The Return of the Native
She murmured a reply, glided by them, and turned round. She could not,
for a moment, believe that chance, unrequested, had brought into her
presence the soul of the house she had gone to inspect, the man without
whom her inspection would not have been thought of.
She strained her eyes to see them, but was unable. Such was her
intentness, however, that it seemed as if her ears were performing the
functions of seeing as well as hearing. This extension of power can
almost be believed in at such moments. The deaf Dr. Kitto was probably
under the influence of a parallel fancy when he described his body as
having become, by long endeavour, so sensitive to vibrations that he
had gained the power of perceiving by it as by ears.
She could follow every word that the ramblers uttered. They were
talking no secrets. They were merely indulging in the ordinary
vivacious chat of relatives who have long been parted in person though
not in soul. But it was not to the words that Eustacia listened; she
could not even have recalled, a few minutes later, what the words were.
It was to the alternating voice that gave out about one-tenth of
them—the voice that had wished her good night. Sometimes this throat
uttered Yes, sometimes it uttered No; sometimes it made inquiries about
a time-worn denizen of the place. Once it surprised her notions by
remarking upon the friendliness and geniality written in the faces of
the hills around.
The three voices passed on, and decayed and died out upon her ear. Thus
much had been granted her; and all besides withheld. No event could
have been more exciting. During the greater part of the afternoon she
had been entrancing herself by imagining the fascination which must
attend a man come direct from beautiful Paris—laden with its
atmosphere, familiar with its charms. And this man had greeted her.
With the departure of the figures the profuse articulations of the
women wasted away from her memory; but the accents of the other stayed
on. Was there anything in the voice of Mrs. Yeobright’s son—for Clym it
was—startling as a sound? No; it was simply comprehensive. All
emotional things were possible to the speaker of that “good night.”
Eustacia’s imagination supplied the rest—except the solution to one
riddle. What _could_ the tastes of that man be who saw friendliness and
geniality in these shaggy hills?
On such occasions as this a thousand ideas pass through a highly
charged woman’s head; and they indicate themselves on her face; but the
changes, though actual, are minute. Eustacia’s features went through a
rhythmical succession of them. She glowed; remembering the mendacity of
the imagination, she flagged; then she freshened; then she fired; then
she cooled again. It was a cycle of aspects, produced by a cycle of
visions.
Eustacia entered her own house; she was excited. Her grandfather was
enjoying himself over the fire, raking about the ashes and exposing the
red-hot surface of the turves, so that their lurid glare irradiated the
chimney-corner with the hues of a furnace.
“Why is it that we are never friendly with the Yeobrights?” she said,
coming forward and stretching her soft hands over the warmth. “I wish
we were. They seem to be very nice people.”
“Be hanged if I know why,” said the captain. “I liked the old man well
enough, though he was as rough as a hedge. But you would never have
cared to go there, even if you might have, I am well sure.”
“Why shouldn’t I?”
“Your town tastes would find them far too countrified. They sit in the
kitchen, drink mead and elder-wine, and sand the floor to keep it
clean. A sensible way of life; but how would you like it?”
“I thought Mrs. Yeobright was a ladylike woman? A curate’s daughter,
was she not?”
“Yes; but she was obliged to live as her husband did; and I suppose she
has taken kindly to it by this time. Ah, I recollect that I once
accidentally offended her, and I have never seen her since.”
That night was an eventful one to Eustacia’s brain, and one which she
hardly ever forgot. She dreamt a dream; and few human beings, from
Nebuchadnezzar to the Swaffham tinker, ever dreamt a more remarkable
one. Such an elaborately developed, perplexing, exciting dream was
certainly never dreamed by a girl in Eustacia’s situation before. It
had as many ramifications as the Cretan labyrinth, as many fluctuations
as the northern lights, as much colour as a parterre in June, and was
as crowded with figures as a coronation. To Queen Scheherazade the
dream might have seemed not far removed from commonplace; and to a girl
just returned from all the courts of Europe it might have seemed not
more than interesting. But amid the circumstances of Eustacia’s life it
was as wonderful as a dream could be.
There was, however, gradually evolved from its transformation scenes a
less extravagant episode, in which the heath dimly appeared behind the
general brilliancy of the action. She was dancing to wondrous music,
and her partner was the man in silver armour who had accompanied her
through the previous fantastic changes, the visor of his helmet being
closed. The mazes of the dance were ecstatic. Soft whispering came into
her ear from under the radiant helmet, and she felt like a woman in
Paradise. Suddenly these two wheeled out from the mass of dancers,
dived into one of the pools of the heath, and came out somewhere into
an iridescent hollow, arched with rainbows. “It must be here,” said the
voice by her side, and blushingly looking up she saw him removing his
casque to kiss her. At that moment there was a cracking noise, and his
figure fell into fragments like a pack of cards.
She cried aloud. “O that I had seen his face!”
Eustacia awoke. The cracking had been that of the window shutter
downstairs, which the maid-servant was opening to let in the day, now
slowly increasing to Nature’s meagre allowance at this sickly time of
the year. “O that I had seen his face!” she said again. “’Twas meant
for Mr. Yeobright!”
When she became cooler she perceived that many of the phases of the
dream had naturally arisen out of the images and fancies of the day
before. But this detracted little from its interest, which lay in the
excellent fuel it provided for newly kindled fervour. She was at the
modulating point between indifference and love, at the stage called
“having a fancy for.” It occurs once in the history of the most
gigantic passions, and it is a period when they are in the hands of the
weakest will.
The perfervid woman was by this time half in love with a vision. The
fantastic nature of her passion, which lowered her as an intellect,
raised her as a soul. If she had had a little more self-control she
would have attenuated the emotion to nothing by sheer reasoning, and so
have killed it off. If she had had a little less pride she might have
gone and circumambulated the Yeobrights’ premises at Blooms-End at any
maidenly sacrifice until she had seen him. But Eustacia did neither of
these things. She acted as the most exemplary might have acted, being
so influenced; she took an airing twice or thrice a day upon the Egdon
hills, and kept her eyes employed.
The first occasion passed, and he did not come that way.
She promenaded a second time, and was again the sole wanderer there.
The third time there was a dense fog; she looked around, but without
much hope. Even if he had been walking within twenty yards of her she
could not have seen him.
At the fourth attempt to encounter him it began to rain in torrents,
and she turned back.
The fifth sally was in the afternoon; it was fine, and she remained out
long, walking to the very top of the valley in which Blooms-End lay.
She saw the white paling about half a mile off; but he did not appear.
It was almost with heart-sickness that she came home and with a sense
of shame at her weakness. She resolved to look for the man from Paris
no more.
But Providence is nothing if not coquettish; and no sooner had Eustacia
formed this resolve than the opportunity came which, while sought, had
been entirely withholden.
IV.
Eustacia Is Led on to an Adventure
In the evening of this last day of expectation, which was the
twenty-third of December, Eustacia was at home alone. She had passed
the recent hour in lamenting over a rumour newly come to her ears—that
Yeobright’s visit to his mother was to be of short duration, and would
end some time the next week. “Naturally,” she said to herself. A man in
the full swing of his activities in a gay city could not afford to
linger long on Egdon Heath. That she would behold face to face the
owner of the awakening voice within the limits of such a holiday was
most unlikely, unless she were to haunt the environs of his mother’s
house like a robin, to do which was difficult and unseemly.
The customary expedient of provincial girls and men in such
circumstances is churchgoing. In an ordinary village or country town
one can safely calculate that, either on Christmas day or the Sunday
contiguous, any native home for the holidays, who has not through age
or ennui lost the appetite for seeing and being seen, will turn up in
some pew or other, shining with hope, self-consciousness, and new
clothes. Thus the congregation on Christmas morning is mostly a Tussaud
collection of celebrities who have been born in the neighbourhood.
Hither the mistress, left neglected at home all the year, can steal and
observe the development of the returned lover who has forgotten her,
and think as she watches him over her prayer book that he may throb
with a renewed fidelity when novelties have lost their charm. And
hither a comparatively recent settler like Eustacia may betake herself
to scrutinize the person of a native son who left home before her
advent upon the scene, and consider if the friendship of his parents be
worth cultivating during his next absence in order to secure a
knowledge of him on his next return.
But these tender schemes were not feasible among the scattered
inhabitants of Egdon Heath. In name they were parishioners, but
virtually they belonged to no parish at all. People who came to these
few isolated houses to keep Christmas with their friends remained in
their friends’ chimney-corners drinking mead and other comforting
liquors till they left again for good and all. Rain, snow, ice, mud
everywhere around, they did not care to trudge two or three miles to
sit wet-footed and splashed to the nape of their necks among those who,
though in some measure neighbours, lived close to the church, and
entered it clean and dry. Eustacia knew it was ten to one that Clym
Yeobright would go to no church at all during his few days of leave,
and that it would be a waste of labour for her to go driving the pony
and gig over a bad road in hope to see him there.
It was dusk, and she was sitting by the fire in the dining-room or
hall, which they occupied at this time of the year in preference to the
parlour, because of its large hearth, constructed for turf-fires, a
fuel the captain was partial to in the winter season. The only visible
articles in the room were those on the window-sill, which showed their
shapes against the low sky, the middle article being the old hourglass,
and the other two a pair of ancient British urns which had been dug
from a barrow near, and were used as flowerpots for two razor-leaved
cactuses. Somebody knocked at the door. The servant was out; so was her
grandfather. The person, after waiting a minute, came in and tapped at
the door of the room.
“Who’s there?” said Eustacia.
“Please, Cap’n Vye, will you let us——”
Eustacia arose and went to the door. “I cannot allow you to come in so
boldly. You should have waited.”
“The cap’n said I might come in without any fuss,” was answered in a
lad’s pleasant voice.