The Return of the Native
journey. Amid the fluctuating sentiments of the day her unpractical
mind had not dwelt on the necessity of being well-provided, and now
that she thoroughly realized the conditions she sighed bitterly and
ceased to stand erect, gradually crouching down under the umbrella as
if she were drawn into the Barrow by a hand from beneath. Could it be
that she was to remain a captive still? Money—she had never felt its
value before. Even to efface herself from the country means were
required. To ask Wildeve for pecuniary aid without allowing him to
accompany her was impossible to a woman with a shadow of pride left in
her; to fly as his mistress—and she knew that he loved her—was of the
nature of humiliation.
Anyone who had stood by now would have pitied her, not so much on
account of her exposure to weather, and isolation from all of humanity
except the mouldered remains inside the tumulus; but for that other
form of misery which was denoted by the slightly rocking movement that
her feelings imparted to her person. Extreme unhappiness weighed
visibly upon her. Between the drippings of the rain from her umbrella
to her mantle, from her mantle to the heather, from the heather to the
earth, very similar sounds could be heard coming from her lips; and the
tearfulness of the outer scene was repeated upon her face. The wings of
her soul were broken by the cruel obstructiveness of all about her; and
even had she seen herself in a promising way of getting to Budmouth,
entering a steamer, and sailing to some opposite port, she would have
been but little more buoyant, so fearfully malignant were other things.
She uttered words aloud. When a woman in such a situation, neither old,
deaf, crazed, nor whimsical, takes upon herself to sob and soliloquize
aloud there is something grievous the matter.
“Can I go, can I go?” she moaned. “He’s not _great_ enough for me to
give myself to—he does not suffice for my desire!... If he had been a
Saul or a Bonaparte—ah! But to break my marriage vow for him—it is too
poor a luxury!... And I have no money to go alone! And if I could, what
comfort to me? I must drag on next year, as I have dragged on this
year, and the year after that as before. How I have tried and tried to
be a splendid woman, and how destiny has been against me!... I do not
deserve my lot!” she cried in a frenzy of bitter revolt. “O, the
cruelty of putting me into this ill-conceived world! I was capable of
much; but I have been injured and blighted and crushed by things beyond
my control! O, how hard it is of Heaven to devise such tortures for me,
who have done no harm to Heaven at all!”
The distant light which Eustacia had cursorily observed in leaving the
house came, as she had divined, from the cottage window of Susan
Nunsuch. What Eustacia did not divine was the occupation of the woman
within at that moment. Susan’s sight of her passing figure earlier in
the evening, not five minutes after the sick boy’s exclamation,
“Mother, I do feel so bad!” persuaded the matron that an evil influence
was certainly exercised by Eustacia’s propinquity.
On this account Susan did not go to bed as soon as the evening’s work
was over, as she would have done at ordinary times. To counteract the
malign spell which she imagined poor Eustacia to be working, the boy’s
mother busied herself with a ghastly invention of superstition,
calculated to bring powerlessness, atrophy, and annihilation on any
human being against whom it was directed. It was a practice well known
on Egdon at that date, and one that is not quite extinct at the present
day.
She passed with her candle into an inner room, where, among other
utensils, were two large brown pans, containing together perhaps a
hundredweight of liquid honey, the produce of the bees during the
foregoing summer. On a shelf over the pans was a smooth and solid
yellow mass of a hemispherical form, consisting of beeswax from the
same take of honey. Susan took down the lump, and cutting off several
thin slices, heaped them in an iron ladle, with which she returned to
the living-room, and placed the vessel in the hot ashes of the
fireplace. As soon as the wax had softened to the plasticity of dough
she kneaded the pieces together. And now her face became more intent.
She began moulding the wax; and it was evident from her manner of
manipulation that she was endeavouring to give it some preconceived
form. The form was human.
By warming and kneading, cutting and twisting, dismembering and
re-joining the incipient image she had in about a quarter of an hour
produced a shape which tolerably well resembled a woman, and was about
six inches high. She laid it on the table to get cold and hard.
Meanwhile she took the candle and went upstairs to where the little boy
was lying.
“Did you notice, my dear, what Mrs. Eustacia wore this afternoon
besides the dark dress?”
“A red ribbon round her neck.”
“Anything else?”
“No—except sandal-shoes.”
“A red ribbon and sandal-shoes,” she said to herself.
Mrs. Nunsuch went and searched till she found a fragment of the
narrowest red ribbon, which she took downstairs and tied round the neck
of the image. Then fetching ink and a quilt from the rickety bureau by
the window, she blackened the feet of the image to the extent
presumably covered by shoes; and on the instep of each foot marked
cross-lines in the shape taken by the sandalstrings of those days.
Finally she tied a bit of black thread round the upper part of the
head, in faint resemblance to a snood worn for confining the hair.
Susan held the object at arm’s length and contemplated it with a
satisfaction in which there was no smile. To anybody acquainted with
the inhabitants of Egdon Heath the image would have suggested Eustacia
Yeobright.
From her workbasket in the window-seat the woman took a paper of pins,
of the old long and yellow sort, whose heads were disposed to come off
at their first usage. These she began to thrust into the image in all
directions, with apparently excruciating energy. Probably as many as
fifty were thus inserted, some into the head of the wax model, some
into the shoulders, some into the trunk, some upwards through the soles
of the feet, till the figure was completely permeated with pins.
She turned to the fire. It had been of turf; and though the high heap
of ashes which turf fires produce was somewhat dark and dead on the
outside, upon raking it abroad with the shovel the inside of the mass
showed a glow of red heat. She took a few pieces of fresh turf from the
chimney-corner and built them together over the glow, upon which the
fire brightened. Seizing with the tongs the image that she had made of
Eustacia, she held it in the heat, and watched it as it began to waste
slowly away. And while she stood thus engaged there came from between
her lips a murmur of words.
It was a strange jargon—the Lord’s Prayer repeated backwards—the
incantation usual in proceedings for obtaining unhallowed assistance
against an enemy. Susan uttered the lugubrious discourse three times
slowly, and when it was completed the image had considerably
diminished. As the wax dropped into the fire a long flame arose from
the spot, and curling its tongue round the figure ate still further
into its substance. A pin occasionally dropped with the wax, and the
embers heated it red as it lay.
VIII.
Rain, Darkness, and Anxious Wanderers
While the effigy of Eustacia was melting to nothing, and the fair woman
herself was standing on Rainbarrow, her soul in an abyss of desolation
seldom plumbed by one so young, Yeobright sat lonely at Blooms-End. He
had fulfilled his word to Thomasin by sending off Fairway with the
letter to his wife, and now waited with increased impatience for some
sound or signal of her return. Were Eustacia still at Mistover the very
least he expected was that she would send him back a reply tonight by
the same hand; though, to leave all to her inclination, he had
cautioned Fairway not to ask for an answer. If one were handed to him
he was to bring it immediately; if not, he was to go straight home
without troubling to come round to Blooms-End again that night.
But secretly Clym had a more pleasing hope. Eustacia might possibly
decline to use her pen—it was rather her way to work silently—and
surprise him by appearing at his door. How fully her mind was made up
to do otherwise he did not know.
To Clym’s regret it began to rain and blow hard as the evening
advanced. The wind rasped and scraped at the corners of the house, and
filliped the eavesdroppings like peas against the panes. He walked
restlessly about the untenanted rooms, stopping strange noises in
windows and doors by jamming splinters of wood into the casements and
crevices, and pressing together the leadwork of the quarries where it
had become loosened from the glass. It was one of those nights when
cracks in the walls of old churches widen, when ancient stains on the
ceilings of decayed manor houses are renewed and enlarged from the size
of a man’s hand to an area of many feet. The little gate in the palings
before his dwelling continually opened and clicked together again, but
when he looked out eagerly nobody was there; it was as if invisible
shapes of the dead were passing in on their way to visit him.
Between ten and eleven o’clock, finding that neither Fairway nor
anybody else came to him, he retired to rest, and despite his anxieties
soon fell asleep. His sleep, however, was not very sound, by reason of
the expectancy he had given way to, and he was easily awakened by a
knocking which began at the door about an hour after. Clym arose and
looked out of the window. Rain was still falling heavily, the whole
expanse of heath before him emitting a subdued hiss under the downpour.
It was too dark to see anything at all.
“Who’s there?” he cried.
Light footsteps shifted their position in the porch, and he could just
distinguish in a plaintive female voice the words, “O Clym, come down
and let me in!”
He flushed hot with agitation. “Surely it is Eustacia!” he murmured. If
so, she had indeed come to him unawares.
He hastily got a light, dressed himself, and went down. On his flinging
open the door the rays of the candle fell upon a woman closely wrapped
up, who at once came forward.
“Thomasin!” he exclaimed in an indescribable tone of disappointment.
“It is Thomasin, and on such a night as this! O, where is Eustacia?”
Thomasin it was, wet, frightened, and panting.
“Eustacia? I don’t know, Clym; but I can think,” she said with much
perturbation. “Let me come in and rest—I will explain this. There is a
great trouble brewing—my husband and Eustacia!”
“What, what?”
“I think my husband is going to leave me or do something dreadful—I
don’t know what—Clym, will you go and see? I have nobody to help me but
you; Eustacia has not yet come home?”
“No.”
She went on breathlessly: “Then they are going to run off together! He
came indoors tonight about eight o’clock and said in an off-hand way,
‘Tamsie, I have just found that I must go a journey.’ ‘When?’ I said.
‘Tonight,’ he said. ‘Where?’ I asked him. ‘I cannot tell you at
present,’ he said; ‘I shall be back again tomorrow.’ He then went and
busied himself in looking up his things, and took no notice of me at
all. I expected to see him start, but he did not, and then it came to
be ten o’clock, when he said, ‘You had better go to bed.’ I didn’t know
what to do, and I went to bed. I believe he thought I fell asleep, for
half an hour after that he came up and unlocked the oak chest we keep
money in when we have much in the house and took out a roll of
something which I believe was banknotes, though I was not aware that he
had ’em there. These he must have got from the bank when he went there