Chapter 44 - Page 2

more to 'ee--
I'll try my luck elsewhere.'"

He experienced not only the bitterness of a man who finds,
in looking back upon an ambitious course, that what he has
sacrificed in sentiment was worth as much as what he has
gained in substance; but the superadded bitterness of seeing
his very recantation nullified. He had been sorry for all
this long ago; but his attempts to replace ambition by love
had been as fully foiled as his ambition itself. His
wronged wife had foiled them by a fraud so grandly simple as
to be almost a virtue. It was an odd sequence that out of
all this tampering with social law came that flower of
Nature, Elizabeth. Part of his wish to wash his hands of
life arose from his perception of its contrarious
inconsistencies--of Nature's jaunty readiness to support
unorthodox social principles.

He intended to go on from this place--visited as an act of
penance--into another part of the country altogether. But
he could not help thinking of Elizabeth, and the quarter of
the horizon in which she lived. Out of this it happened
that the centrifugal tendency imparted by weariness of the
world was counteracted by the centripetal influence of his
love for his stepdaughter. As a consequence, instead of
following a straight course yet further away from
Casterbridge, Henchard gradually, almost unconsciously,
deflected from that right line of his first intention; till,
by degrees, his wandering, like that of the Canadian
woodsman, became part of a circle of which Casterbridge
formed the centre. In ascending any particular hill he
ascertained the bearings as nearly as he could by means of
the sun, moon, or stars, and settled in his mind the exact
direction in which Casterbridge and Elizabeth-Jane lay.
Sneering at himself for his weakness he yet every hour--nay,
every few minutes--conjectured her actions for the time
being--her sitting down and rising up, her goings and
comings, till thought of Newson's and Farfrae's counter-
influence would pass like a cold blast over a pool, and
efface her image. And then he would say to himself, "O you
fool! All this about a daughter who is no daughter of
thine!"

At length he obtained employment at his own occupation of
hay-trusser, work of that sort being in demand at this
autumn time. The scene of his hiring was a pastoral farm
near the old western highway, whose course was the channel
of all such communications as passed between the busy
centres of novelty and the remote Wessex boroughs. He had
chosen the neighbourhood of this artery from a sense that,
situated here, though at a distance of fifty miles, he was
virtually nearer to her whose welfare was so dear than he
would be at a roadless spot only half