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-fliers, machines for testing rustic strength and weight, and in the erections devoted to shooting for nuts. But the real business of the fair had considerably dwindled. The new periodical great markets of neighbouring 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,’ exclaimed 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 184-, 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 Henchard.’
‘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-trusser, wasn’t he, when you last heard of him?’
‘He was.’
‘I suppose he never knew me?’ the girl innocently continued.
Mrs Henchard 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 daresay you are the only one here today who was here all those years ago.’
‘I am not so sure of that,’ said Mrs Newson, 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 furmity sold here!’
It was indeed the former mistress of the furmity 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 whity-brown boys, who came up and asked for ‘A ha’p’orth, please—good measure’, which she served in a couple of chipped yellow basins of commonest clay.
‘She was here at that time,’ resumed Mrs Newson, 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 loth, and turned to some stalls of coloured 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 Henchard-Newson’s request for a pennyworth with more alacrity than she had shown in selling sixpennyworth in her younger days. When the soi-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 slily, whispered, ‘Just a thought o’ rum in it?—smuggled, you know—say two penn’orth—’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 furmity with the leaden spoon offered, and as she did so said blandly to the hag, ‘You’ve seen better days?’
‘Ah, ma’am—well ye may say it!’ responded the old woman, opening the sluices of her heart forthwith. ‘I’ve stood in this fairground, maid, wife, and widow, these nine-and-thirty year, 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 furmity. I knew the clergy’s taste, and 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 Lord’s 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 Newson 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 today?’
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 o’ married parties, every murder, every manslaughter, even every pocket-picking—leastwise large ones—that ‘t has been my lot to witness. But a selling? Was it done quiet-like?’
‘Well, yes. I think so.’
The furmity woman half shook her head again. ‘And yet,’ she said, ‘I do. At any rate, I can mind a man doing something o’ the sort—a man in a cord jacket, with a basket of tools; but, Lord bless ye, we don’t gi’e it head-room, we don’t, such as that. The only reason why I can mind that 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 ha’ thought of it again!’
Mrs Newson 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 go on—it was hardly respectable for you to buy refreshment 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.
