The Return of the Native
caring for him. How terrible it would be if a time should come when I
could not love you, my Clym!”
“Please don’t say such reckless things. When we see such a time at hand
we will say, ‘I have outlived my faith and purpose,’ and die. There,
the hour has expired—now let us walk on.”
Hand in hand they went along the path towards Mistover. When they were
near the house he said, “It is too late for me to see your grandfather
tonight. Do you think he will object to it?”
“I will speak to him. I am so accustomed to be my own mistress that it
did not occur to me that we should have to ask him.”
Then they lingeringly separated, and Clym descended towards Blooms-End.
And as he walked further and further from the charmed atmosphere of his
Olympian girl his face grew sad with a new sort of sadness. A
perception of the dilemma in which his love had placed him came back in
full force. In spite of Eustacia’s apparent willingness to wait through
the period of an unpromising engagement, till he should be established
in his new pursuit, he could not but perceive at moments that she loved
him rather as a visitant from a gay world to which she rightly belonged
than as a man with a purpose opposed to that recent past of his which
so interested her. It meant that, though she made no conditions as to
his return to the French capital, this was what she secretly longed for
in the event of marriage; and it robbed him of many an otherwise
pleasant hour. Along with that came the widening breach between himself
and his mother. Whenever any little occurrence had brought into more
prominence than usual the disappointment that he was causing her it had
sent him on lone and moody walks; or he was kept awake a great part of
the night by the turmoil of spirit which such a recognition created. If
Mrs. Yeobright could only have been led to see what a sound and worthy
purpose this purpose of his was and how little it was being affected by
his devotions to Eustacia, how differently would she regard him!
Thus as his sight grew accustomed to the first blinding halo kindled
about him by love and beauty, Yeobright began to perceive what a strait
he was in. Sometimes he wished that he had never known Eustacia,
immediately to retract the wish as brutal. Three antagonistic growths
had to be kept alive: his mother’s trust in him, his plan for becoming
a teacher, and Eustacia’s happiness. His fervid nature could not afford
to relinquish one of these, though two of the three were as many as he
could hope to preserve. Though his love was as chaste as that of
Petrarch for his Laura, it had made fetters of what previously was only
a difficulty. A position which was not too simple when he stood
whole-hearted had become indescribably complicated by the addition of
Eustacia. Just when his mother was beginning to tolerate one scheme he
had introduced another still bitterer than the first, and the
combination was more than she could bear.
V.
Sharp Words Are Spoken, and a Crisis Ensues
When Yeobright was not with Eustacia he was sitting slavishly over his
books; when he was not reading he was meeting her. These meetings were
carried on with the greatest secrecy.
One afternoon his mother came home from a morning visit to Thomasin. He
could see from a disturbance in the lines of her face that something
had happened.
“I have been told an incomprehensible thing,” she said mournfully. “The
captain has let out at the Woman that you and Eustacia Vye are engaged
to be married.”
“We are,” said Yeobright. “But it may not be yet for a very long time.”
“I should hardly think it _would_ be yet for a very long time! You will
take her to Paris, I suppose?” She spoke with weary hopelessness.
“I am not going back to Paris.”
“What will you do with a wife, then?”
“Keep a school in Budmouth, as I have told you.”
“That’s incredible! The place is overrun with schoolmasters. You have
no special qualifications. What possible chance is there for such as
you?”
“There is no chance of getting rich. But with my system of education,
which is as new as it is true, I shall do a great deal of good to my
fellow-creatures.”
“Dreams, dreams! If there had been any system left to be invented they
would have found it out at the universities long before this time.”
“Never, Mother. They cannot find it out, because their teachers don’t
come in contact with the class which demands such a system—that is,
those who have had no preliminary training. My plan is one for
instilling high knowledge into empty minds without first cramming them
with what has to be uncrammed again before true study begins.”
“I might have believed you if you had kept yourself free from
entanglements; but this woman—if she had been a good girl it would have
been bad enough; but being——”
“She is a good girl.”
“So you think. A Corfu bandmaster’s daughter! What has her life been?
Her surname even is not her true one.”
“She is Captain Vye’s granddaughter, and her father merely took her
mother’s name. And she is a lady by instinct.”
“They call him ‘captain,’ but anybody is captain.”
“He was in the Royal Navy!”
“No doubt he has been to sea in some tub or other. Why doesn’t he look
after her? No lady would rove about the heath at all hours of the day
and night as she does. But that’s not all of it. There was something
queer between her and Thomasin’s husband at one time—I am as sure of it
as that I stand here.”
“Eustacia has told me. He did pay her a little attention a year ago;
but there’s no harm in that. I like her all the better.”
“Clym,” said his mother with firmness, “I have no proofs against her,
unfortunately. But if she makes you a good wife, there has never been a
bad one.”
“Believe me, you are almost exasperating,” said Yeobright vehemently.
“And this very day I had intended to arrange a meeting between you. But
you give me no peace; you try to thwart my wishes in everything.”
“I hate the thought of any son of mine marrying badly! I wish I had
never lived to see this; it is too much for me—it is more than I
dreamt!” She turned to the window. Her breath was coming quickly, and
her lips were pale, parted, and trembling.
“Mother,” said Clym, “whatever you do, you will always be dear to
me—that you know. But one thing I have a right to say, which is, that
at my age I am old enough to know what is best for me.”
Mrs. Yeobright remained for some time silent and shaken, as if she
could say no more. Then she replied, “Best? Is it best for you to
injure your prospects for such a voluptuous, idle woman as that? Don’t
you see that by the very fact of your choosing her you prove that you
do not know what is best for you? You give up your whole thought—you
set your whole soul—to please a woman.”
“I do. And that woman is you.”
“How can you treat me so flippantly!” said his mother, turning again to
him with a tearful look. “You are unnatural, Clym, and I did not expect
it.”
“Very likely,” said he cheerlessly. “You did not know the measure you
were going to mete me, and therefore did not know the measure that
would be returned to you again.”
“You answer me; you think only of her. You stick to her in all things.”
“That proves her to be worthy. I have never yet supported what is bad.
And I do not care only for her. I care for you and for myself, and for
anything that is good. When a woman once dislikes another she is
merciless!”
“O Clym! please don’t go setting down as my fault what is your
obstinate wrongheadedness. If you wished to connect yourself with an
unworthy person why did you come home here to do it? Why didn’t you do
it in Paris?—it is more the fashion there. You have come only to
distress me, a lonely woman, and shorten my days! I wish that you would
bestow your presence where you bestow your love!”
Clym said huskily, “You are my mother. I will say no more—beyond this,
that I beg your pardon for having thought this my home. I will no
longer inflict myself upon you; I’ll go.” And he went out with tears in
his eyes.
It was a sunny afternoon at the beginning of summer, and the moist
hollows of the heath had passed from their brown to their green stage.
Yeobright walked to the edge of the basin which extended down from
Mistover and Rainbarrow.
By this time he was calm, and he looked over the landscape. In the
minor valleys, between the hillocks which diversified the contour of
the vale, the fresh young ferns were luxuriantly growing up, ultimately
to reach a height of five or six feet. He descended a little way, flung
himself down in a spot where a path emerged from one of the small
hollows, and waited. Hither it was that he had promised Eustacia to
bring his mother this afternoon, that they might meet and be friends.
His attempt had utterly failed.
He was in a nest of vivid green. The ferny vegetation round him, though
so abundant, was quite uniform—it was a grove of machine-made foliage,
a world of green triangles with saw-edges, and not a single flower. The
air was warm with a vaporous warmth, and the stillness was unbroken.
Lizards, grasshoppers, and ants were the only living things to be
beheld. The scene seemed to belong to the ancient world of the
carboniferous period, when the forms of plants were few, and of the
fern kind; when there was neither bud nor blossom, nothing but a
monotonous extent of leafage, amid which no bird sang.
When he had reclined for some considerable time, gloomily pondering, he
discerned above the ferns a drawn bonnet of white silk approaching from
the left, and Yeobright knew directly that it covered the head of her
he loved. His heart awoke from its apathy to a warm excitement, and,
jumping to his feet, he said aloud, “I knew she was sure to come.”
She vanished in a hollow for a few moments, and then her whole form
unfolded itself from the brake.
“Only you here?” she exclaimed, with a disappointed air, whose
hollowness was proved by her rising redness and her half-guilty low
laugh. “Where is Mrs. Yeobright?”
“She has not come,” he replied in a subdued tone.
“I wish I had known that you would be here alone,” she said seriously,
“and that we were going to have such an idle, pleasant time as this.
Pleasure not known beforehand is half wasted; to anticipate it is to
double it. I have not thought once today of having you all to myself
this afternoon, and the actual moment of a thing is so soon gone.”
“It is indeed.”
“Poor Clym!” she continued, looking tenderly into his face. “You are
sad. Something has happened at your home. Never mind what is—let us
only look at what seems.”
“But, darling, what shall we do?” said he.
“Still go on as we do now—just live on from meeting to meeting, never
minding about another day. You, I know, are always thinking of that—I
can see you are. But you must not—will you, dear Clym?”
“You are just like all women. They are ever content to build their
lives on any incidental position that offers itself; whilst men would
fain make a globe to suit them. Listen to this, Eustacia. There is a
subject I have determined to put off no longer. Your sentiment on the
wisdom of _Carpe diem_ does not impress me today. Our present mode of
life must shortly be brought to an end.”
“It is your mother!”
“It is. I love you none the less in telling you; it is only right you
should know.”
“I have feared my bliss,” she said, with the merest motion of her lips.
“It has been too intense and consuming.”
“There is hope yet. There are forty years of work in me yet, and why
should you despair? I am only at an awkward turning. I wish people
wouldn’t be so ready to think that there is no progress without
uniformity.”
“Ah—your mind runs off to the philosophical side of it. Well, these sad
and hopeless obstacles are welcome in one sense, for they enable us to