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The Return of the Native

by Thomas Hardy · English · Gutenberg #122 · 802,452 chars · public domain (US)

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Title: The Return of the Native

Author: Thomas Hardy


        
Release date: March 8, 2006 [eBook #122]
                Most recently updated: October 29, 2024

Language: English

Other information and formats: www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/122

Credits: John Hamm and David Widger


*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK THE RETURN OF THE NATIVE ***

[Illustration]




The Return of the Native

by Thomas Hardy


Contents

 PREFACE
 BOOK FIRST—THE THREE WOMEN
 I. A Face on Which Time Makes but Little Impression
 II. Humanity Appears upon the Scene, Hand in Hand with Trouble
 III. The Custom of the Country
 IV. The Halt on the Turnpike Road
 V. Perplexity among Honest People
 VI. The Figure against the Sky
 VII. Queen of Night
 VIII. Those Who Are Found Where There Is Said to Be Nobody
 IX. Love Leads a Shrewd Man into Strategy
 X. A Desperate Attempt at Persuasion
 XI. The Dishonesty of an Honest Woman

 BOOK SECOND—THE ARRIVAL
 I. Tidings of the Comer
 II. The People at Blooms-End Make Ready
 III. How a Little Sound Produced a Great Dream
 IV. Eustacia Is Led on to an Adventure
 V. Through the Moonlight
 VI. The Two Stand Face to Face
 VII. A Coalition between Beauty and Oddness
 VIII. Firmness Is Discovered in a Gentle Heart

 BOOK THIRD—THE FASCINATION
 I. “My Mind to Me a Kingdom Is”
 II. The New Course Causes Disappointment
 III. The First Act in a Timeworn Drama
 IV. An Hour of Bliss and Many Hours of Sadness
 V. Sharp Words Are Spoken, and a Crisis Ensues
 VI. Yeobright Goes, and the Breach Is Complete
 VII. The Morning and the Evening of a Day
 VIII. A New Force Disturbs the Current

 BOOK FOURTH—THE CLOSED DOOR
 I. The Rencounter by the Pool
 II. He Is Set upon by Adversities but He Sings a Song
 III. She Goes Out to Battle against Depression
 IV. Rough Coercion Is Employed
 V. The Journey across the Heath
 VI. A Conjuncture, and Its Result upon the Pedestrian
 VII. The Tragic Meeting of Two Old Friends
 VIII. Eustacia Hears of Good Fortune, and Beholds Evil

 BOOK FIFTH—THE DISCOVERY
 I. “Wherefore Is Light Given to Him That Is in Misery”
 II. A Lurid Light Breaks in upon a Darkened Understanding
 III. Eustacia Dresses Herself on a Black Morning
 IV. The Ministrations of a Half-forgotten One
 V. An Old Move Inadvertently Repeated
 VI. Thomasin Argues with Her Cousin, and He Writes a Letter
 VII. The Night of the Sixth of November
 VIII. Rain, Darkness, and Anxious Wanderers
 IX. Sights and Sounds Draw the Wanderers Together

 BOOK SIXTH—AFTERCOURSES
 I. The Inevitable Movement Onward
 II. Thomasin Walks in a Green Place by the Roman Road
 III. The Serious Discourse of Clym with His Cousin
 IV. Cheerfulness Again Asserts Itself at Blooms-End, and Clym Finds His Vocation




    “To sorrow
    I bade good morrow,
And thought to leave her far away behind;
    But cheerly, cheerly,
    She loves me dearly;
She is so constant to me, and so kind.
    I would deceive her,
    And so leave her,
But ah! she is so constant and so kind.”




PREFACE


The date at which the following events are assumed to have occurred may
be set down as between 1840 and 1850, when the old watering place
herein called “Budmouth” still retained sufficient afterglow from its
Georgian gaiety and prestige to lend it an absorbing attractiveness to
the romantic and imaginative soul of a lonely dweller inland.

Under the general name of “Egdon Heath,” which has been given to the
sombre scene of the story, are united or typified heaths of various
real names, to the number of at least a dozen; these being virtually
one in character and aspect, though their original unity, or partial
unity, is now somewhat disguised by intrusive strips and slices brought
under the plough with varying degrees of success, or planted to
woodland.

It is pleasant to dream that some spot in the extensive tract whose
southwestern quarter is here described, may be the heath of that
traditionary King of Wessex—Lear.

T.H.

_July_, 1895.




BOOK FIRST—THE THREE WOMEN




I.
A Face on Which Time Makes but Little Impression


A Saturday afternoon in November was approaching the time of twilight,
and the vast tract of unenclosed wild known as Egdon Heath embrowned
itself moment by moment. Overhead the hollow stretch of whitish cloud
shutting out the sky was as a tent which had the whole heath for its
floor.

The heaven being spread with this pallid screen and the earth with the
darkest vegetation, their meeting-line at the horizon was clearly
marked. In such contrast the heath wore the appearance of an instalment
of night which had taken up its place before its astronomical hour was
come: darkness had to a great extent arrived hereon, while day stood
distinct in the sky. Looking upwards, a furze-cutter would have been
inclined to continue work; looking down, he would have decided to
finish his faggot and go home. The distant rims of the world and of the
firmament seemed to be a division in time no less than a division in
matter. The face of the heath by its mere complexion added half an hour
to evening; it could in like manner retard the dawn, sadden noon,
anticipate the frowning of storms scarcely generated, and intensify the
opacity of a moonless midnight to a cause of shaking and dread.

In fact, precisely at this transitional point of its nightly roll into
darkness the great and particular glory of the Egdon waste began, and
nobody could be said to understand the heath who had not been there at
such a time. It could best be felt when it could not clearly be seen,
its complete effect and explanation lying in this and the succeeding
hours before the next dawn; then, and only then, did it tell its true
tale. The spot was, indeed, a near relation of night, and when night
showed itself an apparent tendency to gravitate together could be
perceived in its shades and the scene. The sombre stretch of rounds and
hollows seemed to rise and meet the evening gloom in pure sympathy, the
heath exhaling darkness as rapidly as the heavens precipitated it. And
so the obscurity in the air and the obscurity in the land closed
together in a black fraternization towards which each advanced halfway.

The place became full of a watchful intentness now; for when other
things sank brooding to sleep the heath appeared slowly to awake and
listen. Every night its Titanic form seemed to await something; but it
had waited thus, unmoved, during so many centuries, through the crises
of so many things, that it could only be imagined to await one last
crisis—the final overthrow.

It was a spot which returned upon the memory of those who loved it with
an aspect of peculiar and kindly congruity. Smiling champaigns of
flowers and fruit hardly do this, for they are permanently harmonious
only with an existence of better reputation as to its issues than the
present. Twilight combined with the scenery of Egdon Heath to evolve a
thing majestic without severity, impressive without showiness, emphatic
in its admonitions, grand in its simplicity. The qualifications which
frequently invest the façade of a prison with far more dignity than is
found in the façade of a palace double its size lent to this heath a
sublimity in which spots renowned for beauty of the accepted kind are
utterly wanting. Fair prospects wed happily with fair times; but alas,
if times be not fair! Men have oftener suffered from, the mockery of a
place too smiling for their reason than from the oppression of
surroundings oversadly tinged. Haggard Egdon appealed to a subtler and
scarcer instinct, to a more recently learnt emotion, than that which
responds to the sort of beauty called charming and fair.

Indeed, it is a question if the exclusive reign of this orthodox beauty
is not approaching its last quarter. The new Vale of Tempe may be a
gaunt waste in Thule; human souls may find themselves in closer and
closer harmony with external things wearing a sombreness distasteful to
our race when it was young. The time seems near, if it has not actually
arrived, when the chastened sublimity of a moor, a sea, or a mountain
will be all of nature that is absolutely in keeping with the moods of
the more thinking among mankind. And ultimately, to the commonest
tourist, spots like Iceland may become what the vineyards and myrtle
gardens of South Europe are to him now; and Heidelberg and Baden be
passed unheeded as he hastens from the Alps to the sand dunes of
Scheveningen.

The most thoroughgoing ascetic could feel that he had a natural right
to wander on Egdon—he was keeping within the line of legitimate
indulgence when he laid himself open to influences such as these.
Colours and beauties so far subdued were, at least, the birthright of
all. Only in summer days of highest feather did its mood touch the
level of gaiety. Intensity was more usually reached by way of the
solemn than by way of the brilliant, and such a sort of intensity was
often arrived at during winter darkness, tempests, and mists. Then
Egdon was aroused to reciprocity; for the storm was its lover, and the
wind its friend. Then it became the home of strange phantoms; and it
was found to be the hitherto unrecognized original of those wild
regions of obscurity which are vaguely felt to be compassing us about
in midnight dreams of flight and disaster, and are never thought of
after the dream till revived by scenes like this.

It was at present a place perfectly accordant with man’s nature—neither
ghastly, hateful, nor ugly; neither commonplace, unmeaning, nor tame;
but, like man, slighted and enduring; and withal singularly colossal
and mysterious in its swarthy monotony. As with some persons who have
long lived apart, solitude seemed to look out of its countenance. It
had a lonely face, suggesting tragical possibilities.

This obscure, obsolete, superseded country figures in Domesday. Its
condition is recorded therein as that of heathy, furzy, briary
wilderness—“Bruaria.” Then follows the length and breadth in leagues;
and, though some uncertainty exists as to the exact extent of this
ancient lineal measure, it appears from the figures that the area of
Egdon down to the present day has but little diminished. “Turbaria
Bruaria”—the right of cutting heath-turf—occurs in charters relating to
the district. “Overgrown with heth and mosse,” says Leland of the same
dark sweep of country.

Here at least were intelligible facts regarding landscape—far-reaching
proofs productive of genuine satisfaction. The untameable, Ishmaelitish
thing that Egdon now was it always had been. Civilization was its
enemy; and ever since the beginning of vegetation its soil had worn the
same antique brown dress, the natural and invariable garment of the
particular formation. In its venerable one coat lay a certain vein of
satire on human vanity in clothes. A person on a heath in raiment of
modern cut and colours has more or less an anomalous look. We seem to
want the oldest and simplest human clothing where the clothing of the
earth is so primitive.

To recline on a stump of thorn in the central valley of Egdon, between
afternoon and night, as now, where the eye could reach nothing of the
world outside the summits and shoulders of heathland which filled the
whole circumference of its glance, and to know that everything around
and underneath had been from prehistoric times as unaltered as the
stars overhead, gave ballast to the mind adrift on change, and harassed
by the irrepressible New. The great inviolate place had an ancient
permanence which the sea cannot claim. Who can say of a particular sea
that it is old? Distilled by the sun, kneaded by the moon, it is
renewed in a year, in a day, or in an hour. The sea changed, the fields
changed, the rivers, the villages, and the people changed, yet Egdon
remained. Those surfaces were neither so steep as to be destructible by
weather, nor so flat as to be the victims of floods and deposits. With
the exception of an aged highway, and a still more aged barrow
presently to be referred to—themselves almost crystallized to natural
products by long continuance—even the trifling irregularities were not
caused by pickaxe, plough, or spade, but remained as the very
finger-touches of the last geological change.

The above-mentioned highway traversed the lower levels of the heath,
from one horizon to another. In many portions of its course it overlaid
an old vicinal way, which branched from the great Western road of the
Romans, the Via Iceniana, or Ikenild Street, hard by. On the evening
under consideration it would have been noticed that, though the gloom
had increased sufficiently to confuse the minor features of the heath,
the white surface of the road remained almost as clear as ever.




II.
Humanity Appears upon the Scene, Hand in Hand with Trouble


Along the road walked an old man. He was white-headed as a mountain,
bowed in the shoulders, and faded in general aspect. He wore a glazed
hat, an ancient boat-cloak, and shoes; his brass buttons bearing an
anchor upon their face. In his hand was a silver-headed walking stick,
which he used as a veritable third leg, perseveringly dotting the
ground with its point at every few inches’ interval. One would have
said that he had been, in his day, a naval officer of some sort or
other.

Before him stretched the long, laborious road, dry, empty, and white.
It was quite open to the heath on each side, and bisected that vast
dark surface like the parting-line on a head of black hair, diminishing
and bending away on the furthest horizon.

The old man frequently stretched his eyes ahead to gaze over the tract
that he had yet to traverse. At length he discerned, a long distance in
front of him, a moving spot, which appeared to be a vehicle, and it
proved to be going the same way as that in which he himself was
journeying. It was the single atom of life that the scene contained,
and it only served to render the general loneliness more evident. Its
rate of advance was slow, and the old man gained upon it sensibly.

When he drew nearer he perceived it to be a spring van, ordinary in
shape, but singular in colour, this being a lurid red. The driver
walked beside it; and, like his van, he was completely red. One dye of
that tincture covered his clothes, the cap upon his head, his boots,
his face, and his hands. He was not temporarily overlaid with the
colour; it permeated him.

The old man knew the meaning of this. The traveller with the cart was a
reddleman—a person whose vocation it was to supply farmers with redding
for their sheep. He was one of a class rapidly becoming extinct in
Wessex, filling at present in the rural world the place which, during
the last century, the dodo occupied in the world of animals. He is a
curious, interesting, and nearly perished link between obsolete forms
of life and those which generally prevail.

The decayed officer, by degrees, came up alongside his fellow-wayfarer,
and wished him good evening. The reddleman turned his head, and replied
in sad and occupied tones. He was young, and his face, if not exactly
handsome, approached so near to handsome that nobody would have
contradicted an assertion that it really was so in its natural colour.
His eye, which glared so strangely through his stain, was in itself
attractive—keen as that of a bird of prey, and blue as autumn mist. He
had neither whisker nor moustache, which allowed the soft curves of the
lower part of his face to be apparent. His lips were thin, and though,
as it seemed, compressed by thought, there was a pleasant twitch at
their corners now and then. He was clothed throughout in a
tight-fitting suit of corduroy, excellent in quality, not much worn,
and well-chosen for its purpose, but deprived of its original colour by
his trade. It showed to advantage the good shape of his figure. A
certain well-to-do air about the man suggested that he was not poor for
his degree. The natural query of an observer would have been, Why
should such a promising being as this have hidden his prepossessing
exterior by adopting that singular occupation?

After replying to the old man’s greeting he showed no inclination to
continue in talk, although they still walked side by side, for the
elder traveller seemed to desire company. There were no sounds but that
of the booming wind upon the stretch of tawny herbage around them, the
crackling wheels, the tread of the men, and the footsteps of the two
shaggy ponies which drew the van. They were small, hardy animals, of a
breed between Galloway and Exmoor, and were known as “heath-croppers”
here.

Now, as they thus pursued their way, the reddleman occasionally left
his companion’s side, and, stepping behind the van, looked into its
interior through a small window. The look was always anxious. He would
then return to the old man, who made another remark about the state of
the country and so on, to which the reddleman again abstractedly
replied, and then again they would lapse into silence. The silence
conveyed to neither any sense of awkwardness; in these lonely places
wayfarers, after a first greeting, frequently plod on for miles without
speech; contiguity amounts to a tacit conversation where, otherwise
than in cities, such contiguity can be put an end to on the merest
inclination, and where not to put an end to it is intercourse in
itself.

Possibly these two might not have spoken again till their parting, had
it not been for the reddleman’s visits to his van. When he returned
from his fifth time of looking in the old man said, “You have something
inside there besides your load?”

“Yes.”

“Somebody who wants looking after?”

“Yes.”

Not long after this a faint cry sounded from the interior. The
reddleman hastened to the back, looked in, and came away again.

“You have a child there, my man?”

“No, sir, I have a woman.”

“The deuce you have! Why did she cry out?”

“Oh, she has fallen asleep, and not being used to traveling, she’s
uneasy, and keeps dreaming.”

“A young woman?”

“Yes, a young woman.”

“That would have interested me forty years ago. Perhaps she’s your
wife?”

“My wife!” said the other bitterly. “She’s above mating with such as I.
But there’s no reason why I should tell you about that.”

“That’s true. And there’s no reason why you should not. What harm can I
do to you or to her?”

The reddleman looked in the old man’s face. “Well, sir,” he said at
last, “I knew her before today, though perhaps it would have been
better if I had not. But she’s nothing to me, and I am nothing to her;
and she wouldn’t have been in my van if any better carriage had been
there to take her.”

“Where, may I ask?”

“At Anglebury.”

“I know the town well. What was she doing there?”

“Oh, not much—to gossip about. However, she’s tired to death now, and
not at all well, and that’s what makes her so restless. She dropped off
into a nap about an hour ago, and ’twill do her good.”

“A nice-looking girl, no doubt?”

“You would say so.”

The other traveller turned his eyes with interest towards the van
window, and, without withdrawing them, said, “I presume I might look in
upon her?”

“No,” said the reddleman abruptly. “It is getting too dark for you to
see much of her; and, more than that, I have no right to allow you.
Thank God she sleeps so well, I hope she won’t wake till she’s home.”

“Who is she? One of the neighbourhood?”

“’Tis no matter who, excuse me.”

“It is not that girl of Blooms-End, who has been talked about more or
less lately? If so, I know her; and I can guess what has happened.”

“’Tis no matter.... Now, sir, I am sorry to say that we shall soon have
to part company. My ponies are tired, and I have further to go, and I
am going to rest them under this bank for an hour.”

The elder traveller nodded his head indifferently, and the reddleman
turned his horses and van in upon the turf, saying, “Good night.” The
old man replied, and proceeded on his way as before.

The reddleman watched his form as it diminished to a speck on the road
and became absorbed in the thickening films of night. He then took some
hay from a truss which was slung up under the van, and, throwing a
portion of it in front of the horses, made a pad of the rest, which he
laid on the ground beside his vehicle. Upon this he sat down, leaning
his back against the wheel. From the interior a low soft breathing came
to his ear. It appeared to satisfy him, and he musingly surveyed the
scene, as if considering the next step that he should take.

To do things musingly, and by small degrees, seemed, indeed, to be a
duty in the Egdon valleys at this transitional hour, for there was that
in the condition of the heath itself which resembled protracted and
halting dubiousness. It was the quality of the repose appertaining to
the scene. This was not the repose of actual stagnation, but the
apparent repose of incredible slowness. A condition of healthy life so
nearly resembling the torpor of death is a noticeable thing of its
sort; to exhibit the inertness of the desert, and at the same time to
be exercising powers akin to those of the meadow, and even of the
forest, awakened in those who thought of it the attentiveness usually
engendered by understatement and reserve.

The scene before the reddleman’s eyes was a gradual series of ascents
from the level of the road backward into the heart of the heath. It
embraced hillocks, pits, ridges, acclivities, one behind the other,
till all was finished by a high hill cutting against the still light
sky. The traveller’s eye hovered about these things for a time, and
finally settled upon one noteworthy object up there. It was a barrow.
This bossy projection of earth above its natural level occupied the
loftiest ground of the loneliest height that the heath contained.
Although from the vale it appeared but as a wart on an Atlantean brow,
its actual bulk was great. It formed the pole and axis of this heathery
world.

As the resting man looked at the barrow he became aware that its
summit, hitherto the highest object in the whole prospect round, was
surmounted by something higher. It rose from the semiglobular mound
like a spike from a helmet. The first instinct of an imaginative
stranger might have been to suppose it the person of one of the Celts
who built the barrow, so far had all of modern date withdrawn from the
scene. It seemed a sort of last man among them, musing for a moment
before dropping into eternal night with the rest of his race.

There the form stood, motionless as the hill beneath. Above the plain
rose the hill, above the hill rose the barrow, and above the barrow
rose the figure. Above the figure was nothing that could be mapped
elsewhere than on a celestial globe.

Such a perfect, delicate, and necessary finish did the figure give to
the dark pile of hills that it seemed to be the only obvious
justification of their outline. Without it, there was the dome without
the lantern; with it the architectural demands of the mass were
satisfied. The scene was strangely homogeneous, in that the vale, the
upland, the barrow, and the figure above it amounted only to unity.
Looking at this or that member of the group was not observing a
complete thing, but a fraction of a thing.

The form was so much like an organic part of the entire motionless
structure that to see it move would have impressed the mind as a
strange phenomenon. Immobility being the chief characteristic of that
whole which the person formed portion of, the discontinuance of
immobility in any quarter suggested confusion.

Yet that is what happened. The figure perceptibly gave up its fixity,
shifted a step or two, and turned round. As if alarmed, it descended on
the right side of the barrow, with the glide of a water-drop down a
bud, and then vanished. The movement had been sufficient to show more
clearly the characteristics of the figure, and that it was a woman’s.

The reason of her sudden displacement now appeared. With her dropping
out of sight on the right side, a newcomer, bearing a burden, protruded
into the sky on the left side, ascended the tumulus, and deposited the
burden on the top. A second followed, then a third, a fourth, a fifth,
and ultimately the whole barrow was peopled with burdened figures.

The only intelligible meaning in this sky-backed pantomime of
silhouettes was that the woman had no relation to the forms who had
taken her place, was sedulously avoiding these, and had come thither
for another object than theirs. The imagination of the observer clung
by preference to that vanished, solitary figure, as to something more
interesting, more important, more likely to have a history worth
knowing than these newcomers, and unconsciously regarded them as
intruders. But they remained, and established themselves; and the
lonely person who hitherto had been queen of the solitude did not at
present seem likely to return.




III.
The Custom of the Country


Had a looker-on been posted in the immediate vicinity of the barrow, he
would have learned that these persons were boys and men of the
neighbouring hamlets. Each, as he ascended the barrow, had been heavily
laden with furze faggots, carried upon the shoulder by means of a long
stake sharpened at each end for impaling them easily—two in front and
two behind. They came from a part of the heath a quarter of a mile to
the rear, where furze almost exclusively prevailed as a product.

Every individual was so involved in furze by his method of carrying the
faggots that he appeared like a bush on legs till he had thrown them
down. The party had marched in trail, like a travelling flock of sheep;
that is to say, the strongest first, the weak and young behind.

The loads were all laid together, and a pyramid of furze thirty feet in
circumference now occupied the crown of the tumulus, which was known as
Rainbarrow for many miles round. Some made themselves busy with
matches, and in selecting the driest tufts of furze, others in
loosening the bramble bonds which held the faggots together. Others,
again, while this was in progress, lifted their eyes and swept the vast
expanse of country commanded by their position, now lying nearly
obliterated by shade. In the valleys of the heath nothing save its own
wild face was visible at any time of day; but this spot commanded a
horizon enclosing a tract of far extent, and in many cases lying beyond
the heath country. None of its features could be seen now, but the
whole made itself felt as a vague stretch of remoteness.

While the men and lads were building the pile, a change took place in
the mass of shade which denoted the distant landscape. Red suns and
tufts of fire one by one began to arise, flecking the whole country
round. They were the bonfires of other parishes and hamlets that were
engaged in the same sort of commemoration. Some were distant, and stood
in a dense atmosphere, so that bundles of pale straw-like beams
radiated around them in the shape of a fan. Some were large and near,
glowing scarlet-red from the shade, like wounds in a black hide. Some
were Mænades, with winy faces and blown hair. These tinctured the
silent bosom of the clouds above them and lit up their ephemeral caves,
which seemed thenceforth to become scalding caldrons. Perhaps as many
as thirty bonfires could be counted within the whole bounds of the
district; and as the hour may be told on a clock-face when the figures
themselves are invisible, so did the men recognize the locality of each
fire by its angle and direction, though nothing of the scenery could be
viewed.

The first tall flame from Rainbarrow sprang into the sky, attracting
all eyes that had been fixed on the distant conflagrations back to
their own attempt in the same kind. The cheerful blaze streaked the
inner surface of the human circle—now increased by other stragglers,
male and female—with its own gold livery, and even overlaid the dark
turf around with a lively luminousness, which softened off into
obscurity where the barrow rounded downwards out of sight. It showed
the barrow to be the segment of a globe, as perfect as on the day when
it was thrown up, even the little ditch remaining from which the earth
was dug. Not a plough had ever disturbed a grain of that stubborn soil.
In the heath’s barrenness to the farmer lay its fertility to the
historian. There had been no obliteration, because there had been no
tending.

It seemed as if the bonfire-makers were standing in some radiant upper
story of the world, detached from and independent of the dark stretches
below. The heath down there was now a vast abyss, and no longer a
continuation of what they stood on; for their eyes, adapted to the
blaze, could see nothing of the deeps beyond its influence.
Occasionally, it is true, a more vigorous flare than usual from their
faggots sent darting lights like aides-de-camp down the inclines to
some distant bush, pool, or patch of white sand, kindling these to
replies of the same colour, till all was lost in darkness again. Then
the whole black phenomenon beneath represented Limbo as viewed from the
brink by the sublime Florentine in his vision, and the muttered
articulations of the wind in the hollows were as complaints and
petitions from the “souls of mighty worth” suspended therein.

It was as if these men and boys had suddenly dived into past ages, and
fetched therefrom an hour and deed which had before been familiar with
this spot. The ashes of the original British pyre which blazed from
that summit lay fresh and undisturbed in the barrow beneath their
tread. The flames from funeral piles long ago kindled there had shone
down upon the lowlands as these were shining now. Festival fires to
Thor and Woden had followed on the same ground and duly had their day.
Indeed, it is pretty well known that such blazes as this the heathmen
were now enjoying are rather the lineal descendants from jumbled
Druidical rites and Saxon ceremonies than the invention of popular
feeling about Gunpowder Plot.

Moreover to light a fire is the instinctive and resistant act of man
when, at the winter ingress, the curfew is sounded throughout Nature.
It indicates a spontaneous, Promethean rebelliousness against that fiat
that this recurrent season shall bring foul times, cold darkness,
misery and death. Black chaos comes, and the fettered gods of the earth
say, Let there be light.

The brilliant lights and sooty shades which struggled upon the skin and
clothes of the persons standing round caused their lineaments and
general contours to be drawn with Dureresque vigour and dash. Yet the
permanent moral expression of each face it was impossible to discover,
for as the nimble flames towered, nodded, and swooped through the
surrounding air, the blots of shade and flakes of light upon the
countenances of the group changed shape and position endlessly. All was
unstable; quivering as leaves, evanescent as lightning. Shadowy
eye-sockets, deep as those of a death’s head, suddenly turned into pits
of lustre: a lantern-jaw was cavernous, then it was shining; wrinkles
were emphasized to ravines, or obliterated entirely by a changed ray.
Nostrils were dark wells; sinews in old necks were gilt mouldings;
things with no particular polish on them were glazed; bright objects,
such as the tip of a furze-hook one of the men carried, were as glass;
eyeballs glowed like little lanterns. Those whom Nature had depicted as
merely quaint became grotesque, the grotesque became preternatural; for
all was in extremity.

Hence it may be that the face of an old man, who had like others been
called to the heights by the rising flames, was not really the mere
nose and chin that it appeared to be, but an appreciable quantity of
human countenance. He stood complacently sunning himself in the heat.
With a speaker, or stake, he tossed the outlying scraps of fuel into
the conflagration, looking at the midst of the pile, occasionally
lifting his eyes to measure the height of the flame, or to follow the
great sparks which rose with it and sailed away into darkness. The
beaming sight, and the penetrating warmth, seemed to breed in him a
cumulative cheerfulness, which soon amounted to delight. With his stick
in his hand he began to jig a private minuet, a bunch of copper seals
shining and swinging like a pendulum from under his waistcoat: he also
began to sing, in the voice of a bee up a flue—

“The king′ call’d down′ his no-bles all′,
By one′, by two′, by three′;
Earl Mar′-shal, I’ll′ go shrive′-the queen′,
And thou′ shalt wend′ with me′.

“A boon′, a boon′, quoth Earl′ Mar-shal′,
And fell′ on his bend′-ded knee′,
That what′-so-e’er′ the queen′ shall say′,
No harm′ there-of′ may be′.”


Want of breath prevented a continuance of the song; and the breakdown
attracted the attention of a firm-standing man of middle age, who kept
each corner of his crescent-shaped mouth rigorously drawn back into his
cheek, as if to do away with any suspicion of mirthfulness which might
erroneously have attached to him.

“A fair stave, Grandfer Cantle; but I am afeard ’tis too much for the
mouldy weasand of such a old man as you,” he said to the wrinkled
reveller. “Dostn’t wish th’ wast three sixes again, Grandfer, as you
was when you first learnt to sing it?”

“Hey?” said Grandfer Cantle, stopping in his dance.

“Dostn’t wish wast young again, I say? There’s a hole in thy poor
bellows nowadays seemingly.”

“But there’s good art in me? If I couldn’t make a little wind go a long
ways I should seem no younger than the most aged man, should I,
Timothy?”

“And how about the new-married folks down there at the Quiet Woman
Inn?” the other inquired, pointing towards a dim light in the direction
of the distant highway, but considerably apart from where the reddleman
was at that moment resting. “What’s the rights of the matter about ’em?
You ought to know, being an understanding man.”

“But a little rakish, hey? I own to it. Master Cantle is that, or he’s
nothing. Yet ’tis a gay fault, neighbour Fairway, that age will cure.”

“I heard that they were coming home tonight. By this time they must
have come. What besides?”

“The next thing is for us to go and wish ’em joy, I suppose?”

“Well, no.”

“No? Now, I thought we must. I must, or ’twould be very unlike me—the
first in every spree that’s going!

“Do thou′ put on′ a fri′-ar’s coat′,
And I’ll′ put on′ a-no′-ther,
And we′ will to′ Queen Ele′anor go′,
Like Fri′ar and′ his bro′ther.


I met Mis’ess Yeobright, the young bride’s aunt, last night, and she
told me that her son Clym was coming home a’ Christmas. Wonderful
clever, ’a believe—ah, I should like to have all that’s under that
young man’s hair. Well, then, I spoke to her in my well-known merry
way, and she said, ‘O that what’s shaped so venerable should talk like
a fool!’—that’s what she said to me. I don’t care for her, be jowned if
I do, and so I told her. ‘Be jowned if I care for ’ee,’ I said. I had
her there—hey?”

“I rather think she had you,” said Fairway.

“No,” said Grandfer Cantle, his countenance slightly flagging. “’Tisn’t
so bad as that with me?”

“Seemingly ’tis, however, is it because of the wedding that Clym is
coming home a’ Christmas—to make a new arrangement because his mother
is now left in the house alone?”

“Yes, yes—that’s it. But, Timothy, hearken to me,” said the Grandfer
earnestly. “Though known as such a joker, I be an understanding man if
you catch me serious, and I am serious now. I can tell ’ee lots about
the married couple. Yes, this morning at six o’clock they went up the
country to do the job, and neither vell nor mark have been seen of ’em
since, though I reckon that this afternoon has brought ’em home again
man and woman—wife, that is. Isn’t it spoke like a man, Timothy, and
wasn’t Mis’ess Yeobright wrong about me?”

“Yes, it will do. I didn’t know the two had walked together since last
fall, when her aunt forbad the banns. How long has this new set-to been
in mangling then? Do you know, Humphrey?”

“Yes, how long?” said Grandfer Cantle smartly, likewise turning to
Humphrey. “I ask that question.”

“Ever since her aunt altered her mind, and said she might have the man
after all,” replied Humphrey, without removing his eyes from the fire.
He was a somewhat solemn young fellow, and carried the hook and leather
gloves of a furze-cutter, his legs, by reason of that occupation, being
sheathed in bulging leggings as stiff as the Philistine’s greaves of
brass. “That’s why they went away to be married, I count. You see,
after kicking up such a nunny-watch and forbidding the banns ’twould
have made Mis’ess Yeobright seem foolish-like to have a banging wedding
in the same parish all as if she’d never gainsaid it.”

“Exactly—seem foolish-like; and that’s very bad for the poor things
that be so, though I only guess as much, to be sure,” said Grandfer
Cantle, still strenuously preserving a sensible bearing and mien.

“Ah, well, I was at church that day,” said Fairway, “which was a very
curious thing to happen.”

“If ’twasn’t my name’s Simple,” said the Grandfer emphatically. “I
ha’n’t been there to-year; and now the winter is a-coming on I won’t
say I shall.”

“I ha’n’t been these three years,” said Humphrey; “for I’m so dead
sleepy of a Sunday; and ’tis so terrible far to get there; and when you
do get there ’tis such a mortal poor chance that you’ll be chose for up
above, when so many bain’t, that I bide at home and don’t go at all.”

“I not only happened to be there,” said Fairway, with a fresh
collection of emphasis, “but I was sitting in the same pew as Mis’ess
Yeobright. And though you may not see it as such, it fairly made my
blood run cold to hear her. Yes, it is a curious thing; but it made my
blood run cold, for I was close at her elbow.” The speaker looked round
upon the bystanders, now drawing closer to hear him, with his lips
gathered tighter than ever in the rigorousness of his descriptive
moderation.

“’Tis a serious job to have things happen to ’ee there,” said a woman
behind.

“‘Ye are to declare it,’ was the parson’s words,” Fairway continued.
“And then up stood a woman at my side—a-touching of me. ‘Well, be
damned if there isn’t Mis’ess Yeobright a-standing up,’ I said to
myself. Yes, neighbours, though I was in the temple of prayer that’s
what I said. ’Tis against my conscience to curse and swear in company,
and I hope any woman here will overlook it. Still what I did say I did
say, and ’twould be a lie if I didn’t own it.”

“So ’twould, neighbour Fairway.”

“‘Be damned if there isn’t Mis’ess Yeobright a-standing up,’ I said,”
the narrator repeated, giving out the bad word with the same
passionless severity of face as before, which proved how entirely
necessity and not gusto had to do with the iteration. “And the next
thing I heard was, ‘I forbid the banns,’ from her. ‘I’ll speak to you
after the service,’ said the parson, in quite a homely way—yes, turning
all at once into a common man no holier than you or I. Ah, her face was
pale! Maybe you can call to mind that monument in Weatherbury
church—the cross-legged soldier that have had his arm knocked away by
the schoolchildren? Well, he would about have matched that woman’s
face, when she said, ‘I forbid the banns.’”

The audience cleared their throats and tossed a few stalks into the
fire, not because these deeds were urgent, but to give themselves time
to weigh the moral of the story.

“I’m sure when I heard they’d been forbid I felt as glad as if anybody
had gied me sixpence,” said an earnest voice—that of Olly Dowden, a
woman who lived by making heath brooms, or besoms. Her nature was to be
civil to enemies as well as to friends, and grateful to all the world
for letting her remain alive.

“And now the maid have married him just the same,” said Humphrey.

“After that Mis’ess Yeobright came round and was quite agreeable,”
Fairway resumed, with an unheeding air, to show that his words were no
appendage to Humphrey’s, but the result of independent reflection.

“Supposing they were ashamed, I don’t see why they shouldn’t have done
it here-right,” said a wide-spread woman whose stays creaked like shoes
whenever she stooped or turned. “’Tis well to call the neighbours
together and to hae a good racket once now and then; and it may as well
be when there’s a wedding as at tide-times. I don’t care for close
ways.”

“Ah, now, you’d hardly believe it, but I don’t care for gay weddings,”
said Timothy Fairway, his eyes again travelling round. “I hardly blame
Thomasin Yeobright and neighbour Wildeve for doing it quiet, if I must
own it. A wedding at home means five and six-handed reels by the hour;
and they do a man’s legs no good when he’s over forty.”

“True. Once at the woman’s house you can hardly say nay to being one in
a jig, knowing all the time that you be expected to make yourself worth
your victuals.”

“You be bound to dance at Christmas because ’tis the time o’ year; you
must dance at weddings because ’tis the time o’ life. At christenings
folk will even smuggle in a reel or two, if ’tis no further on than the
first or second chiel. And this is not naming the songs you’ve got to
sing.... For my part I like a good hearty funeral as well as anything.
You’ve as splendid victuals and drink as at other parties, and even
better. And it don’t wear your legs to stumps in talking over a poor
fellow’s ways as it do to stand up in hornpipes.”

“Nine folks out of ten would own ’twas going too far to dance then, I
suppose?” suggested Grandfer Cantle.

“’Tis the only sort of party a staid man can feel safe at after the mug
have been round a few times.”

“Well, I can’t understand a quiet ladylike little body like Tamsin
Yeobright caring to be married in such a mean way,” said Susan Nunsuch,
the wide woman, who preferred the original subject. “’Tis worse than
the poorest do. And I shouldn’t have cared about the man, though some
may say he’s good-looking.”

“To give him his due he’s a clever, learned fellow in his way—a’most as
clever as Clym Yeobright used to be. He was brought up to better things
than keeping the Quiet Woman. An engineer—that’s what the man was, as
we know; but he threw away his chance, and so ’a took a public house to
live. His learning was no use to him at all.”

“Very often the case,” said Olly, the besom-maker. “And yet how people
do strive after it and get it! The class of folk that couldn’t use to
make a round O to save their bones from the pit can write their names
now without a sputter of the pen, oftentimes without a single blot—what
do I say?—why, almost without a desk to lean their stomachs and elbows
upon.”

“True—’tis amazing what a polish the world have been brought to,” said
Humphrey.

“Why, afore I went a soldier in the Bang-up Locals (as we was called),
in the year four,” chimed in Grandfer Cantle brightly, “I didn’t know
no more what the world was like than the commonest man among ye. And
now, jown it all, I won’t say what I bain’t fit for, hey?”

“Couldst sign the book, no doubt,” said Fairway, “if wast young enough
to join hands with a woman again, like Wildeve and Mis’ess Tamsin,
which is more than Humph there could do, for he follows his father in
learning. Ah, Humph, well I can mind when I was married how I zid thy
father’s mark staring me in the face as I went to put down my name. He
and your mother were the couple married just afore we were and there
stood they father’s cross with arms stretched out like a great banging
scarecrow. What a terrible black cross that was—thy father’s very
likeness in en! To save my soul I couldn’t help laughing when I zid en,
though all the time I was as hot as dog-days, what with the marrying,
and what with the woman a-hanging to me, and what with Jack Changley
and a lot more chaps grinning at me through church window. But the next
moment a strawmote would have knocked me down, for I called to mind
that if thy father and mother had had high words once, they’d been at
it twenty times since they’d been man and wife, and I zid myself as the
next poor stunpoll to get into the same mess.... Ah—well, what a day
’twas!”

“Wildeve is older than Tamsin Yeobright by a good-few summers. A pretty
maid too she is. A young woman with a home must be a fool to tear her
smock for a man like that.”

The speaker, a peat- or turf-cutter, who had newly joined the group,
carried across his shoulder the singular heart-shaped spade of large
dimensions used in that species of labour, and its well-whetted edge
gleamed like a silver bow in the beams of the fire.

“A hundred maidens would have had him if he’d asked ’em,” said the wide
woman.

“Didst ever know a man, neighbour, that no woman at all would marry?”
inquired Humphrey.

“I never did,” said the turf-cutter.

“Nor I,” said another.

“Nor I,” said Grandfer Cantle.

“Well, now, I did once,” said Timothy Fairway, adding more firmness to
one of his legs. “I did know of such a man. But only once, mind.” He
gave his throat a thorough rake round, as if it were the duty of every
person not to be mistaken through thickness of voice. “Yes, I knew of
such a man,” he said.

“And what ghastly gallicrow might the poor fellow have been like,
Master Fairway?” asked the turf-cutter.

“Well, ’a was neither a deaf man, nor a dumb man, nor a blind man. What
’a was I don’t say.”

“Is he known in these parts?” said Olly Dowden.

“Hardly,” said Timothy; “but I name no name.... Come, keep the fire up
there, youngsters.”

“Whatever is Christian Cantle’s teeth a-chattering for?” said a boy
from amid the smoke and shades on the other side of the blaze. “Be ye
a-cold, Christian?”

A thin jibbering voice was heard to reply, “No, not at all.”

“Come forward, Christian, and show yourself. I didn’t know you were
here,” said Fairway, with a humane look across towards that quarter.

Thus requested, a faltering man, with reedy hair, no shoulders, and a
great quantity of wrist and ankle beyond his clothes, advanced a step
or two by his own will, and was pushed by the will of others half a
dozen steps more. He was Grandfer Cantle’s youngest son.

“What be ye quaking for, Christian?” said the turf-cutter kindly.

“I’m the man.”

“What man?”

“The man no woman will marry.”

“The deuce you be!” said Timothy Fairway, enlarging his gaze to cover
Christian’s whole surface and a great deal more, Grandfer Cantle
meanwhile staring as a hen stares at the duck she has hatched.

“Yes, I be he; and it makes me afeard,” said Christian. “D’ye think
’twill hurt me? I shall always say I don’t care, and swear to it,
though I do care all the while.”

“Well, be damned if this isn’t the queerest start ever I know’d,” said
Mr. Fairway. “I didn’t mean you at all. There’s another in the country,
then! Why did ye reveal yer misfortune, Christian?”

“’Twas to be if ’twas, I suppose. I can’t help it, can I?” He turned
upon them his painfully circular eyes, surrounded by concentric lines
like targets.

“No, that’s true. But ’tis a melancholy thing, and my blood ran cold
when you spoke, for I felt there were two poor fellows where I had
thought only one. ’Tis a sad thing for ye, Christian. How’st know the
women won’t hae thee?”

“I’ve asked ’em.”

“Sure I should never have thought you had the face. Well, and what did
the last one say to ye? Nothing that can’t be got over, perhaps, after
all?”

“‘Get out of my sight, you slack-twisted, slim-looking maphrotight
fool,’ was the woman’s words to me.”

“Not encouraging, I own,” said Fairway. “‘Get out of my sight, you
slack-twisted, slim-looking maphrotight fool,’ is rather a hard way of
saying No. But even that might be overcome by time and patience, so as
to let a few grey hairs show themselves in the hussy’s head. How old be
you, Christian?”

“Thirty-one last tatie-digging, Mister Fairway.”

“Not a boy—not a boy. Still there’s hope yet.”

“That’s my age by baptism, because that’s put down in the great book of
the Judgment that they keep in church vestry; but Mother told me I was
born some time afore I was christened.”

“Ah!”

“But she couldn’t tell when, to save her life, except that there was no
moon.”

“No moon—that’s bad. Hey, neighbours, that’s bad for him!”

“Yes, ’tis bad,” said Grandfer Cantle, shaking his head.

“Mother know’d ’twas no moon, for she asked another woman that had an
almanac, as she did whenever a boy was born to her, because of the
saying, ‘No moon, no man,’ which made her afeard every man-child she
had. Do ye really think it serious, Mister Fairway, that there was no
moon?”

“Yes. ‘No moon, no man.’ ’Tis one of the truest sayings ever spit out.
The boy never comes to anything that’s born at new moon. A bad job for
thee, Christian, that you should have showed your nose then of all days
in the month.”

“I suppose the moon was terrible full when you were born?” said
Christian, with a look of hopeless admiration at Fairway.

“Well, ’a was not new,” Mr. Fairway replied, with a disinterested gaze.

“I’d sooner go without drink at Lammas-tide than be a man of no moon,”
continued Christian, in the same shattered recitative. “’Tis said I be
only the rames of a man, and no good for my race at all; and I suppose
that’s the cause o’t.”

“Ay,” said Grandfer Cantle, somewhat subdued in spirit; “and yet his
mother cried for scores of hours when ’a was a boy, for fear he should
outgrow hisself and go for a soldier.”

“Well, there’s many just as bad as he.” said Fairway.

“Wethers must live their time as well as other sheep, poor soul.”

“So perhaps I shall rub on? Ought I to be afeared o’ nights, Master
Fairway?”

“You’ll have to lie alone all your life; and ’tis not to married
couples but to single sleepers that a ghost shows himself when ’a do
come. One has been seen lately, too. A very strange one.”

“No—don’t talk about it if ’tis agreeable of ye not to! ’Twill make my
skin crawl when I think of it in bed alone. But you will—ah, you will,
I know, Timothy; and I shall dream all night o’t! A very strange one?
What sort of a spirit did ye mean when ye said, a very strange one,
Timothy?—no, no—don’t tell me.”

“I don’t half believe in spirits myself. But I think it ghostly
enough—what I was told. ’Twas a little boy that zid it.”

“What was it like?—no, don’t—”

“A red one. Yes, most ghosts be white; but this is as if it had been
dipped in blood.”

Christian drew a deep breath without letting it expand his body, and
Humphrey said, “Where has it been seen?”

“Not exactly here; but in this same heth. But ’tisn’t a thing to talk
about. What do ye say,” continued Fairway in brisker tones, and turning
upon them as if the idea had not been Grandfer Cantle’s—“what do you
say to giving the new man and wife a bit of a song tonight afore we go
to bed—being their wedding-day? When folks are just married ’tis as
well to look glad o’t, since looking sorry won’t unjoin ’em. I am no
drinker, as we know, but when the womenfolk and youngsters have gone
home we can drop down across to the Quiet Woman, and strike up a ballet
in front of the married folks’ door. ’Twill please the young wife, and
that’s what I should like to do, for many’s the skinful I’ve had at her
hands when she lived with her aunt at Blooms-End.”

“Hey? And so we will!” said Grandfer Cantle, turning so briskly that
his copper seals swung extravagantly. “I’m as dry as a kex with biding
up here in the wind, and I haven’t seen the colour of drink since
nammet-time today. ’Tis said that the last brew at the Woman is very
pretty drinking. And, neighbours, if we should be a little late in the
finishing, why, tomorrow’s Sunday, and we can sleep it off?”

“Grandfer Cantle! you take things very careless for an old man,” said
the wide woman.

“I take things careless; I do—too careless to please the women! Klk!
I’ll sing the ‘Jovial Crew,’ or any other song, when a weak old man
would cry his eyes out. Jown it; I am up for anything.

“The king′ look’d o′-ver his left′ shoul-der′,
And a grim′ look look′-ed hee′,
Earl Mar′-shal, he said′, but for′ my oath′
Or hang′-ed thou′ shouldst bee′.”


“Well, that’s what we’ll do,” said Fairway. “We’ll give ’em a song, an’
it please the Lord. What’s the good of Thomasin’s cousin Clym a-coming
home after the deed’s done? He should have come afore, if so be he
wanted to stop it, and marry her himself.”

“Perhaps he’s coming to bide with his mother a little time, as she must
feel lonely now the maid’s gone.”

“Now, ’tis very odd, but I never feel lonely—no, not at all,” said
Grandfer Cantle. “I am as brave in the nighttime as a’ admiral!”

The bonfire was by this time beginning to sink low, for the fuel had
not been of that substantial sort which can support a blaze long. Most
of the other fires within the wide horizon were also dwindling weak.
Attentive observation of their brightness, colour, and length of
existence would have revealed the quality of the material burnt, and
through that, to some extent the natural produce of the district in
which each bonfire was situate. The clear, kingly effulgence that had
characterized the majority expressed a heath and furze country like
their own, which in one direction extended an unlimited number of
miles; the rapid flares and extinctions at other points of the compass
showed the lightest of fuel—straw, beanstalks, and the usual waste from
arable land. The most enduring of all—steady unaltering eyes like
Planets—signified wood, such as hazel-branches, thorn-faggots, and
stout billets. Fires of the last-mentioned materials were rare, and
though comparatively small in magnitude beside the transient blazes,
now began to get the best of them by mere long continuance. The great
ones had perished, but these remained. They occupied the remotest
visible positions—sky-backed summits rising out of rich coppice and
plantation districts to the north, where the soil was different, and
heath foreign and strange.

Save one; and this was the nearest of any, the moon of the whole
shining throng. It lay in a direction precisely opposite to that of the
little window in the vale below. Its nearness was such that,
notwithstanding its actual smallness, its glow infinitely transcended
theirs.

This quiet eye had attracted attention from time to time; and when
their own fire had become sunken and dim it attracted more; some even
of the wood fires more recently lighted had reached their decline, but
no change was perceptible here.

“To be sure, how near that fire is!” said Fairway. “Seemingly. I can
see a fellow of some sort walking round it. Little and good must be
said of that fire, surely.”

“I can throw a stone there,” said the boy.

“And so can I!” said Grandfer Cantle.

“No, no, you can’t, my sonnies. That fire is not much less than a mile
off, for all that ’a seems so near.”

“’Tis in the heath, but no furze,” said the turf-cutter.

“’Tis cleft-wood, that’s what ’tis,” said Timothy Fairway. “Nothing
would burn like that except clean timber. And ’tis on the knap afore
the old captain’s house at Mistover. Such a queer mortal as that man
is! To have a little fire inside your own bank and ditch, that nobody
else may enjoy it or come anigh it! And what a zany an old chap must
be, to light a bonfire when there’s no youngsters to please.”

“Cap’n Vye has been for a long walk today, and is quite tired out,”
said Grandfer Cantle, “so ’tisn’t likely to be he.”

“And he would hardly afford good fuel like that,” said the wide woman.

“Then it must be his granddaughter,” said Fairway. “Not that a body of
her age can want a fire much.”

“She is very strange in her ways, living up there by herself, and such
things please her,” said Susan.

“She’s a well-favoured maid enough,” said Humphrey the furze-cutter,
“especially when she’s got one of her dandy gowns on.”

“That’s true,” said Fairway. “Well, let her bonfire burn an’t will.
Ours is well-nigh out by the look o’t.”

“How dark ’tis now the fire’s gone down!” said Christian Cantle,
looking behind him with his hare eyes. “Don’t ye think we’d better get
home-along, neighbours? The heth isn’t haunted, I know; but we’d better
get home.... Ah, what was that?”

“Only the wind,” said the turf-cutter.

“I don’t think Fifth-of-Novembers ought to be kept up by night except
in towns. It should be by day in outstep, ill-accounted places like
this!”

“Nonsense, Christian. Lift up your spirits like a man! Susy, dear, you
and I will have a jig—hey, my honey?—before ’tis quite too dark to see
how well-favoured you be still, though so many summers have passed
since your husband, a son of a witch, snapped you up from me.”

This was addressed to Susan Nunsuch; and the next circumstance of which
the beholders were conscious was a vision of the matron’s broad form
whisking off towards the space whereon the fire had been kindled. She
was lifted bodily by Mr. Fairway’s arm, which had been flung round her
waist before she had become aware of his intention. The site of the
fire was now merely a circle of ashes flecked with red embers and
sparks, the furze having burnt completely away. Once within the circle
he whirled her round and round in a dance. She was a woman noisily
constructed; in addition to her enclosing framework of whalebone and
lath, she wore pattens summer and winter, in wet weather and in dry, to
preserve her boots from wear; and when Fairway began to jump about with
her, the clicking of the pattens, the creaking of the stays, and her
screams of surprise, formed a very audible concert.

“I’ll crack thy numskull for thee, you mandy chap!” said Mrs. Nunsuch,
as she helplessly danced round with him, her feet playing like
drumsticks among the sparks. “My ankles were all in a fever before,
from walking through that prickly furze, and now you must make ’em
worse with these vlankers!”

The vagary of Timothy Fairway was infectious. The turf-cutter seized
old Olly Dowden, and, somewhat more gently, poussetted with her
likewise. The young men were not slow to imitate the example of their
elders, and seized the maids; Grandfer Cantle and his stick jigged in
the form of a three-legged object among the rest; and in half a minute
all that could be seen on Rainbarrow was a whirling of dark shapes amid
a boiling confusion of sparks, which leapt around the dancers as high
as their waists. The chief noises were women’s shrill cries, men’s
laughter, Susan’s stays and pattens, Olly Dowden’s “heu-heu-heu!” and
the strumming of the wind upon the furze-bushes, which formed a kind of
tune to the demoniac measure they trod. Christian alone stood aloof,
uneasily rocking himself as he murmured, “They ought not to do it—how
the vlankers do fly! ’tis tempting the Wicked one, ’tis.”

“What was that?” said one of the lads, stopping.

“Ah—where?” said Christian, hastily closing up to the rest.

The dancers all lessened their speed.

“’Twas behind you, Christian, that I heard it—down here.”

“Yes—’tis behind me!” Christian said. “Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John,
bless the bed that I lie on; four angels guard—”

“Hold your tongue. What is it?” said Fairway.

“Hoi-i-i-i!” cried a voice from the darkness.

“Halloo-o-o-o!” said Fairway.

“Is there any cart track up across here to Mis’ess Yeobright’s, of
Blooms-End?” came to them in the same voice, as a long, slim indistinct
figure approached the barrow.

“Ought we not to run home as hard as we can, neighbours, as ’tis
getting late?” said Christian. “Not run away from one another, you
know; run close together, I mean.”

“Scrape up a few stray locks of furze, and make a blaze, so that we can
see who the man is,” said Fairway.

When the flame arose it revealed a young man in tight raiment, and red
from top to toe. “Is there a track across here to Mis’ess Yeobright’s
house?” he repeated.

“Ay—keep along the path down there.”

“I mean a way two horses and a van can travel over?”

“Well, yes; you can get up the vale below here with time. The track is
rough, but if you’ve got a light your horses may pick along wi’ care.
Have ye brought your cart far up, neighbour reddleman?”

“I’ve left it in the bottom, about half a mile back, I stepped on in
front to make sure of the way, as ’tis night-time, and I han’t been
here for so long.”

“Oh, well you can get up,” said Fairway. “What a turn it did give me
when I saw him!” he added to the whole group, the reddleman included.
“Lord’s sake, I thought, whatever fiery mommet is this come to trouble
us? No slight to your looks, reddleman, for ye bain’t bad-looking in
the groundwork, though the finish is queer. My meaning is just to say
how curious I felt. I half thought it ’twas the devil or the red ghost
the boy told of.”

“It gied me a turn likewise,” said Susan Nunsuch, “for I had a dream
last night of a death’s head.”

“Don’t ye talk o’t no more,” said Christian. “If he had a handkerchief
over his head he’d look for all the world like the Devil in the picture
of the Temptation.”

“Well, thank you for telling me,” said the young reddleman, smiling
faintly. “And good night t’ye all.”

He withdrew from their sight down the barrow.

“I fancy I’ve seen that young man’s face before,” said Humphrey. “But
where, or how, or what his name is, I don’t know.”

The reddleman had not been gone more than a few minutes when another
person approached the partially revived bonfire. It proved to be a
well-known and respected widow of the neighbourhood, of a standing
which can only be expressed by the word genteel. Her face, encompassed
by the blackness of the receding heath, showed whitely, and without
half-lights, like a cameo.

She was a woman of middle-age, with well-formed features of the type
usually found where perspicacity is the chief quality enthroned within.
At moments she seemed to be regarding issues from a Nebo denied to
others around. She had something of an estranged mien; the solitude
exhaled from the heath was concentrated in this face that had risen
from it. The air with which she looked at the heathmen betokened a
certain unconcern at their presence, or at what might be their opinions
of her for walking in that lonely spot at such an hour, thus indirectly
implying that in some respect or other they were not up to her level.
The explanation lay in the fact that though her husband had been a
small farmer she herself was a curate’s daughter, who had once dreamt
of doing better things.

Persons with any weight of character carry, like planets, their
atmospheres along with them in their orbits; and the matron who entered
now upon the scene could, and usually did, bring her own tone into a
company. Her normal manner among the heathfolk had that reticence which
results from the consciousness of superior communicative power. But the
effect of coming into society and light after lonely wandering in
darkness is a sociability in the comer above its usual pitch, expressed
in the features even more than in words.

“Why, ’tis Mis’ess Yeobright,” said Fairway. “Mis’ess Yeobright, not
ten minutes ago a man was here asking for you—a reddleman.”

“What did he want?” said she.

“He didn’t tell us.”

“Something to sell, I suppose; what it can be I am at a loss to
understand.”

“I am glad to hear that your son Mr. Clym is coming home at Christmas,
ma’am,” said Sam, the turf-cutter. “What a dog he used to be for
bonfires!”

“Yes. I believe he is coming,” she said.

“He must be a fine fellow by this time,” said Fairway.

“He is a man now,” she replied quietly.

“’Tis very lonesome for ’ee in the heth tonight, mis’ess,” said
Christian, coming from the seclusion he had hitherto maintained. “Mind
you don’t get lost. Egdon Heth is a bad place to get lost in, and the
winds do huffle queerer tonight than ever I heard ’em afore. Them that
know Egdon best have been pixy-led here at times.”

“Is that you, Christian?” said Mrs. Yeobright. “What made you hide away
from me?”

“’Twas that I didn’t know you in this light, mis’ess; and being a man
of the mournfullest make, I was scared a little, that’s all. Oftentimes
if you could see how terrible down I get in my mind, ’twould make ’ee
quite nervous for fear I should die by my hand.”

“You don’t take after your father,” said Mrs. Yeobright, looking
towards the fire, where Grandfer Cantle, with some want of originality,
was dancing by himself among the sparks, as the others had done before.

“Now, Grandfer,” said Timothy Fairway, “we are ashamed of ye. A
reverent old patriarch man as you be—seventy if a day—to go hornpiping
like that by yourself!”

“A harrowing old man, Mis’ess Yeobright,” said Christian despondingly.
“I wouldn’t live with him a week, so playward as he is, if I could get
away.”

“’Twould be more seemly in ye to stand still and welcome Mis’ess
Yeobright, and you the venerablest here, Grandfer Cantle,” said the
besom-woman.

“Faith, and so it would,” said the reveller checking himself
repentantly. “I’ve such a bad memory, Mis’ess Yeobright, that I forget
how I’m looked up to by the rest of ’em. My spirits must be wonderful
good, you’ll say? But not always. ’Tis a weight upon a man to be looked
up to as commander, and I often feel it.”

“I am sorry to stop the talk,” said Mrs. Yeobright. “But I must be
leaving you now. I was passing down the Anglebury Road, towards my
niece’s new home, who is returning tonight with her husband; and seeing
the bonfire and hearing Olly’s voice among the rest I came up here to
learn what was going on. I should like her to walk with me, as her way
is mine.”

“Ay, sure, ma’am, I’m just thinking of moving,” said Olly.

“Why, you’ll be safe to meet the reddleman that I told ye of,” said
Fairway. “He’s only gone back to get his van. We heard that your niece
and her husband were coming straight home as soon as they were married,
and we are going down there shortly, to give ’em a song o’ welcome.”

“Thank you indeed,” said Mrs. Yeobright.

“But we shall take a shorter cut through the furze than you can go with
long clothes; so we won’t trouble you to wait.”

“Very well—are you ready, Olly?”

“Yes, ma’am. And there’s a light shining from your niece’s window, see.
It will help to keep us in the path.”

She indicated the faint light at the bottom of the valley which Fairway
had pointed out; and the two women descended the tumulus.




IV.
The Halt on the Turnpike Road


Down, downward they went, and yet further down—their descent at each
step seeming to outmeasure their advance. Their skirts were scratched
noisily by the furze, their shoulders brushed by the ferns, which,
though dead and dry, stood erect as when alive, no sufficient winter
weather having as yet arrived to beat them down. Their Tartarean
situation might by some have been called an imprudent one for two
unattended women. But these shaggy recesses were at all seasons a
familiar surrounding to Olly and Mrs. Yeobright; and the addition of
darkness lends no frightfulness to the face of a friend.

“And so Tamsin has married him at last,” said Olly, when the incline
had become so much less steep that their foot-steps no longer required
undivided attention.

Mrs. Yeobright answered slowly, “Yes; at last.”

“How you will miss her—living with ’ee as a daughter, as she always
have.”

“I do miss her.”

Olly, though without the tact to perceive when remarks were untimely,
was saved by her very simplicity from rendering them offensive.
Questions that would have been resented in others she could ask with
impunity. This accounted for Mrs. Yeobright’s acquiescence in the
revival of an evidently sore subject.

“I was quite strook to hear you’d agreed to it, ma’am, that I was,”
continued the besom-maker.

“You were not more struck by it than I should have been last year this
time, Olly. There are a good many sides to that wedding. I could not
tell you all of them, even if I tried.”

“I felt myself that he was hardly solid-going enough to mate with your
family. Keeping an inn—what is it? But ’a’s clever, that’s true, and
they say he was an engineering gentleman once, but has come down by
being too outwardly given.”

“I saw that, upon the whole, it would be better she should marry where
she wished.”

“Poor little thing, her feelings got the better of her, no doubt. ’Tis
nature. Well, they may call him what they will—he’ve several acres of
heth-ground broke up here, besides the public house, and the
heth-croppers, and his manners be quite like a gentleman’s. And what’s
done cannot be undone.”

“It cannot,” said Mrs. Yeobright. “See, here’s the wagon-track at last.
Now we shall get along better.”

The wedding subject was no further dwelt upon; and soon a faint
diverging path was reached, where they parted company, Olly first
begging her companion to remind Mr. Wildeve that he had not sent her
sick husband the bottle of wine promised on the occasion of his
marriage. The besom-maker turned to the left towards her own house,
behind a spur of the hill, and Mrs. Yeobright followed the straight
track, which further on joined the highway by the Quiet Woman Inn,
whither she supposed her niece to have returned with Wildeve from their
wedding at Anglebury that day.

She first reached Wildeve’s Patch, as it was called, a plot of land
redeemed from the heath, and after long and laborious years brought
into cultivation. The man who had discovered that it could be tilled
died of the labour; the man who succeeded him in possession ruined
himself in fertilizing it. Wildeve came like Amerigo Vespucci, and
received the honours due to those who had gone before.

When Mrs. Yeobright had drawn near to the inn, and was about to enter,
she saw a horse and vehicle some two hundred yards beyond it, coming
towards her, a man walking alongside with a lantern in his hand. It was
soon evident that this was the reddleman who had inquired for her.
Instead of entering the inn at once, she walked by it and towards the
van.

The conveyance came close, and the man was about to pass her with
little notice, when she turned to him and said, “I think you have been
inquiring for me? I am Mrs. Yeobright of Blooms-End.”

The reddleman started, and held up his finger. He stopped the horses,
and beckoned to her to withdraw with him a few yards aside, which she
did, wondering.

“You don’t know me, ma’am, I suppose?” he said.

“I do not,” said she. “Why, yes, I do! You are young Venn—your father
was a dairyman somewhere here?”

“Yes; and I knew your niece, Miss Tamsin, a little. I have something
bad to tell you.”

“About her—no! She has just come home, I believe, with her husband.
They arranged to return this afternoon—to the inn beyond here.”

“She’s not there.”

“How do you know?”

“Because she’s here. She’s in my van,” he added slowly.

“What new trouble has come?” murmured Mrs. Yeobright, putting her hand
over her eyes.

“I can’t explain much, ma’am. All I know is that, as I was going along
the road this morning, about a mile out of Anglebury, I heard something
trotting after me like a doe, and looking round there she was, white as
death itself. ‘Oh, Diggory Venn!’ she said, ‘I thought ’twas you—will
you help me? I am in trouble.’”

“How did she know your Christian name?” said Mrs. Yeobright doubtingly.

“I had met her as a lad before I went away in this trade. She asked
then if she might ride, and then down she fell in a faint. I picked her
up and put her in, and there she has been ever since. She has cried a
good deal, but she has hardly spoke; all she has told me being that she
was to have been married this morning. I tried to get her to eat
something, but she couldn’t; and at last she fell asleep.”

“Let me see her at once,” said Mrs. Yeobright, hastening towards the
van.

The reddleman followed with the lantern, and, stepping up first,
assisted Mrs. Yeobright to mount beside him. On the door being opened
she perceived at the end of the van an extemporized couch, around which
was hung apparently all the drapery that the reddleman possessed, to
keep the occupant of the little couch from contact with the red
materials of his trade. A young girl lay thereon, covered with a cloak.
She was asleep, and the light of the lantern fell upon her features.

A fair, sweet, and honest country face was revealed, reposing in a nest
of wavy chestnut hair. It was between pretty and beautiful. Though her
eyes were closed, one could easily imagine the light necessarily
shining in them as the culmination of the luminous workmanship around.
The groundwork of the face was hopefulness; but over it now lay like a
foreign substance a film of anxiety and grief. The grief had been there
so shortly as to have abstracted nothing of the bloom, and had as yet
but given a dignity to what it might eventually undermine. The scarlet
of her lips had not had time to abate, and just now it appeared still
more intense by the absence of the neighbouring and more transient
colour of her cheek. The lips frequently parted, with a murmur of
words. She seemed to belong rightly to a madrigal—to require viewing
through rhyme and harmony.

One thing at least was obvious: she was not made to be looked at thus.
The reddleman had appeared conscious of as much, and, while Mrs.
Yeobright looked in upon her, he cast his eyes aside with a delicacy
which well became him. The sleeper apparently thought so too, for the
next moment she opened her own.

The lips then parted with something of anticipation, something more of
doubt; and her several thoughts and fractions of thoughts, as signalled
by the changes on her face, were exhibited by the light to the utmost
nicety. An ingenuous, transparent life was disclosed, as if the flow of
her existence could be seen passing within her. She understood the
scene in a moment.

“O yes, it is I, Aunt,” she cried. “I know how frightened you are, and
how you cannot believe it; but all the same, it is I who have come home
like this!”

“Tamsin, Tamsin!” said Mrs. Yeobright, stooping over the young woman
and kissing her. “O my dear girl!”

Thomasin was now on the verge of a sob, but by an unexpected
self-command she uttered no sound. With a gentle panting breath she sat
upright.

“I did not expect to see you in this state, any more than you me,” she
went on quickly. “Where am I, Aunt?”

“Nearly home, my dear. In Egdon Bottom. What dreadful thing is it?”

“I’ll tell you in a moment. So near, are we? Then I will get out and
walk. I want to go home by the path.”

“But this kind man who has done so much will, I am sure, take you right
on to my house?” said the aunt, turning to the reddleman, who had
withdrawn from the front of the van on the awakening of the girl, and
stood in the road.

“Why should you think it necessary to ask me? I will, of course,” said
he.

“He is indeed kind,” murmured Thomasin. “I was once acquainted with
him, Aunt, and when I saw him today I thought I should prefer his van
to any conveyance of a stranger. But I’ll walk now. Reddleman, stop the
horses, please.”

The man regarded her with tender reluctance, but stopped them

Aunt and niece then descended from the van, Mrs. Yeobright saying to
its owner, “I quite recognize you now. What made you change from the
nice business your father left you?”

“Well, I did,” he said, and looked at Thomasin, who blushed a little.
“Then you’ll not be wanting me any more tonight, ma’am?”

Mrs. Yeobright glanced around at the dark sky, at the hills, at the
perishing bonfires, and at the lighted window of the inn they had
neared. “I think not,” she said, “since Thomasin wishes to walk. We can
soon run up the path and reach home—we know it well.”

And after a few further words they parted, the reddleman moving onwards
with his van, and the two women remaining standing in the road. As soon
as the vehicle and its driver had withdrawn so far as to be beyond all
possible reach of her voice, Mrs. Yeobright turned to her niece.

“Now, Thomasin,” she said sternly, “what’s the meaning of this
disgraceful performance?”




V.
Perplexity among Honest People


Thomasin looked as if quite overcome by her aunt’s change of manner.
“It means just what it seems to mean: I am—not married,” she replied
faintly. “Excuse me—for humiliating you, Aunt, by this mishap—I am
sorry for it. But I cannot help it.”

“Me? Think of yourself first.”

“It was nobody’s fault. When we got there the parson wouldn’t marry us
because of some trifling irregularity in the license.”

“What irregularity?”

“I don’t know. Mr. Wildeve can explain. I did not think when I went
away this morning that I should come back like this.” It being dark,
Thomasin allowed her emotion to escape her by the silent way of tears,
which could roll down her cheek unseen.

“I could almost say that it serves you right—if I did not feel that you
don’t deserve it,” continued Mrs. Yeobright, who, possessing two
distinct moods in close contiguity, a gentle mood and an angry, flew
from one to the other without the least warning. “Remember, Thomasin,
this business was none of my seeking; from the very first, when you
began to feel foolish about that man, I warned you he would not make
you happy. I felt it so strongly that I did what I would never have
believed myself capable of doing—stood up in the church, and made
myself the public talk for weeks. But having once consented, I don’t
submit to these fancies without good reason. Marry him you must after
this.”

“Do you think I wish to do otherwise for one moment?” said Thomasin,
with a heavy sigh. “I know how wrong it was of me to love him, but
don’t pain me by talking like that, Aunt! You would not have had me
stay there with him, would you?—and your house is the only home I have
to return to. He says we can be married in a day or two.”

“I wish he had never seen you.”

“Very well; then I will be the miserablest woman in the world, and not
let him see me again. No, I won’t have him!”

“It is too late to speak so. Come with me. I am going to the inn to see
if he has returned. Of course I shall get to the bottom of this story
at once. Mr. Wildeve must not suppose he can play tricks upon me, or
any belonging to me.”

“It was not that. The license was wrong, and he couldn’t get another
the same day. He will tell you in a moment how it was, if he comes.”

“Why didn’t he bring you back?”

“That was me!” again sobbed Thomasin. “When I found we could not be
married I didn’t like to come back with him, and I was very ill. Then I
saw Diggory Venn, and was glad to get him to take me home. I cannot
explain it any better, and you must be angry with me if you will.”

“I shall see about that,” said Mrs. Yeobright; and they turned towards
the inn, known in the neighbourhood as the Quiet Woman, the sign of
which represented the figure of a matron carrying her head under her
arm. The front of the house was towards the heath and Rainbarrow, whose
dark shape seemed to threaten it from the sky. Upon the door was a
neglected brass plate, bearing the unexpected inscription, “Mr.
Wildeve, Engineer”—a useless yet cherished relic from the time when he
had been started in that profession in an office at Budmouth by those
who had hoped much from him, and had been disappointed. The garden was
at the back, and behind this ran a still deep stream, forming the
margin of the heath in that direction, meadow-land appearing beyond the
stream.

But the thick obscurity permitted only skylines to be visible of any
scene at present. The water at the back of the house could be heard,
idly spinning whirpools in its creep between the rows of dry
feather-headed reeds which formed a stockade along each bank. Their
presence was denoted by sounds as of a congregation praying humbly,
produced by their rubbing against each other in the slow wind.

The window, whence the candlelight had shone up the vale to the eyes of
the bonfire group, was uncurtained, but the sill lay too high for a
pedestrian on the outside to look over it into the room. A vast shadow,
in which could be dimly traced portions of a masculine contour, blotted
half the ceiling.

“He seems to be at home,” said Mrs. Yeobright.

“Must I come in, too, Aunt?” asked Thomasin faintly. “I suppose not; it
would be wrong.”

“You must come, certainly—to confront him, so that he may make no false
representations to me. We shall not be five minutes in the house, and
then we’ll walk home.”

Entering the open passage, she tapped at the door of the private
parlour, unfastened it, and looked in.

The back and shoulders of a man came between Mrs. Yeobright’s eyes and
the fire. Wildeve, whose form it was, immediately turned, arose, and
advanced to meet his visitors.

He was quite a young man, and of the two properties, form and motion,
the latter first attracted the eye in him. The grace of his movement
was singular—it was the pantomimic expression of a lady-killing career.
Next came into notice the more material qualities, among which was a
profuse crop of hair impending over the top of his face, lending to his
forehead the high-cornered outline of an early Gothic shield; and a
neck which was smooth and round as a cylinder. The lower half of his
figure was of light build. Altogether he was one in whom no man would
have seen anything to admire, and in whom no woman would have seen
anything to dislike.

He discerned the young girl’s form in the passage, and said, “Thomasin,
then, has reached home. How could you leave me in that way, darling?”
And turning to Mrs. Yeobright—“It was useless to argue with her. She
would go, and go alone.”

“But what’s the meaning of it all?” demanded Mrs. Yeobright haughtily.

“Take a seat,” said Wildeve, placing chairs for the two women. “Well,
it was a very stupid mistake, but such mistakes will happen. The
license was useless at Anglebury. It was made out for Budmouth, but as
I didn’t read it I wasn’t aware of that.”

“But you had been staying at Anglebury?”

“No. I had been at Budmouth—till two days ago—and that was where I had
intended to take her; but when I came to fetch her we decided upon
Anglebury, forgetting that a new license would be necessary. There was
not time to get to Budmouth afterwards.”

“I think you are very much to blame,” said Mrs. Yeobright.

“It was quite my fault we chose Anglebury,” Thomasin pleaded. “I
proposed it because I was not known there.”

“I know so well that I am to blame that you need not remind me of it,”
replied Wildeve shortly.

“Such things don’t happen for nothing,” said the aunt. “It is a great
slight to me and my family; and when it gets known there will be a very
unpleasant time for us. How can she look her friends in the face
tomorrow? It is a very great injury, and one I cannot easily forgive.
It may even reflect on her character.”

“Nonsense,” said Wildeve.

Thomasin’s large eyes had flown from the face of one to the face of the
other during this discussion, and she now said anxiously, “Will you
allow me, Aunt, to talk it over alone with Damon for five minutes? Will
you, Damon?”

“Certainly, dear,” said Wildeve, “if your aunt will excuse us.” He led
her into an adjoining room, leaving Mrs. Yeobright by the fire.

As soon as they were alone, and the door closed, Thomasin said, turning
up her pale, tearful face to him, “It is killing me, this, Damon! I did
not mean to part from you in anger at Anglebury this morning; but I was
frightened and hardly knew what I said. I’ve not let Aunt know how much
I suffered today; and it is so hard to command my face and voice, and
to smile as if it were a slight thing to me; but I try to do so, that
she may not be still more indignant with you. I know you could not help
it, dear, whatever Aunt may think.”

“She is very unpleasant.”

“Yes,” Thomasin murmured, “and I suppose I seem so now.... Damon, what
do you mean to do about me?”

“Do about you?”

“Yes. Those who don’t like you whisper things which at moments make me
doubt you. We mean to marry, I suppose, don’t we?”

“Of course we do. We have only to go to Budmouth on Monday, and we
marry at once.”

“Then do let us go!—O Damon, what you make me say!” She hid her face in
her handkerchief. “Here am I asking you to marry me, when by rights you
ought to be on your knees imploring me, your cruel mistress, not to
refuse you, and saying it would break your heart if I did. I used to
think it would be pretty and sweet like that; but how different!”

“Yes, real life is never at all like that.”

“But I don’t care personally if it never takes place,” she added with a
little dignity; “no, I can live without you. It is Aunt I think of. She
is so proud, and thinks so much of her family respectability, that she
will be cut down with mortification if this story should get abroad
before—it is done. My cousin Clym, too, will be much wounded.”

“Then he will be very unreasonable. In fact, you are all rather
unreasonable.”

Thomasin coloured a little, and not with love. But whatever the
momentary feeling which caused that flush in her, it went as it came,
and she humbly said, “I never mean to be, if I can help it. I merely
feel that you have my aunt to some extent in your power at last.”

“As a matter of justice it is almost due to me,” said Wildeve. “Think
what I have gone through to win her consent; the insult that it is to
any man to have the banns forbidden—the double insult to a man unlucky
enough to be cursed with sensitiveness, and blue demons, and Heaven
knows what, as I am. I can never forget those banns. A harsher man
would rejoice now in the power I have of turning upon your aunt by
going no further in the business.”

She looked wistfully at him with her sorrowful eyes as he said those
words, and her aspect showed that more than one person in the room
could deplore the possession of sensitiveness. Seeing that she was
really suffering he seemed disturbed and added, “This is merely a
reflection you know. I have not the least intention to refuse to
complete the marriage, Tamsie mine—I could not bear it.”

“You could not, I know!” said the fair girl, brightening. “You, who
cannot bear the sight of pain in even an insect, or any disagreeable
sound, or unpleasant smell even, will not long cause pain to me and
mine.”

“I will not, if I can help it.”

“Your hand upon it, Damon.”

He carelessly gave her his hand.

“Ah, by my crown, what’s that?” he said suddenly.

There fell upon their ears the sound of numerous voices singing in
front of the house. Among these, two made themselves prominent by their
peculiarity: one was a very strong bass, the other a wheezy thin
piping. Thomasin recognized them as belonging to Timothy Fairway and
Grandfer Cantle respectively.

“What does it mean—it is not skimmity-riding, I hope?” she said, with a
frightened gaze at Wildeve.

“Of course not; no, it is that the heath-folk have come to sing to us a
welcome. This is intolerable!” He began pacing about, the men outside
singing cheerily—

“He told′ her that she′ was the joy′ of his life′,
And if′ she’d con-sent′ he would make her his wife′;
She could′ not refuse′ him; to church′ so they went′,
Young Will was forgot′, and young Sue′ was content′;
And then′ was she kiss’d′ and set down′ on his knee′,
No man′ in the world′ was so lov′-ing as he′!”


Mrs. Yeobright burst in from the outer room. “Thomasin, Thomasin!” she
said, looking indignantly at Wildeve; “here’s a pretty exposure! Let us
escape at once. Come!”

It was, however, too late to get away by the passage. A rugged knocking
had begun upon the door of the front room. Wildeve, who had gone to the
window, came back.

“Stop!” he said imperiously, putting his hand upon Mrs. Yeobright’s
arm. “We are regularly besieged. There are fifty of them out there if
there’s one. You stay in this room with Thomasin; I’ll go out and face
them. You must stay now, for my sake, till they are gone, so that it
may seem as if all was right. Come, Tamsie dear, don’t go making a
scene—we must marry after this; that you can see as well as I. Sit
still, that’s all—and don’t speak much. I’ll manage them. Blundering
fools!”

He pressed the agitated girl into a seat, returned to the outer room
and opened the door. Immediately outside, in the passage, appeared
Grandfer Cantle singing in concert with those still standing in front
of the house. He came into the room and nodded abstractedly to Wildeve,
his lips still parted, and his features excruciatingly strained in the
emission of the chorus. This being ended, he said heartily, “Here’s
welcome to the new-made couple, and God bless ’em!”

“Thank you,” said Wildeve, with dry resentment, his face as gloomy as a
thunderstorm.

At the Grandfer’s heels now came the rest of the group, which included
Fairway, Christian, Sam the turf-cutter, Humphrey, and a dozen others.
All smiled upon Wildeve, and upon his tables and chairs likewise, from
a general sense of friendliness towards the articles as well as towards
their owner.

“We be not here afore Mrs. Yeobright after all,” said Fairway,
recognizing the matron’s bonnet through the glass partition which
divided the public apartment they had entered from the room where the
women sat. “We struck down across, d’ye see, Mr. Wildeve, and she went
round by the path.”

“And I see the young bride’s little head!” said Grandfer, peeping in
the same direction, and discerning Thomasin, who was waiting beside her
aunt in a miserable and awkward way. “Not quite settled in yet—well,
well, there’s plenty of time.”

Wildeve made no reply; and probably feeling that the sooner he treated
them the sooner they would go, he produced a stone jar, which threw a
warm halo over matters at once.

“That’s a drop of the right sort, I can see,” said Grandfer Cantle,
with the air of a man too well-mannered to show any hurry to taste it.

“Yes,” said Wildeve, “’tis some old mead. I hope you will like it.”

“O ay!” replied the guests, in the hearty tones natural when the words
demanded by politeness coincide with those of deepest feeling. “There
isn’t a prettier drink under the sun.”

“I’ll take my oath there isn’t,” added Grandfer Cantle. “All that can
be said against mead is that ’tis rather heady, and apt to lie about a
man a good while. But tomorrow’s Sunday, thank God.”

“I feel’d for all the world like some bold soldier after I had had some
once,” said Christian.

“You shall feel so again,” said Wildeve, with condescension, “Cups or
glasses, gentlemen?”

“Well, if you don’t mind, we’ll have the beaker, and pass ’en round;
’tis better than heling it out in dribbles.”

“Jown the slippery glasses,” said Grandfer Cantle. “What’s the good of
a thing that you can’t put down in the ashes to warm, hey, neighbours;
that’s what I ask?”

“Right, Grandfer,” said Sam; and the mead then circulated.

“Well,” said Timothy Fairway, feeling demands upon his praise in some
form or other, “’tis a worthy thing to be married, Mr. Wildeve; and the
woman you’ve got is a dimant, so says I. Yes,” he continued, to
Grandfer Cantle, raising his voice so as to be heard through the
partition, “her father (inclining his head towards the inner room) was
as good a feller as ever lived. He always had his great indignation
ready against anything underhand.”

“Is that very dangerous?” said Christian.

“And there were few in these parts that were upsides with him,” said
Sam. “Whenever a club walked he’d play the clarinet in the band that
marched before ’em as if he’d never touched anything but a clarinet all
his life. And then, when they got to church door he’d throw down the
clarinet, mount the gallery, snatch up the bass viol, and rozum away as
if he’d never played anything but a bass viol. Folk would say—folk that
knowed what a true stave was—‘Surely, surely that’s never the same man
that I saw handling the clarinet so masterly by now!’”

“I can mind it,” said the furze-cutter. “’Twas a wonderful thing that
one body could hold it all and never mix the fingering.”

“There was Kingsbere church likewise,” Fairway recommenced, as one
opening a new vein of the same mine of interest.

Wildeve breathed the breath of one intolerably bored, and glanced
through the partition at the prisoners.

“He used to walk over there of a Sunday afternoon to visit his old
acquaintance Andrew Brown, the first clarinet there; a good man enough,
but rather screechy in his music, if you can mind?”

“’A was.”

“And neighbour Yeobright would take Andrey’s place for some part of the
service, to let Andrey have a bit of a nap, as any friend would
naturally do.”

“As any friend would,” said Grandfer Cantle, the other listeners
expressing the same accord by the shorter way of nodding their heads.

“No sooner was Andrey asleep and the first whiff of neighbour
Yeobright’s wind had got inside Andrey’s clarinet than everyone in
church feeled in a moment there was a great soul among ’em. All heads
would turn, and they’d say, ‘Ah, I thought ’twas he!’ One Sunday I can
well mind—a bass viol day that time, and Yeobright had brought his own.
’Twas the Hundred-and-thirty-third to ‘Lydia’; and when they’d come to
‘Ran down his beard and o’er his robes its costly moisture shed,’
neighbour Yeobright, who had just warmed to his work, drove his bow
into them strings that glorious grand that he e’en a’most sawed the
bass viol into two pieces. Every winder in church rattled as if ’twere
a thunderstorm. Old Pa’son Williams lifted his hands in his great holy
surplice as natural as if he’d been in common clothes, and seemed to
say hisself, ‘Oh for such a man in our parish!’ But not a soul in
Kingsbere could hold a candle to Yeobright.”

“Was it quite safe when the winder shook?” Christian inquired.

He received no answer, all for the moment sitting rapt in admiration of
the performance described. As with Farinelli’s singing before the
princesses, Sheridan’s renowned Begum Speech, and other such examples,
the fortunate condition of its being for ever lost to the world
invested the deceased Mr. Yeobright’s tour de force on that memorable
afternoon with a cumulative glory which comparative criticism, had that
been possible, might considerably have shorn down.

“He was the last you’d have expected to drop off in the prime of life,”
said Humphrey.

“Ah, well; he was looking for the earth some months afore he went. At
that time women used to run for smocks and gown-pieces at Greenhill
Fair, and my wife that is now, being a long-legged slittering maid,
hardly husband-high, went with the rest of the maidens, for ’a was a
good runner afore she got so heavy. When she came home I said—we were
then just beginning to walk together—‘What have ye got, my honey?’
‘I’ve won—well, I’ve won—a gown-piece,’ says she, her colours coming up
in a moment. ’Tis a smock for a crown, I thought; and so it turned out.
Ay, when I think what she’ll say to me now without a mossel of red in
her face, it do seem strange that ’a wouldn’t say such a little thing
then.... However, then she went on, and that’s what made me bring up
the story, ‘Well, whatever clothes I’ve won, white or figured, for eyes
to see or for eyes not to see’ (’a could do a pretty stroke of modesty
in those days), ‘I’d sooner have lost it than have seen what I have.
Poor Mr. Yeobright was took bad directly he reached the fair ground,
and was forced to go home again.’ That was the last time he ever went
out of the parish.”

“’A faltered on from one day to another, and then we heard he was
gone.”

“D’ye think he had great pain when ’a died?” said Christian.

“O no—quite different. Nor any pain of mind. He was lucky enough to be
God A’mighty’s own man.”

“And other folk—d’ye think ’twill be much pain to ’em, Mister Fairway?”

“That depends on whether they be afeard.”

“I bain’t afeard at all, I thank God!” said Christian strenuously. “I’m
glad I bain’t, for then ’twon’t pain me.... I don’t think I be
afeard—or if I be I can’t help it, and I don’t deserve to suffer. I
wish I was not afeard at all!”

There was a solemn silence, and looking from the window, which was
unshuttered and unblinded, Timothy said, “Well, what a fess little
bonfire that one is, out by Cap’n Vye’s! ’Tis burning just the same now
as ever, upon my life.”

All glances went through the window, and nobody noticed that Wildeve
disguised a brief, telltale look. Far away up the sombre valley of
heath, and to the right of Rainbarrow, could indeed be seen the light,
small, but steady and persistent as before.

“It was lighted before ours was,” Fairway continued; “and yet every one
in the country round is out afore ’n.”

“Perhaps there’s meaning in it!” murmured Christian.

“How meaning?” said Wildeve sharply.

Christian was too scattered to reply, and Timothy helped him.

“He means, sir, that the lonesome dark-eyed creature up there that some
say is a witch—ever I should call a fine young woman such a name—is
always up to some odd conceit or other; and so perhaps ’tis she.”

“I’d be very glad to ask her in wedlock, if she’d hae me and take the
risk of her wild dark eyes ill-wishing me,” said Grandfer Cantle
staunchly.

“Don’t ye say it, Father!” implored Christian.

“Well, be dazed if he who do marry the maid won’t hae an uncommon
picture for his best parlour,” said Fairway in a liquid tone, placing
down the cup of mead at the end of a good pull.

“And a partner as deep as the North Star,” said Sam, taking up the cup
and finishing the little that remained. “Well, really, now I think we
must be moving,” said Humphrey, observing the emptiness of the vessel.

“But we’ll gie ’em another song?” said Grandfer Cantle. “I’m as full of
notes as a bird!”

“Thank you, Grandfer,” said Wildeve. “But we will not trouble you now.
Some other day must do for that—when I have a party.”

“Be jown’d if I don’t learn ten new songs for’t, or I won’t learn a
line!” said Grandfer Cantle. “And you may be sure I won’t disappoint ye
by biding away, Mr. Wildeve.”

“I quite believe you,” said that gentleman.

All then took their leave, wishing their entertainer long life and
happiness as a married man, with recapitulations which occupied some
time. Wildeve attended them to the door, beyond which the deep-dyed
upward stretch of heath stood awaiting them, an amplitude of darkness
reigning from their feet almost to the zenith, where a definite form
first became visible in the lowering forehead of Rainbarrow. Diving
into the dense obscurity in a line headed by Sam the turf-cutter, they
pursued their trackless way home.

When the scratching of the furze against their leggings had fainted
upon the ear, Wildeve returned to the room where he had left Thomasin
and her aunt. The women were gone.

They could only have left the house in one way, by the back window; and
this was open.

Wildeve laughed to himself, remained a moment thinking, and idly
returned to the front room. Here his glance fell upon a bottle of wine
which stood on the mantelpiece. “Ah—old Dowden!” he murmured; and going
to the kitchen door shouted, “Is anybody here who can take something to
old Dowden?”

There was no reply. The room was empty, the lad who acted as his
factotum having gone to bed. Wildeve came back, put on his hat, took
the bottle, and left the house, turning the key in the door, for there
was no guest at the inn tonight. As soon as he was on the road the
little bonfire on Mistover Knap again met his eye.

“Still waiting, are you, my lady?” he murmured.

However, he did not proceed that way just then; but leaving the hill to
the left of him, he stumbled over a rutted road that brought him to a
cottage which, like all other habitations on the heath at this hour,
was only saved from being visible by a faint shine from its bedroom
window. This house was the home of Olly Dowden, the besom-maker, and he
entered.

The lower room was in darkness; but by feeling his way he found a
table, whereon he placed the bottle, and a minute later emerged again
upon the heath. He stood and looked northeast at the undying little
fire—high up above him, though not so high as Rainbarrow.

We have been told what happens when a woman deliberates; and the
epigram is not always terminable with woman, provided that one be in
the case, and that a fair one. Wildeve stood, and stood longer, and
breathed perplexedly, and then said to himself with resignation,
“Yes—by Heaven, I must go to her, I suppose!”

Instead of turning in the direction of home he pressed on rapidly by a
path under Rainbarrow towards what was evidently a signal light.




VI.
The Figure against the Sky


When the whole Egdon concourse had left the site of the bonfire to its
accustomed loneliness, a closely wrapped female figure approached the
barrow from that quarter of the heath in which the little fire lay. Had
the reddleman been watching he might have recognized her as the woman
who had first stood there so singularly, and vanished at the approach
of strangers. She ascended to her old position at the top, where the
red coals of the perishing fire greeted her like living eyes in the
corpse of day. There she stood still around her stretching the vast
night atmosphere, whose incomplete darkness in comparison with the
total darkness of the heath below it might have represented a venial
beside a mortal sin.

That she was tall and straight in build, that she was lady-like in her
movements, was all that could be learnt of her just now, her form being
wrapped in a shawl folded in the old cornerwise fashion, and her head
in a large kerchief, a protection not superfluous at this hour and
place. Her back was towards the wind, which blew from the northwest;
but whether she had avoided that aspect because of the chilly gusts
which played about her exceptional position, or because her interest
lay in the southeast, did not at first appear.

Her reason for standing so dead still as the pivot of this circle of
heath-country was just as obscure. Her extraordinary fixity, her
conspicuous loneliness, her heedlessness of night, betokened among
other things an utter absence of fear. A tract of country unaltered
from that sinister condition which made Cæsar anxious every year to get
clear of its glooms before the autumnal equinox, a kind of landscape
and weather which leads travellers from the South to describe our
island as Homer’s Cimmerian land, was not, on the face of it, friendly
to women.

It might reasonably have been supposed that she was listening to the
wind, which rose somewhat as the night advanced, and laid hold of the
attention. The wind, indeed, seemed made for the scene, as the scene
seemed made for the hour. Part of its tone was quite special; what was
heard there could be heard nowhere else. Gusts in innumerable series
followed each other from the northwest, and when each one of them raced
past the sound of its progress resolved into three. Treble, tenor, and
bass notes were to be found therein. The general ricochet of the whole
over pits and prominences had the gravest pitch of the chime. Next
there could be heard the baritone buzz of a holly tree. Below these in
force, above them in pitch, a dwindled voice strove hard at a husky
tune, which was the peculiar local sound alluded to. Thinner and less
immediately traceable than the other two, it was far more impressive
than either. In it lay what may be called the linguistic peculiarity of
the heath; and being audible nowhere on earth off a heath, it afforded
a shadow of reason for the woman’s tenseness, which continued as
unbroken as ever.

Throughout the blowing of these plaintive November winds that note bore
a great resemblance to the ruins of human song which remain to the
throat of fourscore and ten. It was a worn whisper, dry and papery, and
it brushed so distinctly across the ear that, by the accustomed, the
material minutiæ in which it originated could be realized as by touch.
It was the united products of infinitesimal vegetable causes, and these
were neither stems, leaves, fruit, blades, prickles, lichen, nor moss.

They were the mummied heathbells of the past summer, originally tender
and purple, now washed colourless by Michaelmas rains, and dried to
dead skins by October suns. So low was an individual sound from these
that a combination of hundreds only just emerged from silence, and the
myriads of the whole declivity reached the woman’s ear but as a
shrivelled and intermittent recitative. Yet scarcely a single accent
among the many afloat tonight could have such power to impress a
listener with thoughts of its origin. One inwardly saw the infinity of
those combined multitudes; and perceived that each of the tiny trumpets
was seized on entered, scoured and emerged from by the wind as
thoroughly as if it were as vast as a crater.

“The spirit moved them.” A meaning of the phrase forced itself upon the
attention; and an emotional listener’s fetichistic mood might have
ended in one of more advanced quality. It was not, after all, that the
left-hand expanse of old blooms spoke, or the right-hand, or those of
the slope in front; but it was the single person of something else
speaking through each at once.

Suddenly, on the barrow, there mingled with all this wild rhetoric of
night a sound which modulated so naturally into the rest that its
beginning and ending were hardly to be distinguished. The bluffs, and
the bushes, and the heather-bells had broken silence; at last, so did
the woman; and her articulation was but as another phrase of the same
discourse as theirs. Thrown out on the winds it became twined in with
them, and with them it flew away.

What she uttered was a lengthened sighing, apparently at something in
her mind which had led to her presence here. There was a spasmodic
abandonment about it as if, in allowing herself to utter the sound the
woman’s brain had authorized what it could not regulate. One point was
evident in this; that she had been existing in a suppressed state, and
not in one of languor, or stagnation.

Far away down the valley the faint shine from the window of the inn
still lasted on; and a few additional moments proved that the window,
or what was within it, had more to do with the woman’s sigh than had
either her own actions or the scene immediately around. She lifted her
left hand, which held a closed telescope. This she rapidly extended, as
if she were well accustomed to the operation, and raising it to her eye
directed it towards the light beaming from the inn.

The handkerchief which had hooded her head was now a little thrown
back, her face being somewhat elevated. A profile was visible against
the dull monochrome of cloud around her; and it was as though side
shadows from the features of Sappho and Mrs. Siddons had converged
upwards from the tomb to form an image like neither but suggesting
both. This, however, was mere superficiality. In respect of character a
face may make certain admissions by its outline; but it fully confesses
only in its changes. So much is this the case that what is called the
play of the features often helps more in understanding a man or woman
than the earnest labours of all the other members together. Thus the
night revealed little of her whose form it was embracing, for the
mobile parts of her countenance could not be seen.

At last she gave up her spying attitude, closed the telescope, and
turned to the decaying embers. From these no appreciable beams now
radiated, except when a more than usually smart gust brushed over their
faces and raised a fitful glow which came and went like the blush of a
girl. She stooped over the silent circle, and selecting from the brands
a piece of stick which bore the largest live coal at its end, brought
it to where she had been standing before.

She held the brand to the ground, blowing the red coal with her mouth
at the same time; till it faintly illuminated the sod, and revealed a
small object, which turned out to be an hourglass, though she wore a
watch. She blew long enough to show that the sand had all slipped
through.

“Ah!” she said, as if surprised.

The light raised by her breath had been very fitful, and a momentary
irradiation of flesh was all that it had disclosed of her face. That
consisted of two matchless lips and a cheek only, her head being still
enveloped. She threw away the stick, took the glass in her hand, the
telescope under her arm, and moved on.

Along the ridge ran a faint foot-track, which the lady followed. Those
who knew it well called it a path; and, while a mere visitor would have
passed it unnoticed even by day, the regular haunters of the heath were
at no loss for it at midnight. The whole secret of following these
incipient paths, when there was not light enough in the atmosphere to
show a turnpike road, lay in the development of the sense of touch in
the feet, which comes with years of night-rambling in little-trodden
spots. To a walker practised in such places a difference between impact
on maiden herbage, and on the crippled stalks of a slight footway, is
perceptible through the thickest boot or shoe.

The solitary figure who walked this beat took no notice of the windy
tune still played on the dead heathbells. She did not turn her head to
look at a group of dark creatures further on, who fled from her
presence as she skirted a ravine where they fed. They were about a
score of the small wild ponies known as heath-croppers. They roamed at
large on the undulations of Egdon, but in numbers too few to detract
much from the solitude.

The pedestrian noticed nothing just now, and a clue to her abstraction
was afforded by a trivial incident. A bramble caught hold of her skirt,
and checked her progress. Instead of putting it off and hastening
along, she yielded herself up to the pull, and stood passively still.
When she began to extricate herself it was by turning round and round,
and so unwinding the prickly switch. She was in a desponding reverie.

Her course was in the direction of the small undying fire which had
drawn the attention of the men on Rainbarrow and of Wildeve in the
valley below. A faint illumination from its rays began to glow upon her
face, and the fire soon revealed itself to be lit, not on the level
ground, but on a salient corner or redan of earth, at the junction of
two converging bank fences. Outside was a ditch, dry except immediately
under the fire, where there was a large pool, bearded all round by
heather and rushes. In the smooth water of the pool the fire appeared
upside down.

The banks meeting behind were bare of a hedge, save such as was formed
by disconnected tufts of furze, standing upon stems along the top, like
impaled heads above a city wall. A white mast, fitted up with spars and
other nautical tackle, could be seen rising against the dark clouds
whenever the flames played brightly enough to reach it. Altogether the
scene had much the appearance of a fortification upon which had been
kindled a beacon fire.

Nobody was visible; but ever and anon a whitish something moved above
the bank from behind, and vanished again. This was a small human hand,
in the act of lifting pieces of fuel into the fire, but for all that
could be seen the hand, like that which troubled Belshazzar, was there
alone. Occasionally an ember rolled off the bank, and dropped with a
hiss into the pool.

At one side of the pool rough steps built of clods enabled everyone who
wished to do so to mount the bank; which the woman did. Within was a
paddock in an uncultivated state, though bearing evidence of having
once been tilled; but the heath and fern had insidiously crept in, and
were reasserting their old supremacy. Further ahead were dimly visible
an irregular dwelling-house, garden, and outbuildings, backed by a
clump of firs.

The young lady—for youth had revealed its presence in her buoyant bound
up the bank—walked along the top instead of descending inside, and came
to the corner where the fire was burning. One reason for the permanence
of the blaze was now manifest: the fuel consisted of hard pieces of
wood, cleft and sawn—the knotty boles of old thorn trees which grew in
twos and threes about the hillsides. A yet unconsumed pile of these lay
in the inner angle of the bank; and from this corner the upturned face
of a little boy greeted her eyes. He was dilatorily throwing up a piece
of wood into the fire every now and then, a business which seemed to
have engaged him a considerable part of the evening, for his face was
somewhat weary.

“I am glad you have come, Miss Eustacia,” he said, with a sigh of
relief. “I don’t like biding by myself.”

“Nonsense. I have only been a little way for a walk. I have been gone
only twenty minutes.”

“It seemed long,” murmured the sad boy. “And you have been so many
times.”

“Why, I thought you would be pleased to have a bonfire. Are you not
much obliged to me for making you one?”

“Yes; but there’s nobody here to play wi’ me.”

“I suppose nobody has come while I’ve been away?”

“Nobody except your grandfather—he looked out of doors once for ’ee. I
told him you were walking round upon the hill to look at the other
bonfires.”

“A good boy.”

“I think I hear him coming again, miss.”

An old man came into the remoter light of the fire from the direction
of the homestead. He was the same who had overtaken the reddleman on
the road that afternoon. He looked wistfully to the top of the bank at
the woman who stood there, and his teeth, which were quite unimpaired,
showed like parian from his parted lips.

“When are you coming indoors, Eustacia?” he asked. “’Tis almost
bedtime. I’ve been home these two hours, and am tired out. Surely ’tis
somewhat childish of you to stay out playing at bonfires so long, and
wasting such fuel. My precious thorn roots, the rarest of all firing,
that I laid by on purpose for Christmas—you have burnt ’em nearly all!”

“I promised Johnny a bonfire, and it pleases him not to let it go out
just yet,” said Eustacia, in a way which told at once that she was
absolute queen here. “Grandfather, you go in to bed. I shall follow you
soon. You like the fire, don’t you, Johnny?”

The boy looked up doubtfully at her and murmured, “I don’t think I want
it any longer.”

Her grandfather had turned back again, and did not hear the boy’s
reply. As soon as the white-haired man had vanished she said in a tone
of pique to the child, “Ungrateful little boy, how can you contradict
me? Never shall you have a bonfire again unless you keep it up now.
Come, tell me you like to do things for me, and don’t deny it.”

The repressed child said, “Yes, I do, miss,” and continued to stir the
fire perfunctorily.

“Stay a little longer and I will give you a crooked six-pence,” said
Eustacia, more gently. “Put in one piece of wood every two or three
minutes, but not too much at once. I am going to walk along the ridge a
little longer, but I shall keep on coming to you. And if you hear a
frog jump into the pond with a flounce like a stone thrown in, be sure
you run and tell me, because it is a sign of rain.”

“Yes, Eustacia.”

“Miss Vye, sir.”

“Miss Vy—stacia.”

“That will do. Now put in one stick more.”

The little slave went on feeding the fire as before. He seemed a mere
automaton, galvanized into moving and speaking by the wayward
Eustacia’s will. He might have been the brass statue which Albertus
Magnus is said to have animated just so far as to make it chatter, and
move, and be his servant.

Before going on her walk again the young girl stood still on the bank
for a few instants and listened. It was to the full as lonely a place
as Rainbarrow, though at rather a lower level; and it was more
sheltered from wind and weather on account of the few firs to the
north. The bank which enclosed the homestead, and protected it from the
lawless state of the world without, was formed of thick square clods,
dug from the ditch on the outside, and built up with a slight batter or
incline, which forms no slight defense where hedges will not grow
because of the wind and the wilderness, and where wall materials are
unattainable. Otherwise the situation was quite open, commanding the
whole length of the valley which reached to the river behind Wildeve’s
house. High above this to the right, and much nearer thitherward than
the Quiet Woman Inn, the blurred contour of Rainbarrow obstructed the
sky.

After her attentive survey of the wild slopes and hollow ravines a
gesture of impatience escaped Eustacia. She vented petulant words every
now and then, but there were sighs between her words, and sudden
listenings between her sighs. Descending from her perch she again
sauntered off towards Rainbarrow, though this time she did not go the
whole way.

Twice she reappeared at intervals of a few minutes and each time she
said—

“Not any flounce into the pond yet, little man?”

“No, Miss Eustacia,” the child replied.

“Well,” she said at last, “I shall soon be going in, and then I will
give you the crooked sixpence, and let you go home.”

“Thank’ee, Miss Eustacia,” said the tired stoker, breathing more
easily. And Eustacia again strolled away from the fire, but this time
not towards Rainbarrow. She skirted the bank and went round to the
wicket before the house, where she stood motionless, looking at the
scene.

Fifty yards off rose the corner of the two converging banks, with the
fire upon it; within the bank, lifting up to the fire one stick at a
time, just as before, the figure of the little child. She idly watched
him as he occasionally climbed up in the nook of the bank and stood
beside the brands. The wind blew the smoke, and the child’s hair, and
the corner of his pinafore, all in the same direction; the breeze died,
and the pinafore and hair lay still, and the smoke went up straight.

While Eustacia looked on from this distance the boy’s form visibly
started—he slid down the bank and ran across towards the white gate.

“Well?” said Eustacia.

“A hopfrog have jumped into the pond. Yes, I heard ’en!”

“Then it is going to rain, and you had better go home. You will not be
afraid?” She spoke hurriedly, as if her heart had leapt into her throat
at the boy’s words.

“No, because I shall hae the crooked sixpence.”

“Yes, here it is. Now run as fast as you can—not that way—through the
garden here. No other boy in the heath has had such a bonfire as
yours.”

The boy, who clearly had had too much of a good thing, marched away
into the shadows with alacrity. When he was gone Eustacia, leaving her
telescope and hourglass by the gate, brushed forward from the wicket
towards the angle of the bank, under the fire.

Here, screened by the outwork, she waited. In a few moments a splash
was audible from the pond outside. Had the child been there he would
have said that a second frog had jumped in; but by most people the
sound would have been likened to the fall of a stone into the water.
Eustacia stepped upon the bank.

“Yes?” she said, and held her breath.

Thereupon the contour of a man became dimly visible against the
low-reaching sky over the valley, beyond the outer margin of the pool.
He came round it and leapt upon the bank beside her. A low laugh
escaped her—the third utterance which the girl had indulged in tonight.
The first, when she stood upon Rainbarrow, had expressed anxiety; the
second, on the ridge, had expressed impatience; the present was one of
triumphant pleasure. She let her joyous eyes rest upon him without
speaking, as upon some wondrous thing she had created out of chaos.

“I have come,” said the man, who was Wildeve. “You give me no peace.
Why do you not leave me alone? I have seen your bonfire all the
evening.” The words were not without emotion, and retained their level
tone as if by a careful equipoise between imminent extremes.

At this unexpectedly repressing manner in her lover the girl seemed to
repress herself also. “Of course you have seen my fire,” she answered
with languid calmness, artificially maintained. “Why shouldn’t I have a
bonfire on the Fifth of November, like other denizens of the heath?”

“I knew it was meant for me.”

“How did you know it? I have had no word with you since you—you chose
her, and walked about with her, and deserted me entirely, as if I had
never been yours life and soul so irretrievably!”

“Eustacia! could I forget that last autumn at this same day of the
month and at this same place you lighted exactly such a fire as a
signal for me to come and see you? Why should there have been a bonfire
again by Captain Vye’s house if not for the same purpose?”

“Yes, yes—I own it,” she cried under her breath, with a drowsy fervour
of manner and tone which was quite peculiar to her. “Don’t begin
speaking to me as you did, Damon; you will drive me to say words I
would not wish to say to you. I had given you up, and resolved not to
think of you any more; and then I heard the news, and I came out and
got the fire ready because I thought that you had been faithful to me.”

“What have you heard to make you think that?” said Wildeve, astonished.

“That you did not marry her!” she murmured exultingly. “And I knew it
was because you loved me best, and couldn’t do it.... Damon, you have
been cruel to me to go away, and I have said I would never forgive you.
I do not think I can forgive you entirely, even now—it is too much for
a woman of any spirit to quite overlook.”

“If I had known you wished to call me up here only to reproach me, I
wouldn’t have come.”

“But I don’t mind it, and I do forgive you now that you have not
married her, and have come back to me!”

“Who told you that I had not married her?”

“My grandfather. He took a long walk today, and as he was coming home
he overtook some person who told him of a broken-off wedding—he thought
it might be yours, and I knew it was.”

“Does anybody else know?”

“I suppose not. Now Damon, do you see why I lit my signal fire? You did
not think I would have lit it if I had imagined you to have become the
husband of this woman. It is insulting my pride to suppose that.”

Wildeve was silent; it was evident that he had supposed as much.

“Did you indeed think I believed you were married?” she again demanded
earnestly. “Then you wronged me; and upon my life and heart I can
hardly bear to recognize that you have such ill thoughts of me! Damon,
you are not worthy of me—I see it, and yet I love you. Never mind, let
it go—I must bear your mean opinion as best I may.... It is true, is it
not,” she added with ill-concealed anxiety, on his making no
demonstration, “that you could not bring yourself to give me up, and
are still going to love me best of all?”

“Yes; or why should I have come?” he said touchily. “Not that fidelity
will be any great merit in me after your kind speech about my
unworthiness, which should have been said by myself if by anybody, and
comes with an ill grace from you. However, the curse of inflammability
is upon me, and I must live under it, and take any snub from a woman.
It has brought me down from engineering to innkeeping—what lower stage
it has in store for me I have yet to learn.” He continued to look upon
her gloomily.

She seized the moment, and throwing back the shawl so that the
firelight shone full upon her face and throat, said with a smile, “Have
you seen anything better than that in your travels?”

Eustacia was not one to commit herself to such a position without good
ground. He said quietly, “No.”

“Not even on the shoulders of Thomasin?”

“Thomasin is a pleasing and innocent woman.”

“That’s nothing to do with it,” she cried with quick passionateness.
“We will leave her out; there are only you and me now to think of.”
After a long look at him she resumed with the old quiescent warmth,
“Must I go on weakly confessing to you things a woman ought to conceal;
and own that no words can express how gloomy I have been because of
that dreadful belief I held till two hours ago—that you had quite
deserted me?”

“I am sorry I caused you that pain.”

“But perhaps it is not wholly because of you that I get gloomy,” she
archly added. “It is in my nature to feel like that. It was born in my
blood, I suppose.”

“Hypochondriasis.”

“Or else it was coming into this wild heath. I was happy enough at
Budmouth. O the times, O the days at Budmouth! But Egdon will be
brighter again now.”

“I hope it will,” said Wildeve moodily. “Do you know the consequence of
this recall to me, my old darling? I shall come to see you again as
before, at Rainbarrow.”

“Of course you will.”

“And yet I declare that until I got here tonight I intended, after this
one good-bye, never to meet you again.”

“I don’t thank you for that,” she said, turning away, while indignation
spread through her like subterranean heat. “You may come again to
Rainbarrow if you like, but you won’t see me; and you may call, but I
shall not listen; and you may tempt me, but I won’t give myself to you
any more.”

“You have said as much before, sweet; but such natures as yours don’t
so easily adhere to their words. Neither, for the matter of that, do
such natures as mine.”

“This is the pleasure I have won by my trouble,” she whispered
bitterly. “Why did I try to recall you? Damon, a strange warring takes
place in my mind occasionally. I think when I become calm after you
woundings, ‘Do I embrace a cloud of common fog after all?’ You are a
chameleon, and now you are at your worst colour. Go home, or I shall
hate you!”

He looked absently towards Rainbarrow while one might have counted
twenty, and said, as if he did not much mind all this, “Yes, I will go
home. Do you mean to see me again?”

“If you own to me that the wedding is broken off because you love me
best.”

“I don’t think it would be good policy,” said Wildeve, smiling. “You
would get to know the extent of your power too clearly.”

“But tell me!”

“You know.”

“Where is she now?”

“I don’t know. I prefer not to speak of her to you. I have not yet
married her; I have come in obedience to your call. That is enough.”

“I merely lit that fire because I was dull, and thought I would get a
little excitement by calling you up and triumphing over you as the
Witch of Endor called up Samuel. I determined you should come; and you
have come! I have shown my power. A mile and half hither, and a mile
and half back again to your home—three miles in the dark for me. Have I
not shown my power?”

He shook his head at her. “I know you too well, my Eustacia; I know you
too well. There isn’t a note in you which I don’t know; and that hot
little bosom couldn’t play such a cold-blooded trick to save its life.
I saw a woman on Rainbarrow at dusk looking down towards my house. I
think I drew out you before you drew out me.”

The revived embers of an old passion glowed clearly in Wildeve now; and
he leant forward as if about to put his face towards her cheek.

“O no,” she said, intractably moving to the other side of the decayed
fire. “What did you mean by that?”

“Perhaps I may kiss your hand?”

“No, you may not.”

“Then I may shake your hand?”

“No.”

“Then I wish you good night without caring for either. Good-bye,
good-bye.”

She returned no answer, and with the bow of a dancing-master he
vanished on the other side of the pool as he had come.

Eustacia sighed—it was no fragile maiden sigh, but a sigh which shook
her like a shiver. Whenever a flash of reason darted like an electric
light upon her lover—as it sometimes would—and showed his
imperfections, she shivered thus. But it was over in a second, and she
loved on. She knew that he trifled with her; but she loved on. She
scattered the half-burnt brands, went indoors immediately, and up to
her bedroom without a light. Amid the rustles which denoted her to be
undressing in the darkness other heavy breaths frequently came; and the
same kind of shudder occasionally moved through her when, ten minutes
later, she lay on her bed asleep.




VII.
Queen of Night


Eustacia Vye was the raw material of a divinity. On Olympus she would
have done well with a little preparation. She had the passions and
instincts which make a model goddess, that is, those which make not
quite a model woman. Had it been possible for the earth and mankind to
be entirely in her grasp for a while, she had handled the distaff, the
spindle, and the shears at her own free will, few in the world would
have noticed the change of government. There would have been the same
inequality of lot, the same heaping up of favours here, of contumely
there, the same generosity before justice, the same perpetual dilemmas,
the same captious alteration of caresses and blows that we endure now.

She was in person full-limbed and somewhat heavy; without ruddiness, as
without pallor; and soft to the touch as a cloud. To see her hair was
to fancy that a whole winter did not contain darkness enough to form
its shadow—it closed over her forehead like nightfall extinguishing the
western glow.

Her nerves extended into those tresses, and her temper could always be
softened by stroking them down. When her hair was brushed she would
instantly sink into stillness and look like the Sphinx. If, in passing
under one of the Egdon banks, any of its thick skeins were caught, as
they sometimes were, by a prickly tuft of the large _Ulex
Europæus_—which will act as a sort of hairbrush—she would go back a few
steps, and pass against it a second time.

She had pagan eyes, full of nocturnal mysteries, and their light, as it
came and went, and came again, was partially hampered by their
oppressive lids and lashes; and of these the under lid was much fuller
than it usually is with English women. This enabled her to indulge in
reverie without seeming to do so—she might have been believed capable
of sleeping without closing them up. Assuming that the souls of men and
women were visible essences, you could fancy the colour of Eustacia’s
soul to be flamelike. The sparks from it that rose into her dark pupils
gave the same impression.

The mouth seemed formed less to speak than to quiver, less to quiver
than to kiss. Some might have added, less to kiss than to curl. Viewed
sideways, the closing-line of her lips formed, with almost geometric
precision, the curve so well known in the arts of design as the
cima-recta, or ogee. The sight of such a flexible bend as that on grim
Egdon was quite an apparition. It was felt at once that the mouth did
not come over from Sleswig with a band of Saxon pirates whose lips met
like the two halves of a muffin. One had fancied that such lip-curves
were mostly lurking underground in the South as fragments of forgotten
marbles. So fine were the lines of her lips that, though full, each
corner of her mouth was as clearly cut as the point of a spear. This
keenness of corner was only blunted when she was given over to sudden
fits of gloom, one of the phases of the night-side of sentiment which
she knew too well for her years.

Her presence brought memories of such things as Bourbon roses, rubies,
and tropical midnight; her moods recalled lotus-eaters and the march in
Athalie; her motions, the ebb and flow of the sea; her voice, the
viola. In a dim light, and with a slight rearrangement of her hair, her
general figure might have stood for that of either of the higher female
deities. The new moon behind her head, an old helmet upon it, a diadem
of accidental dewdrops round her brow, would have been adjuncts
sufficient to strike the note of Artemis, Athena, or Hera respectively,
with as close an approximation to the antique as that which passes
muster on many respected canvases.

But celestial imperiousness, love, wrath, and fervour had proved to be
somewhat thrown away on netherward Egdon. Her power was limited, and
the consciousness of this limitation had biassed her development. Egdon
was her Hades, and since coming there she had imbibed much of what was
dark in its tone, though inwardly and eternally unreconciled thereto.
Her appearance accorded well with this smouldering rebelliousness, and
the shady splendour of her beauty was the real surface of the sad and
stifled warmth within her. A true Tartarean dignity sat upon her brow,
and not factitiously or with marks of constraint, for it had grown in
her with years.

Across the upper part of her head she wore a thin fillet of black
velvet, restraining the luxuriance of her shady hair, in a way which
added much to this class of majesty by irregularly clouding her
forehead. “Nothing can embellish a beautiful face more than a narrow
band drawn over the brow,” says Richter. Some of the neighbouring girls
wore coloured ribbon for the same purpose, and sported metallic
ornaments elsewhere; but if anyone suggested coloured ribbon and
metallic ornaments to Eustacia Vye she laughed and went on.

Why did a woman of this sort live on Egdon Heath? Budmouth was her
native place, a fashionable seaside resort at that date. She was the
daughter of the bandmaster of a regiment which had been quartered
there—a Corfiote by birth, and a fine musician—who met his future wife
during her trip thither with her father the captain, a man of good
family. The marriage was scarcely in accord with the old man’s wishes,
for the bandmaster’s pockets were as light as his occupation. But the
musician did his best; adopted his wife’s name, made England
permanently his home, took great trouble with his child’s education,
the expenses of which were defrayed by the grandfather, and throve as
the chief local musician till her mother’s death, when he left off
thriving, drank, and died also. The girl was left to the care of her
grandfather, who, since three of his ribs became broken in a shipwreck,
had lived in this airy perch on Egdon, a spot which had taken his fancy
because the house was to be had for next to nothing, and because a
remote blue tinge on the horizon between the hills, visible from the
cottage door, was traditionally believed to be the English Channel. She
hated the change; she felt like one banished; but here she was forced
to abide.

Thus it happened that in Eustacia’s brain were juxtaposed the strangest
assortment of ideas, from old time and from new. There was no middle
distance in her perspective—romantic recollections of sunny afternoons
on an esplanade, with military bands, officers, and gallants around,
stood like gilded letters upon the dark tablet of surrounding Egdon.
Every bizarre effect that could result from the random intertwining of
watering-place glitter with the grand solemnity of a heath, was to be
found in her. Seeing nothing of human life now, she imagined all the
more of what she had seen.

Where did her dignity come from? By a latent vein from Alcinous’ line,
her father hailing from Phæacia’s isle?—or from Fitzalan and De Vere,
her maternal grandfather having had a cousin in the peerage? Perhaps it
was the gift of Heaven—a happy convergence of natural laws. Among other
things opportunity had of late years been denied her of learning to be
undignified, for she lived lonely. Isolation on a heath renders
vulgarity well-nigh impossible. It would have been as easy for the
heath-ponies, bats, and snakes to be vulgar as for her. A narrow life
in Budmouth might have completely demeaned her.

The only way to look queenly without realms or hearts to queen it over
is to look as if you had lost them; and Eustacia did that to a triumph.
In the captain’s cottage she could suggest mansions she had never seen.
Perhaps that was because she frequented a vaster mansion than any of
them, the open hills. Like the summer condition of the place around
her, she was an embodiment of the phrase “a populous
solitude”—apparently so listless, void, and quiet, she was really busy
and full.

To be loved to madness—such was her great desire. Love was to her the
one cordial which could drive away the eating loneliness of her days.
And she seemed to long for the abstraction called passionate love more
than for any particular lover.

She could show a most reproachful look at times, but it was directed
less against human beings than against certain creatures of her mind,
the chief of these being Destiny, through whose interference she dimly
fancied it arose that love alighted only on gliding youth—that any love
she might win would sink simultaneously with the sand in the glass. She
thought of it with an ever-growing consciousness of cruelty, which
tended to breed actions of reckless unconventionality, framed to snatch
a year’s, a week’s, even an hour’s passion from anywhere while it could
be won. Through want of it she had sung without being merry, possessed
without enjoying, outshone without triumphing. Her loneliness deepened
her desire. On Egdon, coldest and meanest kisses were at famine prices,
and where was a mouth matching hers to be found?

Fidelity in love for fidelity’s sake had less attraction for her than
for most women; fidelity because of love’s grip had much. A blaze of
love, and extinction, was better than a lantern glimmer of the same
which should last long years. On this head she knew by prevision what
most women learn only by experience—she had mentally walked round love,
told the towers thereof, considered its palaces, and concluded that
love was but a doleful joy. Yet she desired it, as one in a desert
would be thankful for brackish water.

She often repeated her prayers; not at particular times, but, like the
unaffectedly devout, when she desired to pray. Her prayer was always
spontaneous, and often ran thus, “O deliver my heart from this fearful
gloom and loneliness; send me great love from somewhere, else I shall
die.”

Her high gods were William the Conqueror, Strafford, and Napoleon
Buonaparte, as they had appeared in the Lady’s History used at the
establishment in which she was educated. Had she been a mother she
would have christened her boys such names as Saul or Sisera in
preference to Jacob or David, neither of whom she admired. At school
she had used to side with the Philistines in several battles, and had
wondered if Pontius Pilate were as handsome as he was frank and fair.

Thus she was a girl of some forwardness of mind, indeed, weighed in
relation to her situation among the very rearward of thinkers, very
original. Her instincts towards social non-comformity were at the root
of this. In the matter of holidays, her mood was that of horses who,
when turned out to grass, enjoy looking upon their kind at work on the
highway. She only valued rest to herself when it came in the midst of
other people’s labour. Hence she hated Sundays when all was at rest,
and often said they would be the death of her. To see the heathmen in
their Sunday condition, that is, with their hands in their pockets,
their boots newly oiled, and not laced up (a particularly Sunday sign),
walking leisurely among the turves and furze-faggots they had cut
during the week, and kicking them critically as if their use were
unknown, was a fearful heaviness to her. To relieve the tedium of this
untimely day she would overhaul the cupboards containing her
grandfather’s old charts and other rubbish, humming Saturday-night
ballads of the country people the while. But on Saturday nights she
would frequently sing a psalm, and it was always on a weekday that she
read the Bible, that she might be unoppressed with a sense of doing her
duty.

Such views of life were to some extent the natural begettings of her
situation upon her nature. To dwell on a heath without studying its
meanings was like wedding a foreigner without learning his tongue. The
subtle beauties of the heath were lost to Eustacia; she only caught its
vapours. An environment which would have made a contented woman a poet,
a suffering woman a devotee, a pious woman a psalmist, even a giddy
woman thoughtful, made a rebellious woman saturnine.

Eustacia had got beyond the vision of some marriage of inexpressible
glory; yet, though her emotions were in full vigour, she cared for no
meaner union. Thus we see her in a strange state of isolation. To have
lost the godlike conceit that we may do what we will, and not to have
acquired a homely zest for doing what we can, shows a grandeur of
temper which cannot be objected to in the abstract, for it denotes a
mind that, though disappointed, forswears compromise. But, if congenial
to philosophy, it is apt to be dangerous to the commonwealth. In a
world where doing means marrying, and the commonwealth is one of hearts
and hands, the same peril attends the condition.

And so we see our Eustacia—for at times she was not altogether
unlovable—arriving at that stage of enlightenment which feels that
nothing is worth while, and filling up the spare hours of her existence
by idealizing Wildeve for want of a better object. This was the sole
reason of his ascendency: she knew it herself. At moments her pride
rebelled against her passion for him, and she even had longed to be
free. But there was only one circumstance which could dislodge him, and
that was the advent of a greater man.

For the rest, she suffered much from depression of spirits, and took
slow walks to recover them, in which she carried her grandfather’s
telescope and her grandmother’s hourglass—the latter because of a
peculiar pleasure she derived from watching a material representation
of time’s gradual glide away. She seldom schemed, but when she did
scheme, her plans showed rather the comprehensive strategy of a general
than the small arts called womanish, though she could utter oracles of
Delphian ambiguity when she did not choose to be direct. In heaven she
will probably sit between the Héloïses and the Cleopatras.




VIII.
Those Who Are Found Where There Is Said to Be Nobody


As soon as the sad little boy had withdrawn from the fire he clasped
the money tight in the palm of his hand, as if thereby to fortify his
courage, and began to run. There was really little danger in allowing a
child to go home alone on this part of Egdon Heath. The distance to the
boy’s house was not more than three-eighths of a mile, his father’s
cottage, and one other a few yards further on, forming part of the
small hamlet of Mistover Knap: the third and only remaining house was
that of Captain Vye and Eustacia, which stood quite away from the small
cottages and was the loneliest of lonely houses on these thinly
populated slopes.

He ran until he was out of breath, and then, becoming more courageous,
walked leisurely along, singing in an old voice a little song about a
sailor-boy and a fair one, and bright gold in store. In the middle of
this the child stopped—from a pit under the hill ahead of him shone a
light, whence proceeded a cloud of floating dust and a smacking noise.

Only unusual sights and sounds frightened the boy. The shrivelled voice
of the heath did not alarm him, for that was familiar. The thornbushes
which arose in his path from time to time were less satisfactory, for
they whistled gloomily, and had a ghastly habit after dark of putting
on the shapes of jumping madmen, sprawling giants, and hideous
cripples. Lights were not uncommon this evening, but the nature of all
of them was different from this. Discretion rather than terror prompted
the boy to turn back instead of passing the light, with a view of
asking Miss Eustacia Vye to let her servant accompany him home.

When the boy had reascended to the top of the valley he found the fire
to be still burning on the bank, though lower than before. Beside it,
instead of Eustacia’s solitary form, he saw two persons, the second
being a man. The boy crept along under the bank to ascertain from the
nature of the proceedings if it would be prudent to interrupt so
splendid a creature as Miss Eustacia on his poor trivial account.

After listening under the bank for some minutes to the talk he turned
in a perplexed and doubting manner and began to withdraw as silently as
he had come. That he did not, upon the whole, think it advisable to
interrupt her conversation with Wildeve, without being prepared to bear
the whole weight of her displeasure, was obvious.

Here was a Scyllæo-Charybdean position for a poor boy. Pausing when
again safe from discovery, he finally decided to face the pit
phenomenon as the lesser evil. With a heavy sigh he retraced the slope,
and followed the path he had followed before.

The light had gone, the rising dust had disappeared—he hoped for ever.
He marched resolutely along, and found nothing to alarm him till,
coming within a few yards of the sandpit, he heard a slight noise in
front, which led him to halt. The halt was but momentary, for the noise
resolved itself into the steady bites of two animals grazing.

“Two he’th-croppers down here,” he said aloud. “I have never known ’em
come down so far afore.”

The animals were in the direct line of his path, but that the child
thought little of; he had played round the fetlocks of horses from his
infancy. On coming nearer, however, the boy was somewhat surprised to
find that the little creatures did not run off, and that each wore a
clog, to prevent his going astray; this signified that they had been
broken in. He could now see the interior of the pit, which, being in
the side of the hill, had a level entrance. In the innermost corner the
square outline of a van appeared, with its back towards him. A light
came from the interior, and threw a moving shadow upon the vertical
face of gravel at the further side of the pit into which the vehicle
faced.

The child assumed that this was the cart of a gipsy, and his dread of
those wanderers reached but to that mild pitch which titillates rather
than pains. Only a few inches of mud wall kept him and his family from
being gipsies themselves. He skirted the gravel pit at a respectful
distance, ascended the slope, and came forward upon the brow, in order
to look into the open door of the van and see the original of the
shadow.

The picture alarmed the boy. By a little stove inside the van sat a
figure red from head to heels—the man who had been Thomasin’s friend.
He was darning a stocking, which was red like the rest of him.
Moreover, as he darned he smoked a pipe, the stem and bowl of which
were red also.

At this moment one of the heath-croppers feeding in the outer shadows
was audibly shaking off the clog attached to its foot. Aroused by the
sound, the reddleman laid down his stocking, lit a lantern which hung
beside him, and came out from the van. In sticking up the candle he
lifted the lantern to his face, and the light shone into the whites of
his eyes and upon his ivory teeth, which, in contrast with the red
surrounding, lent him a startling aspect enough to the gaze of a
juvenile. The boy knew too well for his peace of mind upon whose lair
he had lighted. Uglier persons than gipsies were known to cross Egdon
at times, and a reddleman was one of them.

“How I wish ’twas only a gipsy!” he murmured.

The man was by this time coming back from the horses. In his fear of
being seen the boy rendered detection certain by nervous motion. The
heather and peat stratum overhung the brow of the pit in mats, hiding
the actual verge. The boy had stepped beyond the solid ground; the
heather now gave way, and down he rolled over the scarp of grey sand to
the very foot of the man.

The red man opened the lantern and turned it upon the figure of the
prostrate boy.

“Who be ye?” he said.

“Johnny Nunsuch, master!”

“What were you doing up there?”

“I don’t know.”

“Watching me, I suppose?”

“Yes, master.”

“What did you watch me for?”

“Because I was coming home from Miss Vye’s bonfire.”

“Beest hurt?”

“No.”

“Why, yes, you be—your hand is bleeding. Come under my tilt and let me
tie it up.”

“Please let me look for my sixpence.”

“How did you come by that?”

“Miss Vye gied it to me for keeping up her bonfire.”

The sixpence was found, and the man went to the van, the boy behind,
almost holding his breath.

The man took a piece of rag from a satchel containing sewing materials,
tore off a strip, which, like everything else, was tinged red, and
proceeded to bind up the wound.

“My eyes have got foggy-like—please may I sit down, master?” said the
boy.

“To be sure, poor chap. ’Tis enough to make you feel fainty. Sit on
that bundle.”

The man finished tying up the gash, and the boy said, “I think I’ll go
home now, master.”

“You are rather afraid of me. Do you know what I be?”

The child surveyed his vermilion figure up and down with much misgiving
and finally said, “Yes.”

“Well, what?”

“The reddleman!” he faltered.

“Yes, that’s what I be. Though there’s more than one. You little
children think there’s only one cuckoo, one fox, one giant, one devil,
and one reddleman, when there’s lots of us all.”

“Is there? You won’t carry me off in your bags, will ye, master? ’Tis
said that the reddleman will sometimes.”

“Nonsense. All that reddlemen do is sell reddle. You see all these bags
at the back of my cart? They are not full of little boys—only full of
red stuff.”

“Was you born a reddleman?”

“No, I took to it. I should be as white as you if I were to give up the
trade—that is, I should be white in time—perhaps six months; not at
first, because ’tis grow’d into my skin and won’t wash out. Now, you’ll
never be afraid of a reddleman again, will ye?”

“No, never. Willy Orchard said he seed a red ghost here t’other
day—perhaps that was you?”

“I was here t’other day.”

“Were you making that dusty light I saw by now?”

“Oh yes, I was beating out some bags. And have you had a good bonfire
up there? I saw the light. Why did Miss Vye want a bonfire so bad that
she should give you sixpence to keep it up?”

“I don’t know. I was tired, but she made me bide and keep up the fire
just the same, while she kept going up across Rainbarrow way.”

“And how long did that last?”

“Until a hopfrog jumped into the pond.”

The reddleman suddenly ceased to talk idly. “A hopfrog?” he inquired.
“Hopfrogs don’t jump into ponds this time of year.”

“They do, for I heard one.”

“Certain-sure?”

“Yes. She told me afore that I should hear’n; and so I did. They say
she’s clever and deep, and perhaps she charmed ’en to come.”

“And what then?”

“Then I came down here, and I was afeard, and I went back; but I didn’t
like to speak to her, because of the gentleman, and I came on here
again.”

“A gentleman—ah! What did she say to him, my man?”

“Told him she supposed he had not married the other woman because he
liked his old sweetheart best; and things like that.”

“What did the gentleman say to her, my sonny?”

“He only said he did like her best, and how he was coming to see her
again under Rainbarrow o’ nights.”

“Ha!” cried the reddleman, slapping his hand against the side of his
van so that the whole fabric shook under the blow. “That’s the secret
o’t!”

The little boy jumped clean from the stool.

“My man, don’t you be afraid,” said the dealer in red, suddenly
becoming gentle. “I forgot you were here. That’s only a curious way
reddlemen have of going mad for a moment; but they don’t hurt anybody.
And what did the lady say then?”

“I can’t mind. Please, Master Reddleman, may I go home-along now?”

“Ay, to be sure you may. I’ll go a bit of ways with you.”

He conducted the boy out of the gravel pit and into the path leading to
his mother’s cottage. When the little figure had vanished in the
darkness the reddleman returned, resumed his seat by the fire, and
proceeded to darn again.




IX.
Love Leads a Shrewd Man into Strategy


Reddlemen of the old school are now but seldom seen. Since the
introduction of railways Wessex farmers have managed to do without
these Mephistophelian visitants, and the bright pigment so largely used
by shepherds in preparing sheep for the fair is obtained by other
routes. Even those who yet survive are losing the poetry of existence
which characterized them when the pursuit of the trade meant periodical
journeys to the pit whence the material was dug, a regular camping out
from month to month, except in the depth of winter, a peregrination
among farms which could be counted by the hundred, and in spite of this
Arab existence the preservation of that respectability which is insured
by the never-failing production of a well-lined purse.

Reddle spreads its lively hues over everything it lights on, and stamps
unmistakably, as with the mark of Cain, any person who has handled it
half an hour.

A child’s first sight of a reddleman was an epoch in his life. That
blood-coloured figure was a sublimation of all the horrid dreams which
had afflicted the juvenile spirit since imagination began. “The
reddleman is coming for you!” had been the formulated threat of Wessex
mothers for many generations. He was successfully supplanted for a
while, at the beginning of the present century, by Buonaparte; but as
process of time rendered the latter personage stale and ineffective the
older phrase resumed its early prominence. And now the reddleman has in
his turn followed Buonaparte to the land of worn-out bogeys, and his
place is filled by modern inventions.

The reddleman lived like a gipsy; but gipsies he scorned. He was about
as thriving as travelling basket and mat makers; but he had nothing to
do with them. He was more decently born and brought up than the
cattledrovers who passed and repassed him in his wanderings; but they
merely nodded to him. His stock was more valuable than that of pedlars;
but they did not think so, and passed his cart with eyes straight
ahead. He was such an unnatural colour to look at that the men of
roundabouts and waxwork shows seemed gentlemen beside him; but he
considered them low company, and remained aloof. Among all these
squatters and folks of the road the reddleman continually found
himself; yet he was not of them. His occupation tended to isolate him,
and isolated he was mostly seen to be.

It was sometimes suggested that reddlemen were criminals for whose
misdeeds other men wrongfully suffered—that in escaping the law they
had not escaped their own consciences, and had taken to the trade as a
lifelong penance. Else why should they have chosen it? In the present
case such a question would have been particularly apposite. The
reddleman who had entered Egdon that afternoon was an instance of the
pleasing being wasted to form the ground-work of the singular, when an
ugly foundation would have done just as well for that purpose. The one
point that was forbidding about this reddleman was his colour. Freed
from that he would have been as agreeable a specimen of rustic manhood
as one would often see. A keen observer might have been inclined to
think—which was, indeed, partly the truth—that he had relinquished his
proper station in life for want of interest in it. Moreover, after
looking at him one would have hazarded the guess that good nature, and
an acuteness as extreme as it could be without verging on craft, formed
the framework of his character.

While he darned the stocking his face became rigid with thought. Softer
expressions followed this, and then again recurred the tender sadness
which had sat upon him during his drive along the highway that
afternoon. Presently his needle stopped. He laid down the stocking,
arose from his seat, and took a leathern pouch from a hook in the
corner of the van. This contained among other articles a brown-paper
packet, which, to judge from the hinge-like character of its worn
folds, seemed to have been carefully opened and closed a good many
times. He sat down on a three-legged milking stool that formed the only
seat in the van, and, examining his packet by the light of a candle,
took thence an old letter and spread it open. The writing had
originally been traced on white paper, but the letter had now assumed a
pale red tinge from the accident of its situation; and the black
strokes of writing thereon looked like the twigs of a winter hedge
against a vermilion sunset. The letter bore a date some two years
previous to that time, and was signed “Thomasin Yeobright.” It ran as
follows:—

DEAR DIGGORY VENN,—The question you put when you overtook me coming
home from Pond-close gave me such a surprise that I am afraid I did not
make you exactly understand what I meant. Of course, if my aunt had not
met me I could have explained all then at once, but as it was there was
no chance. I have been quite uneasy since, as you know I do not wish to
pain you, yet I fear I shall be doing so now in contradicting what I
seemed to say then. I cannot, Diggory, marry you, or think of letting
you call me your sweetheart. I could not, indeed, Diggory. I hope you
will not much mind my saying this, and feel in a great pain. It makes
me very sad when I think it may, for I like you very much, and I always
put you next to my cousin Clym in my mind. There are so many reasons
why we cannot be married that I can hardly name them all in a letter. I
did not in the least expect that you were going to speak on such a
thing when you followed me, because I had never thought of you in the
sense of a lover at all. You must not becall me for laughing when you
spoke; you mistook when you thought I laughed at you as a foolish man.
I laughed because the idea was so odd, and not at you at all. The great
reason with my own personal self for not letting you court me is, that
I do not feel the things a woman ought to feel who consents to walk
with you with the meaning of being your wife. It is not as you think,
that I have another in my mind, for I do not encourage anybody, and
never have in my life. Another reason is my aunt. She would not, I
know, agree to it, even if I wished to have you. She likes you very
well, but she will want me to look a little higher than a small
dairy-farmer, and marry a professional man. I hope you will not set
your heart against me for writing plainly, but I felt you might try to
see me again, and it is better that we should not meet. I shall always
think of you as a good man, and be anxious for your well-doing. I send
this by Jane Orchard’s little maid,—And remain Diggory, your faithful
friend,

THOMASIN YEOBRIGHT.


To Mr. VENN, Dairy-farmer.

Since the arrival of that letter, on a certain autumn morning long ago,
the reddleman and Thomasin had not met till today. During the interval
he had shifted his position even further from hers than it had
originally been, by adopting the reddle trade; though he was really in
very good circumstances still. Indeed, seeing that his expenditure was
only one-fourth of his income, he might have been called a prosperous
man.

Rejected suitors take to roaming as naturally as unhived bees; and the
business to which he had cynically devoted himself was in many ways
congenial to Venn. But his wanderings, by mere stress of old emotions,
had frequently taken an Egdon direction, though he never intruded upon
her who attracted him thither. To be in Thomasin’s heath, and near her,
yet unseen, was the one ewe-lamb of pleasure left to him.

Then came the incident of that day, and the reddleman, still loving her
well, was excited by this accidental service to her at a critical
juncture to vow an active devotion to her cause, instead of, as
hitherto, sighing and holding aloof. After what had happened it was
impossible that he should not doubt the honesty of Wildeve’s
intentions. But her hope was apparently centred upon him; and
dismissing his regrets Venn determined to aid her to be happy in her
own chosen way. That this way was, of all others, the most distressing
to himself, was awkward enough; but the reddleman’s love was generous.

His first active step in watching over Thomasin’s interests was taken
about seven o’clock the next evening and was dictated by the news which
he had learnt from the sad boy. That Eustacia was somehow the cause of
Wildeve’s carelessness in relation to the marriage had at once been
Venn’s conclusion on hearing of the secret meeting between them. It did
not occur to his mind that Eustacia’s love signal to Wildeve was the
tender effect upon the deserted beauty of the intelligence which her
grandfather had brought home. His instinct was to regard her as a
conspirator against rather than as an antecedent obstacle to Thomasin’s
happiness.

During the day he had been exceedingly anxious to learn the condition
of Thomasin, but he did not venture to intrude upon a threshold to
which he was a stranger, particularly at such an unpleasant moment as
this. He had occupied his time in moving with his ponies and load to a
new point in the heath, eastward to his previous station; and here he
selected a nook with a careful eye to shelter from wind and rain, which
seemed to mean that his stay there was to be a comparatively extended
one. After this he returned on foot some part of the way that he had
come; and, it being now dark, he diverged to the left till he stood
behind a holly bush on the edge of a pit not twenty yards from
Rainbarrow.

He watched for a meeting there, but he watched in vain. Nobody except
himself came near the spot that night.

But the loss of his labour produced little effect upon the reddleman.
He had stood in the shoes of Tantalus, and seemed to look upon a
certain mass of disappointment as the natural preface to all
realizations, without which preface they would give cause for alarm.

The same hour the next evening found him again at the same place; but
Eustacia and Wildeve, the expected trysters, did not appear.

He pursued precisely the same course yet four nights longer, and
without success. But on the next, being the day-week of their previous
meeting, he saw a female shape floating along the ridge and the outline
of a young man ascending from the valley. They met in the little ditch
encircling the barrow—the original excavation from which it had been
thrown up by the ancient British people.

The reddleman, stung with suspicion of wrong to Thomasin, was aroused
to strategy in a moment. He instantly left the bush and crept forward
on his hands and knees. When he had got as close as he might safely
venture without discovery he found that, owing to a cross-wind, the
conversation of the trysting pair could not be overheard.

Near him, as in divers places about the heath, were areas strewn with
large turves, which lay edgeways and upside down awaiting removal by
Timothy Fairway, previous to the winter weather. He took two of these
as he lay, and dragged them over him till one covered his head and
shoulders, the other his back and legs. The reddleman would now have
been quite invisible, even by daylight; the turves, standing upon him
with the heather upwards, looked precisely as if they were growing. He
crept along again, and the turves upon his back crept with him. Had he
approached without any covering the chances are that he would not have
been perceived in the dusk; approaching thus, it was as though he
burrowed underground. In this manner he came quite close to where the
two were standing.

“Wish to consult me on the matter?” reached his ears in the rich,
impetuous accents of Eustacia Vye. “Consult me? It is an indignity to
me to talk so—I won’t bear it any longer!” She began weeping. “I have
loved you, and have shown you that I loved you, much to my regret; and
yet you can come and say in that frigid way that you wish to consult
with me whether it would not be better to marry Thomasin. Better—of
course it would be. Marry her—she is nearer to your own position in
life than I am!”

“Yes, yes; that’s very well,” said Wildeve peremptorily. “But we must
look at things as they are. Whatever blame may attach to me for having
brought it about, Thomasin’s position is at present much worse than
yours. I simply tell you that I am in a strait.”

“But you shall not tell me! You must see that it is only harassing me.
Damon, you have not acted well; you have sunk in my opinion. You have
not valued my courtesy—the courtesy of a lady in loving you—who used to
think of far more ambitious things. But it was Thomasin’s fault. She
won you away from me, and she deserves to suffer for it. Where is she
staying now? Not that I care, nor where I am myself. Ah, if I were dead
and gone how glad she would be! Where is she, I ask?”

“Thomasin is now staying at her aunt’s shut up in a bedroom, and
keeping out of everybody’s sight,” he said indifferently.

“I don’t think you care much about her even now,” said Eustacia with
sudden joyousness, “for if you did you wouldn’t talk so coolly about
her. Do you talk so coolly to her about me? Ah, I expect you do! Why
did you originally go away from me? I don’t think I can ever forgive
you, except on one condition, that whenever you desert me, you come
back again, sorry that you served me so.”

“I never wish to desert you.”

“I do not thank you for that. I should hate it to be all smooth.
Indeed, I think I like you to desert me a little once now and then.
Love is the dismallest thing where the lover is quite honest. O, it is
a shame to say so; but it is true!” She indulged in a little laugh. “My
low spirits begin at the very idea. Don’t you offer me tame love, or
away you go!”

“I wish Tamsie were not such a confoundedly good little woman,” said
Wildeve, “so that I could be faithful to you without injuring a worthy
person. It is I who am the sinner after all; I am not worth the little
finger of either of you.”

“But you must not sacrifice yourself to her from any sense of justice,”
replied Eustacia quickly. “If you do not love her it is the most
merciful thing in the long run to leave her as she is. That’s always
the best way. There, now I have been unwomanly, I suppose. When you
have left me I am always angry with myself for things that I have said
to you.”

Wildeve walked a pace or two among the heather without replying. The
pause was filled up by the intonation of a pollard thorn a little way
to windward, the breezes filtering through its unyielding twigs as
through a strainer. It was as if the night sang dirges with clenched
teeth.

She continued, half sorrowfully, “Since meeting you last, it has
occurred to me once or twice that perhaps it was not for love of me you
did not marry her. Tell me, Damon—I’ll try to bear it. Had I nothing
whatever to do with the matter?”

“Do you press me to tell?”

“Yes, I must know. I see I have been too ready to believe in my own
power.”

“Well, the immediate reason was that the license would not do for the
place, and before I could get another she ran away. Up to that point
you had nothing to do with it. Since then her aunt has spoken to me in
a tone which I don’t at all like.”

“Yes, yes! I am nothing in it—I am nothing in it. You only trifle with
me. Heaven, what can I, Eustacia Vye, be made of to think so much of
you!”

“Nonsense; do not be so passionate.... Eustacia, how we roved among
these bushes last year, when the hot days had got cool, and the shades
of the hills kept us almost invisible in the hollows!”

She remained in moody silence till she said, “Yes; and how I used to
laugh at you for daring to look up to me! But you have well made me
suffer for that since.”

“Yes, you served me cruelly enough until I thought I had found someone
fairer than you. A blessed find for me, Eustacia.”

“Do you still think you found somebody fairer?”

“Sometimes I do, sometimes I don’t. The scales are balanced so nicely
that a feather would turn them.”

“But don’t you really care whether I meet you or whether I don’t?” she
said slowly.

“I care a little, but not enough to break my rest,” replied the young
man languidly. “No, all that’s past. I find there are two flowers where
I thought there was only one. Perhaps there are three, or four, or any
number as good as the first.... Mine is a curious fate. Who would have
thought that all this could happen to me?”

She interrupted with a suppressed fire of which either love or anger
seemed an equally possible issue, “Do you love me now?”

“Who can say?”

“Tell me; I will know it!”

“I do, and I do not,” said he mischievously. “That is, I have my times
and my seasons. One moment you are too tall, another moment you are too
do-nothing, another too melancholy, another too dark, another I don’t
know what, except—that you are not the whole world to me that you used
to be, my dear. But you are a pleasant lady to know and nice to meet,
and I dare say as sweet as ever—almost.”

Eustacia was silent, and she turned from him, till she said, in a voice
of suspended mightiness, “I am for a walk, and this is my way.”

“Well, I can do worse than follow you.”

“You know you can’t do otherwise, for all your moods and changes!” she
answered defiantly. “Say what you will; try as you may; keep away from
me all that you can—you will never forget me. You will love me all your
life long. You would jump to marry me!”

“So I would!” said Wildeve. “Such strange thoughts as I’ve had from
time to time, Eustacia; and they come to me this moment. You hate the
heath as much as ever; that I know.”

“I do,” she murmured deeply. “’Tis my cross, my shame, and will be my
death!”

“I abhor it too,” said he. “How mournfully the wind blows round us
now!”

She did not answer. Its tone was indeed solemn and pervasive. Compound
utterances addressed themselves to their senses, and it was possible to
view by ear the features of the neighbourhood. Acoustic pictures were
returned from the darkened scenery; they could hear where the tracts of
heather began and ended; where the furze was growing stalky and tall;
where it had been recently cut; in what direction the fir-clump lay,
and how near was the pit in which the hollies grew; for these differing
features had their voices no less than their shapes and colours.

“God, how lonely it is!” resumed Wildeve. “What are picturesque ravines
and mists to us who see nothing else? Why should we stay here? Will you
go with me to America? I have kindred in Wisconsin.”

“That wants consideration.”

“It seems impossible to do well here, unless one were a wild bird or a
landscape-painter. Well?”

“Give me time,” she softly said, taking his hand. “America is so far
away. Are you going to walk with me a little way?”

As Eustacia uttered the latter words she retired from the base of the
barrow, and Wildeve followed her, so that the reddleman could hear no
more.

He lifted the turves and arose. Their black figures sank and
disappeared from against the sky. They were as two horns which the
sluggish heath had put forth from its crown, like a mollusc, and had
now again drawn in.

The reddleman’s walk across the vale, and over into the next where his
cart lay, was not sprightly for a slim young fellow of twenty-four. His
spirit was perturbed to aching. The breezes that blew around his mouth
in that walk carried off upon them the accents of a commination.

He entered the van, where there was a fire in a stove. Without lighting
his candle he sat down at once on the three-legged stool, and pondered
on what he had seen and heard touching that still-loved one of his. He
uttered a sound which was neither sigh nor sob, but was even more
indicative than either of a troubled mind.

“My Tamsie,” he whispered heavily. “What can be done? Yes, I will see
that Eustacia Vye.”




X.
A Desperate Attempt at Persuasion


The next morning, at the time when the height of the sun appeared very
insignificant from any part of the heath as compared with the altitude
of Rainbarrow, and when all the little hills in the lower levels were
like an archipelago in a fog-formed Ægean, the reddleman came from the
brambled nook which he had adopted as his quarters and ascended the
slopes of Mistover Knap.

Though these shaggy hills were apparently so solitary, several keen
round eyes were always ready on such a wintry morning as this to
converge upon a passer-by. Feathered species sojourned here in hiding
which would have created wonder if found elsewhere. A bustard haunted
the spot, and not many years before this five and twenty might have
been seen in Egdon at one time. Marsh-harriers looked up from the
valley by Wildeve’s. A cream-coloured courser had used to visit this
hill, a bird so rare that not more than a dozen have ever been seen in
England; but a barbarian rested neither night nor day till he had shot
the African truant, and after that event cream-coloured coursers
thought fit to enter Egdon no more.

A traveller who should walk and observe any of these visitants as Venn
observed them now could feel himself to be in direct communication with
regions unknown to man. Here in front of him was a wild mallard—just
arrived from the home of the north wind. The creature brought within
him an amplitude of Northern knowledge. Glacial catastrophes, snowstorm
episodes, glittering auroral effects, Polaris in the zenith, Franklin
underfoot—the category of his commonplaces was wonderful. But the bird,
like many other philosophers, seemed as he looked at the reddleman to
think that a present moment of comfortable reality was worth a decade
of memories.

Venn passed on through these towards the house of the isolated beauty
who lived up among them and despised them. The day was Sunday; but as
going to church, except to be married or buried, was exceptional at
Egdon, this made little difference. He had determined upon the bold
stroke of asking for an interview with Miss Vye—to attack her position
as Thomasin’s rival either by art or by storm, showing therein,
somewhat too conspicuously, the want of gallantry characteristic of a
certain astute sort of men, from clowns to kings. The great Frederick
making war on the beautiful Archduchess, Napoleon refusing terms to the
beautiful Queen of Prussia, were not more dead to difference of sex
than the reddleman was, in his peculiar way, in planning the
displacement of Eustacia.

To call at the captain’s cottage was always more or less an undertaking
for the inferior inhabitants. Though occasionally chatty, his moods
were erratic, and nobody could be certain how he would behave at any
particular moment. Eustacia was reserved, and lived very much to
herself. Except the daughter of one of the cotters, who was their
servant, and a lad who worked in the garden and stable, scarcely anyone
but themselves ever entered the house. They were the only genteel
people of the district except the Yeobrights, and though far from rich,
they did not feel that necessity for preserving a friendly face towards
every man, bird, and beast which influenced their poorer neighbours.

When the reddleman entered the garden the old man was looking through
his glass at the stain of blue sea in the distant landscape, the little
anchors on his buttons twinkling in the sun. He recognized Venn as his
companion on the highway, but made no remark on that circumstance,
merely saying, “Ah, reddleman—you here? Have a glass of grog?”

Venn declined, on the plea of it being too early, and stated that his
business was with Miss Vye. The captain surveyed him from cap to
waistcoat and from waistcoat to leggings for a few moments, and finally
asked him to go indoors.

Miss Vye was not to be seen by anybody just then; and the reddleman
waited in the window-bench of the kitchen, his hands hanging across his
divergent knees, and his cap hanging from his hands.

“I suppose the young lady is not up yet?” he presently said to the
servant.

“Not quite yet. Folks never call upon ladies at this time of day.”

“Then I’ll step outside,” said Venn. “If she is willing to see me, will
she please send out word, and I’ll come in.”

The reddleman left the house and loitered on the hill adjoining. A
considerable time elapsed, and no request for his presence was brought.
He was beginning to think that his scheme had failed, when he beheld
the form of Eustacia herself coming leisurely towards him. A sense of
novelty in giving audience to that singular figure had been sufficient
to draw her forth.

She seemed to feel, after a bare look at Diggory Venn, that the man had
come on a strange errand, and that he was not so mean as she had
thought him; for her close approach did not cause him to writhe
uneasily, or shift his feet, or show any of those little signs which
escape an ingenuous rustic at the advent of the uncommon in womankind.
On his inquiring if he might have a conversation with her she replied,
“Yes, walk beside me,” and continued to move on.

Before they had gone far it occurred to the perspicacious reddleman
that he would have acted more wisely by appearing less
unimpressionable, and he resolved to correct the error as soon as he
could find opportunity.

“I have made so bold, miss, as to step across and tell you some strange
news which has come to my ears about that man.”

“Ah! what man?”

He jerked his elbow to the southeast—the direction of the Quiet Woman.

Eustacia turned quickly to him. “Do you mean Mr. Wildeve?”

“Yes, there is trouble in a household on account of him, and I have
come to let you know of it, because I believe you might have power to
drive it away.”

“I? What is the trouble?”

“It is quite a secret. It is that he may refuse to marry Thomasin
Yeobright after all.”

Eustacia, though set inwardly pulsing by his words, was equal to her
part in such a drama as this. She replied coldly, “I do not wish to
listen to this, and you must not expect me to interfere.”

“But, miss, you will hear one word?”

“I cannot. I am not interested in the marriage, and even if I were I
could not compel Mr. Wildeve to do my bidding.”

“As the only lady on the heath I think you might,” said Venn with
subtle indirectness. “This is how the case stands. Mr. Wildeve would
marry Thomasin at once, and make all matters smooth, if so be there
were not another woman in the case. This other woman is some person he
has picked up with, and meets on the heath occasionally, I believe. He
will never marry her, and yet through her he may never marry the woman
who loves him dearly. Now, if you, miss, who have so much sway over us
menfolk, were to insist that he should treat your young neighbour
Tamsin with honourable kindness and give up the other woman, he would
perhaps do it, and save her a good deal of misery.”

“Ah, my life!” said Eustacia, with a laugh which unclosed her lips so
that the sun shone into her mouth as into a tulip, and lent it a
similar scarlet fire. “You think too much of my influence over menfolk
indeed, reddleman. If I had such a power as you imagine I would go
straight and use it for the good of anybody who has been kind to
me—which Thomasin Yeobright has not particularly, to my knowledge.”

“Can it be that you really don’t know of it—how much she had always
thought of you?”

“I have never heard a word of it. Although we live only two miles apart
I have never been inside her aunt’s house in my life.”

The superciliousness that lurked in her manner told Venn that thus far
he had utterly failed. He inwardly sighed and felt it necessary to
unmask his second argument.

“Well, leaving that out of the question, ’tis in your power, I assure
you, Miss Vye, to do a great deal of good to another woman.”

She shook her head.

“Your comeliness is law with Mr. Wildeve. It is law with all men who
see ’ee. They say, ‘This well-favoured lady coming—what’s her name? How
handsome!’ Handsomer than Thomasin Yeobright,” the reddleman persisted,
saying to himself, “God forgive a rascal for lying!” And she was
handsomer, but the reddleman was far from thinking so. There was a
certain obscurity in Eustacia’s beauty, and Venn’s eye was not trained.
In her winter dress, as now, she was like the tiger-beetle, which, when
observed in dull situations, seems to be of the quietest neutral
colour, but under a full illumination blazes with dazzling splendour.

Eustacia could not help replying, though conscious that she endangered
her dignity thereby. “Many women are lovelier than Thomasin,” she said,
“so not much attaches to that.”

The reddleman suffered the wound and went on: “He is a man who notices
the looks of women, and you could twist him to your will like
withywind, if you only had the mind.”

“Surely what she cannot do who has been so much with him I cannot do
living up here away from him.”

The reddleman wheeled and looked her in the face. “Miss Vye!” he said.

“Why do you say that—as if you doubted me?” She spoke faintly, and her
breathing was quick. “The idea of your speaking in that tone to me!”
she added, with a forced smile of hauteur. “What could have been in
your mind to lead you to speak like that?”

“Miss Vye, why should you make believe that you don’t know this man?—I
know why, certainly. He is beneath you, and you are ashamed.”

“You are mistaken. What do you mean?”

The reddleman had decided to play the card of truth. “I was at the
meeting by Rainbarrow last night and heard every word,” he said. “The
woman that stands between Wildeve and Thomasin is yourself.”

It was a disconcerting lift of the curtain, and the mortification of
Candaules’ wife glowed in her. The moment had arrived when her lip
would tremble in spite of herself, and when the gasp could no longer be
kept down.

“I am unwell,” she said hurriedly. “No—it is not that—I am not in a
humour to hear you further. Leave me, please.”

“I must speak, Miss Vye, in spite of paining you. What I would put
before you is this. However it may come about—whether she is to blame,
or you—her case is without doubt worse than yours. Your giving up Mr.
Wildeve will be a real advantage to you, for how could you marry him?
Now she cannot get off so easily—everybody will blame her if she loses
him. Then I ask you—not because her right is best, but because her
situation is worst—to give him up to her.”

“No—I won’t, I won’t!” she said impetuously, quite forgetful of her
previous manner towards the reddleman as an underling. “Nobody has ever
been served so! It was going on well—I will not be beaten down—by an
inferior woman like her. It is very well for you to come and plead for
her, but is she not herself the cause of all her own trouble? Am I not
to show favour to any person I may choose without asking permission of
a parcel of cottagers? She has come between me and my inclination, and
now that she finds herself rightly punished she gets you to plead for
her!”

“Indeed,” said Venn earnestly, “she knows nothing whatever about it. It
is only I who ask you to give him up. It will be better for her and you
both. People will say bad things if they find out that a lady secretly
meets a man who has ill-used another woman.”

“I have _not_ injured her—he was mine before he was hers! He came
back—because—because he liked me best!” she said wildly. “But I lose
all self-respect in talking to you. What am I giving way to!”

“I can keep secrets,” said Venn gently. “You need not fear. I am the
only man who knows of your meetings with him. There is but one thing
more to speak of, and then I will be gone. I heard you say to him that
you hated living here—that Egdon Heath was a jail to you.”

“I did say so. There is a sort of beauty in the scenery, I know; but it
is a jail to me. The man you mention does not save me from that
feeling, though he lives here. I should have cared nothing for him had
there been a better person near.”

The reddleman looked hopeful; after these words from her his third
attempt seemed promising. “As we have now opened our minds a bit,
miss,” he said, “I’ll tell you what I have got to propose. Since I have
taken to the reddle trade I travel a good deal, as you know.”

She inclined her head, and swept round so that her eyes rested in the
misty vale beneath them.

“And in my travels I go near Budmouth. Now Budmouth is a wonderful
place—wonderful—a great salt sheening sea bending into the land like a
bow—thousands of gentlepeople walking up and down—bands of music
playing—officers by sea and officers by land walking among the rest—out
of every ten folks you meet nine of ’em in love.”

“I know it,” she said disdainfully. “I know Budmouth better than you. I
was born there. My father came to be a military musician there from
abroad. Ah, my soul, Budmouth! I wish I was there now.”

The reddleman was surprised to see how a slow fire could blaze on
occasion. “If you were, miss,” he replied, “in a week’s time you would
think no more of Wildeve than of one of those he’th-croppers that we
see yond. Now, I could get you there.”

“How?” said Eustacia, with intense curiosity in her heavy eyes.

“My uncle has been for five and twenty years the trusty man of a rich
widow-lady who has a beautiful house facing the sea. This lady has
become old and lame, and she wants a young company-keeper to read and
sing to her, but can’t get one to her mind to save her life, though
she’ve advertised in the papers, and tried half a dozen. She would jump
to get you, and Uncle would make it all easy.”

“I should have to work, perhaps?”

“No, not real work—you’d have a little to do, such as reading and that.
You would not be wanted till New Year’s Day.”

“I knew it meant work,” she said, drooping to languor again.

“I confess there would be a trifle to do in the way of amusing her; but
though idle people might call it work, working people would call it
play. Think of the company and the life you’d lead, miss; the gaiety
you’d see, and the gentleman you’d marry. My uncle is to inquire for a
trustworthy young lady from the country, as she don’t like town girls.”

“It is to wear myself out to please her! and I won’t go. O, if I could
live in a gay town as a lady should, and go my own ways, and do my own
doings, I’d give the wrinkled half of my life! Yes, reddleman, that
would I.”

“Help me to get Thomasin happy, miss, and the chance shall be yours,”
urged her companion.

“Chance—’tis no chance,” she said proudly. “What can a poor man like
you offer me, indeed?—I am going indoors. I have nothing more to say.
Don’t your horses want feeding, or your reddlebags want mending, or
don’t you want to find buyers for your goods, that you stay idling here
like this?”

Venn spoke not another word. With his hands behind him he turned away,
that she might not see the hopeless disappointment in his face. The
mental clearness and power he had found in this lonely girl had indeed
filled his manner with misgiving even from the first few minutes of
close quarters with her. Her youth and situation had led him to expect
a simplicity quite at the beck of his method. But a system of
inducement which might have carried weaker country lasses along with it
had merely repelled Eustacia. As a rule, the word Budmouth meant
fascination on Egdon. That Royal port and watering place, if truly
mirrored in the minds of the heathfolk, must have combined, in a
charming and indescribable manner a Carthaginian bustle of building
with Tarentine luxuriousness and Baian health and beauty. Eustacia felt
little less extravagantly about the place; but she would not sink her
independence to get there.

When Diggory Venn had gone quite away, Eustacia walked to the bank and
looked down the wild and picturesque vale towards the sun, which was
also in the direction of Wildeve’s. The mist had now so far collapsed
that the tips of the trees and bushes around his house could just be
discerned, as if boring upwards through a vast white cobweb which
cloaked them from the day. There was no doubt that her mind was
inclined thitherward; indefinitely, fancifully—twining and untwining
about him as the single object within her horizon on which dreams might
crystallize. The man who had begun by being merely her amusement, and
would never have been more than her hobby but for his skill in
deserting her at the right moments, was now again her desire. Cessation
in his love-making had revivified her love. Such feeling as Eustacia
had idly given to Wildeve was dammed into a flood by Thomasin. She had
used to tease Wildeve, but that was before another had favoured him.
Often a drop of irony into an indifferent situation renders the whole
piquant.

“I will never give him up—never!” she said impetuously.

The reddleman’s hint that rumour might show her to disadvantage had no
permanent terror for Eustacia. She was as unconcerned at that
contingency as a goddess at a lack of linen. This did not originate in
inherent shamelessness, but in her living too far from the world to
feel the impact of public opinion. Zenobia in the desert could hardly
have cared what was said about her at Rome. As far as social ethics
were concerned Eustacia approached the savage state, though in emotion
she was all the while an epicure. She had advanced to the secret
recesses of sensuousness, yet had hardly crossed the threshold of
conventionality.




XI.
The Dishonesty of an Honest Woman


The reddleman had left Eustacia’s presence with desponding views on
Thomasin’s future happiness; but he was awakened to the fact that one
other channel remained untried by seeing, as he followed the way to his
van, the form of Mrs. Yeobright slowly walking towards the Quiet Woman.
He went across to her; and could almost perceive in her anxious face
that this journey of hers to Wildeve was undertaken with the same
object as his own to Eustacia.

She did not conceal the fact. “Then,” said the reddleman, “you may as
well leave it alone, Mrs. Yeobright.”

“I half think so myself,” she said. “But nothing else remains to be
done besides pressing the question upon him.”

“I should like to say a word first,” said Venn firmly. “Mr. Wildeve is
not the only man who has asked Thomasin to marry him; and why should
not another have a chance? Mrs. Yeobright, I should be glad to marry
your niece and would have done it any time these last two years. There,
now it is out, and I have never told anybody before but herself.”

Mrs. Yeobright was not demonstrative, but her eyes involuntarily
glanced towards his singular though shapely figure.

“Looks are not everything,” said the reddleman, noticing the glance.
“There’s many a calling that don’t bring in so much as mine, if it
comes to money; and perhaps I am not so much worse off than Wildeve.
There is nobody so poor as these professional fellows who have failed;
and if you shouldn’t like my redness—well, I am not red by birth, you
know; I only took to this business for a freak; and I might turn my
hand to something else in good time.”

“I am much obliged to you for your interest in my niece; but I fear
there would be objections. More than that, she is devoted to this man.”

“True; or I shouldn’t have done what I have this morning.”

“Otherwise there would be no pain in the case, and you would not see me
going to his house now. What was Thomasin’s answer when you told her of
your feelings?”

“She wrote that you would object to me; and other things.”

“She was in a measure right. You must not take this unkindly—I merely
state it as a truth. You have been good to her, and we do not forget
it. But as she was unwilling on her own account to be your wife, that
settles the point without my wishes being concerned.”

“Yes. But there is a difference between then and now, ma’am. She is
distressed now, and I have thought that if you were to talk to her
about me, and think favourably of me yourself, there might be a chance
of winning her round, and getting her quite independent of this
Wildeve’s backward and forward play, and his not knowing whether he’ll
have her or no.”

Mrs. Yeobright shook her head. “Thomasin thinks, and I think with her,
that she ought to be Wildeve’s wife, if she means to appear before the
world without a slur upon her name. If they marry soon, everybody will
believe that an accident did really prevent the wedding. If not, it may
cast a shade upon her character—at any rate make her ridiculous. In
short, if it is anyhow possible they must marry now.”

“I thought that till half an hour ago. But, after all, why should her
going off with him to Anglebury for a few hours do her any harm?
Anybody who knows how pure she is will feel any such thought to be
quite unjust. I have been trying this morning to help on this marriage
with Wildeve—yes, I, ma’am—in the belief that I ought to do it, because
she was so wrapped up in him. But I much question if I was right, after
all. However, nothing came of it. And now I offer myself.”

Mrs. Yeobright appeared disinclined to enter further into the question.
“I fear I must go on,” she said. “I do not see that anything else can
be done.”

And she went on. But though this conversation did not divert Thomasin’s
aunt from her purposed interview with Wildeve, it made a considerable
difference in her mode of conducting that interview. She thanked God
for the weapon which the reddleman had put into her hands.

Wildeve was at home when she reached the inn. He showed her silently
into the parlour, and closed the door. Mrs. Yeobright began—

“I have thought it my duty to call today. A new proposal has been made
to me, which has rather astonished me. It will affect Thomasin greatly;
and I have decided that it should at least be mentioned to you.”

“Yes? What is it?” he said civilly.

“It is, of course, in reference to her future. You may not be aware
that another man has shown himself anxious to marry Thomasin. Now,
though I have not encouraged him yet, I cannot conscientiously refuse
him a chance any longer. I don’t wish to be short with you; but I must
be fair to him and to her.”

“Who is the man?” said Wildeve with surprise.

“One who has been in love with her longer than she has with you. He
proposed to her two years ago. At that time she refused him.”

“Well?”

“He has seen her lately, and has asked me for permission to pay his
addresses to her. She may not refuse him twice.”

“What is his name?”

Mrs. Yeobright declined to say. “He is a man Thomasin likes,” she
added, “and one whose constancy she respects at least. It seems to me
that what she refused then she would be glad to get now. She is much
annoyed at her awkward position.”

“She never once told me of this old lover.”

“The gentlest women are not such fools as to show _every_ card.”

“Well, if she wants him I suppose she must have him.”

“It is easy enough to say that; but you don’t see the difficulty. He
wants her much more than she wants him; and before I can encourage
anything of the sort I must have a clear understanding from you that
you will not interfere to injure an arrangement which I promote in the
belief that it is for the best. Suppose, when they are engaged, and
everything is smoothly arranged for their marriage, that you should
step between them and renew your suit? You might not win her back, but
you might cause much unhappiness.”

“Of course I should do no such thing,” said Wildeve “But they are not
engaged yet. How do you know that Thomasin would accept him?”

“That’s a question I have carefully put to myself; and upon the whole
the probabilities are in favour of her accepting him in time. I flatter
myself that I have some influence over her. She is pliable, and I can
be strong in my recommendations of him.”

“And in your disparagement of me at the same time.”

“Well, you may depend upon my not praising you,” she said drily. “And
if this seems like manœuvring, you must remember that her position is
peculiar, and that she has been hardly used. I shall also be helped in
making the match by her own desire to escape from the humiliation of
her present state; and a woman’s pride in these cases will lead her a
very great way. A little managing may be required to bring her round;
but I am equal to that, provided that you agree to the one thing
indispensable; that is, to make a distinct declaration that she is to
think no more of you as a possible husband. That will pique her into
accepting him.”

“I can hardly say that just now, Mrs. Yeobright. It is so sudden.”

“And so my whole plan is interfered with! It is very inconvenient that
you refuse to help my family even to the small extent of saying
distinctly you will have nothing to do with us.”

Wildeve reflected uncomfortably. “I confess I was not prepared for
this,” he said. “Of course I’ll give her up if you wish, if it is
necessary. But I thought I might be her husband.”

“We have heard that before.”

“Now, Mrs. Yeobright, don’t let us disagree. Give me a fair time. I
don’t want to stand in the way of any better chance she may have; only
I wish you had let me know earlier. I will write to you or call in a
day or two. Will that suffice?”

“Yes,” she replied, “provided you promise not to communicate with
Thomasin without my knowledge.”

“I promise that,” he said. And the interview then terminated, Mrs.
Yeobright returning homeward as she had come.

By far the greatest effect of her simple strategy on that day was, as
often happens, in a quarter quite outside her view when arranging it.
In the first place, her visit sent Wildeve the same evening after dark
to Eustacia’s house at Mistover.

At this hour the lonely dwelling was closely blinded and shuttered from
the chill and darkness without. Wildeve’s clandestine plan with her was
to take a little gravel in his hand and hold it to the crevice at the
top of the window shutter, which was on the outside, so that it should
fall with a gentle rustle, resembling that of a mouse, between shutter
and glass. This precaution in attracting her attention was to avoid
arousing the suspicions of her grandfather.

The soft words, “I hear; wait for me,” in Eustacia’s voice from within
told him that she was alone.

He waited in his customary manner by walking round the enclosure and
idling by the pool, for Wildeve was never asked into the house by his
proud though condescending mistress. She showed no sign of coming out
in a hurry. The time wore on, and he began to grow impatient. In the
course of twenty minutes she appeared from round the corner, and
advanced as if merely taking an airing.

“You would not have kept me so long had you known what I come about,”
he said with bitterness. “Still, you are worth waiting for.”

“What has happened?” said Eustacia. “I did not know you were in
trouble. I too am gloomy enough.”

“I am not in trouble,” said he. “It is merely that affairs have come to
a head, and I must take a clear course.”

“What course is that?” she asked with attentive interest.

“And can you forget so soon what I proposed to you the other night?
Why, take you from this place, and carry you away with me abroad.”

“I have not forgotten. But why have you come so unexpectedly to repeat
the question, when you only promised to come next Saturday? I thought I
was to have plenty of time to consider.”

“Yes, but the situation is different now.”

“Explain to me.”

“I don’t want to explain, for I may pain you.”

“But I must know the reason of this hurry.”

“It is simply my ardour, dear Eustacia. Everything is smooth now.”

“Then why are you so ruffled?”

“I am not aware of it. All is as it should be. Mrs. Yeobright—but she
is nothing to us.”

“Ah, I knew she had something to do with it! Come, I don’t like
reserve.”

“No—she has nothing. She only says she wishes me to give up Thomasin
because another man is anxious to marry her. The woman, now she no
longer needs me, actually shows off!” Wildeve’s vexation has escaped
him in spite of himself.

Eustacia was silent a long while. “You are in the awkward position of
an official who is no longer wanted,” she said in a changed tone.

“It seems so. But I have not yet seen Thomasin.”

“And that irritates you. Don’t deny it, Damon. You are actually nettled
by this slight from an unexpected quarter.”

“Well?”

“And you come to get me because you cannot get her. This is certainly a
new position altogether. I am to be a stop-gap.”

“Please remember that I proposed the same thing the other day.”

Eustacia again remained in a sort of stupefied silence. What curious
feeling was this coming over her? Was it really possible that her
interest in Wildeve had been so entirely the result of antagonism that
the glory and the dream departed from the man with the first sound that
he was no longer coveted by her rival? She was, then, secure of him at
last. Thomasin no longer required him. What a humiliating victory! He
loved her best, she thought; and yet—dared she to murmur such
treacherous criticism ever so softly?—what was the man worth whom a
woman inferior to herself did not value? The sentiment which lurks more
or less in all animate nature—that of not desiring the undesired of
others—was lively as a passion in the supersubtle, epicurean heart of
Eustacia. Her social superiority over him, which hitherto had scarcely
ever impressed her, became unpleasantly insistent, and for the first
time she felt that she had stooped in loving him.

“Well, darling, you agree?” said Wildeve.

“If it could be London, or even Budmouth, instead of America,” sh

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