They were fair:  his were dark.  But this was an unimportant preliminary.  In sleep there come to the surface buried genealogical facts, ancestral curves, dead men’s traits, which the mobility of daytime animation screens and overwhelms.  In the present statuesque repose of the young girl’s countenance Richard Newson’s was unmistakably reflected.  He could not endure the sight of her, and hastened away.

Misery taught him nothing more than defiant endurance of it.  His wife was dead, and the first impulse for revenge died with the thought that she was beyond him.  He looked out at the night as at a fiend.  Henchard, like all his kind, was superstitious, and he could not help thinking that the concatenation of events this evening had produced was the scheme of some sinister intelligence bent on punishing him.  Yet they had developed naturally.  If he had not revealed his past history to Elizabeth he would not have searched the drawer for papers, and so on.  The mockery was, that he should have no sooner taught a girl to claim the shelter of his paternity than he discovered her to have no kinship with him.

This ironical sequence of things angered him like an impish trick from a fellow-creature.  Like Prester John’s, his table had been spread, and infernal harpies had snatched up the food.  He went out of the house, and moved sullenly onward down the pavement till he came to the bridge at the bottom of the High Street.  Here he turned in upon a bypath on the river bank, skirting the north-eastern limits of the town.

These precincts embodied the mournful phases of Casterbridge life, as the south avenues embodied its cheerful moods.  The whole way along here was sunless, even in summer time; in spring, white frosts lingered here when other places were steaming with warmth; while in winter it was the seed-field of all the aches, rheumatisms, and torturing cramps of the year.  The Casterbridge doctors must have pined away for want of sufficient nourishment but for the configuration of the landscape on the north-eastern side.

The river—­slow, noiseless, and dark—­the Schwarzwasser of Casterbridge—­ran beneath a low cliff, the two together forming a defence which had rendered walls and artificial earthworks on this side unnecessary.  Here were ruins of a Franciscan priory, and a mill attached to the same, the water of which roared down a back-hatch like the voice of desolation.  Above the cliff, and behind the river, rose a pile of buildings, and in the front of the pile a square mass cut into the sky.  It was like a pedestal lacking its statue.  This missing feature, without which the design remained incomplete, was, in truth, the corpse of a man, for the square mass formed the base of the gallows, the extensive buildings at the back being the county gaol.  In the meadow where Henchard now walked the mob were wont to gather whenever an execution took place, and there to the tune of the roaring weir they stood and watched the spectacle.