When Henchard’s ruin was complete, he too began to frequent the stone bridge, and would have ended in the same way, not at the bridge itself, but over in the meadows where the many branches of the Frome are regulated and controlled by a number of sluices known as Ten Hatches. “To the east of Casterbridge lay moors and meadows, through which much water flowed. The wanderer in this direction, who should stand still for a few moments on a quiet night, might hear singular symphonies from these waters, as from a lampless orchestra, all playing in their sundry tones, from near and far parts of the moor. At a hole in a rotten weir they executed a recitative; where a tributary brook fell over a stone breastwork they trilled cheerily; under an arch they performed a metallic cymballing; and at Durnover Weir they hissed. The spot at which their instrumentation rose loudest was a place called Ten Hatches, whence during high springs there proceeded a very fugue of sounds.”
The ruined mayor, to whom, and not the cold, successful Donald Farfrae, the reader’s sympathies go out, would have ended all his troubles here with a plunge in the waters, had it not been for the ghastly floating Skimmington effigy of himself he saw floating down the current as he was about to drop in.
“Gray’s Bridge,” as the stone structure on the London Road is known, is that toward which Bob Loveday, in the Trumpet Major, gazed anxiously, awaiting the coach bearing his Matilda, and across it, of course, on their way to Longpiddle, went those “Crusted Characters,” telling stories in the carrier’s cart jogging along with them so comfortably from the “White Hart.”
The fateful, almost sentient, character many natural objects are made to assume in the march of Mr. Hardy’s tragic stories is expressly shown in his description of the Roman amphitheatre of Maumbury, at the farther or western extremity of Dorchester, beside the road to Weymouth. He styles it “the Ring, on the Budmouth Road,” and explains how “it was to Casterbridge what the ruined Coliseum is to modern Rome, and was nearly of the same magnitude.” It is not, as might be gathered from this passage, a building, like the Coliseum, but a vast amphitheatre formed by earthworks. Used by the Romans as the scene of their gladiatorial displays, it has doubtless witnessed many an act of savage cruelty, but is now a solitude. A sinister place it has been always, for, when executions were public affairs, the gallows stood within the old arena; and until well into the eighteenth century the populace came to it in thousands to witness the execution of felons where, before the dawn of the Christian era, fighting men had struggled to the death: where perhaps, in early Christian times, in the days of the Diocletian persecution, Christians had been sacrificed. It was here, in 1705, that Mary Channing was executed, under the most fearful circumstances of barbarity belonging to the penalties prescribed for petit treason. The crimes known by that name included several forms of rebellion against authority, among them the murder of a husband by a wife. A husband being then, much more than now, in the eyes of the law in a position of authority over his wife, to murder him was not merely murder—it was petit treason as well, and therefore deserving of exceptional punishment. Mary Brookes, married by the wish of her parents, against her own inclination, to one Richard Channing of Dorchester, a grocer, almost ruined him by her extravagance, and then poisoned him by giving him white mercury, first in rice-milk, and twice afterwards in a glass of wine. At the Summer Assizes, 1704, she was found guilty and condemned to death. On March 21st, 1705, accordingly, she was strangled here, in this arena, and then burned, the horrible spectacle being witnessed by ten thousand persons. She was but nineteen years of age. This Golgotha was disestablished in 1767, when the gallows was removed to the decent solitudes of Bradford Down, a mile and a half along the Exeter Road, on the way to Bridport. It was to this spot that a mayor of Dorchester desired to escort a distinguished traveller leaving the town, after being presented with the customary address. “May I be allowed to accompany your Highness as far as the gallows?” he asked, greatly to the dismay of that departing Serenity, to whom the allusion seemed more ill-omened than really it was. It is a tale told of many places and many mayors, and he would be a clever commentator who should distinguish the real original.
The lone amphitheatre of Maumbury has thus, it will be seen, real tragical associations fitting it for the novelist’s more sombre humours. He tells how intrigues were there carried forward, how furtive and sinister meetings happened within the rim of these ancient earthworks, and how, although the patching up of long-standing feuds might be attempted on this spot, seldom had it been the place of meeting of happy lovers. In this ring, then, the reconciliation of Susan and Henchard took place, after eighteen years, and was but the prelude to miseries and disasters.
CHAPTER VIII
DORCHESTER (continued)
Henchard’s house—“one of the best, faced with dull red-and-grey old brick,” there are many such here—was in the neighbourhood of North Street, and not far from that Corn Exchange where Bathsheba was wont, on market days, to mingle with the burly farmers and corn-factors, like a yacht among ironclads, displaying for inspection the sample wheat in her outstretched palm.
Down here, too, is the gaol, whose mass is seen from the meads on approaching the town. It has been much altered, but the heavy stone gateway, together with the flanking walls of red brick, is very much as of old. Happily, such things as are noticed in that gruesome short story, The Withered Arm, are things only of dreadful memory. At that time the populace of Dorchester were accustomed to wait below in the meadows, eager to witness the executioner, the criminals—murderers, burglars, rick-firers, sheep and horse-stealers, even down to those convicted of petty larceny—being capitally condemned and hanged as high as, possibly indeed higher than, Haman, whose place of suspension is notoriously and traditionally lofty. Gertrude Lodge, coming here for the cure of her withered arm by the agency of the dead man’s touch, observed, as all could then not help observing, those “three rectangular lines against the sky,” which indicated the coming execution and the morrow’s exhibition, to be followed by the merry-makings of Hang Fair. When she enquired the hour of execution, she was told: “The same as usual—twelve o’clock, or as soon after as the London mail-coach gets in. We always wait for that, in case of a reprieve.”
