The Return of the Native
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