The Return of the Native
In her anxiety to get out of the direct view of the house she had
diverged from the straightest path homeward, and while looking about to
regain it she came upon a little boy gathering whortleberries in a
hollow. The boy was Johnny Nunsuch, who had been Eustacia’s stoker at
the bonfire, and, with the tendency of a minute body to gravitate
towards a greater, he began hovering round Mrs. Yeobright as soon as
she appeared, and trotted on beside her without perceptible
consciousness of his act.
Mrs. Yeobright spoke to him as one in a mesmeric sleep. “’Tis a long
way home, my child, and we shall not get there till evening.”
“I shall,” said her small companion. “I am going to play marnels afore
supper, and we go to supper at six o’clock, because Father comes home.
Does your father come home at six too?”
“No, he never comes; nor my son either, nor anybody.”
“What have made you so down? Have you seen a ooser?”
“I have seen what’s worse—a woman’s face looking at me through a
windowpane.”
“Is that a bad sight?”
“Yes. It is always a bad sight to see a woman looking out at a weary
wayfarer and not letting her in.”
“Once when I went to Throope Great Pond to catch effets I seed myself
looking up at myself, and I was frightened and jumped back like
anything.”
...“If they had only shown signs of meeting my advances halfway how
well it might have been done! But there is no chance. Shut out! She
must have set him against me. Can there be beautiful bodies without
hearts inside? I think so. I would not have done it against a
neighbour’s cat on such a fiery day as this!”
“What is it you say?”
“Never again—never! Not even if they send for me!”
“You must be a very curious woman to talk like that.”
“O no, not at all,” she said, returning to the boy’s prattle. “Most
people who grow up and have children talk as I do. When you grow up
your mother will talk as I do too.”
“I hope she won’t; because ’tis very bad to talk nonsense.”
“Yes, child; it is nonsense, I suppose. Are you not nearly spent with
the heat?”
“Yes. But not so much as you be.”
“How do you know?”
“Your face is white and wet, and your head is hanging-down-like.”
“Ah, I am exhausted from inside.”
“Why do you, every time you take a step, go like this?” The child in
speaking gave to his motion the jerk and limp of an invalid.
“Because I have a burden which is more than I can bear.”
The little boy remained silently pondering, and they tottered on side
by side until more than a quarter of an hour had elapsed, when Mrs.
Yeobright, whose weakness plainly increased, said to him, “I must sit
down here to rest.”
When she had seated herself he looked long in her face and said, “How
funny you draw your breath—like a lamb when you drive him till he’s
nearly done for. Do you always draw your breath like that?”
“Not always.” Her voice was now so low as to be scarcely above a
whisper.
“You will go to sleep there, I suppose, won’t you? You have shut your
eyes already.”
“No. I shall not sleep much till—another day, and then I hope to have a
long, long one—very long. Now can you tell me if Rimsmoor Pond is dry
this summer?”
“Rimsmoor Pond is, but Oker’s Pool isn’t, because he is deep, and is
never dry—’tis just over there.”
“Is the water clear?”
“Yes, middling—except where the heath-croppers walk into it.”
“Then, take this, and go as fast as you can, and dip me up the clearest
you can find. I am very faint.”
She drew from the small willow reticule that she carried in her hand an
old-fashioned china teacup without a handle; it was one of half a dozen
of the same sort lying in the reticule, which she had preserved ever
since her childhood, and had brought with her today as a small present
for Clym and Eustacia.
The boy started on his errand, and soon came back with the water, such
as it was. Mrs. Yeobright attempted to drink, but it was so warm as to
give her nausea, and she threw it away. Afterwards she still remained
sitting, with her eyes closed.
The boy waited, played near her, caught several of the little brown
butterflies which abounded, and then said as he waited again, “I like
going on better than biding still. Will you soon start again?”
“I don’t know.”
“I wish I might go on by myself,” he resumed, fearing, apparently, that
he was to be pressed into some unpleasant service. “Do you want me any
more, please?”
Mrs. Yeobright made no reply.
“What shall I tell Mother?” the boy continued.
“Tell her you have seen a broken-hearted woman cast off by her son.”
Before quite leaving her he threw upon her face a wistful glance, as if
he had misgivings on the generosity of forsaking her thus. He gazed
into her face in a vague, wondering manner, like that of one examining
some strange old manuscript the key to whose characters is
undiscoverable. He was not so young as to be absolutely without a sense
that sympathy was demanded, he was not old enough to be free from the
terror felt in childhood at beholding misery in adult quarters hitherto
deemed impregnable; and whether she were in a position to cause trouble
or to suffer from it, whether she and her affliction were something to
pity or something to fear, it was beyond him to decide. He lowered his
eyes and went on without another word. Before he had gone half a mile
he had forgotten all about her, except that she was a woman who had sat
down to rest.
Mrs. Yeobright’s exertions, physical and emotional, had well-nigh
prostrated her; but she continued to creep along in short stages with
long breaks between. The sun had now got far to the west of south and
stood directly in her face, like some merciless incendiary, brand in
hand, waiting to consume her. With the departure of the boy all visible
animation disappeared from the landscape, though the intermittent husky
notes of the male grasshoppers from every tuft of furze were enough to
show that amid the prostration of the larger animal species an unseen
insect world was busy in all the fullness of life.
In two hours she reached a slope about three-fourths the whole distance
from Alderworth to her own home, where a little patch of
shepherd’s-thyme intruded upon the path; and she sat down upon the
perfumed mat it formed there. In front of her a colony of ants had
established a thoroughfare across the way, where they toiled a
never-ending and heavy-laden throng. To look down upon them was like
observing a city street from the top of a tower. She remembered that
this bustle of ants had been in progress for years at the same
spot—doubtless those of the old times were the ancestors of these which
walked there now. She leant back to obtain more thorough rest, and the
soft eastern portion of the sky was as great a relief to her eyes as
the thyme was to her head. While she looked a heron arose on that side
of the sky and flew on with his face towards the sun. He had come
dripping wet from some pool in the valleys, and as he flew the edges
and lining of his wings, his thighs and his breast were so caught by
the bright sunbeams that he appeared as if formed of burnished silver.
Up in the zenith where he was seemed a free and happy place, away from
all contact with the earthly ball to which she was pinioned; and she
wished that she could arise uncrushed from its surface and fly as he
flew then.
But, being a mother, it was inevitable that she should soon cease to
ruminate upon her own condition. Had the track of her next thought been
marked by a streak in the air, like the path of a meteor, it would have
shown a direction contrary to the heron’s, and have descended to the
eastward upon the roof of Clym’s house.
VII.
The Tragic Meeting of Two Old Friends
He in the meantime had aroused himself from sleep, sat up, and looked
around. Eustacia was sitting in a chair hard by him, and though she
held a book in her hand she had not looked into it for some time.
“Well, indeed!” said Clym, brushing his eyes with his hands. “How
soundly I have slept! I have had such a tremendous dream, too—one I
shall never forget.”
“I thought you had been dreaming,” said she.
“Yes. It was about my mother. I dreamt that I took you to her house to
make up differences, and when we got there we couldn’t get in, though
she kept on crying to us for help. However, dreams are dreams. What
o’clock is it, Eustacia?”
“Half-past two.”
“So late, is it? I didn’t mean to stay so long. By the time I have had
something to eat it will be after three.”
“Ann is not come back from the village, and I thought I would let you
sleep on till she returned.”
Clym went to the window and looked out. Presently he said, musingly,
“Week after week passes, and yet Mother does not come. I thought I
should have heard something from her long before this.”
Misgiving, regret, fear, resolution, ran their swift course of
expression in Eustacia’s dark eyes. She was face to face with a
monstrous difficulty, and she resolved to get free of it by
postponement.
“I must certainly go to Blooms-End soon,” he continued, “and I think I
had better go alone.” He picked up his leggings and gloves, threw them
down again, and added, “As dinner will be so late today I will not go
back to the heath, but work in the garden till the evening, and then,
when it will be cooler, I will walk to Blooms-End. I am quite sure that
if I make a little advance Mother will be willing to forget all. It
will be rather late before I can get home, as I shall not be able to do
the distance either way in less than an hour and a half. But you will
not mind for one evening, dear? What are you thinking of to make you
look so abstracted?”
“I cannot tell you,” she said heavily. “I wish we didn’t live here,
Clym. The world seems all wrong in this place.”
“Well—if we make it so. I wonder if Thomasin has been to Blooms-End
lately. I hope so. But probably not, as she is, I believe, expecting to
be confined in a month or so. I wish I had thought of that before. Poor
Mother must indeed be very lonely.”
“I don’t like you going tonight.”
“Why not tonight?”
“Something may be said which will terribly injure me.”
“My mother is not vindictive,” said Clym, his colour faintly rising.
“But I wish you would not go,” Eustacia repeated in a low tone. “If you
agree not to go tonight I promise to go by myself to her house
tomorrow, and make it up with her, and wait till you fetch me.”
“Why do you want to do that at this particular time, when at every
previous time that I have proposed it you have refused?”
“I cannot explain further than that I should like to see her alone
before you go,” she answered, with an impatient move of her head, and
looking at him with an anxiety more frequently seen upon those of a
sanguine temperament than upon such as herself.
“Well, it is very odd that just when I had decided to go myself you
should want to do what I proposed long ago. If I wait for you to go
tomorrow another day will be lost; and I know I shall be unable to rest
another night without having been. I want to get this settled, and
will. You must visit her afterwards—it will be all the same.”
“I could even go with you now?”
“You could scarcely walk there and back without a longer rest than I
shall take. No, not tonight, Eustacia.”
“Let it be as you say, then,” she replied in the quiet way of one who,
though willing to ward off evil consequences by a mild effort, would
let events fall out as they might sooner than wrestle hard to direct
them.
Clym then went into the garden; and a thoughtful languor stole over
Eustacia for the remainder of the afternoon, which her husband
attributed to the heat of the weather.
In the evening he set out on the journey. Although the heat of summer
was yet intense the days had considerably shortened, and before he had