The Return of the Native
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.