 Chapter 45 It was about a month after the day which closed is in the last chapter. Elizabeth Jane had grown accustomed to the novelty of her situation, and the only difference between Donald's movements now and formerly was that he hastened indoors rather more quickly after business hours than he had been in the habit of doing for some time. Neusen had stayed in Casterbridge three days after the wedding party, whose gaiety as might have been surmised was of his making rather than of the married couples, and was stared at and honored as became the returned Crusoe of the hour. But whether or not because Casterbridge was difficult to excite by dramatic returns and disappearances through having been for centuries in a sized town in which sensational exits from the world, antipodian absences and such like were half-yearly occurrences, the inhabitants did not altogether lose their equanimity on his account. On the fourth morning he was discovered disconsolently climbing a hill in his craving to get a glimpse of the sea from somewhere or other. The contiguity of saltwater proved to be such a necessity of his existence that he preferred Budmouth as a place of residence, notwithstanding the society of his daughter in the other town. Thither he went and settled in lodgings in a green-shuttered cottage which had a bow window jetting out sufficiently to afford glimpses of a vertical strip of blue sea to anyone opening the sash and leaning forward far enough to look through a narrow lane of tall, intervening houses. Elizabeth Jane was standing in the middle of her upstairs parlor, critically surveying some rearrangement of articles with her head to one side, when the housemaid came in with the announcement, Oh, please, ma'am, we know now how that birdcage came there. In exploring her new domain during the first week of residence, Gazing was critical satisfaction on this cheerful room and that, penetrating cautiously into dark cellars, sallying forth with gingerly tread to the garden, now leaf-stroomed by autumn winds, and thus, like a wise field-martial estimating the capabilities of the site wherein she was about to open her housekeeping campaign. Mrs. Donald Farfray had discovered in a screened corner a new birdcage shrouded in newspaper, and at the bottom of the cage a little ball of feathers, the dead body of a goldfinch. Nobody could tell her how the bird and cage had come there, though that the poor little songster had been starved to death was evident. The sadness of the incident had made an impression on her. She had not been able to forget it for days, despite Farfray's tender banter, and now, when the matter had been nearly forgotten, it was again revived. Please, ma'am, we know how the birdcage came there. That farmer's man, who called on the evening of the wedding, he was seen with it in his hand as he came up the street, and his thought that he put it down while he came in with his message, and then went away for getting where he had left it. This was enough to set Elizabeth thinking, and in thinking she seized hold of the idea at one feminine bound that the caged bird had been brought by Henshard for her as a wedding gift and token of repentance. He had not expressed to her any regrets or excuses for what he had done in the past, but it was a part of his nature to extenuate nothing and live on as one of his own worst accusers. She went out, looked at the cage, buried the starved little singer, and from that hour her heart softened towards the self-alienated man. When her husband came in, she told him her solution of the birdcage mystery, and begged Donald to help her in finding out, as soon as possible, with her Henshard had banished himself, that she might make her peace with him, try to do something to render his life less of an outcast and more tolerable to him. Although Farfay had never so passionately liked Henshard as Henshard had liked him, he had, on the other hand, never so passionately hated in the same direction as his former friend had done, and he was therefore not the least indisposed to assist Elizabeth Jane in her laudable plan. But it was by no means easy to set about discovering Henshard. He had apparently sunk into the earth on leaving Mr. and Mrs. Farfay's door. Elizabeth Jane remembered what he had once attempted and trembled. But though she did not know it, Henshard had become a changed man since then, as far that is, as change of emotional basis can justify such a radical phrase, and she needed not to fear. In a few days Farfay's inquiries elicited that Henshard had been seen by one who knew him walking steadily along the Melchester Highway eastward, at twelve o'clock at night, in other words retracing his steps on the road by which he had come. This was enough, and the next morning Farfay might have been discovered driving his gig out of Casterbridge in that direction, Elizabeth Jane sitting beside him, wrapped in a thick flat fur, the victorine of the period, her complexion somewhat richer than formerly, and an incipient matronly dignity which the serene manurva eyes of one whose gestures beamed with mind made becoming, settling on her face. Having herself arrived at a promising haven from at least the grosser troubles of her life, her object was to place Henshard in some similar quietude before he should sink into that lower stage of existence which was only too possible to him now. After driving along the highway for a few miles they made further inquiries and learned of a roadmender who had been working thereabouts for weeks that he had observed such a man at the time mentioned. He had left the Melchester Coach Road at Weatherbury by a forking highway which skirted the north of Eddon Heath. Into this road they directed the horse's head and soon were bowling across that ancient country whose surface never had been stirred to a finger's depth saved by the scratchings of rabbits since brushed by the feet of the earliest tribes. The tumuli these had left behind, done and shagged with heather, jutted roundly into the sky from the uplands as though they were the full breasts of Diana Multimamia supinely extended there. They searched Agdon but found no Henshard. Farfay drove onward and by the afternoon reached the neighborhood of some extension of the Heath to the north of Anglebury, a prominent feature of which, in the form of a blasted clump of furs on a summit of a hill, they soon passed under. That the road they were following had, up to this point been Henshard's track on foot, they were pretty certain. But the ramifications which now began to reveal themselves in the route made further progress in the right direction a matter of pure guesswork. And Donald strongly advised his wife to give up the search in person and trust to other means for obtaining news of her stepfather. They were now a score of miles at least from home but by resting the horse for a couple of hours at a village they had just traversed it would be possible to get back to Casterbridge that same day while to go much further afield would reduce them to the necessity of camping out for the night. And that will make a hole in a sovereign said Farfay. She pondered the position and agreed with him. He accordingly drew rain but before reversing their direction paused a moment and looked vaguely round upon the wide country which the elevated position disclosed. While they looked a solitary human form came from under the clump of trees and crossed ahead of them. The person was some laborer. His gate was shambling. His regard fixed in front of him as absolutely as if he wore blinkers and in his hand he carried a few sticks. Having crossed the road he descended into a ravine where a cottage revealed itself which he entered. If it were not so far away from Casterbridge I should say that must be poor Whittle. Just just like him observed Elizabeth Jane and it may be Whittle for he's never been to the yard these three weeks going away without saying any word at all and eye owing him for two days' work without knowing who to pay it to. The possibility led them to a light and at least make an inquiry at the cottage. Farfay hitched the range to the gate post and they approached what was of humble dwellings surely the humblest, the walls built of kneaded clay originally faced with a trowel had been worn by years of rain washing to a lumpy crumbling surface, channeled and sunken from its plain its gray rents held together here and there by a leafy strap of ivy which could scarcely find substance enough for the purpose. The rafters were sunken and the thatch of the roof in ragged holes. Leaves from the fence had been blown into the corners of the doorway and lay there undisturbed. The door was ajar. Farfay knocked and he who stood before them was whittle as they had conjectured. His face showed marks of deep sadness, his eyes lighting on them was an unfocused gaze and he still held in his hand the few sticks he had been out to gather. As soon as he recognized them he started. What, Able Whittle, is it that ye are here? said Farfay. Hey, yes, sir, you see he was kind like to mother when she were here below though I was rough to me. Who are you talking of? Well, sir, Mr. Hensit, didn't you know it? He's just gone about half an hour ago by the sun, for I've got no watch to my name. Not dead, faltered Elizabeth Chain. Yes, ma'am, he's gone. He was kind like to mother when she were here below, sending her the best ship coal and hardly any ashes from it at all, and taties and such like that were very needful to her. I ced and go down street on the night of your worshipful's wedding to the lady at your side, and I thought he looked low and faltering, and I followed an overgrazed bridge and he turned and zed me and said, you go back. But I followed, and he turned again and said, do you hear, sir, go back. But I zed that he was low and I followed on still. Then I said, Whittle, what do ye follow me for when I've told ye to go back all these times? And I said, because, sir, I see things be bad with thee, and ye were kind like to mother if ye were rough to me, and I would feign be kind like to you. Then he walked on and I followed, and he never complained at me no more. We walked on like that all night, and in the blue of the morning, once was hardly day, I looked ahead of me, and I zed that he wobbled, and could hardly drag along. By the time we had got past here, but I had seen that this house was empty as I went by, and I got him to come back, and I took down the boards from the windows and helped him inside. What, Whittle, he said, and can ye really be such a poor fawn's fool as to care for such a wretch's eye? Then I went on further, and some neighborly woodman lent me a bed and a chair and a few other traps, and we brought him here, and made him as comfortable as we could. But he didn't gain strength, for ye see, ma'am, he couldn't eat, no appetite at all, and he got weaker, and today he died. One of the neighbors of going to get a man to measure him. Dear me, is that so? said Farfay. As for Elizabeth, she said nothing. Upon the head of his bed he pinned a piece of paper with some writing upon it. I continued able, Whittle, but not being a man of letters I can't read writing, so I don't know what it is. I can get it and show ye. They stood in silence while he ran into the cottage, returning in a moment with a crumpled scrap of paper. On it there was penciled as follows. Michael henchards will, that Elizabeth Jane Farfay be not told of my death or made to grieve on account of me, and that I be not buried in consecrated ground, and that no sexton be asked to be told the bell, and that nobody is wished to see my dead body, and that no mourners walk behind me at my funeral, and that no flowers be planted on my grave, and that no man remember me. To this I put my name, Michael henchard. What are we to do? said Donald, when he had handed the paper to her. She could not answer distinctly. Oh, Donald, she cried at last through her tears. What bitterness lies there? No, I would not have minded so much if it had not been for my unkindness at that last parting, but there's no altering, so it must be. What henchard had written in the anguish of his dying was respected as far as practicable by Elizabeth Jane, though less from a sense of the sacredness of last words as such, than from her independent knowledge that the man who wrote them meant what he said. She knew the directions to be a piece of the same stuff that his whole life was made of, and hence were not to be tampered with to give herself a mournful pleasure or her husband credit for large heartedness. All was over at last, even her regrets for having misunderstood him on his last visit, for not having searched him out sooner, though these were deep and sharp for a good while. From this time forward Elizabeth Jane found herself in a latitude of calm weather, kindly and grateful in itself, and doubly so after the caffarnum in which some of her preceding years had been spent, as the lively and sparkling emotions of her early married life cohered into an equable serenity, the finer movements of her nature found scope in discovering to the narrow-lived ones around her the secret, as she had once learned it, of making limited opportunities and durable, which she deemed to consist in the cunning enlargement by a species of microscopic treatment of those minute forms of satisfaction that offer themselves to everybody, not in positive pain, which, thus handled, have much of the same inspiring effect upon life as wider interests cursorily embraced. Her teaching had a reflex action upon herself in so much that she thought she could perceive no great personal difference between being respected in the nether parts of Casterbridge and glorified at the uppermost end of the social world. Her position was indeed, to a marked degree, one that in the common phrase afforded much to be thankful for, that she was not demonstratively thankful was no fault of hers. Her experience had been of a kind to teach her, rightly or wrongly, that the doubtful honor of a brief transmit through a sorry world hardly called for effusiveness, even when the path was suddenly irradiated at some half-way point by day-beams rich as hers. But her strong sense that neither she nor any human being deserved less than was given did not blind her to the fact that there were others receiving less who had deserved much more, and in being forced to class herself among the fortunate she did not cease to wonder at the persistence of the unforeseen, when the one to whom such unbroken tranquillity had been accorded in the adult stage was she whose youth had seemed to teach that happiness was but the occasional episode in a general drama of pain. End of Chapter 45 End of The Mayor of Casterbridge by Thomas Hardy Read by Debra Lynn