“I’ll be glad to hear it, if I can be of any service,” said Donald, allowing his eyes to travel over the intricate wood-carvings of the chimney-piece, representing garlanded lyres, shields, and quivers, on either side of a draped ox-skull, and flanked by heads of Apollo and Diana in low relief.

“I’ve not been always what I am now,” continued Henchard, his firm deep voice being ever so little shaken.  He was plainly under that strange influence which sometimes prompts men to confide to the new-found friend what they will not tell to the old.  “I began life as a working hay-trusser, and when I was eighteen I married on the strength o’ my calling.  Would you think me a married man?”

“I heard in the town that you were a widower.”

“Ah, yes—­you would naturally have heard that.  Well, I lost my wife nineteen years ago or so—­by my own fault....This is how it came about.  One summer evening I was travelling for employment, and she was walking at my side, carrying the baby, our only child.  We came to a booth in a country fair.  I was a drinking man at that time.”

Henchard paused a moment, threw himself back so that his elbow rested on the table, his forehead being shaded by his hand, which, however, did not hide the marks of introspective inflexibility on his features as he narrated in fullest detail the incidents of the transaction with the sailor.  The tinge of indifference which had at first been visible in the Scotchman now disappeared.

Henchard went on to describe his attempts to find his wife; the oath he swore; the solitary life he led during the years which followed.  “I have kept my oath for nineteen years,” he went on; “I have risen to what you see me now.”

“Ay!”

“Well—­no wife could I hear of in all that time; and being by nature something of a woman-hater, I have found it no hardship to keep mostly at a distance from the sex.  No wife could I hear of, I say, till this very day.  And now—­she has come back.”

“Come back, has she!”

“This morning—­this very morning.  And what’s to be done?”

“Can ye no’ take her and live with her, and make some amends?”

“That’s what I’ve planned and proposed.  But, Farfrae,” said Henchard gloomily, “by doing right with Susan I wrong another innocent woman.”

“Ye don’t say that?”

“In the nature of things, Farfrae, it is almost impossible that a man of my sort should have the good fortune to tide through twenty years o’ life without making more blunders than one.  It has been my custom for many years to run across to Jersey in the the way of business, particularly in the potato and root season.  I do a large trade wi’ them in that line.  Well, one autumn when stopping there I fell quite ill, and in my illness I sank into one of those gloomy fits I sometimes suffer from, on account o’ the loneliness of my domestic life, when the world seems to have the blackness of hell, and, like Job, I could curse the day that gave me birth.”