The Return of the Native
kind to Tamsin to let her be married like this, and neither of us there
to keep up her spirits or care a bit about her. She hasn’t disgraced
herself, or done anything to deserve that. It is bad enough that the
wedding should be so hurried and unceremonious, without our keeping
away from it in addition. Upon my soul, ’tis almost a shame. I’ll go.”
“It is over by this time,” said his mother with a sigh; “unless they
were late, or he—”
“Then I shall be soon enough to see them come out. I don’t quite like
your keeping me in ignorance, Mother, after all. Really, I half hope he
has failed to meet her!”
“And ruined her character?”
“Nonsense—that wouldn’t ruin Thomasin.”
He took up his hat and hastily left the house. Mrs. Yeobright looked
rather unhappy, and sat still, deep in thought. But she was not long
left alone. A few minutes later Clym came back again, and in his
company came Diggory Venn.
“I find there isn’t time for me to get there,” said Clym.
“Is she married?” Mrs. Yeobright inquired, turning to the reddleman a
face in which a strange strife of wishes, for and against, was
apparent.
Venn bowed. “She is, ma’am.”
“How strange it sounds,” murmured Clym.
“And he didn’t disappoint her this time?” said Mrs. Yeobright.
“He did not. And there is now no slight on her name. I was hastening
ath’art to tell you at once, as I saw you were not there.”
“How came you to be there? How did you know it?” she asked.
“I have been in that neighbourhood for some time, and I saw them go
in,” said the reddleman. “Wildeve came up to the door, punctual as the
clock. I didn’t expect it of him.” He did not add, as he might have
added, that how he came to be in that neighbourhood was not by
accident; that, since Wildeve’s resumption of his right to Thomasin,
Venn, with the thoroughness which was part of his character, had
determined to see the end of the episode.
“Who was there?” said Mrs. Yeobright.
“Nobody hardly. I stood right out of the way, and she did not see me.”
The reddleman spoke huskily, and looked into the garden.
“Who gave her away?”
“Miss Vye.”
“How very remarkable! Miss Vye! It is to be considered an honour, I
suppose?”
“Who’s Miss Vye?” said Clym.
“Captain Vye’s granddaughter, of Mistover Knap.”
“A proud girl from Budmouth,” said Mrs. Yeobright. “One not much to my
liking. People say she’s a witch, but of course that’s absurd.”
The reddleman kept to himself his acquaintance with that fair
personage, and also that Eustacia was there because he went to fetch
her, in accordance with a promise he had given as soon as he learnt
that the marriage was to take place. He merely said, in continuation of
the story——
“I was sitting on the churchyard wall when they came up, one from one
way, the other from the other; and Miss Vye was walking thereabouts,
looking at the headstones. As soon as they had gone in I went to the
door, feeling I should like to see it, as I knew her so well. I pulled
off my boots because they were so noisy, and went up into the gallery.
I saw then that the parson and clerk were already there.”
“How came Miss Vye to have anything to do with it, if she was only on a
walk that way?”
“Because there was nobody else. She had gone into the church just
before me, not into the gallery. The parson looked round before
beginning, and as she was the only one near he beckoned to her, and she
went up to the rails. After that, when it came to signing the book, she
pushed up her veil and signed; and Tamsin seemed to thank her for her
kindness.” The reddleman told the tale thoughtfully for there lingered
upon his vision the changing colour of Wildeve, when Eustacia lifted
the thick veil which had concealed her from recognition and looked
calmly into his face. “And then,” said Diggory sadly, “I came away, for
her history as Tamsin Yeobright was over.”
“I offered to go,” said Mrs. Yeobright regretfully. “But she said it
was not necessary.”
“Well, it is no matter,” said the reddleman. “The thing is done at last
as it was meant to be at first, and God send her happiness. Now I’ll
wish you good morning.”
He placed his cap on his head and went out.
From that instant of leaving Mrs. Yeobright’s door, the reddleman was
seen no more in or about Egdon Heath for a space of many months. He
vanished entirely. The nook among the brambles where his van had been
standing was as vacant as ever the next morning, and scarcely a sign
remained to show that he had been there, excepting a few straws, and a
little redness on the turf, which was washed away by the next storm of
rain.
The report that Diggory had brought of the wedding, correct as far as
it went, was deficient in one significant particular, which had escaped
him through his being at some distance back in the church. When
Thomasin was tremblingly engaged in signing her name Wildeve had flung
towards Eustacia a glance that said plainly, “I have punished you now.”
She had replied in a low tone—and he little thought how truly—“You
mistake; it gives me sincerest pleasure to see her your wife today.”
BOOK THIRD—THE FASCINATION
I.
“My Mind to Me a Kingdom Is”
In Clym Yeobright’s face could be dimly seen the typical countenance of
the future. Should there be a classic period to art hereafter, its
Pheidias may produce such faces. The view of life as a thing to be put
up with, replacing that zest for existence which was so intense in
early civilizations, must ultimately enter so thoroughly into the
constitution of the advanced races that its facial expression will
become accepted as a new artistic departure. People already feel that a
man who lives without disturbing a curve of feature, or setting a mark
of mental concern anywhere upon himself, is too far removed from modern
perceptiveness to be a modern type. Physically beautiful men—the glory
of the race when it was young—are almost an anachronism now; and we may
wonder whether, at some time or other, physically beautiful women may
not be an anachronism likewise.
The truth seems to be that a long line of disillusive centuries has
permanently displaced the Hellenic idea of life, or whatever it may be
called. What the Greeks only suspected we know well; what their
Æschylus imagined our nursery children feel. That old-fashioned
revelling in the general situation grows less and less possible as we
uncover the defects of natural laws, and see the quandary that man is
in by their operation.
The lineaments which will get embodied in ideals based upon this new
recognition will probably be akin to those of Yeobright. The observer’s
eye was arrested, not by his face as a picture, but by his face as a
page; not by what it was, but by what it recorded. His features were
attractive in the light of symbols, as sounds intrinsically common
become attractive in language, and as shapes intrinsically simple
become interesting in writing.
He had been a lad of whom something was expected. Beyond this all had
been chaos. That he would be successful in an original way, or that he
would go to the dogs in an original way, seemed equally probable. The
only absolute certainty about him was that he would not stand still in
the circumstances amid which he was born.
Hence, when his name was casually mentioned by neighbouring yeomen, the
listener said, “Ah, Clym Yeobright—what is he doing now?” When the
instinctive question about a person is, What is he doing? it is felt
that he will be found to be, like most of us, doing nothing in
particular. There is an indefinite sense that he must be invading some
region of singularity, good or bad. The devout hope is that he is doing
well. The secret faith is that he is making a mess of it. Half a dozen
comfortable market-men, who were habitual callers at the Quiet Woman as
they passed by in their carts, were partial to the topic. In fact,
though they were not Egdon men, they could hardly avoid it while they
sucked their long clay tubes and regarded the heath through the window.
Clym had been so inwoven with the heath in his boyhood that hardly
anybody could look upon it without thinking of him. So the subject
recurred: if he were making a fortune and a name, so much the better
for him; if he were making a tragical figure in the world, so much the
better for a narrative.
The fact was that Yeobright’s fame had spread to an awkward extent
before he left home. “It is bad when your fame outruns your means,”
said the Spanish Jesuit Gracian. At the age of six he had asked a
Scripture riddle: “Who was the first man known to wear breeches?” and
applause had resounded from the very verge of the heath. At seven he
painted the Battle of Waterloo with tiger-lily pollen and black-currant
juice, in the absence of water-colours. By the time he reached twelve
he had in this manner been heard of as artist and scholar for at least
two miles round. An individual whose fame spreads three or four
thousand yards in the time taken by the fame of others similarly
situated to travel six or eight hundred, must of necessity have
something in him. Possibly Clym’s fame, like Homer’s, owed something to
the accidents of his situation; nevertheless famous he was.
He grew up and was helped out in life. That waggery of fate which
started Clive as a writing clerk, Gay as a linen-draper, Keats as a
surgeon, and a thousand others in a thousand other odd ways, banished
the wild and ascetic heath lad to a trade whose sole concern was with
the especial symbols of self-indulgence and vainglory.
The details of this choice of a business for him it is not necessary to
give. At the death of his father a neighbouring gentleman had kindly
undertaken to give the boy a start, and this assumed the form of
sending him to Budmouth. Yeobright did not wish to go there, but it was
the only feasible opening. Thence he went to London; and thence,
shortly after, to Paris, where he had remained till now.
Something being expected of him, he had not been at home many days
before a great curiosity as to why he stayed on so long began to arise
in the heath. The natural term of a holiday had passed, yet he still
remained. On the Sunday morning following the week of Thomasin’s
marriage a discussion on this subject was in progress at a hair-cutting
before Fairway’s house. Here the local barbering was always done at
this hour on this day, to be followed by the great Sunday wash of the
inhabitants at noon, which in its turn was followed by the great Sunday
dressing an hour later. On Egdon Heath Sunday proper did not begin till
dinner-time, and even then it was a somewhat battered specimen of the
day.
These Sunday-morning hair-cuttings were performed by Fairway; the
victim sitting on a chopping-block in front of the house, without a
coat, and the neighbours gossiping around, idly observing the locks of
hair as they rose upon the wind after the snip, and flew away out of
sight to the four quarters of the heavens. Summer and winter the scene
was the same, unless the wind were more than usually blusterous, when
the stool was shifted a few feet round the corner. To complain of cold
in sitting out of doors, hatless and coatless, while Fairway told true
stories between the cuts of the scissors, would have been to pronounce
yourself no man at once. To flinch, exclaim, or move a muscle of the
face at the small stabs under the ear received from those instruments,
or at scarifications of the neck by the comb, would have been thought a
gross breach of good manners, considering that Fairway did it all for
nothing. A bleeding about the poll on Sunday afternoons was amply
accounted for by the explanation. “I have had my hair cut, you know.”
The conversation on Yeobright had been started by a distant view of the
young man rambling leisurely across the heath before them.