“You can wipe and wipe, and say, ‘A fine hot day,’ can ye!” cried Henchard in a savage undertone, imprisoning Jopp between himself and the bank wall.  “If it hadn’t been for your blasted advice it might have been a fine day enough!  Why did ye let me go on, hey?—­when a word of doubt from you or anybody would have made me think twice!  For you can never be sure of weather till ’tis past.”

“My advice, sir, was to do what you thought best.”

“A useful fellow!  And the sooner you help somebody else in that way the better!” Henchard continued his address to Jopp in similar terms till it ended in Jopp s dismissal there and then, Henchard turning upon his heel and leaving him.

“You shall be sorry for this, sir; sorry as a man can be!” said Jopp, standing pale, and looking after the corn-merchant as he disappeared in the crowd of market-men hard by.

27.

It was the eve of harvest.  Prices being low Farfrae was buying.  As was usual, after reckoning too surely on famine weather the local farmers had flown to the other extreme, and (in Farfrae’s opinion) were selling off too recklessly—­calculating with just a trifle too much certainty upon an abundant yield.  So he went on buying old corn at its comparatively ridiculous price:  for the produce of the previous year, though not large, had been of excellent quality.

When Henchard had squared his affairs in a disastrous way, and got rid of his burdensome purchases at a monstrous loss, the harvest began.  There were three days of excellent weather, and then—­“What if that curst conjuror should be right after all!” said Henchard.

The fact was, that no sooner had the sickles begun to play than the atmosphere suddenly felt as if cress would grow in it without other nourishment.  It rubbed people’s cheeks like damp flannel when they walked abroad.  There was a gusty, high, warm wind; isolated raindrops starred the window-panes at remote distances:  the sunlight would flap out like a quickly opened fan, throw the pattern of the window upon the floor of the room in a milky, colourless shine, and withdraw as suddenly as it had appeared.

From that day and hour it was clear that there was not to be so successful an ingathering after all.  If Henchard had only waited long enough he might at least have avoided loss though he had not made a profit.  But the momentum of his character knew no patience.  At this turn of the scales he remained silent.  The movements of his mind seemed to tend to the thought that some power was working against him.

“I wonder,” he asked himself with eerie misgiving; “I wonder if it can be that somebody has been roasting a waxen image of me, or stirring an unholy brew to confound me!  I don’t believe in such power; and yet—­what if they should ha’ been doing it!” Even he could not admit that the perpetrator, if any, might be Farfrae.  These isolated hours of superstition came to Henchard in time of moody depression, when all his practical largeness of view had oozed out of him.