The Return of the Native
murmured languidly. “Well, I will think. It is too great a thing for me
to decide offhand. I wish I hated the heath less—or loved you more.”
“You can be painfully frank. You loved me a month ago warmly enough to
go anywhere with me.”
“And you loved Thomasin.”
“Yes, perhaps that was where the reason lay,” he returned, with almost
a sneer. “I don’t hate her now.”
“Exactly. The only thing is that you can no longer get her.”
“Come—no taunts, Eustacia, or we shall quarrel. If you don’t agree to
go with me, and agree shortly, I shall go by myself.”
“Or try Thomasin again. Damon, how strange it seems that you could have
married her or me indifferently, and only have come to me because I
am—cheapest! Yes, yes—it is true. There was a time when I should have
exclaimed against a man of that sort, and been quite wild; but it is
all past now.”
“Will you go, dearest? Come secretly with me to Bristol, marry me, and
turn our backs upon this dog-hole of England for ever? Say Yes.”
“I want to get away from here at almost any cost,” she said with
weariness, “but I don’t like to go with you. Give me more time to
decide.”
“I have already,” said Wildeve. “Well, I give you one more week.”
“A little longer, so that I may tell you decisively. I have to consider
so many things. Fancy Thomasin being anxious to get rid of you! I
cannot forget it.”
“Never mind that. Say Monday week. I will be here precisely at this
time.”
“Let it be at Rainbarrow,” said she. “This is too near home; my
grandfather may be walking out.”
“Thank you, dear. On Monday week at this time I will be at the Barrow.
Till then good-bye.”
“Good-bye. No, no, you must not touch me now. Shaking hands is enough
till I have made up my mind.”
Eustacia watched his shadowy form till it had disappeared. She placed
her hand to her forehead and breathed heavily; and then her rich,
romantic lips parted under that homely impulse—a yawn. She was
immediately angry at having betrayed even to herself the possible
evanescence of her passion for him. She could not admit at once that
she might have overestimated Wildeve, for to perceive his mediocrity
now was to admit her own great folly heretofore. And the discovery that
she was the owner of a disposition so purely that of the dog in the
manger had something in it which at first made her ashamed.
The fruit of Mrs. Yeobright’s diplomacy was indeed remarkable, though
not as yet of the kind she had anticipated. It had appreciably
influenced Wildeve, but it was influencing Eustacia far more. Her lover
was no longer to her an exciting man whom many women strove for, and
herself could only retain by striving with them. He was a superfluity.
She went indoors in that peculiar state of misery which is not exactly
grief, and which especially attends the dawnings of reason in the
latter days of an ill-judged, transient love. To be conscious that the
end of the dream is approaching, and yet has not absolutely come, is
one of the most wearisome as well as the most curious stages along the
course between the beginning of a passion and its end.
Her grandfather had returned, and was busily engaged in pouring some
gallons of newly arrived rum into the square bottles of his square
cellaret. Whenever these home supplies were exhausted he would go to
the Quiet Woman, and, standing with his back to the fire, grog in hand,
tell remarkable stories of how he had lived seven years under the
waterline of his ship, and other naval wonders, to the natives, who
hoped too earnestly for a treat of ale from the teller to exhibit any
doubts of his truth.
He had been there this evening. “I suppose you have heard the Egdon
news, Eustacia?” he said, without looking up from the bottles. “The men
have been talking about it at the Woman as if it were of national
importance.”
“I have heard none,” she said.
“Young Clym Yeobright, as they call him, is coming home next week to
spend Christmas with his mother. He is a fine fellow by this time, it
seems. I suppose you remember him?”
“I never saw him in my life.”
“Ah, true; he left before you came here. I well remember him as a
promising boy.”
“Where has he been living all these years?”
“In that rookery of pomp and vanity, Paris, I believe.”
BOOK SECOND—THE ARRIVAL
I.
Tidings of the Comer
On the fine days at this time of the year, and earlier, certain
ephemeral operations were apt to disturb, in their trifling way, the
majestic calm of Egdon Heath. They were activities which, beside those
of a town, a village, or even a farm, would have appeared as the
ferment of stagnation merely, a creeping of the flesh of somnolence.
But here, away from comparisons, shut in by the stable hills, among
which mere walking had the novelty of pageantry, and where any man
could imagine himself to be Adam without the least difficulty, they
attracted the attention of every bird within eyeshot, every reptile not
yet asleep, and set the surrounding rabbits curiously watching from
hillocks at a safe distance.
The performance was that of bringing together and building into a stack
the furze faggots which Humphrey had been cutting for the captain’s use
during the foregoing fine days. The stack was at the end of the
dwelling, and the men engaged in building it were Humphrey and Sam, the
old man looking on.
It was a fine and quiet afternoon, about three o’clock; but the winter
solstice having stealthily come on, the lowness of the sun caused the
hour to seem later than it actually was, there being little here to
remind an inhabitant that he must unlearn his summer experience of the
sky as a dial. In the course of many days and weeks sunrise had
advanced its quarters from northeast to southeast, sunset had receded
from northwest to southwest; but Egdon had hardly heeded the change.
Eustacia was indoors in the dining-room, which was really more like a
kitchen, having a stone floor and a gaping chimney-corner. The air was
still, and while she lingered a moment here alone sounds of voices in
conversation came to her ears directly down the chimney. She entered
the recess, and, listening, looked up the old irregular shaft, with its
cavernous hollows, where the smoke blundered about on its way to the
square bit of sky at the top, from which the daylight struck down with
a pallid glare upon the tatters of soot draping the flue as seaweed
drapes a rocky fissure.
She remembered: the furze-stack was not far from the chimney, and the
voices were those of the workers.
Her grandfather joined in the conversation. “That lad ought never to
have left home. His father’s occupation would have suited him best, and
the boy should have followed on. I don’t believe in these new moves in
families. My father was a sailor, so was I, and so should my son have
been if I had had one.”
“The place he’s been living at is Paris,” said Humphrey, “and they tell
me ’tis where the king’s head was cut off years ago. My poor mother
used to tell me about that business. ‘Hummy,’ she used to say, ‘I was a
young maid then, and as I was at home ironing Mother’s caps one
afternoon the parson came in and said, “They’ve cut the king’s head
off, Jane; and what ’twill be next God knows.’”
“A good many of us knew as well as He before long,” said the captain,
chuckling. “I lived seven years under water on account of it in my
boyhood—in that damned surgery of the Triumph, seeing men brought down
to the cockpit with their legs and arms blown to Jericho.... And so the
young man has settled in Paris. Manager to a diamond merchant, or some
such thing, is he not?”
“Yes, sir, that’s it. ’Tis a blazing great business that he belongs to,
so I’ve heard his mother say—like a king’s palace, as far as diments
go.”
“I can well mind when he left home,” said Sam.
“’Tis a good thing for the feller,” said Humphrey. “A sight of times
better to be selling diments than nobbling about here.”
“It must cost a good few shillings to deal at such a place.”
“A good few indeed, my man,” replied the captain. “Yes, you may make
away with a deal of money and be neither drunkard nor glutton.”
“They say, too, that Clym Yeobright is become a real perusing man, with
the strangest notions about things. There, that’s because he went to
school early, such as the school was.”
“Strange notions, has he?” said the old man. “Ah, there’s too much of
that sending to school in these days! It only does harm. Every gatepost
and barn’s door you come to is sure to have some bad word or other
chalked upon it by the young rascals—a woman can hardly pass for shame
sometimes. If they’d never been taught how to write they wouldn’t have
been able to scribble such villainy. Their fathers couldn’t do it, and
the country was all the better for it.”
“Now, I should think, Cap’n, that Miss Eustacia had about as much in
her head that comes from books as anybody about here?”
“Perhaps if Miss Eustacia, too, had less romantic nonsense in her head
it would be better for her,” said the captain shortly; after which he
walked away.
“I say, Sam,” observed Humphrey when the old man was gone, “she and
Clym Yeobright would make a very pretty pigeon-pair—hey? If they
wouldn’t I’ll be dazed! Both of one mind about niceties for certain,
and learned in print, and always thinking about high doctrine—there
couldn’t be a better couple if they were made o’ purpose. Clym’s family
is as good as hers. His father was a farmer, that’s true; but his
mother was a sort of lady, as we know. Nothing would please me better
than to see them two man and wife.”
“They’d look very natty, arm-in-crook together, and their best clothes
on, whether or no, if he’s at all the well-favoured fellow he used to
be.”
“They would, Humphrey. Well, I should like to see the chap terrible
much after so many years. If I knew for certain when he was coming I’d
stroll out three or four miles to meet him and help carry anything
for’n; though I suppose he’s altered from the boy he was. They say he
can talk French as fast as a maid can eat blackberries; and if so,
depend upon it we who have stayed at home shall seem no more than
scroff in his eyes.”
“Coming across the water to Budmouth by steamer, isn’t he?”
“Yes; but how he’s coming from Budmouth I don’t know.”
“That’s a bad trouble about his cousin Thomasin. I wonder such a
nice-notioned fellow as Clym likes to come home into it. What a
nunnywatch we were in, to be sure, when we heard they weren’t married
at all, after singing to ’em as man and wife that night! Be dazed if I
should like a relation of mine to have been made such a fool of by a
man. It makes the family look small.”
“Yes. Poor maid, her heart has ached enough about it. Her health is
suffering from it, I hear, for she will bide entirely indoors. We never
see her out now, scampering over the furze with a face as red as a
rose, as she used to do.”
“I’ve heard she wouldn’t have Wildeve now if he asked her.”
“You have? ’Tis news to me.”
While the furze-gatherers had desultorily conversed thus Eustacia’s
face gradually bent to the hearth in a profound reverie, her toe
unconsciously tapping the dry turf which lay burning at her feet.
The subject of their discourse had been keenly interesting to her. A
young and clever man was coming into that lonely heath from, of all
contrasting places in the world, Paris. It was like a man coming from
heaven. More singular still, the heathmen had instinctively coupled her
and this man together in their minds as a pair born for each other.
That five minutes of overhearing furnished Eustacia with visions enough
to fill the whole blank afternoon. Such sudden alternations from mental
vacuity do sometimes occur thus quietly. She could never have believed
in the morning that her colourless inner world would before night