He had hardly gone down the staircase when she dropped upon the sofa and jumped up again in a fit of desperation.
“I WILL love him!” she cried passionately; “as for HIM—he’s hot-tempered and stern, and it would be madness to bind myself to him knowing that.
I won’t be a slave to the past—I’ll love where I choose!”
Yet having decided to break away from Henchard one might have supposed her capable of aiming higher than Farfrae.
But Lucetta reasoned nothing: she feared hard words from the people with whom she had been earlier associated; she had no relatives left; and with native lightness of heart took kindly to what fate offered.
Elizabeth-Jane, surveying the position of Lucetta between her two lovers from the crystalline sphere of a straightforward mind, did not fail to perceive that her father, as she called him, and Donald Farfrae became more desperately enamoured of her friend every day.
On Farfrae’s side it was the unforced passion of youth.
On Henchard’s the artificially stimulated coveting of maturer age.
The pain she experienced from the almost absolute obliviousness to her existence that was shown by the pair of them became at times half dissipated by her sense of its humourousness.
When Lucetta had pricked her finger they were as deeply concerned as if she were dying; when she herself had been seriously sick or in danger they uttered a conventional word of sympathy at the news, and forgot all about it immediately.
But, as regarded Henchard, this perception of hers also caused her some filial grief; she could not help asking what she had done to be neglected so, after the professions of solicitude he had made.
As regarded Farfrae, she thought, after honest reflection, that it was quite natural.
What was she beside Lucetta?—as one of the “meaner beauties of the night,” when the moon had risen in the skies.
She had learnt the lesson of renunciation, and was as familiar with the wreck of each day’s wishes as with the diurnal setting of the sun.
If her earthly career had taught her few book philosophies it had at least well practised her in this.
Yet her experience had consisted less in a series of pure disappointments than in a series of substitutions.
Continually it had happened that what she had desired had not been granted her, and that what had been granted her she had not desired.
So she viewed with an approach to equanimity the now cancelled days when Donald had been her undeclared lover, and wondered what unwished-for thing Heaven might send her in place of him.
26.
It chanced that on a fine spring morning Henchard and Farfrae met in the chestnut-walk which ran along the south wall of the town.
Each had just come out from his early breakfast, and there was not another soul near.
Henchard was reading a letter from Lucetta, sent in answer to a note from him, in which she made some excuse for not immediately granting him a second interview that he had desired.
Donald had no wish to enter into conversation with his former friend on their present constrained terms; neither would he pass him in scowling silence.
He nodded, and Henchard did the same.
They receded from each other several paces when a voice cried
“Farfrae!”
It was Henchard’s, who stood regarding him.
“Do you remember,” said Henchard, as if it were the presence of the thought and not of the man which made him speak, “do you remember my story of that second woman—who suffered for her thoughtless intimacy with me?”
“I do,” said Farfrae.
“Do you remember my telling ‘ee how it all began and how it ended?
“Yes.”
“Well, I have offered to marry her now that I can; but she won’t marry me.
Now what would you think of her—I put it to you?”
“Well, ye owe her nothing more now,” said Farfrae heartily.
“It is true,” said Henchard, and went on.
That he had looked up from a letter to ask his questions completely shut out from Farfrae’s mind all vision of Lucetta as the culprit.
Indeed, her present position was so different from that of the young woman of Henchard’s story as of itself to be sufficient to blind him absolutely to her identity.
As for Henchard, he was reassured by Farfrae’s words and manner against a suspicion which had crossed his mind.
They were not those of a conscious rival.
Yet that there was rivalry by some one he was firmly persuaded.
He could feel it in the air around Lucetta, see it in the turn of her pen.
There was an antagonistic force in exercise, so that when he had tried to hang near her he seemed standing in a refluent current.
That it was not innate caprice he was more and more certain.
Her windows gleamed as if they did not want him; her curtains seem to hang slily, as if they screened an ousting presence.
To discover whose presence that was—whether really Farfrae’s after all, or another’s—he exerted himself to the utmost to see her again; and at length succeeded.
At the interview, when she offered him tea, he made it a point to launch a cautious inquiry if she knew Mr. Farfrae.
O yes, she knew him, she declared; she could not help knowing almost everybody in Casterbridge, living in such a gazebo over the centre and arena of the town.
“Pleasant young fellow,” said Henchard.
“Yes,” said Lucetta.
“We both know him,” said kind Elizabeth-Jane, to relieve her companion’s divined embarrassment.