The Return of the Native
viper-catchers, I believe,” replied the doctor. “It is mentioned as an
infallible ointment by Hoffman, Mead, and I think the Abbé Fontana.
Undoubtedly it was as good a thing as you could do; though I question
if some other oils would not have been equally efficacious.”
“Come here, come here!” was then rapidly said in anxious female tones,
and Clym and the doctor could be heard rushing forward from the back
part of the shed to where Mrs. Yeobright lay.
“Oh, what is it?” whispered Eustacia.
“’Twas Thomasin who spoke,” said Wildeve. “Then they have fetched her.
I wonder if I had better go in—yet it might do harm.”
For a long time there was utter silence among the group within; and it
was broken at last by Clym saying, in an agonized voice, “O Doctor,
what does it mean?”
The doctor did not reply at once; ultimately he said, “She is sinking
fast. Her heart was previously affected, and physical exhaustion has
dealt the finishing blow.”
Then there was a weeping of women, then waiting, then hushed
exclamations, then a strange gasping sound, then a painful stillness.
“It is all over,” said the doctor.
Further back in the hut the cotters whispered, “Mrs. Yeobright is
dead.”
Almost at the same moment the two watchers observed the form of a small
old-fashioned child entering at the open side of the shed. Susan
Nunsuch, whose boy it was, went forward to the opening and silently
beckoned to him to go back.
“I’ve got something to tell ’ee, Mother,” he cried in a shrill tone.
“That woman asleep there walked along with me today; and she said I was
to say that I had seed her, and she was a broken-hearted woman and cast
off by her son, and then I came on home.”
A confused sob as from a man was heard within, upon which Eustacia
gasped faintly, “That’s Clym—I must go to him—yet dare I do it? No—come
away!”
When they had withdrawn from the neighbourhood of the shed she said
huskily, “I am to blame for this. There is evil in store for me.”
“Was she not admitted to your house after all?” Wildeve inquired.
“No, and that’s where it all lies! Oh, what shall I do! I shall not
intrude upon them—I shall go straight home. Damon, good-bye! I cannot
speak to you any more now.”
They parted company; and when Eustacia had reached the next hill she
looked back. A melancholy procession was wending its way by the light
of the lantern from the hut towards Blooms-End. Wildeve was nowhere to
be seen.
BOOK FIFTH—THE DISCOVERY
I.
“Wherefore Is Light Given to Him That Is in Misery”
One evening, about three weeks after the funeral of Mrs. Yeobright,
when the silver face of the moon sent a bundle of beams directly upon
the floor of Clym’s house at Alderworth, a woman came forth from
within. She reclined over the garden gate as if to refresh herself
awhile. The pale lunar touches which make beauties of hags lent
divinity to this face, already beautiful.
She had not long been there when a man came up the road and with some
hesitation said to her, “How is he tonight, ma’am, if you please?”
“He is better, though still very unwell, Humphrey,” replied Eustacia.
“Is he light-headed, ma’am?”
“No. He is quite sensible now.”
“Do he rave about his mother just the same, poor fellow?” continued
Humphrey.
“Just as much, though not quite so wildly,” she said in a low voice.
“It was very unfortunate, ma’am, that the boy Johnny should ever ha’
told him his mother’s dying words, about her being broken-hearted and
cast off by her son. ’Twas enough to upset any man alive.”
Eustacia made no reply beyond that of a slight catch in her breath, as
of one who fain would speak but could not; and Humphrey, declining her
invitation to come in, went away.
Eustacia turned, entered the house, and ascended to the front bedroom,
where a shaded light was burning. In the bed lay Clym, pale, haggard,
wide awake, tossing to one side and to the other, his eyes lit by a hot
light, as if the fire in their pupils were burning up their substance.
“Is it you, Eustacia?” he said as she sat down.
“Yes, Clym. I have been down to the gate. The moon is shining
beautifully, and there is not a leaf stirring.”
“Shining, is it? What’s the moon to a man like me? Let it shine—let
anything be, so that I never see another day!... Eustacia, I don’t know
where to look—my thoughts go through me like swords. O, if any man
wants to make himself immortal by painting a picture of wretchedness,
let him come here!”
“Why do you say so?”
“I cannot help feeling that I did my best to kill her.”
“No, Clym.”
“Yes, it was so; it is useless to excuse me! My conduct to her was too
hideous—I made no advances; and she could not bring herself to forgive
me. Now she is dead! If I had only shown myself willing to make it up
with her sooner, and we had been friends, and then she had died, it
wouldn’t be so hard to bear. But I never went near her house, so she
never came near mine, and didn’t know how welcome she would have
been—that’s what troubles me. She did not know I was going to her house
that very night, for she was too insensible to understand me. If she
had only come to see me! I longed that she would. But it was not to
be.”
There escaped from Eustacia one of those shivering sighs which used to
shake her like a pestilent blast. She had not yet told.
But Yeobright was too deeply absorbed in the ramblings incidental to
his remorseful state to notice her. During his illness he had been
continually talking thus. Despair had been added to his original grief
by the unfortunate disclosure of the boy who had received the last
words of Mrs. Yeobright—words too bitterly uttered in an hour of
misapprehension. Then his distress had overwhelmed him, and he longed
for death as a field labourer longs for the shade. It was the pitiful
sight of a man standing in the very focus of sorrow. He continually
bewailed his tardy journey to his mother’s house, because it was an
error which could never be rectified, and insisted that he must have
been horribly perverted by some fiend not to have thought before that
it was his duty to go to her, since she did not come to him. He would
ask Eustacia to agree with him in his self-condemnation; and when she,
seared inwardly by a secret she dared not tell, declared that she could
not give an opinion, he would say, “That’s because you didn’t know my
mother’s nature. She was always ready to forgive if asked to do so; but
I seemed to her to be as an obstinate child, and that made her
unyielding. Yet not unyielding—she was proud and reserved, no more....
Yes, I can understand why she held out against me so long. She was
waiting for me. I dare say she said a hundred times in her sorrow,
‘What a return he makes for all the sacrifices I have made for him!’ I
never went to her! When I set out to visit her it was too late. To
think of that is nearly intolerable!”
Sometimes his condition had been one of utter remorse, unsoftened by a
single tear of pure sorrow: and then he writhed as he lay, fevered far
more by thought than by physical ills. “If I could only get one
assurance that she did not die in a belief that I was resentful,” he
said one day when in this mood, “it would be better to think of than a
hope of heaven. But that I cannot do.”
“You give yourself up too much to this wearying despair,” said
Eustacia. “Other men’s mothers have died.”
“That doesn’t make the loss of mine less. Yet it is less the loss than
the circumstances of the loss. I sinned against her, and on that
account there is no light for me.”
“She sinned against you, I think.”
“No, she did not. I committed the guilt; and may the whole burden be
upon my head!”
“I think you might consider twice before you say that,” Eustacia
replied. “Single men have, no doubt, a right to curse themselves as
much as they please; but men with wives involve two in the doom they
pray down.”
“I am in too sorry a state to understand what you are refining on,”
said the wretched man. “Day and night shout at me, ‘You have helped to
kill her.’ But in loathing myself I may, I own, be unjust to you, my
poor wife. Forgive me for it, Eustacia, for I scarcely know what I do.”
Eustacia was always anxious to avoid the sight of her husband in such a
state as this, which had become as dreadful to her as the trial scene
was to Judas Iscariot. It brought before her eyes the spectre of a
worn-out woman knocking at a door which she would not open; and she
shrank from contemplating it. Yet it was better for Yeobright himself
when he spoke openly of his sharp regret, for in silence he endured
infinitely more, and would sometimes remain so long in a tense,
brooding mood, consuming himself by the gnawing of his thought, that it
was imperatively necessary to make him talk aloud, that his grief might
in some degree expend itself in the effort.
Eustacia had not been long indoors after her look at the moonlight when
a soft footstep came up to the house, and Thomasin was announced by the
woman downstairs.
“Ah, Thomasin! Thank you for coming tonight,” said Clym when she
entered the room. “Here am I, you see. Such a wretched spectacle am I,
that I shrink from being seen by a single friend, and almost from you.”
“You must not shrink from me, dear Clym,” said Thomasin earnestly, in
that sweet voice of hers which came to a sufferer like fresh air into a
Black Hole. “Nothing in you can ever shock me or drive me away. I have
been here before, but you don’t remember it.”
“Yes, I do; I am not delirious, Thomasin, nor have I been so at all.
Don’t you believe that if they say so. I am only in great misery at
what I have done, and that, with the weakness, makes me seem mad. But
it has not upset my reason. Do you think I should remember all about my
mother’s death if I were out of my mind? No such good luck. Two months
and a half, Thomasin, the last of her life, did my poor mother live
alone, distracted and mourning because of me; yet she was unvisited by
me, though I was living only six miles off. Two months and a
half—seventy-five days did the sun rise and set upon her in that
deserted state which a dog didn’t deserve! Poor people who had nothing
in common with her would have cared for her, and visited her had they
known her sickness and loneliness; but I, who should have been all to
her, stayed away like a cur. If there is any justice in God let Him
kill me now. He has nearly blinded me, but that is not enough. If He
would only strike me with more pain I would believe in Him forever!”
“Hush, hush! O, pray, Clym, don’t, don’t say it!” implored Thomasin,
affrighted into sobs and tears; while Eustacia, at the other side of
the room, though her pale face remained calm, writhed in her chair.
Clym went on without heeding his cousin.
“But I am not worth receiving further proof even of Heaven’s
reprobation. Do you think, Thomasin, that she knew me—that she did not
die in that horrid mistaken notion about my not forgiving her, which I
can’t tell you how she acquired? If you could only assure me of that!
Do you think so, Eustacia? Do speak to me.”
“I think I can assure you that she knew better at last,” said Thomasin.
The pallid Eustacia said nothing.
“Why didn’t she come to my house? I would have taken her in and showed
her how I loved her in spite of all. But she never came; and I didn’t
go to her, and she died on the heath like an animal kicked out, nobody
to help her till it was too late. If you could have seen her, Thomasin,
as I saw her—a poor dying woman, lying in the dark upon the bare
ground, moaning, nobody near, believing she was utterly deserted by all
the world, it would have moved you to anguish, it would have moved a
brute. And this poor woman my mother! No wonder she said to the child,
‘You have seen a broken-hearted woman.’ What a state she must have been