The Return of the Native
Blooms-End?” came to them in the same voice, as a long, slim indistinct
figure approached the barrow.
“Ought we not to run home as hard as we can, neighbours, as ’tis
getting late?” said Christian. “Not run away from one another, you
know; run close together, I mean.”
“Scrape up a few stray locks of furze, and make a blaze, so that we can
see who the man is,” said Fairway.
When the flame arose it revealed a young man in tight raiment, and red
from top to toe. “Is there a track across here to Mis’ess Yeobright’s
house?” he repeated.
“Ay—keep along the path down there.”
“I mean a way two horses and a van can travel over?”
“Well, yes; you can get up the vale below here with time. The track is
rough, but if you’ve got a light your horses may pick along wi’ care.
Have ye brought your cart far up, neighbour reddleman?”
“I’ve left it in the bottom, about half a mile back, I stepped on in
front to make sure of the way, as ’tis night-time, and I han’t been
here for so long.”
“Oh, well you can get up,” said Fairway. “What a turn it did give me
when I saw him!” he added to the whole group, the reddleman included.
“Lord’s sake, I thought, whatever fiery mommet is this come to trouble
us? No slight to your looks, reddleman, for ye bain’t bad-looking in
the groundwork, though the finish is queer. My meaning is just to say
how curious I felt. I half thought it ’twas the devil or the red ghost
the boy told of.”
“It gied me a turn likewise,” said Susan Nunsuch, “for I had a dream
last night of a death’s head.”
“Don’t ye talk o’t no more,” said Christian. “If he had a handkerchief
over his head he’d look for all the world like the Devil in the picture
of the Temptation.”
“Well, thank you for telling me,” said the young reddleman, smiling
faintly. “And good night t’ye all.”
He withdrew from their sight down the barrow.
“I fancy I’ve seen that young man’s face before,” said Humphrey. “But
where, or how, or what his name is, I don’t know.”
The reddleman had not been gone more than a few minutes when another
person approached the partially revived bonfire. It proved to be a
well-known and respected widow of the neighbourhood, of a standing
which can only be expressed by the word genteel. Her face, encompassed
by the blackness of the receding heath, showed whitely, and without
half-lights, like a cameo.
She was a woman of middle-age, with well-formed features of the type
usually found where perspicacity is the chief quality enthroned within.
At moments she seemed to be regarding issues from a Nebo denied to
others around. She had something of an estranged mien; the solitude
exhaled from the heath was concentrated in this face that had risen
from it. The air with which she looked at the heathmen betokened a
certain unconcern at their presence, or at what might be their opinions
of her for walking in that lonely spot at such an hour, thus indirectly
implying that in some respect or other they were not up to her level.
The explanation lay in the fact that though her husband had been a
small farmer she herself was a curate’s daughter, who had once dreamt
of doing better things.
Persons with any weight of character carry, like planets, their
atmospheres along with them in their orbits; and the matron who entered
now upon the scene could, and usually did, bring her own tone into a
company. Her normal manner among the heathfolk had that reticence which
results from the consciousness of superior communicative power. But the
effect of coming into society and light after lonely wandering in
darkness is a sociability in the comer above its usual pitch, expressed
in the features even more than in words.
“Why, ’tis Mis’ess Yeobright,” said Fairway. “Mis’ess Yeobright, not
ten minutes ago a man was here asking for you—a reddleman.”
“What did he want?” said she.
“He didn’t tell us.”
“Something to sell, I suppose; what it can be I am at a loss to
understand.”
“I am glad to hear that your son Mr. Clym is coming home at Christmas,
ma’am,” said Sam, the turf-cutter. “What a dog he used to be for
bonfires!”
“Yes. I believe he is coming,” she said.
“He must be a fine fellow by this time,” said Fairway.
“He is a man now,” she replied quietly.
“’Tis very lonesome for ’ee in the heth tonight, mis’ess,” said
Christian, coming from the seclusion he had hitherto maintained. “Mind
you don’t get lost. Egdon Heth is a bad place to get lost in, and the
winds do huffle queerer tonight than ever I heard ’em afore. Them that
know Egdon best have been pixy-led here at times.”
“Is that you, Christian?” said Mrs. Yeobright. “What made you hide away
from me?”
“’Twas that I didn’t know you in this light, mis’ess; and being a man
of the mournfullest make, I was scared a little, that’s all. Oftentimes
if you could see how terrible down I get in my mind, ’twould make ’ee
quite nervous for fear I should die by my hand.”
“You don’t take after your father,” said Mrs. Yeobright, looking
towards the fire, where Grandfer Cantle, with some want of originality,
was dancing by himself among the sparks, as the others had done before.
“Now, Grandfer,” said Timothy Fairway, “we are ashamed of ye. A
reverent old patriarch man as you be—seventy if a day—to go hornpiping
like that by yourself!”
“A harrowing old man, Mis’ess Yeobright,” said Christian despondingly.
“I wouldn’t live with him a week, so playward as he is, if I could get
away.”
“’Twould be more seemly in ye to stand still and welcome Mis’ess
Yeobright, and you the venerablest here, Grandfer Cantle,” said the
besom-woman.
“Faith, and so it would,” said the reveller checking himself
repentantly. “I’ve such a bad memory, Mis’ess Yeobright, that I forget
how I’m looked up to by the rest of ’em. My spirits must be wonderful
good, you’ll say? But not always. ’Tis a weight upon a man to be looked
up to as commander, and I often feel it.”
“I am sorry to stop the talk,” said Mrs. Yeobright. “But I must be
leaving you now. I was passing down the Anglebury Road, towards my
niece’s new home, who is returning tonight with her husband; and seeing
the bonfire and hearing Olly’s voice among the rest I came up here to
learn what was going on. I should like her to walk with me, as her way
is mine.”
“Ay, sure, ma’am, I’m just thinking of moving,” said Olly.
“Why, you’ll be safe to meet the reddleman that I told ye of,” said
Fairway. “He’s only gone back to get his van. We heard that your niece
and her husband were coming straight home as soon as they were married,
and we are going down there shortly, to give ’em a song o’ welcome.”
“Thank you indeed,” said Mrs. Yeobright.
“But we shall take a shorter cut through the furze than you can go with
long clothes; so we won’t trouble you to wait.”
“Very well—are you ready, Olly?”
“Yes, ma’am. And there’s a light shining from your niece’s window, see.
It will help to keep us in the path.”
She indicated the faint light at the bottom of the valley which Fairway
had pointed out; and the two women descended the tumulus.
IV.
The Halt on the Turnpike Road
Down, downward they went, and yet further down—their descent at each
step seeming to outmeasure their advance. Their skirts were scratched
noisily by the furze, their shoulders brushed by the ferns, which,
though dead and dry, stood erect as when alive, no sufficient winter
weather having as yet arrived to beat them down. Their Tartarean
situation might by some have been called an imprudent one for two
unattended women. But these shaggy recesses were at all seasons a
familiar surrounding to Olly and Mrs. Yeobright; and the addition of
darkness lends no frightfulness to the face of a friend.
“And so Tamsin has married him at last,” said Olly, when the incline
had become so much less steep that their foot-steps no longer required
undivided attention.
Mrs. Yeobright answered slowly, “Yes; at last.”
“How you will miss her—living with ’ee as a daughter, as she always
have.”
“I do miss her.”
Olly, though without the tact to perceive when remarks were untimely,
was saved by her very simplicity from rendering them offensive.
Questions that would have been resented in others she could ask with
impunity. This accounted for Mrs. Yeobright’s acquiescence in the
revival of an evidently sore subject.
“I was quite strook to hear you’d agreed to it, ma’am, that I was,”
continued the besom-maker.
“You were not more struck by it than I should have been last year this
time, Olly. There are a good many sides to that wedding. I could not
tell you all of them, even if I tried.”
“I felt myself that he was hardly solid-going enough to mate with your
family. Keeping an inn—what is it? But ’a’s clever, that’s true, and
they say he was an engineering gentleman once, but has come down by
being too outwardly given.”
“I saw that, upon the whole, it would be better she should marry where
she wished.”
“Poor little thing, her feelings got the better of her, no doubt. ’Tis
nature. Well, they may call him what they will—he’ve several acres of
heth-ground broke up here, besides the public house, and the
heth-croppers, and his manners be quite like a gentleman’s. And what’s
done cannot be undone.”
“It cannot,” said Mrs. Yeobright. “See, here’s the wagon-track at last.
Now we shall get along better.”
The wedding subject was no further dwelt upon; and soon a faint
diverging path was reached, where they parted company, Olly first
begging her companion to remind Mr. Wildeve that he had not sent her
sick husband the bottle of wine promised on the occasion of his
marriage. The besom-maker turned to the left towards her own house,
behind a spur of the hill, and Mrs. Yeobright followed the straight
track, which further on joined the highway by the Quiet Woman Inn,
whither she supposed her niece to have returned with Wildeve from their
wedding at Anglebury that day.
She first reached Wildeve’s Patch, as it was called, a plot of land
redeemed from the heath, and after long and laborious years brought
into cultivation. The man who had discovered that it could be tilled
died of the labour; the man who succeeded him in possession ruined
himself in fertilizing it. Wildeve came like Amerigo Vespucci, and
received the honours due to those who had gone before.
When Mrs. Yeobright had drawn near to the inn, and was about to enter,
she saw a horse and vehicle some two hundred yards beyond it, coming
towards her, a man walking alongside with a lantern in his hand. It was
soon evident that this was the reddleman who had inquired for her.
Instead of entering the inn at once, she walked by it and towards the
van.
The conveyance came close, and the man was about to pass her with
little notice, when she turned to him and said, “I think you have been
inquiring for me? I am Mrs. Yeobright of Blooms-End.”
The reddleman started, and held up his finger. He stopped the horses,
and beckoned to her to withdraw with him a few yards aside, which she
did, wondering.
“You don’t know me, ma’am, I suppose?” he said.
“I do not,” said she. “Why, yes, I do! You are young Venn—your father
was a dairyman somewhere here?”
“Yes; and I knew your niece, Miss Tamsin, a little. I have something
bad to tell you.”
“About her—no! She has just come home, I believe, with her husband.
They arranged to return this afternoon—to the inn beyond here.”
“She’s not there.”
“How do you know?”
“Because she’s here. She’s in my van,” he added slowly.
“What new trouble has come?” murmured Mrs. Yeobright, putting her hand
over her eyes.
“I can’t explain much, ma’am. All I know is that, as I was going along
the road this morning, about a mile out of Anglebury, I heard something
trotting after me like a doe, and looking round there she was, white as