The Return of the Native
recent struggle for life was in his fingertips, which were worn and
sacrificed in his dying endeavours to obtain a hold on the face of the
weir-wall.
Yeobright’s manner had been so quiet, he had uttered so few syllables
since his reappearance, that Venn imagined him resigned. It was only
when they had left the room and stood upon the landing that the true
state of his mind was apparent. Here he said, with a wild smile,
inclining his head towards the chamber in which Eustacia lay, “She is
the second woman I have killed this year. I was a great cause of my
mother’s death, and I am the chief cause of hers.”
“How?” said Venn.
“I spoke cruel words to her, and she left my house. I did not invite
her back till it was too late. It is I who ought to have drowned
myself. It would have been a charity to the living had the river
overwhelmed me and borne her up. But I cannot die. Those who ought to
have lived lie dead; and here am I alive!”
“But you can’t charge yourself with crimes in that way,” said Venn.
“You may as well say that the parents be the cause of a murder by the
child, for without the parents the child would never have been begot.”
“Yes, Venn, that is very true; but you don’t know all the
circumstances. If it had pleased God to put an end to me it would have
been a good thing for all. But I am getting used to the horror of my
existence. They say that a time comes when men laugh at misery through
long acquaintance with it. Surely that time will soon come to me!”
“Your aim has always been good,” said Venn. “Why should you say such
desperate things?”
“No, they are not desperate. They are only hopeless; and my great
regret is that for what I have done no man or law can punish me!”
BOOK SIXTH—AFTERCOURSES
I.
The Inevitable Movement Onward
The story of the deaths of Eustacia and Wildeve was told throughout
Egdon, and far beyond, for many weeks and months. All the known
incidents of their love were enlarged, distorted, touched up, and
modified, till the original reality bore but a slight resemblance to
the counterfeit presentation by surrounding tongues. Yet, upon the
whole, neither the man nor the woman lost dignity by sudden death.
Misfortune had struck them gracefully, cutting off their erratic
histories with a catastrophic dash, instead of, as with many,
attenuating each life to an uninteresting meagreness, through long
years of wrinkles, neglect, and decay.
On those most nearly concerned the effect was somewhat different.
Strangers who had heard of many such cases now merely heard of one
more; but immediately where a blow falls no previous imaginings amount
to appreciable preparation for it. The very suddenness of her
bereavement dulled, to some extent, Thomasin’s feelings; yet
irrationally enough, a consciousness that the husband she had lost
ought to have been a better man did not lessen her mourning at all. On
the contrary, this fact seemed at first to set off the dead husband in
his young wife’s eyes, and to be the necessary cloud to the rainbow.
But the horrors of the unknown had passed. Vague misgivings about her
future as a deserted wife were at an end. The worst had once been
matter of trembling conjecture; it was now matter of reason only, a
limited badness. Her chief interest, the little Eustacia, still
remained. There was humility in her grief, no defiance in her attitude;
and when this is the case a shaken spirit is apt to be stilled.
Could Thomasin’s mournfulness now and Eustacia’s serenity during life
have been reduced to common measure, they would have touched the same
mark nearly. But Thomasin’s former brightness made shadow of that which
in a sombre atmosphere was light itself.
The spring came and calmed her; the summer came and soothed her; the
autumn arrived, and she began to be comforted, for her little girl was
strong and happy, growing in size and knowledge every day. Outward
events flattered Thomasin not a little. Wildeve had died intestate, and
she and the child were his only relatives. When administration had been
granted, all the debts paid, and the residue of her husband’s uncle’s
property had come into her hands, it was found that the sum waiting to
be invested for her own and the child’s benefit was little less than
ten thousand pounds.
Where should she live? The obvious place was Blooms-End. The old rooms,
it is true, were not much higher than the between-decks of a frigate,
necessitating a sinking in the floor under the new clock-case she
brought from the inn, and the removal of the handsome brass knobs on
its head, before there was height for it to stand; but, such as the
rooms were, there were plenty of them, and the place was endeared to
her by every early recollection. Clym very gladly admitted her as a
tenant, confining his own existence to two rooms at the top of the back
staircase, where he lived on quietly, shut off from Thomasin and the
three servants she had thought fit to indulge in now that she was a
mistress of money, going his own ways, and thinking his own thoughts.
His sorrows had made some change in his outward appearance; and yet the
alteration was chiefly within. It might have been said that he had a
wrinkled mind. He had no enemies, and he could get nobody to reproach
him, which was why he so bitterly reproached himself.
He did sometimes think he had been ill-used by fortune, so far as to
say that to be born is a palpable dilemma, and that instead of men
aiming to advance in life with glory they should calculate how to
retreat out of it without shame. But that he and his had been
sarcastically and pitilessly handled in having such irons thrust into
their souls he did not maintain long. It is usually so, except with the
sternest of men. Human beings, in their generous endeavour to construct
a hypothesis that shall not degrade a First Cause, have always
hesitated to conceive a dominant power of lower moral quality than
their own; and, even while they sit down and weep by the waters of
Babylon, invent excuses for the oppression which prompts their tears.
Thus, though words of solace were vainly uttered in his presence, he
found relief in a direction of his own choosing when left to himself.
For a man of his habits the house and the hundred and twenty pounds a
year which he had inherited from his mother were enough to supply all
worldly needs. Resources do not depend upon gross amounts, but upon the
proportion of spendings to takings.
He frequently walked the heath alone, when the past seized upon him
with its shadowy hand, and held him there to listen to its tale. His
imagination would then people the spot with its ancient
inhabitants—forgotten Celtic tribes trod their tracks about him, and he
could almost live among them, look in their faces, and see them
standing beside the barrows which swelled around, untouched and perfect
as at the time of their erection. Those of the dyed barbarians who had
chosen the cultivable tracts were, in comparison with those who had
left their marks here, as writers on paper beside writers on parchment.
Their records had perished long ago by the plough, while the works of
these remained. Yet they all had lived and died unconscious of the
different fates awaiting their relics. It reminded him that unforeseen
factors operate in the evolution of immortality.
Winter again came round, with its winds, frosts, tame robins, and
sparkling starlight. The year previous Thomasin had hardly been
conscious of the season’s advance; this year she laid her heart open to
external influences of every kind. The life of this sweet cousin, her
baby, and her servants, came to Clym’s senses only in the form of
sounds through a wood partition as he sat over books of exceptionally
large type; but his ear became at last so accustomed to these slight
noises from the other part of the house that he almost could witness
the scenes they signified. A faint beat of half-seconds conjured up
Thomasin rocking the cradle, a wavering hum meant that she was singing
the baby to sleep, a crunching of sand as between millstones raised the
picture of Humphrey’s, Fairway’s, or Sam’s heavy feet crossing the
stone floor of the kitchen; a light boyish step, and a gay tune in a
high key, betokened a visit from Grandfer Cantle; a sudden break-off in
the Grandfer’s utterances implied the application to his lips of a mug
of small beer, a bustling and slamming of doors meant starting to go to
market; for Thomasin, in spite of her added scope of gentility, led a
ludicrously narrow life, to the end that she might save every possible
pound for her little daughter.
One summer day Clym was in the garden, immediately outside the parlour
window, which was as usual open. He was looking at the pot-flowers on
the sill; they had been revived and restored by Thomasin to the state
in which his mother had left them. He heard a slight scream from
Thomasin, who was sitting inside the room.
“O, how you frightened me!” she said to someone who had entered. “I
thought you were the ghost of yourself.”
Clym was curious enough to advance a little further and look in at the
window. To his astonishment there stood within the room Diggory Venn,
no longer a reddleman, but exhibiting the strangely altered hues of an
ordinary Christian countenance, white shirt-front, light flowered
waistcoat, blue-spotted neckerchief, and bottle-green coat. Nothing in
this appearance was at all singular but the fact of its great
difference from what he had formerly been. Red, and all approach to
red, was carefully excluded from every article of clothes upon him; for
what is there that persons just out of harness dread so much as
reminders of the trade which has enriched them?
Yeobright went round to the door and entered.
“I was so alarmed!” said Thomasin, smiling from one to the other. “I
couldn’t believe that he had got white of his own accord! It seemed
supernatural.”
“I gave up dealing in reddle last Christmas,” said Venn. “It was a
profitable trade, and I found that by that time I had made enough to
take the dairy of fifty cows that my father had in his lifetime. I
always thought of getting to that place again if I changed at all, and
now I am there.”
“How did you manage to become white, Diggory?” Thomasin asked.
“I turned so by degrees, ma’am.”
“You look much better than ever you did before.”
Venn appeared confused; and Thomasin, seeing how inadvertently she had
spoken to a man who might possibly have tender feelings for her still,
blushed a little. Clym saw nothing of this, and added good-humouredly—
“What shall we have to frighten Thomasin’s baby with, now you have
become a human being again?”
“Sit down, Diggory,” said Thomasin, “and stay to tea.”
Venn moved as if he would retire to the kitchen, when Thomasin said
with pleasant pertness as she went on with some sewing, “Of course you
must sit down here. And where does your fifty-cow dairy lie, Mr. Venn?”
“At Stickleford—about two miles to the right of Alderworth, ma’am,
where the meads begin. I have thought that if Mr. Yeobright would like
to pay me a visit sometimes he shouldn’t stay away for want of asking.
I’ll not bide to tea this afternoon, thank’ee, for I’ve got something
on hand that must be settled. ’Tis Maypole-day tomorrow, and the
Shadwater folk have clubbed with a few of your neighbours here to have
a pole just outside your palings in the heath, as it is a nice green
place.” Venn waved his elbow towards the patch in front of the house.
“I have been talking to Fairway about it,” he continued, “and I said to
him that before we put up the pole it would be as well to ask Mrs.
Wildeve.”
“I can say nothing against it,” she answered. “Our property does not
reach an inch further than the white palings.”