The Return of the Native
“What of?”
“Partly of that moth whose skeleton is getting burnt up in the wick of
the candle,” she said slowly. “But you know I always take an interest
in what you say.”
“Very well, dear. Then I think I must go and call upon her.” ...He went
on with tender feeling: “It is a thing I am not at all too proud to do,
and only a fear that I might irritate her has kept me away so long. But
I must do something. It is wrong in me to allow this sort of thing to
go on.”
“What have you to blame yourself about?”
“She is getting old, and her life is lonely, and I am her only son.”
“She has Thomasin.”
“Thomasin is not her daughter; and if she were that would not excuse
me. But this is beside the point. I have made up my mind to go to her,
and all I wish to ask you is whether you will do your best to help
me—that is, forget the past; and if she shows her willingness to be
reconciled, meet her halfway by welcoming her to our house, or by
accepting a welcome to hers?”
At first Eustacia closed her lips as if she would rather do anything on
the whole globe than what he suggested. But the lines of her mouth
softened with thought, though not so far as they might have softened,
and she said, “I will put nothing in your way; but after what has
passed it is asking too much that I go and make advances.”
“You never distinctly told me what did pass between you.”
“I could not do it then, nor can I now. Sometimes more bitterness is
sown in five minutes than can be got rid of in a whole life; and that
may be the case here.” She paused a few moments, and added, “If you had
never returned to your native place, Clym, what a blessing it would
have been for you!... It has altered the destinies of——”
“Three people.”
“Five,” Eustacia thought; but she kept that in.
V.
The Journey across the Heath
Thursday, the thirty-first of August, was one of a series of days
during which snug houses were stifling, and when cool draughts were
treats; when cracks appeared in clayey gardens, and were called
“earthquakes” by apprehensive children; when loose spokes were
discovered in the wheels of carts and carriages; and when stinging
insects haunted the air, the earth, and every drop of water that was to
be found.
In Mrs. Yeobright’s garden large-leaved plants of a tender kind flagged
by ten o’clock in the morning; rhubarb bent downward at eleven; and
even stiff cabbages were limp by noon.
It was about eleven o’clock on this day that Mrs. Yeobright started
across the heath towards her son’s house, to do her best in getting
reconciled with him and Eustacia, in conformity with her words to the
reddleman. She had hoped to be well advanced in her walk before the
heat of the day was at its highest, but after setting out she found
that this was not to be done. The sun had branded the whole heath with
its mark, even the purple heath-flowers having put on a brownness under
the dry blazes of the few preceding days. Every valley was filled with
air like that of a kiln, and the clean quartz sand of the winter
water-courses, which formed summer paths, had undergone a species of
incineration since the drought had set in.
In cool, fresh weather Mrs. Yeobright would have found no inconvenience
in walking to Alderworth, but the present torrid attack made the
journey a heavy undertaking for a woman past middle age; and at the end
of the third mile she wished that she had hired Fairway to drive her a
portion at least of the distance. But from the point at which she had
arrived it was as easy to reach Clym’s house as to get home again. So
she went on, the air around her pulsating silently, and oppressing the
earth with lassitude. She looked at the sky overhead, and saw that the
sapphirine hue of the zenith in spring and early summer had been
replaced by a metallic violet.
Occasionally she came to a spot where independent worlds of ephemerons
were passing their time in mad carousal, some in the air, some on the
hot ground and vegetation, some in the tepid and stringy water of a
nearly dried pool. All the shallower ponds had decreased to a vaporous
mud amid which the maggoty shapes of innumerable obscure creatures
could be indistinctly seen, heaving and wallowing with enjoyment. Being
a woman not disinclined to philosophize she sometimes sat down under
her umbrella to rest and to watch their happiness, for a certain
hopefulness as to the result of her visit gave ease to her mind, and
between important thoughts left it free to dwell on any infinitesimal
matter which caught her eyes.
Mrs. Yeobright had never before been to her son’s house, and its exact
position was unknown to her. She tried one ascending path and another,
and found that they led her astray. Retracing her steps, she came again
to an open level, where she perceived at a distance a man at work. She
went towards him and inquired the way.
The labourer pointed out the direction, and added, “Do you see that
furze-cutter, ma’am, going up that footpath yond?”
Mrs. Yeobright strained her eyes, and at last said that she did
perceive him.
“Well, if you follow him you can make no mistake. He’s going to the
same place, ma’am.”
She followed the figure indicated. He appeared of a russet hue, not
more distinguishable from the scene around him than the green
caterpillar from the leaf it feeds on. His progress when actually
walking was more rapid than Mrs. Yeobright’s; but she was enabled to
keep at an equable distance from him by his habit of stopping whenever
he came to a brake of brambles, where he paused awhile. On coming in
her turn to each of these spots she found half a dozen long limp
brambles which he had cut from the bush during his halt and laid out
straight beside the path. They were evidently intended for furze-faggot
bonds which he meant to collect on his return.
The silent being who thus occupied himself seemed to be of no more
account in life than an insect. He appeared as a mere parasite of the
heath, fretting its surface in his daily labour as a moth frets a
garment, entirely engrossed with its products, having no knowledge of
anything in the world but fern, furze, heath, lichens, and moss.
The furze-cutter was so absorbed in the business of his journey that he
never turned his head; and his leather-legged and gauntleted form at
length became to her as nothing more than a moving handpost to show her
the way. Suddenly she was attracted to his individuality by observing
peculiarities in his walk. It was a gait she had seen somewhere before;
and the gait revealed the man to her, as the gait of Ahimaaz in the
distant plain made him known to the watchman of the king. “His walk is
exactly as my husband’s used to be,” she said; and then the thought
burst upon her that the furze-cutter was her son.
She was scarcely able to familiarize herself with this strange reality.
She had been told that Clym was in the habit of cutting furze, but she
had supposed that he occupied himself with the labour only at odd
times, by way of useful pastime; yet she now beheld him as a
furze-cutter and nothing more—wearing the regulation dress of the
craft, and thinking the regulation thoughts, to judge by his motions.
Planning a dozen hasty schemes for at once preserving him and Eustacia
from this mode of life, she throbbingly followed the way, and saw him
enter his own door.
At one side of Clym’s house was a knoll, and on the top of the knoll a
clump of fir trees so highly thrust up into the sky that their foliage
from a distance appeared as a black spot in the air above the crown of
the hill. On reaching this place Mrs. Yeobright felt distressingly
agitated, weary, and unwell. She ascended, and sat down under their
shade to recover herself, and to consider how best to break the ground
with Eustacia, so as not to irritate a woman underneath whose apparent
indolence lurked passions even stronger and more active than her own.
The trees beneath which she sat were singularly battered, rude, and
wild, and for a few minutes Mrs. Yeobright dismissed thoughts of her
own storm-broken and exhausted state to contemplate theirs. Not a bough
in the nine trees which composed the group but was splintered, lopped,
and distorted by the fierce weather that there held them at its mercy
whenever it prevailed. Some were blasted and split as if by lightning,
black stains as from fire marking their sides, while the ground at
their feet was strewn with dead fir-needles and heaps of cones blown
down in the gales of past years. The place was called the Devil’s
Bellows, and it was only necessary to come there on a March or November
night to discover the forcible reasons for that name. On the present
heated afternoon, when no perceptible wind was blowing, the trees kept
up a perpetual moan which one could hardly believe to be caused by the
air.
Here she sat for twenty minutes or more ere she could summon resolution
to go down to the door, her courage being lowered to zero by her
physical lassitude. To any other person than a mother it might have
seemed a little humiliating that she, the elder of the two women,
should be the first to make advances. But Mrs. Yeobright had well
considered all that, and she only thought how best to make her visit
appear to Eustacia not abject but wise.
From her elevated position the exhausted woman could perceive the roof
of the house below, and the garden and the whole enclosure of the
little domicile. And now, at the moment of rising, she saw a second man
approaching the gate. His manner was peculiar, hesitating, and not that
of a person come on business or by invitation. He surveyed the house
with interest, and then walked round and scanned the outer boundary of
the garden, as one might have done had it been the birthplace of
Shakespeare, the prison of Mary Stuart, or the Château of Hougomont.
After passing round and again reaching the gate he went in. Mrs.
Yeobright was vexed at this, having reckoned on finding her son and his
wife by themselves; but a moment’s thought showed her that the presence
of an acquaintance would take off the awkwardness of her first
appearance in the house, by confining the talk to general matters until
she had begun to feel comfortable with them. She came down the hill to
the gate, and looked into the hot garden.
There lay the cat asleep on the bare gravel of the path, as if beds,
rugs, and carpets were unendurable. The leaves of the hollyhocks hung
like half-closed umbrellas, the sap almost simmered in the stems, and
foliage with a smooth surface glared like metallic mirrors. A small
apple tree, of the sort called Ratheripe, grew just inside the gate,
the only one which throve in the garden, by reason of the lightness of
the soil; and among the fallen apples on the ground beneath were wasps
rolling drunk with the juice, or creeping about the little caves in
each fruit which they had eaten out before stupefied by its sweetness.
By the door lay Clym’s furze-hook and the last handful of faggot-bonds
she had seen him gather; they had plainly been thrown down there as he
entered the house.
VI.
A Conjuncture, and Its Result upon the Pedestrian
Wildeve, as has been stated, was determined to visit Eustacia boldly,
by day, and on the easy terms of a relation, since the reddleman had
spied out and spoilt his walks to her by night. The spell that she had
thrown over him in the moonlight dance made it impossible for a man
having no strong puritanic force within him to keep away altogether. He
merely calculated on meeting her and her husband in an ordinary manner,
chatting a little while, and leaving again. Every outward sign was to
be conventional; but the one great fact would be there to satisfy
him—he would see her. He did not even desire Clym’s absence, since it