The Mayor of Casterbridge by Thomas Hardy - Chapter 3/45 (read by Bruce Pirie)

III. The high road into the village of Weyden Pryors was again carpeted with dust. The trees had put on, as of yore, their aspect of dingy green, and where the hen-shard family of three had once walked along, two persons, not unconnected with the family, walked now. The scene in its broad aspect had so much of its previous character, even to the voices and rattle from the neighboring village down, that it might, for that matter, have been the afternoon following the previously recorded episode. Change was only to be observed in details. But here it was obvious that a long procession of years had passed by. One of the two who walked to the road was she who had figured as the young wife of hen-shard on the previous occasion. Now her face had lost much of its rotundity, her skin had undergone a textural change, and though her hair had not lost color, it was considerably thinner than heretofore. She was dressed in the morning clothes of a widow. Her companion, also in black, appeared as a well-formed young woman, about eighteen, greatly possessed of that ephemeral precious essence youth, which is itself beauty, irrespective of complexion or contour. A glance was sufficient to inform the eye that this was Susan hen-shard's grown-up daughter. While life's middle summer had set its hardening mark on the mother's face, her former spring-like specialities were transferred so dexterously by time to the second figure, her child, that the absence of certain facts within her mother's knowledge from the girl's mind would have seemed for the moment, to one reflecting on those facts, to be a curious imperfection in nature's powers of continuity. They walked with joined hands, and it could be perceived that this was the act of simple affection. The daughter carried in her outer hand a withy basket of old-fashioned make, the mother a blue bundle, which contrasted oddly with her black-stuffed gown. Reaching the outskirts of the village, they pursued the same track as formerly, and ascended to the fair. Here too it was evident that the years had told. Certain mechanical improvements might have been noticed in the roundabouts and high-flyers, machines for testing rustic strength and weight, and in the erections devoted to shooting for But the real business of the fair had considerably dwindled. The new periodical great markets of neighboring towns were beginning to interfere seriously with the trade carried on here for centuries. The pens for sheep, the tie-ropes for horses, were about half as long as they had been. The stalls of tailors, hosiers, coopers, linen-drapers, and other such trades had almost disappeared, and the vehicles were far less numerous. The mother and daughter threaded the crowd for some little distance, and then stood still. ''Why did we hinder our time by coming in here? I thought you wished to get onward,'' said the maiden. ''Yes, my dear Elizabeth Jane,'' explained the other, ''but I had a fancy for looking up here. Why?'' ''It was here I first met with Newson, on such a day as this.'' ''First met with father here?'' ''Yes, you have told me so before. And now he's drowned and gone from us.'' As she spoke, the girl drew a card from her pocket and looked at it with a sigh. It was edged with black, and inscribed within a design resembling a mural-tablet were the words, ''In affectionate memory of Richard Newson, Mariner, who was unfortunately lost at sea in the month of November 1840-blank, aged forty-one years.'' ''And it was here,'' continued her mother, with more hesitation, ''that I last saw the relation we are going to look for, Mr. Michael Henshardt. What is his exact kin to us, mother, I have never clearly had it told me. He is, or was, for he may be dead, a connection by marriage,'' said her mother deliberately. ''That's exactly what you have said a score of times before,'' replied the young woman, looking about her inattentively. ''He's not a near relation, I suppose?'' ''Not by any means. He was a hay-tresser, wasn't he, when you last heard of him?'' ''He was.'' ''I suppose you never knew me,'' the girl innocently continued. Mrs. Henshardt paused for a moment and answered uneasily, ''Of course not, Elizabeth Jane. But come this way.'' She moved on to another part of the field. ''It is not much use inquiring here for anybody, I should think,'' the daughter observed as she gazed round about. ''People at fairs change like the leaves of trees, and I dare say you are the only one here to-day who was here all those years ago.'' ''I am not so sure of that,'' said Mrs. Newsome, as she now called herself, keenly eyeing something under a green bank a little way off. ''See there!'' The daughter looked in the direction signified. The object pointed out was a tripod of sticks stuck into the earth, from which hung a three-legged crock kept hot by a smouldering wood-fire beneath. Over the pot stooped an old woman, haggard, wrinkled, and almost in rags. She stirred the contents of the pot with a large spoon, and occasionally croaked in a broken voice, ''Good firmity sold here!'' It was, indeed, the former mistress of the firmity-tent, once thriving, cleanly, white-aproned, and chinking with money, now tentless, dirty, owning no tables or benches, and having scarce any customers, except two small whitey-brown boys, who came up and asked for a hay-perth, please, good measure, which she served in a couple of chipped yellow basins of commonest clay. ''She was here at that time,'' resumed Mrs. Newsome, making a step as if to draw nearer. ''Don't speak to her, it isn't respectable,'' urged the other. ''I will just say a word. You, Elizabeth Jane, can stay here.'' The girl was not loath, and turned to some stalls of colored prints while her mother went forward. The old woman begged for the latter's custom as soon as she saw her, and responded to Mrs. Hinchard Newsome's request for a penny-worth, with more alacrity than she had shown in selling six penny-worths in her younger days. When the soie-disant widow had taken the basin of thin poor slop that stood for the rich concoction of the former time, the hag opened a little basket behind the fire, and looking up slyly, whispered, ''Just a thought or rum in it,'' smuggled Jeannot, ''say, two pen-earth? Twill make it slip down like cordial?'' Her customer smiled bitterly at this survival of the old trick, and shook her head with a meaning the old woman was far from translating. She pretended to eat a little of the firmity with the leaden spoon offered, and as she did so said blandly to the hag, ''You've seen better days?'' ''Ah, ma'am, well, may ye say it,'' responded the old woman, opening the sluices of her heart forthwith, ''I've stood in this fair ground, maid, wife, and widow, these nine and thirty years, and in that time have known what it was to do business with the richest stomachs in the land. Ma'am, you'd hardly believe that I was once the owner of a great pavilion tent that was the attraction of the fair. Nobody could come, nobody could go, without having a dish of Mrs. Goodenough's firmity. I knew the clergy's taste, the dandy gent's taste, I knew the town's taste, the country's taste, I even knowed the taste of the coarse, shameless females. But, lords, my life, the world's no memory. Straightforward dealings don't bring profit, tis the sly and the underhand that get on in these times.'' Mrs. Newsome glanced round, her daughter was still bending over the distant stalls. ''Can you call to mind,'' she said cautiously to the old woman, ''the sale of a wife by her husband in your tent eighteen years ago to-day?'' The hag reflected and half shook her head. ''If it had been a big thing I should have minded it in a moment,'' she said. ''I can mind every serious fight of married parties, every murder, every manslaughter, and every pocket-picking, leastwise large ones, that it has been my lot to witness. But a selling? Was it done quiet-like?'' ''Well, yes, I think so.'' The firmity woman half shook her head again. ''And yet,'' she said, ''I do. At any rate I can mind a man doing something of the sort, a man in a cord-jacket with a basket of tools. But Lord bless ye, we don't give yet headroom, we don't, such as that. The only reason why I can mind the man is that he came back here to the next year's fair and told me, quite private-like, that if a woman ever asked for him I was to say he had gone to—where?—Casterbridge, yes, to Casterbridge,'' said he. ''But, Lord's my life, I shouldn't have thought of it again.'' Mrs. Newsome would have rewarded the old woman as far as her small means afforded, had she not discreetly borne in mind that it was by that unscrupulous person's liquor her husband had been degraded. She briefly thanked her informant, and rejoined Elizabeth, who greeted her with, ''Mother, do let's get on. It was hardly respectable for you to buy refreshments there. I see none but the lowest do.'' ''I have learned what I wanted, however,'' said her mother quietly. The last time our relative visited this fair he said he was living at Casterbridge. It is a long, long way from here, and it was many years ago that he said it, but there I think we'll go. With this they descended out of the fair and went onward to the village where they obtained a night's lodging.