Chapter 18

There came a shock which had been foreseen for some time by
Elizabeth, as the box passenger foresees the approaching
jerk from some channel across the highway.

Her mother was ill--too unwell to leave her room. Henchard,
who treated her kindly, except in moments of irritation,
sent at once for the richest, busiest doctor, whom he
supposed to be the best. Bedtime came, and they burnt a
light all night. In a day or two she rallied.

Elizabeth, who had been staying up, did not appear at
breakfast on the second morning, and Henchard sat down
alone. He was startled to see a letter for him from Jersey
in a writing he knew too well, and had expected least to
behold again. He took it up in his hands and looked at it
as at a picture, a vision, a vista of past enactments; and
then he read it as an unimportant finale to conjecture.

The writer said that she at length perceived how impossible
it would be for any further communications to proceed
between them now that his re-marriage had taken place. That
such reunion had been the only straightforward course open
to him she was bound to admit.

"On calm reflection, therefore," she went on, "I quite
forgive you for landing me in such a dilemma, remembering
that you concealed nothing before our ill-advised
acquaintance; and that you really did set before me in your
grim way the fact of there being a certain risk in intimacy
with you, slight as it seemed to be after fifteen or sixteen
years of silence on your wife's part. I thus look upon the
whole as a misfortune of mine, and not a fault of yours.

"So that, Michael, I must ask you to overlook those letters
with which I pestered you day after day in the heat of my
feelings. They were written whilst I thought your conduct
to me cruel; but now I know more particulars of the position
you were in I see how inconsiderate my reproaches were.

"Now you will, I am sure, perceive that the one condition
which will make any future happiness possible for me is that
the past connection between our lives be kept secret outside
this isle. Speak of it I know you will not; and I can trust
you not to write of it. One safe-guard more remains to be
mentioned--that no writings of mine, or trifling articles
belonging to me, should be left in your possession through
neglect or forgetfulness. To this end may I request you to
return to me any such you may have, particularly the letters
written in the first abandonment of feeling.

"For the handsome sum you forwarded to me as a plaster to
the wound I heartily thank you.

"I am now on my way to Bristol, to see my only relative.
She is rich, and I hope will do something for me. I shall
return through Casterbridge and Budmouth,