They came in from the
country, and the steaming horses had probably been travelling a great
part of the night. To the shaft of each hung a little board, on which
was painted in white letters, "Henchard, corn-factor and hay-merchant."
The spectacle renewed his wife's conviction that, for her daughter's
sake, she should strain a point to rejoin him.
The discussion was continued during breakfast, and the end of it was
that Mrs. Henchard decided, for good or for ill, to send Elizabeth-Jane
with a message to Henchard, to the effect that his relative Susan, a
sailor's widow, was in the town; leaving it to him to say whether or not
he would recognize her. What had brought her to this determination were
chiefly two things. He had been described as a lonely widower; and
he had expressed shame for a past transaction of his life. There was
promise in both.
"If he says no," she enjoined, as Elizabeth-Jane stood, bonnet on, ready
to depart; "if he thinks it does not become the good position he has
reached to in the town, to own--to let us call on him as--his distant
kinfolk, say, 'Then, sir, we would rather not intrude; we will leave
Casterbridge as quietly as we have come, and go back to our own
country.'...I almost feel that I would rather he did say so, as I have
not seen him for so many years, and we are so--little allied to him!"
"And if he say yes?" inquired the more sanguine one.
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