‘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 ‘ee, and ye wer kind-like to mother if ye wer rough to me, and I would fain 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 o’ the morning, when ‘twas hardly day, I looked ahead o’ me, and I zeed that he wambled, 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 fond fool as to care for such a wretch as I!’ Then I went on further, and some neighbourly woodmen lent me a bed, and a chair, and a few other traps, and we brought ‘em here, and made him as comfortable as we could. But he didn’t gain strength, for you see, ma’am, he couldn’t eat— no appetite at all—and he got weaker; and to-day he died. One of the neighbours have gone to get a man to measure him.”
“Dear me—is that so!” said Farfrae.
As for Elizabeth, she said nothing.
“Upon the head of his bed he pinned a piece of paper, with some writing upon it,” continued Abel Whittle. “But not being a man o’ 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 pencilled as follows:—
MICHAEL HENCHARD’S WILL
“That Elizabeth-Jane Farfrae be not told of my death, or made to grieve on account of me. “& that I be not bury’d in consecrated ground. “& that no sexton be asked to toll the bell. “& that nobody is wished to see my dead body. “& that no murners walk behind me at my funeral. “& that no flours be planted on my grave, “& 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. “O Donald!” she cried at last through her tears, “what bitterness lies there! O 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 Capharnaum in which some of her preceding years had been spent. As the lively and sparkling emotions of her early married live 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 learnt it) of making limited opportunities endurable; 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, insomuch 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 honour 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 daybeams 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 tranquility 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.
