prepared for the first step in this new situation. The moment he came into the breakfast-room Elizabeth advanced with open confidence to him and took him by the arm.
"I have thought and thought all night of it," she said frankly65. "And I see that everything must be as you say. And I am going to look upon you as the father that you are, and not to call you Mr. Henchard any more. It is so plain to me now. Indeed, father, it is. For, of course, you would not have done half the things you have done for me, and let me have my own way so entirely66, and bought me presents, if I had only been your step-daughter! He--Mr. Newson--whom my poor mother married by such a strange mistake" (Henchard was glad that he had disguised matters here), "was very kind--O so kind!" (she spoke with tears in her eyes); "but that is not the same thing as being one's real father after all. Now, father, breakfast is ready!" she said cheerfully.
Henchard bent and kissed her cheek. The moment and the act he had prefigured for weeks with a thrill of pleasure; yet it was no less than a miserable67 insipidity68 to him now that it had come. His reinstation of her mother had been chiefly for the girl's sake, and the fruition of the whole scheme was such dust and ashes as this.
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1
conversing
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| v.交谈，谈话( converse的现在分词 ) | |
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poised
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| a.摆好姿势不动的 | |
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gilt
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| adj.镀金的；n.金边证券 | |
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sundry
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| adj.各式各样的，种种的 | |
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brass
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| n.黄铜；黄铜器，铜管乐器 | |
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bent
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| n.爱好，癖好；adj.弯的；决心的，一心的 | |
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7
spoke
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| n.（车轮的）辐条；轮辐；破坏某人的计划；阻挠某人的行动 v.讲，谈（speak的过去式）；说；演说；从某种观点来说 | |
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8
stolid
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| adj.无动于衷的，感情麻木的 | |
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9
modulated
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| 已调整[制]的，被调的 | |
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10
estrangement
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| n.疏远，失和，不和 | |
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worthy
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| adj.(of)值得的，配得上的；有价值的 | |
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12
corroborated
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| v.证实，支持（某种说法、信仰、理论等）( corroborate的过去式 ) | |
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agitated
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| adj.被鼓动的，不安的 | |
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vehement
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| adj.感情强烈的；热烈的；(人)有强烈感情的 | |
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pathos
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| n.哀婉，悲怆 | |
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fully
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| adv.完全地，全部地，彻底地；充分地 | |
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avowal
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| n.公开宣称，坦白承认 | |
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whim
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| n.一时的兴致，突然的念头；奇想，幻想 | |
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19
softened
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| （使）变软( soften的过去式和过去分词 )； 缓解打击； 缓和； 安慰 | |
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genial
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| adj.亲切的，和蔼的，愉快的，脾气好的 | |
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reposeful
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| adj.平稳的，沉着的 | |
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repose
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| v.(使)休息；n.安息 | |
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craving
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| n.渴望,热望 | |
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reluctance
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| n.厌恶，讨厌，勉强，不情愿 | |
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restriction
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| n.限制，约束 | |
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junction
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| n.连接，接合；交叉点，接合处，枢纽站 | |
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requisite
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| adj.需要的，必不可少的；n.必需品 | |
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trifling
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| adj.微不足道的；没什么价值的 | |
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29
situated
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| adj.坐落在...的，处于某种境地的 | |
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30
twitched
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| vt.& vi.（使）抽动，（使）颤动（twitch的过去式与过去分词形式） | |
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31
moody
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| adj.心情不稳的，易怒的，喜怒无常的 | |
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32
scourging
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| 鞭打( scourge的现在分词 )； 惩罚，压迫 | |
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33
passionate
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| adj.热情的，热烈的，激昂的，易动情的，易怒的，性情暴躁的 | |
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34
slippers
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| n. 拖鞋 | |
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steadfastly
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| adv.踏实地，不变地；岿然；坚定不渝 | |
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mobility
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| n.可动性，变动性，情感不定 | |
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animation
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| n.活泼，兴奋，卡通片／动画片的制作 | |
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38
countenance
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| n.脸色，面容；面部表情；vt.支持，赞同 | |
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misery
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| n.痛苦，苦恼，苦难；悲惨的境遇，贫苦 | |
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defiant
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| adj.无礼的，挑战的 | |
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41
superstitious
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| adj.迷信的 | |
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42
sinister
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| adj.不吉利的，凶恶的，左边的 | |
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43
ironical
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| adj.讽刺的，冷嘲的 | |
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sullenly
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| 不高兴地，绷着脸，忧郁地 | |
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onward
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| adj.向前的，前进的；adv.向前，前进，在先 | |
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46
embodied
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| v.表现( embody的过去式和过去分词 )；象征；包括；包含 | |
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47
cramps
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| n. 抽筋, 腹部绞痛, 铁箍 adj. 狭窄的, 难解的 v. 使...抽筋, 以铁箍扣紧, 束缚 | |
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48
nourishment
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| n.食物，营养品；营养情况 | |
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configuration
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| n.结构，布局，形态，(计算机)配置 | |
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50
corpse
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| n.尸体，死尸 | |
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51
gallows
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| n.绞刑架，绞台 | |
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52
gaol
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| n.(jail)监狱；(不加冠词)监禁；vt.使…坐牢 | |
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53
wont
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| adj.习惯于；v.习惯；n.习惯 | |
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54
tune
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| n.调子；和谐，协调；v.调音，调节，调整 | |
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55
weir
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| n.堰堤，拦河坝 | |
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56
lugubrious
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| adj.悲哀的，忧郁的 | |
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57
melancholy
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| n.忧郁，愁思；adj.令人感伤（沮丧）的，忧郁的 | |
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58
monopolized
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| v.垄断( monopolize的过去式和过去分词 )；独占；专卖；专营 | |
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59
engendered
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| v.产生（某形势或状况），造成，引起( engender的过去式和过去分词 ) | |
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60
secluded
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| adj.与世隔绝的；隐退的；偏僻的v.使隔开，使隐退( seclude的过去式和过去分词) | |
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maiden
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| n.少女，处女；adj.未婚的，纯洁的，无经验的 | |
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62
speculative
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| adj.思索性的，暝想性的，推理的 | |
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63
recede
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| vi.退(去)，渐渐远去；向后倾斜，缩进 | |
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64
humiliation
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| n.羞辱 | |
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65
frankly
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| adv.坦白地，直率地；坦率地说 | |
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66
entirely
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| ad.全部地，完整地；完全地，彻底地 | |
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67
miserable
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| adj.悲惨的，痛苦的；可怜的，糟糕的 | |
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insipidity
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| n.枯燥无味，清淡，无精神；无生气状 | |
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