Coming down the steps of the bank he encountered Jopp.
The gloomy transactions just completed within had added fever to the original sting of Farfrae’s sympathy that morning, which Henchard fancied might be a satire disguised so that Jopp met with anything but a bland reception.
The latter was in the act of taking off his hat to wipe his forehead, and saying,
“A fine hot day,” to an acquaintance.
“You can wipe and wipe, and say,
‘A fine hot day,’ can ye!” cried Henchard in a savage undertone, imprisoning Jopp between himself and the bank wall. “If it hadn’t been for your blasted advice it might have been a fine day enough!
Why did ye let me go on, hey?—when a word of doubt from you or anybody would have made me think twice!
For you can never be sure of weather till ‘tis past.”
“My advice, sir, was to do what you thought best.”
“A useful fellow!
And the sooner you help somebody else in that way the better!”
Henchard continued his address to Jopp in similar terms till it ended in Jopp’s dismissal there and then, Henchard turning upon his heel and leaving him.
“You shall be sorry for this, sir; sorry as a man can be!” said Jopp, standing pale, and looking after the corn-merchant as he disappeared in the crowd of market-men hard by.
27.
It was the eve of harvest.
Prices being low Farfrae was buying.
As was usual, after reckoning too surely on famine weather the local farmers had flown to the other extreme, and (in Farfrae’s opinion) were selling off too recklessly—calculating with just a trifle too much certainty upon an abundant yield.
So he went on buying old corn at its comparatively ridiculous price: for the produce of the previous year, though not large, had been of excellent quality.
When Henchard had squared his affairs in a disastrous way, and got rid of his burdensome purchases at a monstrous loss, the harvest began.
There were three days of excellent weather, and then—“What if that curst conjuror should be right after all!” said Henchard.
The fact was, that no sooner had the sickles begun to play than the atmosphere suddenly felt as if cress would grow in it without other nourishment.
It rubbed people’s cheeks like damp flannel when they walked abroad.
There was a gusty, high, warm wind; isolated raindrops starred the window-panes at remote distances: the sunlight would flap out like a quickly opened fan, throw the pattern of the window upon the floor of the room in a milky, colourless shine, and withdraw as suddenly as it had appeared.
From that day and hour it was clear that there was not to be so successful an ingathering after all.
If Henchard had only waited long enough he might at least have avoided loss though he had not made a profit.
But the momentum of his character knew no patience.
At this turn of the scales he remained silent.
The movements of his mind seemed to tend to the thought that some power was working against him.
“I wonder,” he asked himself with eerie misgiving; “I wonder if it can be that somebody has been roasting a waxen image of me, or stirring an unholy brew to confound me!
I don’t believe in such power; and yet—what if they should ha’ been doing it!”
Even he could not admit that the perpetrator, if any, might be Farfrae.
These isolated hours of superstition came to Henchard in time of moody depression, when all his practical largeness of view had oozed out of him.
Meanwhile Donald Farfrae prospered.
He had purchased in so depressed a market that the present moderate stiffness of prices was sufficient to pile for him a large heap of gold where a little one had been.
“Why, he’ll soon be Mayor!” said Henchard.
It was indeed hard that the speaker should, of all others, have to follow the triumphal chariot of this man to the Capitol.
The rivalry of the masters was taken up by the men.
September-night shades had fallen upon Casterbridge; the clocks had struck half-past eight, and the moon had risen.
The streets of the town were curiously silent for such a comparatively early hour.
A sound of jangling horse-bells and heavy wheels passed up the street.
These were followed by angry voices outside Lucetta’s house, which led her and Elizabeth-Jane to run to the windows, and pull up the blinds.
The neighbouring Market House and Town Hall abutted against its next neighbour the Church except in the lower storey, where an arched thoroughfare gave admittance to a large square called Bull Stake.
A stone post rose in the midst, to which the oxen had formerly been tied for baiting with dogs to make them tender before they were killed in the adjoining shambles.
In a corner stood the stocks.
The thoroughfare leading to this spot was now blocked by two four-horse waggons and horses, one laden with hay-trusses, the leaders having already passed each other, and become entangled head to tail.
The passage of the vehicles might have been practicable if empty; but built up with hay to the bedroom windows as one was, it was impossible.
“You must have done it a’ purpose!” said Farfrae’s waggoner. “You can hear my horses’ bells half-a-mile such a night as this!”
“If ye’d been minding your business instead of zwailing along in such a gawk-hammer way, you would have zeed me!” retorted the wroth representative of Henchard.
However, according to the strict rule of the road it appeared that Henchard’s man was most in the wrong, he therefore attempted to back into the High Street.
In doing this the near hind-wheel rose against the churchyard wall and the whole mountainous load went over, two of the four wheels rising in the air, and the legs of the thill horse.