44.

Meanwhile, the man of their talk had pursued his solitary way eastward till weariness overtook him, and he looked about for a place of rest.  His heart was so exacerbated at parting from the girl that he could not face an inn, or even a household of the most humble kind; and entering a field he lay down under a wheatrick, feeling no want of food.  The very heaviness of his soul caused him to sleep profoundly.

The bright autumn sun shining into his eyes across the stubble awoke him the next morning early.  He opened his basket and ate for his breakfast what he had packed for his supper; and in doing so overhauled the remainder of his kit.  Although everything he brought necessitated carriage at his own back, he had secreted among his tools a few of Elizabeth-Jane’s cast-off belongings, in the shape of gloves, shoes, a scrap of her handwriting, and the like, and in his pocket he carried a curl of her hair.  Having looked at these things he closed them up again, and went onward.

During five consecutive days Henchard’s rush basket rode along upon his shoulder between the highway hedges, the new yellow of the rushes catching the eye of an occasional field-labourer as he glanced through the quickset, together with the wayfarer’s hat and head, and down-turned face, over which the twig shadows moved in endless procession.  It now became apparent that the direction of his journey was Weydon Priors, which he reached on the afternoon of the sixth day.

The renowned hill whereon the annual fair had been held for so many generations was now bare of human beings, and almost of aught besides.  A few sheep grazed thereabout, but these ran off when Henchard halted upon the summit.  He deposited his basket upon the turf, and looked about with sad curiosity; till he discovered the road by which his wife and himself had entered on the upland so memorable to both, five-and-twenty years before.

“Yes, we came up that way,” he said, after ascertaining his bearings.  “She was carrying the baby, and I was reading a ballet-sheet.  Then we crossed about here—­she so sad and weary, and I speaking to her hardly at all, because of my cursed pride and mortification at being poor.  Then we saw the tent—­that must have stood more this way.”  He walked to another spot, it was not really where the tent had stood but it seemed so to him.  “Here we went in, and here we sat down.  I faced this way.  Then I drank, and committed my crime.  It must have been just on that very pixy-ring that she was standing when she said her last words to me before going off with him; I can hear their sound now, and the sound of her sobs:  ’O Mike!  I’ve lived with thee all this while, and had nothing but temper.  Now I’m no more to ‘ee—­I’ll try my luck elsewhere.’”