"Father!--I will not leave you alone like this!" she cried.
"May I live with you, and tend upon you as I used to do? I do not mind
your being poor. I would have agreed to come this morning, but you did
not ask me."
"May you come to me?" he cried bitterly. "Elizabeth, don't mock me! If
you only would come!"
"I will," said she.
"How will you forgive all my roughness in former days? You cannot!"
"I have forgotten it. Talk of that no more."
Thus she assured him, and arranged their plans for reunion; and at
length each went home. Then Henchard shaved for the first time during
many days, and put on clean linen, and combed his hair; and was as a man
resuscitated thenceforward.
The next morning the fact turned out to be as Elizabeth-Jane had stated;
the effigy was discovered by a cowherd, and that of Lucetta a little
higher up in the same stream. But as little as possible was said of the
matter, and the figures were privately destroyed.
Despite this natural solution of the mystery Henchard no less regarded
it as an intervention that the figure should have been floating there.
Elizabeth-Jane heard him say, "Who is such a reprobate as I! And yet it
seems that even I be in Somebody's hand!"
42.
But the emotional conviction that he was in Somebody's hand began to die
out of Henchard's breast as time slowly removed into distance the event
which had given that feeling birth.
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