The Return of the Native
‘I’ve won—well, I’ve won—a gown-piece,’ says she, her colours coming up
in a moment. ’Tis a smock for a crown, I thought; and so it turned out.
Ay, when I think what she’ll say to me now without a mossel of red in
her face, it do seem strange that ’a wouldn’t say such a little thing
then.... However, then she went on, and that’s what made me bring up
the story, ‘Well, whatever clothes I’ve won, white or figured, for eyes
to see or for eyes not to see’ (’a could do a pretty stroke of modesty
in those days), ‘I’d sooner have lost it than have seen what I have.
Poor Mr. Yeobright was took bad directly he reached the fair ground,
and was forced to go home again.’ That was the last time he ever went
out of the parish.”
“’A faltered on from one day to another, and then we heard he was
gone.”
“D’ye think he had great pain when ’a died?” said Christian.
“O no—quite different. Nor any pain of mind. He was lucky enough to be
God A’mighty’s own man.”
“And other folk—d’ye think ’twill be much pain to ’em, Mister Fairway?”
“That depends on whether they be afeard.”
“I bain’t afeard at all, I thank God!” said Christian strenuously. “I’m
glad I bain’t, for then ’twon’t pain me.... I don’t think I be
afeard—or if I be I can’t help it, and I don’t deserve to suffer. I
wish I was not afeard at all!”
There was a solemn silence, and looking from the window, which was
unshuttered and unblinded, Timothy said, “Well, what a fess little
bonfire that one is, out by Cap’n Vye’s! ’Tis burning just the same now
as ever, upon my life.”
All glances went through the window, and nobody noticed that Wildeve
disguised a brief, telltale look. Far away up the sombre valley of
heath, and to the right of Rainbarrow, could indeed be seen the light,
small, but steady and persistent as before.
“It was lighted before ours was,” Fairway continued; “and yet every one
in the country round is out afore ’n.”
“Perhaps there’s meaning in it!” murmured Christian.
“How meaning?” said Wildeve sharply.
Christian was too scattered to reply, and Timothy helped him.
“He means, sir, that the lonesome dark-eyed creature up there that some
say is a witch—ever I should call a fine young woman such a name—is
always up to some odd conceit or other; and so perhaps ’tis she.”
“I’d be very glad to ask her in wedlock, if she’d hae me and take the
risk of her wild dark eyes ill-wishing me,” said Grandfer Cantle
staunchly.
“Don’t ye say it, Father!” implored Christian.
“Well, be dazed if he who do marry the maid won’t hae an uncommon
picture for his best parlour,” said Fairway in a liquid tone, placing
down the cup of mead at the end of a good pull.
“And a partner as deep as the North Star,” said Sam, taking up the cup
and finishing the little that remained. “Well, really, now I think we
must be moving,” said Humphrey, observing the emptiness of the vessel.
“But we’ll gie ’em another song?” said Grandfer Cantle. “I’m as full of
notes as a bird!”
“Thank you, Grandfer,” said Wildeve. “But we will not trouble you now.
Some other day must do for that—when I have a party.”
“Be jown’d if I don’t learn ten new songs for’t, or I won’t learn a
line!” said Grandfer Cantle. “And you may be sure I won’t disappoint ye
by biding away, Mr. Wildeve.”
“I quite believe you,” said that gentleman.
All then took their leave, wishing their entertainer long life and
happiness as a married man, with recapitulations which occupied some
time. Wildeve attended them to the door, beyond which the deep-dyed
upward stretch of heath stood awaiting them, an amplitude of darkness
reigning from their feet almost to the zenith, where a definite form
first became visible in the lowering forehead of Rainbarrow. Diving
into the dense obscurity in a line headed by Sam the turf-cutter, they
pursued their trackless way home.
When the scratching of the furze against their leggings had fainted
upon the ear, Wildeve returned to the room where he had left Thomasin
and her aunt. The women were gone.
They could only have left the house in one way, by the back window; and
this was open.
Wildeve laughed to himself, remained a moment thinking, and idly
returned to the front room. Here his glance fell upon a bottle of wine
which stood on the mantelpiece. “Ah—old Dowden!” he murmured; and going
to the kitchen door shouted, “Is anybody here who can take something to
old Dowden?”
There was no reply. The room was empty, the lad who acted as his
factotum having gone to bed. Wildeve came back, put on his hat, took
the bottle, and left the house, turning the key in the door, for there
was no guest at the inn tonight. As soon as he was on the road the
little bonfire on Mistover Knap again met his eye.
“Still waiting, are you, my lady?” he murmured.
However, he did not proceed that way just then; but leaving the hill to
the left of him, he stumbled over a rutted road that brought him to a
cottage which, like all other habitations on the heath at this hour,
was only saved from being visible by a faint shine from its bedroom
window. This house was the home of Olly Dowden, the besom-maker, and he
entered.
The lower room was in darkness; but by feeling his way he found a
table, whereon he placed the bottle, and a minute later emerged again
upon the heath. He stood and looked northeast at the undying little
fire—high up above him, though not so high as Rainbarrow.
We have been told what happens when a woman deliberates; and the
epigram is not always terminable with woman, provided that one be in
the case, and that a fair one. Wildeve stood, and stood longer, and
breathed perplexedly, and then said to himself with resignation,
“Yes—by Heaven, I must go to her, I suppose!”
Instead of turning in the direction of home he pressed on rapidly by a
path under Rainbarrow towards what was evidently a signal light.
VI.
The Figure against the Sky
When the whole Egdon concourse had left the site of the bonfire to its
accustomed loneliness, a closely wrapped female figure approached the
barrow from that quarter of the heath in which the little fire lay. Had
the reddleman been watching he might have recognized her as the woman
who had first stood there so singularly, and vanished at the approach
of strangers. She ascended to her old position at the top, where the
red coals of the perishing fire greeted her like living eyes in the
corpse of day. There she stood still around her stretching the vast
night atmosphere, whose incomplete darkness in comparison with the
total darkness of the heath below it might have represented a venial
beside a mortal sin.
That she was tall and straight in build, that she was lady-like in her
movements, was all that could be learnt of her just now, her form being
wrapped in a shawl folded in the old cornerwise fashion, and her head
in a large kerchief, a protection not superfluous at this hour and
place. Her back was towards the wind, which blew from the northwest;
but whether she had avoided that aspect because of the chilly gusts
which played about her exceptional position, or because her interest
lay in the southeast, did not at first appear.
Her reason for standing so dead still as the pivot of this circle of
heath-country was just as obscure. Her extraordinary fixity, her
conspicuous loneliness, her heedlessness of night, betokened among
other things an utter absence of fear. A tract of country unaltered
from that sinister condition which made Cæsar anxious every year to get
clear of its glooms before the autumnal equinox, a kind of landscape
and weather which leads travellers from the South to describe our
island as Homer’s Cimmerian land, was not, on the face of it, friendly
to women.
It might reasonably have been supposed that she was listening to the
wind, which rose somewhat as the night advanced, and laid hold of the
attention. The wind, indeed, seemed made for the scene, as the scene
seemed made for the hour. Part of its tone was quite special; what was
heard there could be heard nowhere else. Gusts in innumerable series
followed each other from the northwest, and when each one of them raced
past the sound of its progress resolved into three. Treble, tenor, and
bass notes were to be found therein. The general ricochet of the whole
over pits and prominences had the gravest pitch of the chime. Next
there could be heard the baritone buzz of a holly tree. Below these in
force, above them in pitch, a dwindled voice strove hard at a husky
tune, which was the peculiar local sound alluded to. Thinner and less
immediately traceable than the other two, it was far more impressive
than either. In it lay what may be called the linguistic peculiarity of
the heath; and being audible nowhere on earth off a heath, it afforded
a shadow of reason for the woman’s tenseness, which continued as
unbroken as ever.
Throughout the blowing of these plaintive November winds that note bore
a great resemblance to the ruins of human song which remain to the
throat of fourscore and ten. It was a worn whisper, dry and papery, and
it brushed so distinctly across the ear that, by the accustomed, the
material minutiæ in which it originated could be realized as by touch.
It was the united products of infinitesimal vegetable causes, and these
were neither stems, leaves, fruit, blades, prickles, lichen, nor moss.
They were the mummied heathbells of the past summer, originally tender
and purple, now washed colourless by Michaelmas rains, and dried to
dead skins by October suns. So low was an individual sound from these
that a combination of hundreds only just emerged from silence, and the
myriads of the whole declivity reached the woman’s ear but as a
shrivelled and intermittent recitative. Yet scarcely a single accent
among the many afloat tonight could have such power to impress a
listener with thoughts of its origin. One inwardly saw the infinity of
those combined multitudes; and perceived that each of the tiny trumpets
was seized on entered, scoured and emerged from by the wind as
thoroughly as if it were as vast as a crater.
“The spirit moved them.” A meaning of the phrase forced itself upon the
attention; and an emotional listener’s fetichistic mood might have
ended in one of more advanced quality. It was not, after all, that the
left-hand expanse of old blooms spoke, or the right-hand, or those of
the slope in front; but it was the single person of something else
speaking through each at once.
Suddenly, on the barrow, there mingled with all this wild rhetoric of
night a sound which modulated so naturally into the rest that its
beginning and ending were hardly to be distinguished. The bluffs, and
the bushes, and the heather-bells had broken silence; at last, so did
the woman; and her articulation was but as another phrase of the same
discourse as theirs. Thrown out on the winds it became twined in with
them, and with them it flew away.
What she uttered was a lengthened sighing, apparently at something in
her mind which had led to her presence here. There was a spasmodic
abandonment about it as if, in allowing herself to utter the sound the
woman’s brain had authorized what it could not regulate. One point was
evident in this; that she had been existing in a suppressed state, and
not in one of languor, or stagnation.
Far away down the valley the faint shine from the window of the inn
still lasted on; and a few additional moments proved that the window,
or what was within it, had more to do with the woman’s sigh than had
either her own actions or the scene immediately around. She lifted her
left hand, which held a closed telescope. This she rapidly extended, as
if she were well accustomed to the operation, and raising it to her eye
directed it towards the light beaming from the inn.