The Return of the Native
the other day. What does he want banknotes for, if he is only going off
for a day? When he had gone down I thought of Eustacia, and how he had
met her the night before—I know he did meet her, Clym, for I followed
him part of the way; but I did not like to tell you when you called,
and so make you think ill of him, as I did not think it was so serious.
Then I could not stay in bed; I got up and dressed myself, and when I
heard him out in the stable I thought I would come and tell you. So I
came downstairs without any noise and slipped out.”
“Then he was not absolutely gone when you left?”
“No. Will you, dear Cousin Clym, go and try to persuade him not to go?
He takes no notice of what I say, and puts me off with the story of his
going on a journey, and will be home tomorrow, and all that; but I
don’t believe it. I think you could influence him.”
“I’ll go,” said Clym. “O, Eustacia!”
Thomasin carried in her arms a large bundle; and having by this time
seated herself she began to unroll it, when a baby appeared as the
kernel to the husks—dry, warm, and unconscious of travel or rough
weather. Thomasin briefly kissed the baby, and then found time to begin
crying as she said, “I brought baby, for I was afraid what might happen
to her. I suppose it will be her death, but I couldn’t leave her with
Rachel!”
Clym hastily put together the logs on the hearth, raked abroad the
embers, which were scarcely yet extinct, and blew up a flame with the
bellows.
“Dry yourself,” he said. “I’ll go and get some more wood.”
“No, no—don’t stay for that. I’ll make up the fire. Will you go at
once—please will you?”
Yeobright ran upstairs to finish dressing himself. While he was gone
another rapping came to the door. This time there was no delusion that
it might be Eustacia’s—the footsteps just preceding it had been heavy
and slow. Yeobright thinking it might possibly be Fairway with a note
in answer, descended again and opened the door.
“Captain Vye?” he said to a dripping figure.
“Is my granddaughter here?” said the captain.
“No.”
“Then where is she?”
“I don’t know.”
“But you ought to know—you are her husband.”
“Only in name apparently,” said Clym with rising excitement. “I believe
she means to elope tonight with Wildeve. I am just going to look to
it.”
“Well, she has left my house; she left about half an hour ago. Who’s
sitting there?”
“My cousin Thomasin.”
The captain bowed in a preoccupied way to her. “I only hope it is no
worse than an elopement,” he said.
“Worse? What’s worse than the worst a wife can do?”
“Well, I have been told a strange tale. Before starting in search of
her I called up Charley, my stable lad. I missed my pistols the other
day.”
“Pistols?”
“He said at the time that he took them down to clean. He has now owned
that he took them because he saw Eustacia looking curiously at them;
and she afterwards owned to him that she was thinking of taking her
life, but bound him to secrecy, and promised never to think of such a
thing again. I hardly suppose she will ever have bravado enough to use
one of them; but it shows what has been lurking in her mind; and people
who think of that sort of thing once think of it again.”
“Where are the pistols?”
“Safely locked up. O no, she won’t touch them again. But there are more
ways of letting out life than through a bullet-hole. What did you
quarrel about so bitterly with her to drive her to all this? You must
have treated her badly indeed. Well, I was always against the marriage,
and I was right.”
“Are you going with me?” said Yeobright, paying no attention to the
captain’s latter remark. “If so I can tell you what we quarrelled about
as we walk along.”
“Where to?”
“To Wildeve’s—that was her destination, depend upon it.”
Thomasin here broke in, still weeping: “He said he was only going on a
sudden short journey; but if so why did he want so much money? O, Clym,
what do you think will happen? I am afraid that you, my poor baby, will
soon have no father left to you!”
“I am off now,” said Yeobright, stepping into the porch.
“I would fain go with ’ee,” said the old man doubtfully. “But I begin
to be afraid that my legs will hardly carry me there such a night as
this. I am not so young as I was. If they are interrupted in their
flight she will be sure to come back to me, and I ought to be at the
house to receive her. But be it as ’twill I can’t walk to the Quiet
Woman, and that’s an end on’t. I’ll go straight home.”
“It will perhaps be best,” said Clym. “Thomasin, dry yourself, and be
as comfortable as you can.”
With this he closed the door upon her, and left the house in company
with Captain Vye, who parted from him outside the gate, taking the
middle path, which led to Mistover. Clym crossed by the right-hand
track towards the inn.
Thomasin, being left alone, took off some of her wet garments, carried
the baby upstairs to Clym’s bed, and then came down to the sitting-room
again, where she made a larger fire, and began drying herself. The fire
soon flared up the chimney, giving the room an appearance of comfort
that was doubled by contrast with the drumming of the storm without,
which snapped at the windowpanes and breathed into the chimney strange
low utterances that seemed to be the prologue to some tragedy.
But the least part of Thomasin was in the house, for her heart being at
ease about the little girl upstairs she was mentally following Clym on
his journey. Having indulged in this imaginary peregrination for some
considerable interval, she became impressed with a sense of the
intolerable slowness of time. But she sat on. The moment then came when
she could scarcely sit longer, and it was like a satire on her patience
to remember that Clym could hardly have reached the inn as yet. At last
she went to the baby’s bedside. The child was sleeping soundly; but her
imagination of possibly disastrous events at her home, the predominance
within her of the unseen over the seen, agitated her beyond endurance.
She could not refrain from going down and opening the door. The rain
still continued, the candlelight falling upon the nearest drops and
making glistening darts of them as they descended across the throng of
invisible ones behind. To plunge into that medium was to plunge into
water slightly diluted with air. But the difficulty of returning to her
house at this moment made her all the more desirous of doing
so—anything was better than suspense. “I have come here well enough,”
she said, “and why shouldn’t I go back again? It is a mistake for me to
be away.”
She hastily fetched the infant, wrapped it up, cloaked herself as
before, and shoveling the ashes over the fire, to prevent accidents,
went into the open air. Pausing first to put the door key in its old
place behind the shutter, she resolutely turned her face to the
confronting pile of firmamental darkness beyond the palings, and
stepped into its midst. But Thomasin’s imagination being so actively
engaged elsewhere, the night and the weather had for her no terror
beyond that of their actual discomfort and difficulty.
She was soon ascending Blooms-End valley and traversing the undulations
on the side of the hill. The noise of the wind over the heath was
shrill, and as if it whistled for joy at finding a night so congenial
as this. Sometimes the path led her to hollows between thickets of tall
and dripping bracken, dead, though not yet prostrate, which enclosed
her like a pool. When they were more than usually tall she lifted the
baby to the top of her head, that it might be out of the reach of their
drenching fronds. On higher ground, where the wind was brisk and
sustained, the rain flew in a level flight without sensible descent, so
that it was beyond all power to imagine the remoteness of the point at
which it left the bosoms of the clouds. Here self-defence was
impossible, and individual drops stuck into her like the arrows into
Saint Sebastian. She was enabled to avoid puddles by the nebulous
paleness which signified their presence, though beside anything less
dark than the heath they themselves would have appeared as blackness.
Yet in spite of all this Thomasin was not sorry that she had started.
To her there were not, as to Eustacia, demons in the air, and malice in
every bush and bough. The drops which lashed her face were not
scorpions, but prosy rain; Egdon in the mass was no monster whatever,
but impersonal open ground. Her fears of the place were rational, her
dislikes of its worst moods reasonable. At this time it was in her view
a windy, wet place, in which a person might experience much discomfort,
lose the path without care, and possibly catch cold.
If the path is well known the difficulty at such times of keeping
therein is not altogether great, from its familiar feel to the feet;
but once lost it is irrecoverable. Owing to her baby, who somewhat
impeded Thomasin’s view forward and distracted her mind, she did at
last lose the track. This mishap occurred when she was descending an
open slope about two-thirds home. Instead of attempting, by wandering
hither and thither, the hopeless task of finding such a mere thread,
she went straight on, trusting for guidance to her general knowledge of
the contours, which was scarcely surpassed by Clym’s or by that of the
heath-croppers themselves.
At length Thomasin reached a hollow and began to discern through the
rain a faint blotted radiance, which presently assumed the oblong form
of an open door. She knew that no house stood hereabouts, and was soon
aware of the nature of the door by its height above the ground.
“Why, it is Diggory Venn’s van, surely!” she said.
A certain secluded spot near Rainbarrow was, she knew, often Venn’s
chosen centre when staying in this neighbourhood; and she guessed at
once that she had stumbled upon this mysterious retreat. The question
arose in her mind whether or not she should ask him to guide her into
the path. In her anxiety to reach home she decided that she would
appeal to him, notwithstanding the strangeness of appearing before his
eyes at this place and season. But when, in pursuance of this resolve,
Thomasin reached the van and looked in she found it to be untenanted;
though there was no doubt that it was the reddleman’s. The fire was
burning in the stove, the lantern hung from the nail. Round the doorway
the floor was merely sprinkled with rain, and not saturated, which told
her that the door had not long been opened.
While she stood uncertainly looking in Thomasin heard a footstep
advancing from the darkness behind her, and turning, beheld the
well-known form in corduroy, lurid from head to foot, the lantern beams
falling upon him through an intervening gauze of raindrops.
“I thought you went down the slope,” he said, without noticing her
face. “How do you come back here again?”
“Diggory?” said Thomasin faintly.
“Who are you?” said Venn, still unperceiving. “And why were you crying
so just now?”
“O, Diggory! don’t you know me?” said she. “But of course you don’t,
wrapped up like this. What do you mean? I have not been crying here,
and I have not been here before.”
Venn then came nearer till he could see the illuminated side of her
form.
“Mrs. Wildeve!” he exclaimed, starting. “What a time for us to meet!
And the baby too! What dreadful thing can have brought you out on such
a night as this?”
She could not immediately answer; and without asking her permission he
hopped into his van, took her by the arm, and drew her up after him.
“What is it?” he continued when they stood within.
“I have lost my way coming from Blooms-End, and I am in a great hurry
to get home. Please show me as quickly as you can! It is so silly of me
not to know Egdon better, and I cannot think how I came to lose the