The Return of the Native
to me like that? I insist upon repeating to you that had I known that
my life would from my marriage up to this time have been as it is, I
should have said _No_. I don’t complain. I have never uttered a sound
of such a thing to him; but it is true. I hope therefore that in the
future you will be silent on my eagerness. If you injure me now you
injure yourself.”
“Injure you? Do you think I am an evil-disposed person?”
“You injured me before my marriage, and you have now suspected me of
secretly favouring another man for money!”
“I could not help what I thought. But I have never spoken of you
outside my house.”
“You spoke of me within it, to Clym, and you could not do worse.”
“I did my duty.”
“And I’ll do mine.”
“A part of which will possibly be to set him against his mother. It is
always so. But why should I not bear it as others have borne it before
me!”
“I understand you,” said Eustacia, breathless with emotion. “You think
me capable of every bad thing. Who can be worse than a wife who
encourages a lover, and poisons her husband’s mind against his
relative? Yet that is now the character given to me. Will you not come
and drag him out of my hands?”
Mrs. Yeobright gave back heat for heat.
“Don’t rage at me, madam! It ill becomes your beauty, and I am not
worth the injury you may do it on my account, I assure you. I am only a
poor old woman who has lost a son.”
“If you had treated me honourably you would have had him still.”
Eustacia said, while scalding tears trickled from her eyes. “You have
brought yourself to folly; you have caused a division which can never
be healed!”
“I have done nothing. This audacity from a young woman is more than I
can bear.”
“It was asked for; you have suspected me, and you have made me speak of
my husband in a way I would not have done. You will let him know that I
have spoken thus, and it will cause misery between us. Will you go away
from me? You are no friend!”
“I will go when I have spoken a word. If anyone says I have come here
to question you without good grounds for it, that person speaks
untruly. If anyone says that I attempted to stop your marriage by any
but honest means, that person, too, does not speak the truth. I have
fallen on an evil time; God has been unjust to me in letting you insult
me! Probably my son’s happiness does not lie on this side of the grave,
for he is a foolish man who neglects the advice of his parent. You,
Eustacia, stand on the edge of a precipice without knowing it. Only
show my son one-half the temper you have shown me today—and you may
before long—and you will find that though he is as gentle as a child
with you now, he can be as hard as steel!”
The excited mother then withdrew, and Eustacia, panting, stood looking
into the pool.
II.
He Is Set upon by Adversities but He Sings a Song
The result of that unpropitious interview was that Eustacia, instead of
passing the afternoon with her grandfather, hastily returned home to
Clym, where she arrived three hours earlier than she had been expected.
She came indoors with her face flushed, and her eyes still showing
traces of her recent excitement. Yeobright looked up astonished; he had
never seen her in any way approaching to that state before. She passed
him by, and would have gone upstairs unnoticed, but Clym was so
concerned that he immediately followed her.
“What is the matter, Eustacia?” he said. She was standing on the
hearthrug in the bedroom, looking upon the floor, her hands clasped in
front of her, her bonnet yet unremoved. For a moment she did not
answer; and then she replied in a low voice—
“I have seen your mother; and I will never see her again!”
A weight fell like a stone upon Clym. That same morning, when Eustacia
had arranged to go and see her grandfather, Clym had expressed a wish
that she would drive down to Blooms-End and inquire for her
mother-in-law, or adopt any other means she might think fit to bring
about a reconciliation. She had set out gaily; and he had hoped for
much.
“Why is this?” he asked.
“I cannot tell—I cannot remember. I met your mother. And I will never
meet her again.”
“Why?”
“What do I know about Mr. Wildeve now? I won’t have wicked opinions
passed on me by anybody. O! it was too humiliating to be asked if I had
received any money from him, or encouraged him, or something of the
sort—I don’t exactly know what!”
“How could she have asked you that?”
“She did.”
“Then there must have been some meaning in it. What did my mother say
besides?”
“I don’t know what she said, except in so far as this, that we both
said words which can never be forgiven!”
“Oh, there must be some misapprehension. Whose fault was it that her
meaning was not made clear?”
“I would rather not say. It may have been the fault of the
circumstances, which were awkward at the very least. O Clym—I cannot
help expressing it—this is an unpleasant position that you have placed
me in. But you must improve it—yes, say you will—for I hate it all now!
Yes, take me to Paris, and go on with your old occupation, Clym! I
don’t mind how humbly we live there at first, if it can only be Paris,
and not Egdon Heath.”
“But I have quite given up that idea,” said Yeobright, with surprise.
“Surely I never led you to expect such a thing?”
“I own it. Yet there are thoughts which cannot be kept out of mind, and
that one was mine. Must I not have a voice in the matter, now I am your
wife and the sharer of your doom?”
“Well, there are things which are placed beyond the pale of discussion;
and I thought this was specially so, and by mutual agreement.”
“Clym, I am unhappy at what I hear,” she said in a low voice; and her
eyes drooped, and she turned away.
This indication of an unexpected mine of hope in Eustacia’s bosom
disconcerted her husband. It was the first time that he had confronted
the fact of the indirectness of a woman’s movement towards her desire.
But his intention was unshaken, though he loved Eustacia well. All the
effect that her remark had upon him was a resolve to chain himself more
closely than ever to his books, so as to be the sooner enabled to
appeal to substantial results from another course in arguing against
her whim.
Next day the mystery of the guineas was explained. Thomasin paid them a
hurried visit, and Clym’s share was delivered up to him by her own
hands. Eustacia was not present at the time.
“Then this is what my mother meant,” exclaimed Clym. “Thomasin, do you
know that they have had a bitter quarrel?”
There was a little more reticence now than formerly in Thomasin’s
manner towards her cousin. It is the effect of marriage to engender in
several directions some of the reserve it annihilates in one. “Your
mother told me,” she said quietly. “She came back to my house after
seeing Eustacia.”
“The worst thing I dreaded has come to pass. Was Mother much disturbed
when she came to you, Thomasin?”
“Yes.”
“Very much indeed?”
“Yes.”
Clym leant his elbow upon the post of the garden gate, and covered his
eyes with his hand.
“Don’t trouble about it, Clym. They may get to be friends.”
He shook his head. “Not two people with inflammable natures like
theirs. Well, what must be will be.”
“One thing is cheerful in it—the guineas are not lost.”
“I would rather have lost them twice over than have had this happen.”
Amid these jarring events Yeobright felt one thing to be
indispensable—that he should speedily make some show of progress in his
scholastic plans. With this view he read far into the small hours
during many nights.
One morning, after a severer strain than usual, he awoke with a strange
sensation in his eyes. The sun was shining directly upon the
window-blind, and at his first glance thitherward a sharp pain obliged
him to close his eyelids quickly. At every new attempt to look about
him the same morbid sensibility to light was manifested, and
excoriating tears ran down his cheeks. He was obliged to tie a bandage
over his brow while dressing; and during the day it could not be
abandoned. Eustacia was thoroughly alarmed. On finding that the case
was no better the next morning they decided to send to Anglebury for a
surgeon.
Towards evening he arrived, and pronounced the disease to be acute
inflammation induced by Clym’s night studies, continued in spite of a
cold previously caught, which had weakened his eyes for the time.
Fretting with impatience at this interruption to a task he was so
anxious to hasten, Clym was transformed into an invalid. He was shut up
in a room from which all light was excluded, and his condition would
have been one of absolute misery had not Eustacia read to him by the
glimmer of a shaded lamp. He hoped that the worst would soon be over;
but at the surgeon’s third visit he learnt to his dismay that although
he might venture out of doors with shaded eyes in the course of a
month, all thought of pursuing his work, or of reading print of any
description, would have to be given up for a long time to come.
One week and another week wore on, and nothing seemed to lighten the
gloom of the young couple. Dreadful imaginings occurred to Eustacia,
but she carefully refrained from uttering them to her husband. Suppose
he should become blind, or, at all events, never recover sufficient
strength of sight to engage in an occupation which would be congenial
to her feelings, and conduce to her removal from this lonely dwelling
among the hills? That dream of beautiful Paris was not likely to cohere
into substance in the presence of this misfortune. As day after day
passed by, and he got no better, her mind ran more and more in this
mournful groove, and she would go away from him into the garden and
weep despairing tears.
Yeobright thought he would send for his mother; and then he thought he
would not. Knowledge of his state could only make her the more unhappy;
and the seclusion of their life was such that she would hardly be
likely to learn the news except through a special messenger.
Endeavouring to take the trouble as philosophically as possible, he
waited on till the third week had arrived, when he went into the open
air for the first time since the attack. The surgeon visited him again
at this stage, and Clym urged him to express a distinct opinion. The
young man learnt with added surprise that the date at which he might
expect to resume his labours was as uncertain as ever, his eyes being
in that peculiar state which, though affording him sight enough for
walking about, would not admit of their being strained upon any
definite object without incurring the risk of reproducing ophthalmia in
its acute form.
Clym was very grave at the intelligence, but not despairing. A quiet
firmness, and even cheerfulness, took possession of him. He was not to
be blind; that was enough. To be doomed to behold the world through
smoked glass for an indefinite period was bad enough, and fatal to any
kind of advance; but Yeobright was an absolute stoic in the face of
mishaps which only affected his social standing; and, apart from
Eustacia, the humblest walk of life would satisfy him if it could be
made to work in with some form of his culture scheme. To keep a cottage
night-school was one such form; and his affliction did not master his
spirit as it might otherwise have done.
He walked through the warm sun westward into those tracts of Egdon with
which he was best acquainted, being those lying nearer to his old home.
He saw before him in one of the valleys the gleaming of whetted iron,
and advancing, dimly perceived that the shine came from the tool of a
man who was cutting furze. The worker recognized Clym, and Yeobright
learnt from the voice that the speaker was Humphrey.
Humphrey expressed his sorrow at Clym’s condition, and added, “Now, if