The Return of the Native
panel and the Miraculous Draught of Fishes on the base; his
grandmother’s corner cupboard with the glass door, through which the
spotted china was visible; the dumb-waiter; the wooden tea trays; the
hanging fountain with the brass tap—whither would these venerable
articles have to be banished?
He noticed that the flowers in the window had died for want of water,
and he placed them out upon the ledge, that they might be taken away.
While thus engaged he heard footsteps on the gravel without, and
somebody knocked at the door.
Yeobright opened it, and Venn was standing before him.
“Good morning,” said the reddleman. “Is Mrs. Yeobright at home?”
Yeobright looked upon the ground. “Then you have not seen Christian or
any of the Egdon folks?” he said.
“No. I have only just returned after a long stay away. I called here
the day before I left.”
“And you have heard nothing?”
“Nothing.”
“My mother is—dead.”
“Dead!” said Venn mechanically.
“Her home now is where I shouldn’t mind having mine.”
Venn regarded him, and then said, “If I didn’t see your face I could
never believe your words. Have you been ill?”
“I had an illness.”
“Well, the change! When I parted from her a month ago everything seemed
to say that she was going to begin a new life.”
“And what seemed came true.”
“You say right, no doubt. Trouble has taught you a deeper vein of talk
than mine. All I meant was regarding her life here. She has died too
soon.”
“Perhaps through my living too long. I have had a bitter experience on
that score this last month, Diggory. But come in; I have been wanting
to see you.”
He conducted the reddleman into the large room where the dancing had
taken place the previous Christmas, and they sat down in the settle
together. “There’s the cold fireplace, you see,” said Clym. “When that
half-burnt log and those cinders were alight she was alive! Little has
been changed here yet. I can do nothing. My life creeps like a snail.”
“How came she to die?” said Venn.
Yeobright gave him some particulars of her illness and death, and
continued: “After this no kind of pain will ever seem more than an
indisposition to me. I began saying that I wanted to ask you something,
but I stray from subjects like a drunken man. I am anxious to know what
my mother said to you when she last saw you. You talked with her a long
time, I think?”
“I talked with her more than half an hour.”
“About me?”
“Yes. And it must have been on account of what we said that she was on
the heath. Without question she was coming to see you.”
“But why should she come to see me if she felt so bitterly against me?
There’s the mystery.”
“Yet I know she quite forgave ’ee.”
“But, Diggory—would a woman, who had quite forgiven her son, say, when
she felt herself ill on the way to his house, that she was
broken-hearted because of his ill-usage? Never!”
“What I know is that she didn’t blame you at all. She blamed herself
for what had happened, and only herself. I had it from her own lips.”
“You had it from her lips that I had _not_ ill-treated her; and at the
same time another had it from her lips that I _had_ ill-treated her? My
mother was no impulsive woman who changed her opinion every hour
without reason. How can it be, Venn, that she should have told such
different stories in close succession?”
“I cannot say. It is certainly odd, when she had forgiven you, and had
forgiven your wife, and was going to see ye on purpose to make
friends.”
“If there was one thing wanting to bewilder me it was this
incomprehensible thing!... Diggory, if we, who remain alive, were only
allowed to hold conversation with the dead—just once, a bare minute,
even through a screen of iron bars, as with persons in prison—what we
might learn! How many who now ride smiling would hide their heads! And
this mystery—I should then be at the bottom of it at once. But the
grave has forever shut her in; and how shall it be found out now?”
No reply was returned by his companion, since none could be given; and
when Venn left, a few minutes later, Clym had passed from the dullness
of sorrow to the fluctuation of carking incertitude.
He continued in the same state all the afternoon. A bed was made up for
him in the same house by a neighbour, that he might not have to return
again the next day; and when he retired to rest in the deserted place
it was only to remain awake hour after hour thinking the same thoughts.
How to discover a solution to this riddle of death seemed a query of
more importance than highest problems of the living. There was housed
in his memory a vivid picture of the face of a little boy as he entered
the hovel where Clym’s mother lay. The round eyes, eager gaze, the
piping voice which enunciated the words, had operated like stilettos on
his brain.
A visit to the boy suggested itself as a means of gleaning new
particulars; though it might be quite unproductive. To probe a child’s
mind after the lapse of six weeks, not for facts which the child had
seen and understood, but to get at those which were in their nature
beyond him, did not promise much; yet when every obvious channel is
blocked we grope towards the small and obscure. There was nothing else
left to do; after that he would allow the enigma to drop into the abyss
of undiscoverable things.
It was about daybreak when he had reached this decision, and he at once
arose. He locked up the house and went out into the green patch which
merged in heather further on. In front of the white garden-palings the
path branched into three like a broad arrow. The road to the right led
to the Quiet Woman and its neighbourhood; the middle track led to
Mistover Knap; the left-hand track led over the hill to another part of
Mistover, where the child lived. On inclining into the latter path
Yeobright felt a creeping chilliness, familiar enough to most people,
and probably caused by the unsunned morning air. In after days he
thought of it as a thing of singular significance.
When Yeobright reached the cottage of Susan Nunsuch, the mother of the
boy he sought, he found that the inmates were not yet astir. But in
upland hamlets the transition from a-bed to abroad is surprisingly
swift and easy. There no dense partition of yawns and toilets divides
humanity by night from humanity by day. Yeobright tapped at the upper
windowsill, which he could reach with his walking stick; and in three
or four minutes the woman came down.
It was not till this moment that Clym recollected her to be the person
who had behaved so barbarously to Eustacia. It partly explained the
insuavity with which the woman greeted him. Moreover, the boy had been
ailing again; and Susan now, as ever since the night when he had been
pressed into Eustacia’s service at the bonfire, attributed his
indispositions to Eustacia’s influence as a witch. It was one of those
sentiments which lurk like moles underneath the visible surface of
manners, and may have been kept alive by Eustacia’s entreaty to the
captain, at the time that he had intended to prosecute Susan for the
pricking in church, to let the matter drop; which he accordingly had
done.
Yeobright overcame his repugnance, for Susan had at least borne his
mother no ill-will. He asked kindly for the boy; but her manner did not
improve.
“I wish to see him,” continued Yeobright, with some hesitation, “to ask
him if he remembers anything more of his walk with my mother than what
he has previously told.”
She regarded him in a peculiar and criticizing manner. To anybody but a
half-blind man it would have said, “You want another of the knocks
which have already laid you so low.”
She called the boy downstairs, asked Clym to sit down on a stool, and
continued, “Now, Johnny, tell Mr. Yeobright anything you can call to
mind.”
“You have not forgotten how you walked with the poor lady on that hot
day?” said Clym.
“No,” said the boy.
“And what she said to you?”
The boy repeated the exact words he had used on entering the hut.
Yeobright rested his elbow on the table and shaded his face with his
hand; and the mother looked as if she wondered how a man could want
more of what had stung him so deeply.
“She was going to Alderworth when you first met her?”
“No; she was coming away.”
“That can’t be.”
“Yes; she walked along with me. I was coming away, too.”
“Then where did you first see her?”
“At your house.”
“Attend, and speak the truth!” said Clym sternly.
“Yes, sir; at your house was where I seed her first.”
Clym started up, and Susan smiled in an expectant way which did not
embellish her face; it seemed to mean, “Something sinister is coming!”
“What did she do at my house?”
“She went and sat under the trees at the Devil’s Bellows.”
“Good God! this is all news to me!”
“You never told me this before?” said Susan.
“No, Mother; because I didn’t like to tell ’ee I had been so far. I was
picking blackhearts, and went further than I meant.”
“What did she do then?” said Yeobright.
“Looked at a man who came up and went into your house.”
“That was myself—a furze-cutter, with brambles in his hand.”
“No; ’twas not you. ’Twas a gentleman. You had gone in afore.”
“Who was he?”
“I don’t know.”
“Now tell me what happened next.”
“The poor lady went and knocked at your door, and the lady with black
hair looked out of the side window at her.”
The boy’s mother turned to Clym and said, “This is something you didn’t
expect?”
Yeobright took no more notice of her than if he had been of stone. “Go
on, go on,” he said hoarsely to the boy.
“And when she saw the young lady look out of the window the old lady
knocked again; and when nobody came she took up the furze-hook and
looked at it, and put it down again, and then she looked at the
faggot-bonds; and then she went away, and walked across to me, and
blowed her breath very hard, like this. We walked on together, she and
I, and I talked to her and she talked to me a bit, but not much,
because she couldn’t blow her breath.”
“O!” murmured Clym, in a low tone, and bowed his head. “Let’s have
more,” he said.
“She couldn’t talk much, and she couldn’t walk; and her face was, O so
queer!”
“How was her face?”
“Like yours is now.”
The woman looked at Yeobright, and beheld him colourless, in a cold
sweat. “Isn’t there meaning in it?” she said stealthily. “What do you
think of her now?”
“Silence!” said Clym fiercely. And, turning to the boy, “And then you
left her to die?”
“No,” said the woman, quickly and angrily. “He did not leave her to
die! She sent him away. Whoever says he forsook her says what’s not
true.”
“Trouble no more about that,” answered Clym, with a quivering mouth.
“What he did is a trifle in comparison with what he saw. Door kept
shut, did you say? Kept shut, she looking out of window? Good heart of
God!—what does it mean?”
The child shrank away from the gaze of his questioner.
“He said so,” answered the mother, “and Johnny’s a God-fearing boy and
tells no lies.”
“‘Cast off by my son!’ No, by my best life, dear mother, it is not so!
But by your son’s, your son’s—May all murderesses get the torment they
deserve!”
With these words Yeobright went forth from the little dwelling. The
pupils of his eyes, fixed steadfastly on blankness, were vaguely lit
with an icy shine; his mouth had passed into the phase more or less
imaginatively rendered in studies of Oedipus. The strangest deeds were
possible to his mood. But they were not possible to his situation.
Instead of there being before him the pale face of Eustacia, and a
masculine shape unknown, there was only the imperturbable countenance
of the heath, which, having defied the cataclysmal onsets of centuries,
reduced to insignificance by its seamed and antique features the
wildest turmoil of a single man.