The Return of the Native
become as animated as water under a microscope, and that without the
arrival of a single visitor. The words of Sam and Humphrey on the
harmony between the unknown and herself had on her mind the effect of
the invading Bard’s prelude in the Castle of Indolence, at which
myriads of imprisoned shapes arose where had previously appeared the
stillness of a void.
Involved in these imaginings she knew nothing of time. When she became
conscious of externals it was dusk. The furze-rick was finished; the
men had gone home. Eustacia went upstairs, thinking that she would take
a walk at this her usual time; and she determined that her walk should
be in the direction of Blooms-End, the birthplace of young Yeobright
and the present home of his mother. She had no reason for walking
elsewhere, and why should she not go that way? The scene of the
daydream is sufficient for a pilgrimage at nineteen. To look at the
palings before the Yeobrights’ house had the dignity of a necessary
performance. Strange that such a piece of idling should have seemed an
important errand.
She put on her bonnet, and, leaving the house, descended the hill on
the side towards Blooms-End, where she walked slowly along the valley
for a distance of a mile and a half. This brought her to a spot in
which the green bottom of the dale began to widen, the furze bushes to
recede yet further from the path on each side, till they were
diminished to an isolated one here and there by the increasing
fertility of the soil. Beyond the irregular carpet of grass was a row
of white palings, which marked the verge of the heath in this latitude.
They showed upon the dusky scene that they bordered as distinctly as
white lace on velvet. Behind the white palings was a little garden;
behind the garden an old, irregular, thatched house, facing the heath,
and commanding a full view of the valley. This was the obscure, removed
spot to which was about to return a man whose latter life had been
passed in the French capital—the centre and vortex of the fashionable
world.
II.
The People at Blooms-End Make Ready
All that afternoon the expected arrival of the subject of Eustacia’s
ruminations created a bustle of preparation at Blooms-End. Thomasin had
been persuaded by her aunt, and by an instinctive impulse of loyalty
towards her cousin Clym, to bestir herself on his account with an
alacrity unusual in her during these most sorrowful days of her life.
At the time that Eustacia was listening to the rick-makers’
conversation on Clym’s return, Thomasin was climbing into a loft over
her aunt’s fuelhouse, where the store-apples were kept, to search out
the best and largest of them for the coming holiday-time.
The loft was lighted by a semicircular hole, through which the pigeons
crept to their lodgings in the same high quarters of the premises; and
from this hole the sun shone in a bright yellow patch upon the figure
of the maiden as she knelt and plunged her naked arms into the soft
brown fern, which, from its abundance, was used on Egdon in packing
away stores of all kinds. The pigeons were flying about her head with
the greatest unconcern, and the face of her aunt was just visible above
the floor of the loft, lit by a few stray motes of light, as she stood
halfway up the ladder, looking at a spot into which she was not climber
enough to venture.
“Now a few russets, Tamsin. He used to like them almost as well as
ribstones.”
Thomasin turned and rolled aside the fern from another nook, where more
mellow fruit greeted her with its ripe smell. Before picking them out
she stopped a moment.
“Dear Clym, I wonder how your face looks now?” she said, gazing
abstractedly at the pigeon-hole, which admitted the sunlight so
directly upon her brown hair and transparent tissues that it almost
seemed to shine through her.
“If he could have been dear to you in another way,” said Mrs. Yeobright
from the ladder, “this might have been a happy meeting.”
“Is there any use in saying what can do no good, Aunt?”
“Yes,” said her aunt, with some warmth. “To thoroughly fill the air
with the past misfortune, so that other girls may take warning and keep
clear of it.”
Thomasin lowered her face to the apples again. “I am a warning to
others, just as thieves and drunkards and gamblers are,” she said in a
low voice. “What a class to belong to! Do I really belong to them? ’Tis
absurd! Yet why, Aunt, does everybody keep on making me think that I
do, by the way they behave towards me? Why don’t people judge me by my
acts? Now, look at me as I kneel here, picking up these apples—do I
look like a lost woman?... I wish all good women were as good as I!”
she added vehemently.
“Strangers don’t see you as I do,” said Mrs. Yeobright; “they judge
from false report. Well, it is a silly job, and I am partly to blame.”
“How quickly a rash thing can be done!” replied the girl. Her lips were
quivering, and tears so crowded themselves into her eyes that she could
hardly distinguish apples from fern as she continued industriously
searching to hide her weakness.
“As soon as you have finished getting the apples,” her aunt said,
descending the ladder, “come down, and we’ll go for the holly. There is
nobody on the heath this afternoon, and you need not fear being stared
at. We must get some berries, or Clym will never believe in our
preparations.”
Thomasin came down when the apples were collected, and together they
went through the white palings to the heath beyond. The open hills were
airy and clear, and the remote atmosphere appeared, as it often appears
on a fine winter day, in distinct planes of illumination independently
toned, the rays which lit the nearer tracts of landscape streaming
visibly across those further off; a stratum of ensaffroned light was
imposed on a stratum of deep blue, and behind these lay still remoter
scenes wrapped in frigid grey.
They reached the place where the hollies grew, which was in a conical
pit, so that the tops of the trees were not much above the general
level of the ground. Thomasin stepped up into a fork of one of the
bushes, as she had done under happier circumstances on many similar
occasions, and with a small chopper that they had brought she began to
lop off the heavily berried boughs.
“Don’t scratch your face,” said her aunt, who stood at the edge of the
pit, regarding the girl as she held on amid the glistening green and
scarlet masses of the tree. “Will you walk with me to meet him this
evening?”
“I should like to. Else it would seem as if I had forgotten him,” said
Thomasin, tossing out a bough. “Not that that would matter much; I
belong to one man; nothing can alter that. And that man I must marry,
for my pride’s sake.”
“I am afraid—” began Mrs. Yeobright.
“Ah, you think, ‘That weak girl—how is she going to get a man to marry
her when she chooses?’ But let me tell you one thing, Aunt: Mr. Wildeve
is not a profligate man, any more than I am an improper woman. He has
an unfortunate manner, and doesn’t try to make people like him if they
don’t wish to do it of their own accord.”
“Thomasin,” said Mrs. Yeobright quietly, fixing her eye upon her niece,
“do you think you deceive me in your defence of Mr. Wildeve?”
“How do you mean?”
“I have long had a suspicion that your love for him has changed its
colour since you have found him not to be the saint you thought him,
and that you act a part to me.”
“He wished to marry me, and I wish to marry him.”
“Now, I put it to you: would you at this present moment agree to be his
wife if that had not happened to entangle you with him?”
Thomasin looked into the tree and appeared much disturbed. “Aunt,” she
said presently, “I have, I think, a right to refuse to answer that
question.”
“Yes, you have.”
“You may think what you choose. I have never implied to you by word or
deed that I have grown to think otherwise of him, and I never will. And
I shall marry him.”
“Well, wait till he repeats his offer. I think he may do it, now that
he knows—something I told him. I don’t for a moment dispute that it is
the most proper thing for you to marry him. Much as I have objected to
him in bygone days, I agree with you now, you may be sure. It is the
only way out of a false position, and a very galling one.”
“What did you tell him?”
“That he was standing in the way of another lover of yours.”
“Aunt,” said Thomasin, with round eyes, “what _do_ you mean?”
“Don’t be alarmed; it was my duty. I can say no more about it now, but
when it is over I will tell you exactly what I said, and why I said
it.”
Thomasin was perforce content.
“And you will keep the secret of my would-be marriage from Clym for the
present?” she next asked.
“I have given my word to. But what is the use of it? He must soon know
what has happened. A mere look at your face will show him that
something is wrong.”
Thomasin turned and regarded her aunt from the tree. “Now, hearken to
me,” she said, her delicate voice expanding into firmness by a force
which was other than physical. “Tell him nothing. If he finds out that
I am not worthy to be his cousin, let him. But, since he loved me once,
we will not pain him by telling him my trouble too soon. The air is
full of the story, I know; but gossips will not dare to speak of it to
him for the first few days. His closeness to me is the very thing that
will hinder the tale from reaching him early. If I am not made safe
from sneers in a week or two I will tell him myself.”
The earnestness with which Thomasin spoke prevented further objections.
Her aunt simply said, “Very well. He should by rights have been told at
the time that the wedding was going to be. He will never forgive you
for your secrecy.”
“Yes, he will, when he knows it was because I wished to spare him, and
that I did not expect him home so soon. And you must not let me stand
in the way of your Christmas party. Putting it off would only make
matters worse.”
“Of course I shall not. I do not wish to show myself beaten before all
Egdon, and the sport of a man like Wildeve. We have enough berries now,
I think, and we had better take them home. By the time we have decked
the house with this and hung up the mistletoe, we must think of
starting to meet him.”
Thomasin came out of the tree, shook from her hair and dress the loose
berries which had fallen thereon, and went down the hill with her aunt,
each woman bearing half the gathered boughs. It was now nearly four
o’clock, and the sunlight was leaving the vales. When the west grew red
the two relatives came again from the house and plunged into the heath
in a different direction from the first, towards a point in the distant
highway along which the expected man was to return.
III.
How a Little Sound Produced a Great Dream
Eustacia stood just within the heath, straining her eyes in the
direction of Mrs. Yeobright’s house and premises. No light, sound, or
movement was perceptible there. The evening was chilly; the spot was
dark and lonely. She inferred that the guest had not yet come; and
after lingering ten or fifteen minutes she turned again towards home.
She had not far retraced her steps when sounds in front of her
betokened the approach of persons in conversation along the same path.
Soon their heads became visible against the sky. They were walking
slowly; and though it was too dark for much discovery of character from
aspect, the gait of them showed that they were not workers on the
heath. Eustacia stepped a little out of the foot-track to let them
pass. They were two women and a man; and the voices of the women were
those of Mrs. Yeobright and Thomasin.
They went by her, and at the moment of passing appeared to discern her
dusky form. There came to her ears in a masculine voice, “Good night!”