The Return of the Native
it, if only for the sake of my own foolish kisses that were wasted
there before I knew what I cherished. How bewitched I was! How could
there be any good in a woman that everybody spoke ill of?”
“O, O, O!” she cried, breaking down at last; and, shaking with sobs
which choked her, she sank upon her knees. “O, will you have done! O,
you are too relentless—there’s a limit to the cruelty of savages! I
have held out long—but you crush me down. I beg for mercy—I cannot bear
this any longer—it is inhuman to go further with this! If I had—killed
your—mother with my own hand—I should not deserve such a scourging to
the bone as this. O, O! God have mercy upon a miserable woman!... You
have beaten me in this game—I beg you to stay your hand in pity!... I
confess that I—wilfully did not undo the door the first time she
knocked—but—I should have unfastened it the second—if I had not thought
you had gone to do it yourself. When I found you had not I opened it,
but she was gone. That’s the extent of my crime—towards _her_. Best
natures commit bad faults sometimes, don’t they?—I think they do. Now I
will leave you—for ever and ever!”
“Tell all, and I _will_ pity you. Was the man in the house with you
Wildeve?”
“I cannot tell,” she said desperately through her sobbing. “Don’t
insist further—I cannot tell. I am going from this house. We cannot
both stay here.”
“You need not go—I will go. You can stay here.”
“No, I will dress, and then I will go.”
“Where?”
“Where I came from, or _else_where.”
She hastily dressed herself, Yeobright moodily walking up and down the
room the whole of the time. At last all her things were on. Her little
hands quivered so violently as she held them to her chin to fasten her
bonnet that she could not tie the strings, and after a few moments she
relinquished the attempt. Seeing this he moved forward and said, “Let
me tie them.”
She assented in silence, and lifted her chin. For once at least in her
life she was totally oblivious of the charm of her attitude. But he was
not, and he turned his eyes aside, that he might not be tempted to
softness.
The strings were tied; she turned from him. “Do you still prefer going
away yourself to my leaving you?” he inquired again.
“I do.”
“Very well—let it be. And when you will confess to the man I may pity
you.”
She flung her shawl about her and went downstairs, leaving him standing
in the room.
Eustacia had not long been gone when there came a knock at the door of
the bedroom; and Yeobright said, “Well?”
It was the servant; and she replied, “Somebody from Mrs. Wildeve’s have
called to tell ’ee that the mis’ess and the baby are getting on
wonderful well, and the baby’s name is to be Eustacia Clementine.” And
the girl retired.
“What a mockery!” said Clym. “This unhappy marriage of mine to be
perpetuated in that child’s name!”
IV.
The Ministrations of a Half-forgotten One
Eustacia’s journey was at first as vague in direction as that of
thistledown on the wind. She did not know what to do. She wished it had
been night instead of morning, that she might at least have borne her
misery without the possibility of being seen. Tracing mile after mile
along between the dying ferns and the wet white spiders’ webs, she at
length turned her steps towards her grandfather’s house. She found the
front door closed and locked. Mechanically she went round to the end
where the stable was, and on looking in at the stable door she saw
Charley standing within.
“Captain Vye is not at home?” she said.
“No, ma’am,” said the lad in a flutter of feeling; “he’s gone to
Weatherbury, and won’t be home till night. And the servant is gone home
for a holiday. So the house is locked up.”
Eustacia’s face was not visible to Charley as she stood at the doorway,
her back being to the sky, and the stable but indifferently lighted;
but the wildness of her manner arrested his attention. She turned and
walked away across the enclosure to the gate, and was hidden by the
bank.
When she had disappeared Charley, with misgiving in his eyes, slowly
came from the stable door, and going to another point in the bank he
looked over. Eustacia was leaning against it on the outside, her face
covered with her hands, and her head pressing the dewy heather which
bearded the bank’s outer side. She appeared to be utterly indifferent
to the circumstance that her bonnet, hair, and garments were becoming
wet and disarranged by the moisture of her cold, harsh pillow. Clearly
something was wrong.
Charley had always regarded Eustacia as Eustacia had regarded Clym when
she first beheld him—as a romantic and sweet vision, scarcely
incarnate. He had been so shut off from her by the dignity of her look
and the pride of her speech, except at that one blissful interval when
he was allowed to hold her hand, that he had hardly deemed her a woman,
wingless and earthly, subject to household conditions and domestic
jars. The inner details of her life he had only conjectured. She had
been a lovely wonder, predestined to an orbit in which the whole of his
own was but a point; and this sight of her leaning like a helpless,
despairing creature against a wild wet bank filled him with an amazed
horror. He could no longer remain where he was. Leaping over, he came
up, touched her with his finger, and said tenderly, “You are poorly,
ma’am. What can I do?”
Eustacia started up, and said, “Ah, Charley—you have followed me. You
did not think when I left home in the summer that I should come back
like this!”
“I did not, dear ma’am. Can I help you now?”
“I am afraid not. I wish I could get into the house. I feel
giddy—that’s all.”
“Lean on my arm, ma’am, till we get to the porch, and I will try to
open the door.”
He supported her to the porch, and there depositing her on a seat
hastened to the back, climbed to a window by the help of a ladder, and
descending inside opened the door. Next he assisted her into the room,
where there was an old-fashioned horsehair settee as large as a donkey
wagon. She lay down here, and Charley covered her with a cloak he found
in the hall.
“Shall I get you something to eat and drink?” he said.
“If you please, Charley. But I suppose there is no fire?”
“I can light it, ma’am.”
He vanished, and she heard a splitting of wood and a blowing of
bellows; and presently he returned, saying, “I have lighted a fire in
the kitchen, and now I’ll light one here.”
He lit the fire, Eustacia dreamily observing him from her couch. When
it was blazing up he said, “Shall I wheel you round in front of it,
ma’am, as the morning is chilly?”
“Yes, if you like.”
“Shall I go and bring the victuals now?”
“Yes, do,” she murmured languidly.
When he had gone, and the dull sounds occasionally reached her ears of
his movements in the kitchen, she forgot where she was, and had for a
moment to consider by an effort what the sounds meant. After an
interval which seemed short to her whose thoughts were elsewhere, he
came in with a tray on which steamed tea and toast, though it was
nearly lunch-time.
“Place it on the table,” she said. “I shall be ready soon.”
He did so, and retired to the door; when, however, he perceived that
she did not move he came back a few steps.
“Let me hold it to you, if you don’t wish to get up,” said Charley. He
brought the tray to the front of the couch, where he knelt down,
adding, “I will hold it for you.”
Eustacia sat up and poured out a cup of tea. “You are very kind to me,
Charley,” she murmured as she sipped.
“Well, I ought to be,” said he diffidently, taking great trouble not to
rest his eyes upon her, though this was their only natural position,
Eustacia being immediately before him. “You have been kind to me.”
“How have I?” said Eustacia.
“You let me hold your hand when you were a maiden at home.”
“Ah, so I did. Why did I do that? My mind is lost—it had to do with the
mumming, had it not?”
“Yes, you wanted to go in my place.”
“I remember. I do indeed remember—too well!”
She again became utterly downcast; and Charley, seeing that she was not
going to eat or drink any more, took away the tray.
Afterwards he occasionally came in to see if the fire was burning, to
ask her if she wanted anything, to tell her that the wind had shifted
from south to west, to ask her if she would like him to gather her some
blackberries; to all which inquiries she replied in the negative or
with indifference.
She remained on the settee some time longer, when she aroused herself
and went upstairs. The room in which she had formerly slept still
remained much as she had left it, and the recollection that this forced
upon her of her own greatly changed and infinitely worsened situation
again set on her face the undetermined and formless misery which it had
worn on her first arrival. She peeped into her grandfather’s room,
through which the fresh autumn air was blowing from the open window.
Her eye was arrested by what was a familiar sight enough, though it
broke upon her now with a new significance.
It was a brace of pistols, hanging near the head of her grandfather’s
bed, which he always kept there loaded, as a precaution against
possible burglars, the house being very lonely. Eustacia regarded them
long, as if they were the page of a book in which she read a new and a
strange matter. Quickly, like one afraid of herself, she returned
downstairs and stood in deep thought.
“If I could only do it!” she said. “It would be doing much good to
myself and all connected with me, and no harm to a single one.”
The idea seemed to gather force within her, and she remained in a fixed
attitude nearly ten minutes, when a certain finality was expressed in
her gaze, and no longer the blankness of indecision.
She turned and went up the second time—softly and stealthily now—and
entered her grandfather’s room, her eyes at once seeking the head of
the bed. The pistols were gone.
The instant quashing of her purpose by their absence affected her brain
as a sudden vacuum affects the body—she nearly fainted. Who had done
this? There was only one person on the premises besides herself.
Eustacia involuntarily turned to the open window which overlooked the
garden as far as the bank that bounded it. On the summit of the latter
stood Charley, sufficiently elevated by its height to see into the
room. His gaze was directed eagerly and solicitously upon her.
She went downstairs to the door and beckoned to him.
“You have taken them away?”
“Yes, ma’am.”
“Why did you do it?”
“I saw you looking at them too long.”
“What has that to do with it?”
“You have been heart-broken all the morning, as if you did not want to
live.”
“Well?”
“And I could not bear to leave them in your way. There was meaning in
your look at them.”
“Where are they now?”
“Locked up.”
“Where?”
“In the stable.”
“Give them to me.”
“No, ma’am.”
“You refuse?”
“I do. I care too much for you to give ’em up.”
She turned aside, her face for the first time softening from the stony
immobility of the earlier day, and the corners of her mouth resuming
something of that delicacy of cut which was always lost in her moments
of despair. At last she confronted him again.
“Why should I not die if I wish?” she said tremulously. “I have made a
bad bargain with life, and I am weary of it—weary. And now you have
hindered my escape. O, why did you, Charley! What makes death painful
except the thought of others’ grief?—and that is absent in my case, for
not a sigh would follow me!”
“Ah, it is trouble that has done this! I wish in my very soul that he
who brought it about might die and rot, even if ’tis transportation to
say it!”
“Charley, no more of that. What do you mean to do about this you have
seen?”