Nance glanced triumphantly at Henchard, and sailed into the barn; for assuming that she was to be discharged on the instant she had resolved to make the most of her victory.
Henchard, however, said nothing about discharging her.
Unduly sensitive on such points by reason of his own past, he had the look of one completely ground down to the last indignity. Elizabeth followed him to the house like a culprit; but when she got inside she could not see him.
Nor did she see him again that day.
Convinced of the scathing damage to his local repute and position that must have been caused by such a fact, though it had never before reached his own ears, Henchard showed a positive distaste for the presence of this girl not his own, whenever he encountered her.
He mostly dined with the farmers at the market-room of one of the two chief hotels, leaving her in utter solitude.
Could he have seen how she made use of those silent hours he might have found reason to reserve his judgment on her quality.
She read and took notes incessantly, mastering facts with painful laboriousness, but never flinching from her self-imposed task.
She began the study of Latin, incited by the Roman characteristics of the town she lived in.
“If I am not well-informed it shall be by no fault of my own,” she would say to herself through the tears that would occasionally glide down her peachy cheeks when she was fairly baffled by the portentous obscurity of many of these educational works.
Thus she lived on, a dumb, deep-feeling, great-eyed creature, construed by not a single contiguous being; quenching with patient fortitude her incipient interest in Farfrae, because it seemed to be one-sided, unmaidenly, and unwise.
True, that for reasons best known to herself, she had, since Farfrae’s dismissal, shifted her quarters from the back room affording a view of the yard (which she had occupied with such zest) to a front chamber overlooking the street; but as for the young man, whenever he passed the house he seldom or never turned his head.
Winter had almost come, and unsettled weather made her still more dependent upon indoor resources.
But there were certain early winter days in Casterbridge—days of firmamental exhaustion which followed angry south-westerly tempests—when, if the sun shone, the air was like velvet.
She seized on these days for her periodical visits to the spot where her mother lay buried—the still-used burial-ground of the old Roman-British city, whose curious feature was this, its continuity as a place of sepulture.
Mrs. Henchard’s dust mingled with the dust of women who lay ornamented with glass hair-pins and amber necklaces, and men who held in their mouths coins of Hadrian, Posthumus, and the Constantines.
Half-past ten in the morning was about her hour for seeking this spot—a time when the town avenues were deserted as the avenues of Karnac.
Business had long since passed down them into its daily cells, and Leisure had not arrived there.
So Elizabeth-Jane walked and read, or looked over the edge of the book to think, and thus reached the churchyard.
There, approaching her mother’s grave she saw a solitary dark figure in the middle of the gravel-walk.
This figure, too, was reading; but not from a book: the words which engrossed it being the inscription on Mrs. Henchard’s tombstone.
The personage was in mourning like herself, was about her age and size, and might have been her wraith or double, but for the fact that it was a lady much more beautifully dressed than she.
Indeed, comparatively indifferent as Elizabeth-Jane was to dress, unless for some temporary whim or purpose, her eyes were arrested by the artistic perfection of the lady’s appearance.
Her gait, too, had a flexuousness about it, which seemed to avoid angularity.
It was a revelation to Elizabeth that human beings could reach this stage of external development—she had never suspected it.
She felt all the freshness and grace to be stolen from herself on the instant by the neighbourhood of such a stranger.
And this was in face of the fact that Elizabeth could now have been writ handsome, while the young lady was simply pretty.
Had she been envious she might have hated the woman; but she did not do that—she allowed herself the pleasure of feeling fascinated.
She wondered where the lady had come from.
The stumpy and practical walk of honest homeliness which mostly prevailed there, the two styles of dress thereabout, the simple and the mistaken, equally avouched that this figure was no Casterbridge woman’s, even if a book in her hand resembling a guide-book had not also suggested it.
The stranger presently moved from the tombstone of Mrs. Henchard, and vanished behind the corner of the wall.
Elizabeth went to the tomb herself; beside it were two footprints distinct in the soil, signifying that the lady had stood there a long time.
She returned homeward, musing on what she had seen, as she might have mused on a rainbow or the Northern Lights, a rare butterfly or a cameo.
Interesting as things had been out of doors, at home it turned out to be one of her bad days.
Henchard, whose two years’ mayoralty was ending, had been made aware that he was not to be chosen to fill a vacancy in the list of aldermen; and that Farfrae was likely to become one of the Council.
This caused the unfortunate discovery that she had played the waiting-maid in the town of which he was Mayor to rankle in his mind yet more poisonously.
He had learnt by personal inquiry at the time that it was to Donald Farfrae—that treacherous upstart—that she had thus humiliated herself.
And though Mrs. Stannidge seemed to attach no great importance to the incident—the cheerful souls at the Three Mariners having exhausted its aspects long ago—such was Henchard’s haughty spirit that the simple thrifty deed was regarded as little less than a social catastrophe by him.
Ever since the evening of his wife’s arrival with her daughter there had been something in the air which had changed his luck.
That dinner at the King’s Arms with his friends had been Henchard’s Austerlitz: he had had his successes since, but his course had not been upward.
He was not to be numbered among the aldermen—that Peerage of burghers—as he had expected to be, and the consciousness of this soured him to-day.
“Well, where have you been?” he said to her with offhand laconism.
“I’ve been strolling in the Walks and churchyard, father, till I feel quite leery.”
She clapped her hand to her mouth, but too late.
This was just enough to incense Henchard after the other crosses of the day.
“I WON’T have you talk like that!” he thundered. “‘Leery,’ indeed.
One would think you worked upon a farm!
One day I learn that you lend a hand in public-houses.
Then I hear you talk like a clodhopper.
I’m burned, if it goes on, this house can’t hold us two.”