Chapter 6 - Page 2

his corn-
dealings had been broached, changed itself into one of
arrested attention. He read the note slowly, and fell into
thought, not moody, but fitfully intense, as that of a man
who has been captured by an idea.

By this time toasts and speeches had given place to songs,
the wheat subject being quite forgotten. Men were putting
their heads together in twos and threes, telling good
stories, with pantomimic laughter which reached convulsive
grimace. Some were beginning to look as if they did not
know how they had come there, what they had come for, or how
they were going to get home again; and provisionally sat on
with a dazed smile. Square-built men showed a tendency to
become hunchbacks; men with a dignified presence lost it in
a curious obliquity of figure, in which their features grew
disarranged and one-sided, whilst the heads of a few who had
dined with extreme thoroughness were somehow sinking into
their shoulders, the corners of their mouth and eyes being
bent upwards by the subsidence. Only Henchard did not
conform to these flexuous changes; he remained stately and
vertical, silently thinking.

The clock struck nine. Elizabeth-Jane turned to her
companion. "The evening is drawing on, mother," she said.
"What do you propose to do?"

She was surprised to find how irresolute her mother had
become. "We must get a place to lie down in," she murmured.
"I have seen--Mr. Henchard; and that's all I wanted to do."

"That's enough for to-night, at any rate," Elizabeth-Jane
replied soothingly. "We can think to-morrow what is best to
do about him. The question now is--is it not?--how shall we
find a lodging?"

As her mother did not reply Elizabeth-Jane's mind reverted
to the words of the waiter, that the Three Mariners was an
inn of moderate charges. A recommendation good for one
person was probably good for another. "Let's go where the
young man has gone to," she said. "He is respectable. What
do you say?"

Her mother assented, and down the street they went.

In the meantime the Mayor's thoughtfulness, engendered by
the note as stated, continued to hold him in abstraction;
till, whispering to his neighbour to take his place, he
found opportunity to leave the chair. This was just after
the departure of his wife and Elizabeth.

Outside the door of the assembly-room he saw the waiter, and
beckoning to him asked who had brought the note which had
been handed in a quarter of an hour before.

"A young man, sir--a sort of traveller. He was a Scotchman
seemingly."

"Did he say how he had got it?"

"He wrote it himself, sir, as he stood outside the window."

"Oh--wrote it himself....Is the young man in the hotel?"