The Return of the Native
“But you might not like to see a lot of folk going crazy round a stick,
under your very nose?”
“I shall have no objection at all.”
Venn soon after went away, and in the evening Yeobright strolled as far
as Fairway’s cottage. It was a lovely May sunset, and the birch trees
which grew on this margin of the vast Egdon wilderness had put on their
new leaves, delicate as butterflies’ wings, and diaphanous as amber.
Beside Fairway’s dwelling was an open space recessed from the road, and
here were now collected all the young people from within a radius of a
couple of miles. The pole lay with one end supported on a trestle, and
women were engaged in wreathing it from the top downwards with
wild-flowers. The instincts of merry England lingered on here with
exceptional vitality, and the symbolic customs which tradition has
attached to each season of the year were yet a reality on Egdon.
Indeed, the impulses of all such outlandish hamlets are pagan still—in
these spots homage to nature, self-adoration, frantic gaieties,
fragments of Teutonic rites to divinities whose names are forgotten,
seem in some way or other to have survived mediæval doctrine.
Yeobright did not interrupt the preparations, and went home again. The
next morning, when Thomasin withdrew the curtains of her bedroom
window, there stood the Maypole in the middle of the green, its top
cutting into the sky. It had sprung up in the night, or rather early
morning, like Jack’s bean-stalk. She opened the casement to get a
better view of the garlands and posies that adorned it. The sweet
perfume of the flowers had already spread into the surrounding air,
which, being free from every taint, conducted to her lips a full
measure of the fragrance received from the spire of blossom in its
midst. At the top of the pole were crossed hoops decked with small
flowers; beneath these came a milk-white zone of Maybloom; then a zone
of bluebells, then of cowslips, then of lilacs, then of ragged-robins,
daffodils, and so on, till the lowest stage was reached. Thomasin
noticed all these, and was delighted that the May revel was to be so
near.
When afternoon came people began to gather on the green, and Yeobright
was interested enough to look out upon them from the open window of his
room. Soon after this Thomasin walked out from the door immediately
below and turned her eyes up to her cousin’s face. She was dressed more
gaily than Yeobright had ever seen her dressed since the time of
Wildeve’s death, eighteen months before; since the day of her marriage
even she had not exhibited herself to such advantage.
“How pretty you look today, Thomasin!” he said. “Is it because of the
Maypole?”
“Not altogether.” And then she blushed and dropped her eyes, which he
did not specially observe, though her manner seemed to him to be rather
peculiar, considering that she was only addressing himself. Could it be
possible that she had put on her summer clothes to please him?
He recalled her conduct towards him throughout the last few weeks, when
they had often been working together in the garden, just as they had
formerly done when they were boy and girl under his mother’s eye. What
if her interest in him were not so entirely that of a relative as it
had formerly been? To Yeobright any possibility of this sort was a
serious matter; and he almost felt troubled at the thought of it. Every
pulse of loverlike feeling which had not been stilled during Eustacia’s
lifetime had gone into the grave with her. His passion for her had
occurred too far on in his manhood to leave fuel enough on hand for
another fire of that sort, as may happen with more boyish loves. Even
supposing him capable of loving again, that love would be a plant of
slow and laboured growth, and in the end only small and sickly, like an
autumn-hatched bird.
He was so distressed by this new complexity that when the enthusiastic
brass band arrived and struck up, which it did about five o’clock, with
apparently wind enough among its members to blow down his house, he
withdrew from his rooms by the back door, went down the garden, through
the gate in the hedge, and away out of sight. He could not bear to
remain in the presence of enjoyment today, though he had tried hard.
Nothing was seen of him for four hours. When he came back by the same
path it was dusk, and the dews were coating every green thing. The
boisterous music had ceased; but, entering the premises as he did from
behind, he could not see if the May party had all gone till he had
passed through Thomasin’s division of the house to the front door.
Thomasin was standing within the porch alone.
She looked at him reproachfully. “You went away just when it began,
Clym,” she said.
“Yes. I felt I could not join in. You went out with them, of course?”
“No, I did not.”
“You appeared to be dressed on purpose.”
“Yes, but I could not go out alone; so many people were there. One is
there now.”
Yeobright strained his eyes across the dark-green patch beyond the
paling, and near the black form of the Maypole he discerned a shadowy
figure, sauntering idly up and down. “Who is it?” he said.
“Mr. Venn,” said Thomasin.
“You might have asked him to come in, I think, Tamsie. He has been very
kind to you first and last.”
“I will now,” she said; and, acting on the impulse, went through the
wicket to where Venn stood under the Maypole.
“It is Mr. Venn, I think?” she inquired.
Venn started as if he had not seen her—artful man that he was—and said,
“Yes.”
“Will you come in?”
“I am afraid that I—”
“I have seen you dancing this evening, and you had the very best of the
girls for your partners. Is it that you won’t come in because you wish
to stand here, and think over the past hours of enjoyment?”
“Well, that’s partly it,” said Mr. Venn, with ostentatious sentiment.
“But the main reason why I am biding here like this is that I want to
wait till the moon rises.”
“To see how pretty the Maypole looks in the moonlight?”
“No. To look for a glove that was dropped by one of the maidens.”
Thomasin was speechless with surprise. That a man who had to walk some
four or five miles to his home should wait here for such a reason
pointed to only one conclusion—the man must be amazingly interested in
that glove’s owner.
“Were you dancing with her, Diggory?” she asked, in a voice which
revealed that he had made himself considerably more interesting to her
by this disclosure.
“No,” he sighed.
“And you will not come in, then?”
“Not tonight, thank you, ma’am.”
“Shall I lend you a lantern to look for the young person’s glove, Mr.
Venn?”
“O no; it is not necessary, Mrs. Wildeve, thank you. The moon will rise
in a few minutes.”
Thomasin went back to the porch. “Is he coming in?” said Clym, who had
been waiting where she had left him.
“He would rather not tonight,” she said, and then passed by him into
the house; whereupon Clym too retired to his own rooms.
When Clym was gone Thomasin crept upstairs in the dark, and, just
listening by the cot, to assure herself that the child was asleep, she
went to the window, gently lifted the corner of the white curtain, and
looked out. Venn was still there. She watched the growth of the faint
radiance appearing in the sky by the eastern hill, till presently the
edge of the moon burst upwards and flooded the valley with light.
Diggory’s form was now distinct on the green; he was moving about in a
bowed attitude, evidently scanning the grass for the precious missing
article, walking in zigzags right and left till he should have passed
over every foot of the ground.
“How very ridiculous!” Thomasin murmured to herself, in a tone which
was intended to be satirical. “To think that a man should be so silly
as to go mooning about like that for a girl’s glove! A respectable
dairyman, too, and a man of money as he is now. What a pity!”
At last Venn appeared to find it; whereupon he stood up and raised it
to his lips. Then placing it in his breastpocket—the nearest receptacle
to a man’s heart permitted by modern raiment—he ascended the valley in
a mathematically direct line towards his distant home in the meadows.
II.
Thomasin Walks in a Green Place by the Roman Road
Clym saw little of Thomasin for several days after this; and when they
met she was more silent than usual. At length he asked her what she was
thinking of so intently.
“I am thoroughly perplexed,” she said candidly. “I cannot for my life
think who it is that Diggory Venn is so much in love with. None of the
girls at the Maypole were good enough for him, and yet she must have
been there.”
Clym tried to imagine Venn’s choice for a moment; but ceasing to be
interested in the question he went on again with his gardening.
No clearing up of the mystery was granted her for some time. But one
afternoon Thomasin was upstairs getting ready for a walk, when she had
occasion to come to the landing and call “Rachel.” Rachel was a girl
about thirteen, who carried the baby out for airings; and she came
upstairs at the call.
“Have you seen one of my last new gloves about the house, Rachel?”
inquired Thomasin. “It is the fellow to this one.”
Rachel did not reply.
“Why don’t you answer?” said her mistress.
“I think it is lost, ma’am.”
“Lost? Who lost it? I have never worn them but once.”
Rachel appeared as one dreadfully troubled, and at last began to cry.
“Please, ma’am, on the day of the Maypole I had none to wear, and I
seed yours on the table, and I thought I would borrow ’em. I did not
mean to hurt ’em at all, but one of them got lost. Somebody gave me
some money to buy another pair for you, but I have not been able to go
anywhere to get ’em.”
“Who’s somebody?”
“Mr. Venn.”
“Did he know it was my glove?”
“Yes. I told him.”
Thomasin was so surprised by the explanation that she quite forgot to
lecture the girl, who glided silently away. Thomasin did not move
further than to turn her eyes upon the grass-plat where the Maypole had
stood. She remained thinking, then said to herself that she would not
go out that afternoon, but would work hard at the baby’s unfinished
lovely plaid frock, cut on the cross in the newest fashion. How she
managed to work hard, and yet do no more than she had done at the end
of two hours, would have been a mystery to anyone not aware that the
recent incident was of a kind likely to divert her industry from a
manual to a mental channel.
Next day she went her ways as usual, and continued her custom of
walking in the heath with no other companion than little Eustacia, now
of the age when it is a matter of doubt with such characters whether
they are intended to walk through the world on their hands or on their
feet; so that they get into painful complications by trying both. It
was very pleasant to Thomasin, when she had carried the child to some
lonely place, to give her a little private practice on the green turf
and shepherd’s-thyme, which formed a soft mat to fall headlong upon
them when equilibrium was lost.
Once, when engaged in this system of training, and stooping to remove
bits of stick, fern-stalks, and other such fragments from the child’s
path, that the journey might not be brought to an untimely end by some
insuperable barrier a quarter of an inch high, she was alarmed by
discovering that a man on horseback was almost close beside her, the
soft natural carpet having muffled the horse’s tread. The rider, who
was Venn, waved his hat in the air and bowed gallantly.
“Diggory, give me my glove,” said Thomasin, whose manner it was under
any circumstances to plunge into the midst of a subject which engrossed
her.
Venn immediately dismounted, put his hand in his breastpocket, and
handed the glove.
“Thank you. It was very good of you to take care of it.”