Book Five - The Discovery
1 - "Wherefore Is Light Given to Him That Is in Misery"
One evening, about three weeks after the funeral of Mrs.
Yeobright, when the silver face of the moon sent a bundle of beams directly
upon the floor of Clym's house at Alderworth, a woman came forth from
within. She reclined over the garden gate as if to refresh herself awhile.
The pale lunar touches which make beauties of hags lent divinity to
this face, already beautiful.
She had not long been there when a man came up the road and with some
hesitation said to her, "How is he tonight, ma'am, if you please?"
"He is better, though still very unwell, Humphrey," replied
Eustacia.
"Is he light-headed, ma'am?"
"No. He is quite sensible now."
"Do he rave about his mother just the same, poor fellow?"
continued Humphrey.
"Just as much, though not quite so wildly," she said in a
low voice.
"It was very unfortunate, ma'am, that the boy Johnny should ever
ha' told him his mother's dying words, about her being broken-hearted
and cast off by her son. 'Twas enough to upset any man alive."
Eustacia made no reply beyond that of a slight catch in her breath,
as of one who fain would speak but could not; and Humphrey, declining
her invitation to come in, went away.
Eustacia turned, entered the house, and ascended to the front bedroom,
where a shaded light was burning. In the bed lay Clym, pale, haggard,
wide awake, tossing to one side and to the other, his eyes lit by a
hot light, as if the fire in their pupils were burning up their substance.
"Is it you, Eustacia?" he said as she sat down.
"Yes, Clym. I have been down to the gate. The moon is shining beautifully,
and there is not a leaf stirring."
"Shining, is it? What's the moon to a man like me? Let it shine-let
anything be, so that I never see another day!...Eustacia, I don't know
where to look-my thoughts go through me like swords. O, if any man wants
to make himself immortal by painting a picture of wretchedness, let
him come here!"
"Why do you say so?"
"I cannot help feeling that I did my best to kill her."
"No, Clym."
"Yes, it was so; it is useless to excuse me! My conduct to her
was too hideous-I made no advances; and she could not bring herself
to forgive me. Now she is dead! If I had only shown myself willing to
make it up with her sooner, and we had been friends, and then she had
died, it wouldn't be so hard to bear. But I never went near her house,
so she never came near mine, and didn't know how welcome she would have
been-that's what troubles me. She did not know I was going to her house
that very night, for she was too insensible to understand me. If she
had only come to see me! I longed that she would. But it was not to
be."
There escaped from Eustacia one of those shivering sighs which used
to shake her like a pestilent blast. She had not yet told.
But Yeobright was too deeply absorbed in the ramblings incidental to
his remorseful state to notice her. During his illness he had been continually
talking thus. Despair had been added to his original grief by the unfortunate
disclosure of the boy who had received the last words of Mrs. Yeobright-words
too bitterly uttered in an hour of misapprehension. Then his distress
had overwhelmed him, and he longed for death as a field labourer longs
for the shade. It was the pitiful sight of a man standing in the very
focus of sorrow. He continually bewailed his tardy journey to his mother's
house, because it was an error which could never be rectified, and insisted
that he must have been horribly perverted by some fiend not to have
thought before that it was his duty to go to her, since she did not
come to him. He would ask Eustacia to agree with him in his self-condemnation;
and when she, seared inwardly by a secret she dared not tell, declared
that she could not give an opinion, he would say, "That's because
you didn't know my mother's nature. She was always ready to forgive
if asked to do so; but I seemed to her to be as an obstinate child,
and that made her unyielding. Yet not unyielding-she was proud and reserved,
no more....Yes, I can understand why she held out against me so long.
She was waiting for me. I dare say she said a hundred times in her sorrow,
'What a return he makes for all the sacrifices I have made for him!'
I never went to her! When I set out to visit her it was too late. To
think of that is nearly intolerable!"
Sometimes his condition had been one of utter remorse, unsoftened by
a single tear of pure sorrow: and then he writhed as he lay, fevered
far more by thought than by physical ills. "If I could only get
one assurance that she did not die in a belief that I was resentful,"
he said one day when in this mood, "it would be better to think
of than a hope of heaven. But that I cannot do."
"You give yourself up too much to this wearying despair,"
said Eustacia. "Other men's mothers have died."
"That doesn't make the loss of mine less. Yet it is less the loss
than the circumstances of the loss. I sinned against her, and on that
account there is no light for me."
"She sinned against you, I think."
"No, she did not. I committed the guilt; and may the whole burden
be upon my head!"
"I think you might consider twice before you say that," Eustacia
replied. "Single men have, no doubt, a right to curse themselves
as much as they please; but men with wives involve two in the doom they
pray down."
"I am in too sorry a state to understand what you are refining
on," said the wretched man. "Day and night shout at me, 'You
have helped to kill her.' But in loathing myself I may, I own, be unjust
to you, my poor wife. Forgive me for it, Eustacia, for I scarcely know
what I do."
Eustacia was always anxious to avoid the sight of her husband in such
a state as this, which had become as dreadful to her as the trial scene
was to Judas Iscariot. It brought before her eyes the spectre of a worn-out
woman knocking at a door which she would not open; and she shrank from
contemplating it. Yet it was better for Yeobright himself when he spoke
openly of his sharp regret, for in silence he endured infinitely more,
and would sometimes remain so long in a tense, brooding mood, consuming
himself by the gnawing of his thought, that it was imperatively necessary
to make him talk aloud, that his grief might in some degree expend itself
in the effort.
Eustacia had not been long indoors after her look at the moonlight when
a soft footstep came up to the house, and Thomasin was announced by
the woman downstairs.
"Ah, Thomasin! Thank you for coming tonight," said Clym when
she entered the room. "Here am I, you see. Such a wretched spectacle
am I, that I shrink from being seen by a single friend, and almost from
you."
"You must not shrink from me, dear Clym," said Thomasin earnestly,
in that sweet voice of hers which came to a sufferer like fresh air
into a Black Hole. "Nothing in you can ever shock me or drive me
away.
I have been here before, but you don't remember it."
"Yes, I do; I am not delirious, Thomasin, nor have I been so at
all. Don't you believe that if they say so. I am only in great misery
at what I have done, and that, with the weakness, makes me seem mad.
But it has not upset my reason. Do you think I should remember all about
my mother's death if I were out of my mind? No such good luck. Two months
and a half, Thomasin, the last of her life, did my poor mother live
alone, distracted and mourning because of me; yet she was unvisited
by me, though I was living only six miles off. Two months and a half-seventy-five
days did the sun rise and set upon her in that deserted state which
a dog didn't deserve! Poor people who had nothing in common with her
would have cared for her, and visited her had they known her sickness
and loneliness; but I, who should have been all to her, stayed away
like a cur. If there is any justice in God let Him kill me now.
He has nearly blinded me, but that is not enough. If He would only strike
me with more pain I would believe in Him forever!"
"Hush, hush! O, pray, Clym, don't, don't say it!" implored
Thomasin, affrighted into sobs and tears; while Eustacia, at the other
side of the room, though her pale face remained calm, writhed in her
chair. Clym went on without heeding his cousin.
"But I am not worth receiving further proof even of Heaven's reprobation.
Do you think, Thomasin, that she knew me-that she did not die in that
horrid mistaken notion about my not forgiving her, which I can't tell
you how she acquired? If you could only assure me of that! Do you think
so, Eustacia? Do speak to me."
"I think I can assure you that she knew better at last," said
Thomasin. The pallid Eustacia said nothing.
"Why didn't she come to my house? I would have taken her in and
showed her how I loved her in spite of all. But she never came; and
I didn't go to her, and she died on the heath like an animal kicked
out, nobody to help her till it was too late. If you could have seen
her, Thomasin, as I saw her-a poor dying woman, lying in the dark upon
the bare ground, moaning, nobody near, believing she was utterly deserted
by all the world, it would have moved you to anguish, it would have
moved a brute. And this poor woman my mother! No wonder she said to
the child, 'You have seen a broken-hearted woman.' What a state she
must have been brought to, to say that! and who can have done it but
I? It is too dreadful to think of, and I wish I could be punished more
heavily than I am. How long was I what they called out of my senses?"
"A week, I think."
"And then I became calm."
"Yes, for four days."
"And now I have left off being calm."
"But try to be quiet-please do, and you will soon be strong.
If you could remove that impression from your mind-"
"Yes, yes," he said impatiently. "But I don't want to
get strong. What's the use of my getting well? It would be better for
me if I die, and it would certainly be better for Eustacia. Is Eustacia
there?"
"Yes."
"It would be better for you, Eustacia, if I were to die?"
"Don't press such a question, dear Clym."
"Well, it really is but a shadowy supposition; for unfortunately
I am going to live. I feel myself getting better. Thomasin, how long
are you going to stay at the inn, now that all this money has come to
your husband?"
"Another month or two, probably; until my illness is over. We cannot
get off till then. I think it will be a month or more."
"Yes, yes. Of course. Ah, Cousin Tamsie, you will get over your
trouble-one little month will take you through it, and bring something
to console you; but I shall never get over mine, and no consolation
will come!"
"Clym, you are unjust to yourself. Depend upon it, Aunt thought
kindly of you. I know that, if she had lived, you would have been reconciled
with her."
"But she didn't come to see me, though I asked her, before I married,
if she would come. Had she come, or had I gone there, she would never
have died saying, 'I am a broken-hearted woman, cast off by my son.'
My door has always been open to her-a welcome here has always awaited
her. But that she never came to see."
"You had better not talk any more now, Clym," said Eustacia
faintly from the other part of the room, for the scene was growing intolerable
to her.
"Let me talk to you instead for the little time I shall be here,"
Thomasin said soothingly. "Consider what a one-sided way you have
of looking at the matter, Clym. When she said that to the little boy
you had not found her and taken her into your arms; and it might have
been uttered in a moment of bitterness. It was rather like Aunt to say
things in haste. She sometimes used to speak so to me. Though she did
not come I am convinced that she thought of coming to see you. Do you
suppose a man's mother could live two or three months without one forgiving
thought? She forgave me; and why should she not have forgiven you?"
"You laboured to win her round; I did nothing. I, who was going
to teach people the higher secrets of happiness, did not know how to
keep out of that gross misery which the most untaught are wise enough
to avoid."
"How did you get here tonight, Thomasin?" said Eustacia.
"Damon set me down at the end of the lane. He has driven into East
Egdon on business, and he will come and pick me up by-and-by."
Accordingly they soon after heard the noise of wheels. Wildeve had come,
and was waiting outside with his horse and gig.
"Send out and tell him I will be down in two minutes," said
Thomasin.
"I will run down myself," said Eustacia.
She went down. Wildeve had alighted, and was standing before the horse's
head when Eustacia opened the door. He did not turn for a moment, thinking
the comer Thomasin.
Then he looked, startled ever so little, and said one word:
"Well?"
"I have not yet told him," she replied in a whisper.
"Then don't do so till he is well-it will be fatal.
You are ill yourself."
"I am wretched....O Damon," she said, bursting into tears,
"I-I can't tell you how unhappy I am! I can hardly bear this. I
can tell nobody of my trouble-nobody knows of it but you."
"Poor girl!" said Wildeve, visibly affected at her distress,
and at last led on so far as to take her hand. "It is hard, when
you have done nothing to deserve it, that you should have got involved
in such a web as this. You were not made for these sad scenes. I am
to blame most.
If I could only have saved you from it all!"
"But, Damon, please pray tell me what I must do? To sit by him
hour after hour, and hear him reproach himself as being the cause of
her death, and to know that I am the sinner, if any human being is at
all, drives me into cold despair. I don't know what to do. Should I
tell him or should I not tell him? I always am asking myself that. O,
I want to tell him; and yet I am afraid. If he find it out he must surely
kill me, for nothing else will be in proportion to his feelings now.
'Beware the fury of a patient man' sounds day by day in my ears as I
watch him."
"Well, wait till he is better, and trust to chance. And when you
tell, you must only tell part-for his own sake."
"Which part should I keep back?"
Wildeve paused. "That I was in the house at the time," he
said in a low tone.
"Yes; it must be concealed, seeing what has been whispered. How
much easier are hasty actions than speeches that will excuse them!"
"If he were only to die-" Wildeve murmured.
"Do not think of it! I would not buy hope of immunity by so cowardly
a desire even if I hated him. Now I am going up to him again. Thomasin
bade me tell you she would be down in a few minutes. Good-bye."
She returned, and Thomasin soon appeared. When she was seated in the
gig with her husband, and the horse was turning to go off, Wildeve lifted
his eyes to the bedroom windows. Looking from one of them he could discern
a pale, tragic face watching him drive away. It was Eustacia's.
2 - A Lurid Light Breaks in upon a Darkened Understanding
Clym's grief became mitigated by wearing itself out. His
strength returned, and a month after the visit of Thomasin he might
have been seen walking about the garden. Endurance and despair, equanimity
and gloom, the tints of health and the pallor of death, mingled weirdly
in his face. He was now unnaturally silent upon all of the past that
related to his mother; and though Eustacia knew that he was thinking
of it none the less, she was only too glad to escape the topic ever
to bring it up anew. When his mind had been weaker his heart had led
him to speak out; but reason having now somewhat recovered itself he
sank into taciturnity.
One evening when he was thus standing in the garden, abstractedly spudding
up a weed with his stick, a bony figure turned the corner of the house
and came up to him.
"Christian, isn't it?" said Clym. "I am glad you have
found me out. I shall soon want you to go to Blooms-End and assist me
in putting the house in order. I suppose it is all locked up as I left
it?"
"Yes, Mister Clym."
"Have you dug up the potatoes and other roots?"
"Yes, without a drop o' rain, thank God. But I was coming to tell
'ee of something else which is quite different from what we have lately
had in the family. I am sent by the rich gentleman at the Woman, that
we used to call the landlord, to tell 'ee that Mrs. Wildeve is doing
well of a girl, which was born punctually at one o'clock at noon, or
a few minutes more or less; and 'tis said that expecting of this increase
is what have kept 'em there since they came into their money."
"And she is getting on well, you say?"
"Yes, sir. Only Mr. Wildeve is twanky because 'tisn't a boy-that's
what they say in the kitchen, but I was not supposed to notice that."
"Christian, now listen to me."
"Yes, sure, Mr. Yeobright."
"Did you see my mother the day before she died?"
"No, I did not."
Yeobright's face expressed disappointment.
"But I zeed her the morning of the same day she died."
Clym's look lighted up. "That's nearer still to my meaning,"
he said.
"Yes, I know 'twas the same day; for she said, 'I be going to see
him, Christian; so I shall not want any vegetables brought in for dinner.'"
"See whom?"
"See you. She was going to your house, you understand."
Yeobright regarded Christian with intense surprise. "Why did you
never mention this?" he said. "Are you sure it was my house
she was coming to?"
"O yes. I didn't mention it because I've never zeed you lately.
And as she didn't get there it was all nought, and nothing to tell."
"And I have been wondering why she should have walked in the heath
on that hot day! Well, did she say what she was coming for? It is a
thing, Christian, I am very anxious to know."
"Yes, Mister Clym. She didn't say it to me, though I think she
did to one here and there."
"Do you know one person to whom she spoke of it?"
"There is one man, please, sir, but I hope you won't mention my
name to him, as I have seen him in strange places, particular in dreams.
One night last summer he glared at me like Famine and Sword, and it
made me feel so low that I didn't comb out my few hairs for two days.
He was standing, as it might be, Mister Yeobright, in the
middle of the path to Mistover, and your mother came up,
looking as pale-"
"Yes, when was that?"
"Last summer, in my dream."
"Pooh! Who's the man?"
"Diggory, the reddleman. He called upon her and sat with her the
evening before she set out to see you. I hadn't gone home from work
when he came up to the gate."
"I must see Venn-I wish I had known it before," said Clym
anxiously. "I wonder why he has not come to tell me?"
"He went out of Egdon Heath the next day, so would not be likely
to know you wanted him."
"Christian," said Clym, "you must go and find Venn. I
am otherwise engaged, or I would go myself. Find him at once, and tell
him I want to speak to him."
"I am a good hand at hunting up folk by day," said Christian,
looking dubiously round at the declining light;
"but as to night-time, never is such a bad hand as I, Mister Yeobright."
"Search the heath when you will, so that you bring him soon.
Bring him tomorrow, if you can."
Christian then departed. The morrow came, but no Venn.
In the evening Christian arrived, looking very weary. He had been searching
all day, and had heard nothing of the reddleman.
"Inquire as much as you can tomorrow without neglecting your work,"
said Yeobright. "Don't come again till you have found him."
The next day Yeobright set out for the old house at Blooms-End, which,
with the garden, was now his own. His severe illness had hindered all
preparations for his removal thither; but it had become necessary that
he should go and overlook its contents, as administrator to his mother's
little property; for which purpose he decided to pass the next night
on the premises.
He journeyed onward, not quickly or decisively, but in the slow walk
of one who has been awakened from a stupefying sleep. It was early afternoon
when he reached the valley. The expression of the place, the tone of
the hour, were precisely those of many such occasions in days gone by;
and these antecedent similarities fostered the illusion that she, who
was there no longer, would come out to welcome him. The garden gate
was locked and the shutters were closed, just as he himself had left
them on the evening after the funeral. He unlocked the gate, and found
that a spider had already constructed a large web, tying the door to
the lintel, on the supposition that it was never to be opened again.
When he had entered the house and flung back the shutters he set about
his task of overhauling the cupboards and closets, burning papers, and
considering how best to arrange the place for Eustacia's reception,
until such time as he might be in a position to carry out his long-delayed
scheme, should that time ever arrive.
As he surveyed the rooms he felt strongly disinclined for the alterations
which would have to be made in the time-honoured furnishing of his parents
and grandparents, to suit Eustacia's modern ideas. The gaunt oak-cased
clock, with the picture of the Ascension on the door panel and the Miraculous
Draught of Fishes on the base; his grandmother's corner cupboard with
the glass door, through which the spotted china was visible; the dumb-waiter;
the wooden tea trays; the hanging fountain with the brass tap-whither
would these venerable articles have to be banished?
He noticed that the flowers in the window had died for want of water,
and he placed them out upon the ledge, that they might be taken away.
While thus engaged he heard footsteps on the gravel without, and somebody
knocked at the door.
Yeobright opened it, and Venn was standing before him.
"Good morning," said the reddleman. "Is Mrs. Yeobright
at home?"
Yeobright looked upon the ground. "Then you have not seen Christian
or any of the Egdon folks?" he said.
"No. I have only just returned after a long stay away.
I called here the day before I left."
"And you have heard nothing?"
"Nothing."
"My mother is-dead."
"Dead!" said Venn mechanically.
"Her home now is where I shouldn't mind having mine."
Venn regarded him, and then said, "If I didn't see your face I
could never believe your words. Have you been ill?"
"I had an illness."
"Well, the change! When I parted from her a month ago everything
seemed to say that she was going to begin a new life."
"And what seemed came true."
"You say right, no doubt. Trouble has taught you a deeper vein
of talk than mine. All I meant was regarding her life here. She has
died too soon."
"Perhaps through my living too long. I have had a bitter experience
on that score this last month, Diggory. But come in; I have been wanting
to see you."
He conducted the reddleman into the large room where the dancing had
taken place the previous Christmas, and they sat down in the settle
together. "There's the cold fireplace, you see," said Clym.
"When that half-burnt log and those cinders were alight she was
alive! Little has been changed here yet. I can do nothing.
My life creeps like a snail."
"How came she to die?" said Venn.
Yeobright gave him some particulars of her illness and death, and continued:
"After this no kind of pain will ever seem more than an indisposition
to me. I began saying that I wanted to ask you something, but I stray
from subjects like a drunken man. I am anxious to know what my mother
said to you when she last saw you. You talked with her a long time,
I think?"
"I talked with her more than half an hour."
"About me?"
"Yes. And it must have been on account of what we said that she
was on the heath. Without question she was coming to see you."
"But why should she come to see me if she felt so bitterly against
me? There's the mystery."
"Yet I know she quite forgave 'ee."
"But, Diggory-would a woman, who had quite forgiven her son, say,
when she felt herself ill on the way to his house, that she was broken-hearted
because of his ill-usage? Never!"
"What I know is that she didn't blame you at all.
She blamed herself for what had happened, and only herself.
I had it from her own lips."
"You had it from her lips that I had NOT ill-treated her; and at
the same time another had it from her lips that I HAD ill-treated her?
My mother was no impulsive woman who changed her opinion every hour
without reason. How can it be, Venn, that she should have told such
different stories in close succession?"
"I cannot say. It is certainly odd, when she had forgiven you,
and had forgiven your wife, and was going to see ye on purpose to make
friends."
"If there was one thing wanting to bewilder me it was this incomprehensible
thing!...Diggory, if we, who remain alive, were only allowed to hold
conversation with the dead-just once, a bare minute, even through a
screen of iron bars, as with persons in prison-what we might learn!
How many who now ride smiling would hide their heads! And this mystery-I
should then be at the bottom of it at once. But the grave has forever
shut her in; and how shall it be found out now?"
No reply was returned by his companion, since none could be given; and
when Venn left, a few minutes later, Clym had passed from the dullness
of sorrow to the fluctuation of carking incertitude.
He continued in the same state all the afternoon. A bed was made up
for him in the same house by a neighbour, that he might not have to
return again the next day; and when he retired to rest in the deserted
place it was only to remain awake hour after hour thinking the same
thoughts. How to discover a solution to this riddle of death seemed
a query of more importance than highest problems of the living. There
was housed in his memory a vivid picture of the face of a little boy
as he entered the hovel where Clym's mother lay. The round eyes, eager
gaze, the piping voice which enunciated the words, had operated like
stilettos on his brain.
A visit to the boy suggested itself as a means of gleaning new particulars;
though it might be quite unproductive. To probe a child's mind after
the lapse of six weeks, not for facts which the child had seen and understood,
but to get at those which were in their nature beyond him, did not promise
much; yet when every obvious channel is blocked we grope towards the
small and obscure. There was nothing else left to do; after that he
would allow the enigma to drop into the abyss of undiscoverable things.
It was about daybreak when he had reached this decision, and he at once
arose. He locked up the house and went out into the green patch which
merged in heather further on. In front of the white garden-palings the
path branched into three like a broad arrow. The road to the right led
to the Quiet Woman and its neighbourhood; the middle track led to Mistover
Knap; the left-hand track led over the hill to another part of Mistover,
where the child lived. On inclining into the latter path Yeobright felt
a creeping chilliness, familiar enough to most people, and probably
caused by the unsunned morning air. In after days he thought of it as
a thing of singular significance.
When Yeobright reached the cottage of Susan Nunsuch, the mother of the
boy he sought, he found that the inmates were not yet astir. But in
upland hamlets the transition from a-bed to abroad is surprisingly swift
and easy. There no dense partition of yawns and toilets divides humanity
by night from humanity by day. Yeobright tapped at the upper windowsill,
which he could reach with his walking stick; and in three or four minutes
the woman came down.
It was not till this moment that Clym recollected her to be the person
who had behaved so barbarously to Eustacia. It partly explained the
insuavity with which the woman greeted him. Moreover, the boy had been
ailing again; and Susan now, as ever since the night when he had been
pressed into Eustacia's service at the bonfire, attributed his indispositions
to Eustacia's influence as a witch. It was one of those sentiments which
lurk like moles underneath the visible surface of manners, and may have
been kept alive by Eustacia's entreaty to the captain, at the time that
he had intended to prosecute Susan for the pricking in church, to let
the matter drop; which he accordingly had done.
Yeobright overcame his repugnance, for Susan had at least borne his
mother no ill-will. He asked kindly for the boy; but her manner did
not improve.
"I wish to see him," continued Yeobright, with some hesitation,
"to ask him if he remembers anything more of his walk with my mother
than what he has previously told."
She regarded him in a peculiar and criticizing manner. To anybody but
a half-blind man it would have said, "You want another of the knocks
which have already laid you so low."
She called the boy downstairs, asked Clym to sit down on a stool, and
continued, "Now, Johnny, tell Mr. Yeobright anything you can call
to mind."
"You have not forgotten how you walked with the poor lady on that
hot day?" said Clym.
"No," said the boy.
"And what she said to you?"
The boy repeated the exact words he had used on entering the hut. Yeobright
rested his elbow on the table and shaded his face with his hand; and
the mother looked as if she wondered how a man could want more of what
had stung him so deeply.
"She was going to Alderworth when you first met her?"
"No; she was coming away."
"That can't be."
"Yes; she walked along with me. I was coming away, too."
"Then where did you first see her?"
"At your house."
"Attend, and speak the truth!" said Clym sternly.
"Yes, sir; at your house was where I seed her first."
Clym started up, and Susan smiled in an expectant way which did not
embellish her face; it seemed to mean, "Something sinister is coming!"
"What did she do at my house?"
"She went and sat under the trees at the Devil's Bellows."
"Good God! this is all news to me!"
"You never told me this before?" said Susan.
"No, Mother; because I didn't like to tell 'ee I had been so far.
I was picking blackhearts, and went further than I meant."
"What did she do then?" said Yeobright.
"Looked at a man who came up and went into your house."
"That was myself-a furze-cutter, with brambles in his hand."
"No; 'twas not you. 'Twas a gentleman. You had gone in afore."
"Who was he?"
"I don't know."
"Now tell me what happened next."
"The poor lady went and knocked at your door, and the lady with
black hair looked out of the side window at her."
The boy's mother turned to Clym and said, "This is something you
didn't expect?"
Yeobright took no more notice of her than if he had been of stone. "Go
on, go on," he said hoarsely to the boy.
"And when she saw the young lady look out of the window the old
lady knocked again; and when nobody came she took up the furze-hook
and looked at it, and put it down again, and then she looked at the
faggot-bonds; and then she went away, and walked across to me, and blowed
her breath very hard, like this. We walked on together, she and I, and
I talked to her and she talked to me a bit, but not much, because she
couldn't blow her breath."
"O!" murmured Clym, in a low tone, and bowed his head.
"Let's have more," he said.
"She couldn't talk much, and she couldn't walk; and her face was,
O so queer!"
"How was her face?"
"Like yours is now."
The woman looked at Yeobright, and beheld him colourless, in a cold
sweat. "Isn't there meaning in it?" she said stealthily. "What
do you think of her now?"
"Silence!" said Clym fiercely. And, turning to the boy, "And
then you left her to die?"
"No," said the woman, quickly and angrily. "He did not
leave her to die! She sent him away. Whoever says he forsook her says
what's not true."
"Trouble no more about that," answered Clym, with a quivering
mouth. "What he did is a trifle in comparison with what he saw.
Door kept shut, did you say? Kept shut, she looking out of window? Good
heart of God!--what does it mean?"
The child shrank away from the gaze of his questioner.
"He said so," answered the mother, "and Johnny's a God-fearing
boy and tells no lies."
"'Cast off by my son!' No, by my best life, dear mother, it is
not so! But by your son's, your son's-May all murderesses get the torment
they deserve!"
With these words Yeobright went forth from the little dwelling. The
pupils of his eyes, fixed steadfastly on blankness, were vaguely lit
with an icy shine; his mouth had passed into the phase more or less
imaginatively rendered in studies of Oedipus. The strangest deeds were
possible to his mood. But they were not possible to his situation. Instead
of there being before him the pale face of Eustacia, and a masculine
shape unknown, there was only the imperturbable countenance of the heath,
which, having defied the cataclysmal onsets of centuries, reduced to
insignificance by its seamed and antique features the wildest turmoil
of a single man.
3 - Eustacia Dresses Herself on a Black Morning
A consciousness of a vast impassivity in all which lay
around him took possession even of Yeobright in his wild walk towards
Alderworth. He had once before felt in his own person this overpowering
of the fervid by the inanimate; but then it had tended to enervate a
passion far sweeter than that which at present pervaded him. It was
once when he stood parting from Eustacia in the moist still levels beyond
the hills.
But dismissing all this he went onward home, and came to the front of
his house. The blinds of Eustacia's bedroom were still closely drawn,
for she was no early riser. All the life visible was in the shape of
a solitary thrush cracking a small snail upon the door-stone for his
breakfast, and his tapping seemed a loud noise in the general silence
which prevailed; but on going to the door Clym found it unfastened,
the young girl who attended upon Eustacia being astir in the back part
of the premises. Yeobright entered and went straight to his wife's room.
The noise of his arrival must have aroused her, for when he opened the
door she was standing before the looking glass in her nightdress, the
ends of her hair gathered into one hand, with which she was coiling
the whole mass round her head, previous to beginning toilette operations.
She was not a woman given to speaking first at a meeting, and she allowed
Clym to walk across in silence, without turning her head. He came behind
her, and she saw his face in the glass. It was ashy, haggard, and terrible.
Instead of starting towards him in sorrowful surprise, as even Eustacia,
undemonstrative wife as she was, would have done in days before she
burdened herself with a secret, she remained motionless, looking at
him in the glass. And while she looked the carmine flush with which
warmth and sound sleep had suffused her cheeks and neck dissolved from
view, and the deathlike pallor in his face flew across into hers. He
was close enough to see this, and the sight instigated his tongue.
"You know what is the matter," he said huskily.
"I see it in your face."
Her hand relinquished the rope of hair and dropped to her side, and
the pile of tresses, no longer supported, fell from the crown of her
head about her shoulders and over the white nightgown. She made no reply.
"Speak to me," said Yeobright peremptorily.
The blanching process did not cease in her, and her lips now became
as white as her face. She turned to him and said, "Yes, Clym, I'll
speak to you. Why do you return so early? Can I do anything for you?"
"Yes, you can listen to me. It seems that my wife is not very well?"
"Why?"
"Your face, my dear; your face. Or perhaps it is the pale morning
light which takes your colour away? Now I am going to reveal a secret
to you. Ha-ha!"
"O, that is ghastly!"
"What?"
"Your laugh."
"There's reason for ghastliness. Eustacia, you have held my happiness
in the hollow of your hand, and like a devil you have dashed it down!"
She started back from the dressing-table, retreated a few steps from
him, and looked him in the face. "Ah! you think to frighten me,"
she said, with a slight laugh. "Is it worth while? I am undefended,
and alone."
"How extraordinary!"
"What do you mean?"
"As there is ample time I will tell you, though you know well enough.
I mean that it is extraordinary that you should be alone in my absence.
Tell me, now, where is he who was with you on the afternoon of the thirty-first
of August? Under the bed? Up the chimney?"
A shudder overcame her and shook the light fabric of her nightdress
throughout. "I do not remember dates so exactly," she said.
"I cannot recollect that anybody was with me besides yourself."
"The day I mean," said Yeobright, his voice growing louder
and harsher, "was the day you shut the door against my mother and
killed her. O, it is too much-too bad!" He leant over the footpiece
of the bedstead for a few moments, with his back towards her; then rising
again-"Tell me, tell me! tell me-do you hear?" he cried, rushing
up to her and seizing her by the loose folds of her sleeve.
The superstratum of timidity which often overlies those who are daring
and defiant at heart had been passed through, and the mettlesome substance
of the woman was reached. The red blood inundated her face, previously
so pale.
"What are you going to do?" she said in a low voice, regarding
him with a proud smile. "You will not alarm me by holding on so;
but it would be a pity to tear my sleeve."
Instead of letting go he drew her closer to him. "Tell me
the particulars of-my mother's death," he said in a hard,
panting whisper; "or-I'll-I'll-"
"Clym," she answered slowly, "do you think you dare do
anything to me that I dare not bear? But before you strike me listen.
You will get nothing from me by a blow, even though it should kill me,
as it probably will. But perhaps you do not wish me to speak-killing
may be all you mean?"
"Kill you! Do you expect it?"
"I do."
"Why?"
"No less degree of rage against me will match your previous grief
for her."
"Phew-I shall not kill you," he said contemptuously, as if
under a sudden change of purpose. "I did think of it; but-I shall
not. That would be making a martyr of you, and sending you to where
she is; and I would keep you away from her till the universe come to
an end, if I could."
"I almost wish you would kill me," said she with gloomy bitterness.
"It is with no strong desire, I assure you, that I play the part
I have lately played on earth. You are no blessing, my husband."
"You shut the door-you looked out of the window upon her-you had
a man in the house with you-you sent her away to die. The inhumanity-the
treachery-I will not touch you-stand away from me-and confess every
word!"
"Never! I'll hold my tongue like the very death that I don't mind
meeting, even though I can clear myself of half you believe by speaking.
Yes. I will! Who of any dignity would take the trouble to clear cobwebs
from a wild man's mind after such language as this? No; let him go on,
and think his narrow thoughts, and run his head into the mire. I have
other cares."
"'Tis too much-but I must spare you."
"Poor charity."
"By my wretched soul you sting me, Eustacia! I can keep it up,
and hotly too. Now, then, madam, tell me his name!"
"Never, I am resolved."
"How often does he write to you? Where does he put his letters-when
does he meet you? Ah, his letters! Do you tell me his name?"
"I do not."
"Then I'll find it myself." His eyes had fallen upon a small
desk that stood near, on which she was accustomed to write her letters.
He went to it. It was locked.
"Unlock this!"
"You have no right to say it. That's mine."
Without another word he seized the desk and dashed it to the floor.
The hinge burst open, and a number of letters tumbled out.
"Stay!" said Eustacia, stepping before him with more excitement
than she had hitherto shown.
"Come, come! stand away! I must see them."
She looked at the letters as they lay, checked her feeling and moved
indifferently aside; when he gathered them up, and examined them.
By no stretch of meaning could any but a harmless construction be placed
upon a single one of the letters themselves. The solitary exception
was an empty envelope directed to her, and the handwriting was Wildeve's.
Yeobright held it up. Eustacia was doggedly silent.
"Can you read, madam? Look at this envelope. Doubtless we shall
find more soon, and what was inside them. I shall no doubt be gratified
by learning in good time what a well-finished and full-blown adept in
a certain trade my lady is."
"Do you say it to me-do you?" she gasped.
He searched further, but found nothing more. "What was in this
letter?" he said.
"Ask the writer. Am I your hound that you should talk to me in
this way?"
"Do you brave me? do you stand me out, mistress? Answer. Don't
look at me with those eyes if you would bewitch me again! Sooner than
that I die. You refuse to answer?"
"I wouldn't tell you after this, if I were as innocent as the sweetest
babe in heaven!"
"Which you are not."
"Certainly I am not absolutely," she replied. "I have
not done what you suppose; but if to have done no harm at all is the
only innocence recognized, I am beyond forgiveness. But I require no
help from your conscience."
"You can resist, and resist again! Instead of hating you I could,
I think, mourn for and pity you, if you were contrite, and would confess
all. Forgive you I never can. I don't speak of your lover-I will give
you the benefit of the doubt in that matter, for it only affects me
personally. But the other-had you half-killed me, had it been that you
wilfully took the sight away from these feeble eyes of mine, I could
have forgiven you. But THAT'S too much for nature!"
"Say no more. I will do without your pity. But I would have saved
you from uttering what you will regret."
"I am going away now. I shall leave you."
"You need not go, as I am going myself. You will keep just as far
away from me by staying here."
"Call her to mind-think of her-what goodness there was in her-it
showed in every line of her face! Most women, even when but slightly
annoyed, show a flicker of evil in some curl of the mouth or some corner
of the cheek; but as for her, never in her angriest moments was there
anything malicious in her look. She was angered quickly, but she forgave
just as readily, and underneath her pride there was the meekness of
a child. What came of it.?--what cared you? You hated her just as she
was learning to love you. O! couldn't you see what was best for you,
but must bring a curse upon me, and agony and death upon her, by doing
that cruel deed! What was the fellow's name who was keeping you company
and causing you to add cruelty to her to your wrong to me? Was it Wildeve?
Was it poor Thomasin's husband? Heaven, what wickedness! Lost your voice,
have you? It is natural after detection of that most noble trick....Eustacia,
didn't any tender thought of your own mother lead you to think of being
gentle to mine at such a time of weariness? Did not one grain of pity
enter your heart as she turned away? Think what a vast opportunity was
then lost of beginning a forgiving and honest course. Why did not you
kick him out, and let her in, and say I'll be an honest wife and a noble
woman from this hour? Had I told you to go and quench eternally our
last flickering chance of happiness here you could have done no worse.
Well, she's asleep now; and have you a hundred gallants, neither they
nor you can insult her any more."
"You exaggerate fearfully," she said in a faint, weary voice;
"but I cannot enter into my defence-it is not worth doing. You
are nothing to me in future, and the past side of the story may as well
remain untold. I have lost all through you, but I have not complained.
Your blunders and misfortunes may have been a sorrow to you, but they
have been a wrong to me. All persons of refinement have been scared
away from me since I sank into the mire of marriage. Is this your cherishing-to
put me into a hut like this, and keep me like the wife of a hind? You
deceived me-not by words, but by appearances, which are less seen through
than words. But the place will serve as well as any other-as somewhere
to pass from-into my grave." Her words were smothered in her throat,
and her head drooped down.
"I don't know what you mean by that. Am I the cause of your sin?"
(Eustacia made a trembling motion towards him.) "What, you can
begin to shed tears and offer me your hand? Good God! can you? No, not
I. I'll not commit the fault of taking that." (The hand she had
offered dropped nervelessly, but the tears continued flowing.) "Well,
yes, I'll take it, if only for the sake of my own foolish kisses that
were wasted there before I knew what I cherished. How bewitched I was!
How could there be any good in a woman that everybody spoke ill of?"
"O, O, O!" she cried, breaking down at last; and, shaking
with sobs which choked her, she sank upon her knees. "O, will you
have done! O, you are too relentless-there's a limit to the cruelty
of savages! I have held out long-but you crush me down. I beg for mercy-I
cannot bear this any longer-it is inhuman to go further with this! If
I had-killed your-mother with my own hand-I should not deserve such
a scourging to the bone as this. O, O! God have mercy upon a miserable
woman!...You have beaten me in this game-I beg you to stay your hand
in pity!...I confess that I-wilfully did not undo the door the first
time she knocked-but-I should have unfastened it the second- if I had
not thought you had gone to do it yourself. When I found you had not
I opened it, but she was gone. That's the extent of my crime-towards
HER. Best natures commit bad faults sometimes, don't they?--I think
they do. Now I will leave you-for ever and ever!"
"Tell all, and I WILL pity you. Was the man in the house with you
Wildeve?"
"I cannot tell," she said desperately through her sobbing.
"Don't insist further-I cannot tell. I am going from this house.
We cannot both stay here."
"You need not go-I will go. You can stay here."
"No, I will dress, and then I will go."
"Where?"
"Where I came from, or ELSEWHERE."
She hastily dressed herself, Yeobright moodily walking up and down the
room the whole of the time. At last all her things were on. Her little
hands quivered so violently as she held them to her chin to fasten her
bonnet that she could not tie the strings, and after a few moments she
relinquished the attempt. Seeing this he moved forward and said, "Let
me tie them."
She assented in silence, and lifted her chin. For once at least in her
life she was totally oblivious of the charm of her attitude. But he
was not, and he turned his eyes aside, that he might not be tempted
to softness.
The strings were tied; she turned from him. "Do you still prefer
going away yourself to my leaving you?" he inquired again.
"I do."
"Very well-let it be. And when you will confess to the man I may
pity you."
She flung her shawl about her and went downstairs, leaving him standing
in the room.
Eustacia had not long been gone when there came a knock
at the door of the bedroom; and Yeobright said, "Well?"
It was the servant; and she replied, "Somebody from Mrs. Wildeve's
have called to tell 'ee that the mis'ess and the baby are getting on
wonderful well, and the baby's name is to be Eustacia Clementine."
And the girl retired.
"What a mockery!" said Clym. "This unhappy marriage of
mine to be perpetuated in that child's name!"
4 - The Ministrations of a Half-forgotten One
Eustacia's journey was at first as vague in direction
as that of thistledown on the wind. She did not know what to do. She
wished it had been night instead of morning, that she might at least
have borne her misery without the possibility of being seen. Tracing
mile after mile along between the dying ferns and the wet white spiders'
webs, she at length turned her steps towards her grandfather's house.
She found the front door closed and locked. Mechanically she went round
to the end where the stable was, and on looking in at the stable door
she saw Charley standing within.
"Captain Vye is not at home?" she said.
"No, ma'am," said the lad in a flutter of feeling;
"he's gone to Weatherbury, and won't be home till night. And the
servant is gone home for a holiday. So the house is locked up."
Eustacia's face was not visible to Charley as she stood at the doorway,
her back being to the sky, and the stable but indifferently lighted;
but the wildness of her manner arrested his attention. She turned and
walked away across the enclosure to the gate, and was hidden by the
bank.
When she had disappeared Charley, with misgiving in his eyes, slowly
came from the stable door, and going to another point in the bank he
looked over. Eustacia was leaning against it on the outside, her face
covered with her hands, and her head pressing the dewy heather which
bearded the bank's outer side. She appeared to be utterly indifferent
to the circumstance that her bonnet, hair, and garments were becoming
wet and disarranged by the moisture of her cold, harsh pillow. Clearly
something was wrong.
Charley had always regarded Eustacia as Eustacia had regarded Clym when
she first beheld him-as a romantic and sweet vision, scarcely incarnate.
He had been so shut off from her by the dignity of her look and the
pride of her speech, except at that one blissful interval when he was
allowed to hold her hand, that he had hardly deemed her a woman, wingless
and earthly, subject to household conditions and domestic jars. The
inner details of her life he had only conjectured. She had been a lovely
wonder, predestined to an orbit in which the whole of his own was but
a point; and this sight of her leaning like a helpless, despairing creature
against a wild wet bank filled him with an amazed horror. He could no
longer remain where he was. Leaping over, he came up, touched her with
his finger, and said tenderly, "You are poorly, ma'am. What can
I do?"
Eustacia started up, and said, "Ah, Charley-you have followed me.
You did not think when I left home in the summer that I should come
back like this!"
"I did not, dear ma'am. Can I help you now?"
"I am afraid not. I wish I could get into the house.
I feel giddy-that's all."
"Lean on my arm, ma'am, till we get to the porch, and I will try
to open the door."
He supported her to the porch, and there depositing her on a seat hastened
to the back, climbed to a window by the help of a ladder, and descending
inside opened the door. Next he assisted her into the room, where there
was an old-fashioned horsehair settee as large as a donkey wagon. She
lay down here, and Charley covered her with a cloak he found in the
hall.
"Shall I get you something to eat and drink?" he said.
"If you please, Charley. But I suppose there is no fire?"
"I can light it, ma'am."
He vanished, and she heard a splitting of wood and a blowing of bellows;
and presently he returned, saying, "I have lighted a fire in the
kitchen, and now I'll light one here."
He lit the fire, Eustacia dreamily observing him from her couch. When
it was blazing up he said, "Shall I wheel you round in front of
it, ma'am, as the morning is chilly?"
"Yes, if you like."
"Shall I go and bring the victuals now?"
"Yes, do," she murmured languidly.
When he had gone, and the dull sounds occasionally reached her ears
of his movements in the kitchen, she forgot where she was, and had for
a moment to consider by an effort what the sounds meant. After an interval
which seemed short to her whose thoughts were elsewhere, he came in
with a tray on which steamed tea and toast, though it was nearly lunch-time.
"Place it on the table," she said. "I shall be ready
soon."
He did so, and retired to the door; when, however, he perceived that
she did not move he came back a few steps.
"Let me hold it to you, if you don't wish to get up," said
Charley. He brought the tray to the front of the couch, where he knelt
down, adding, "I will hold it for you."
Eustacia sat up and poured out a cup of tea. "You are very kind
to me, Charley," she murmured as she sipped.
"Well, I ought to be," said he diffidently, taking great trouble
not to rest his eyes upon her, though this was their only natural position,
Eustacia being immediately before him. "You have been kind to me."
"How have I?" said Eustacia.
"You let me hold your hand when you were a maiden at home."
"Ah, so I did. Why did I do that? My mind is lost-it had to do
with the mumming, had it not?"
"Yes, you wanted to go in my place."
"I remember. I do indeed remember-too well!"
She again became utterly downcast; and Charley, seeing that she was
not going to eat or drink any more, took away the tray.
Afterwards he occasionally came in to see if the fire was burning, to
ask her if she wanted anything, to tell her that the wind had shifted
from south to west, to ask her if she would like him to gather her some
blackberries; to all which inquiries she replied in the negative or
with indifference.
She remained on the settee some time longer, when she aroused herself
and went upstairs. The room in which she had formerly slept still remained
much as she had left it, and the recollection that this forced upon
her of her own greatly changed and infinitely worsened situation again
set on her face the undetermined and formless misery which it had worn
on her first arrival. She peeped into her grandfather's room, through
which the fresh autumn air was blowing from the open window. Her eye
was arrested by what was a familiar sight enough, though it broke upon
her now with a new significance.
It was a brace of pistols, hanging near the head of her grandfather's
bed, which he always kept there loaded, as a precaution against possible
burglars, the house being very lonely. Eustacia regarded them long,
as if they were the page of a book in which she read a new and a strange
matter. Quickly, like one afraid of herself, she returned downstairs
and stood in deep thought.
"If I could only do it!" she said. "It would be doing
much good to myself and all connected with me, and no harm to a single
one."
The idea seemed to gather force within her, and she remained in a fixed
attitude nearly ten minutes, when a certain finality was expressed in
her gaze, and no longer the blankness of indecision.
She turned and went up the second time-softly and stealthily now-and
entered her grandfather's room, her eyes at once seeking the head of
the bed. The pistols were gone.
The instant quashing of her purpose by their absence affected her brain
as a sudden vacuum affects the body-she nearly fainted. Who had done
this? There was only one person on the premises besides herself. Eustacia
involuntarily turned to the open window which overlooked the garden
as far as the bank that bounded it. On the summit of the latter stood
Charley, sufficiently elevated by its height to see into the room. His
gaze was directed eagerly and solicitously upon her.
She went downstairs to the door and beckoned to him.
"You have taken them away?"
"Yes, ma'am."
"Why did you do it?"
"I saw you looking at them too long."
"What has that to do with it?"
"You have been heart-broken all the morning, as if you did not
want to live."
"Well?"
"And I could not bear to leave them in your way.
There was meaning in your look at them."
"Where are they now?"
"Locked up."
"Where?"
"In the stable."
"Give them to me."
"No, ma'am."
"You refuse?"
"I do. I care too much for you to give 'em up."
She turned aside, her face for the first time softening from the stony
immobility of the earlier day, and the corners of her mouth resuming
something of that delicacy of cut which was always lost in her moments
of despair. At last she confronted him again.
"Why should I not die if I wish?" she said tremulously. "I
have made a bad bargain with life, and I am weary of it-weary. And now
you have hindered my escape. O, why did you, Charley! What makes death
painful except the thought of others' grief?--and that is absent in
my case, for not a sigh would follow me!"
"Ah, it is trouble that has done this! I wish in my very soul that
he who brought it about might die and rot, even if 'tis transportation
to say it!"
"Charley, no more of that. What do you mean to do about this you
have seen?"
"Keep it close as night, if you promise not to think of it again."
"You need not fear. The moment has passed. I promise."
She then went away, entered the house, and lay down.
Later in the afternoon her grandfather returned. He was about to question
her categorically, but on looking at her he withheld his words.
"Yes, it is too bad to talk of," she slowly returned in answer
to his glance. "Can my old room be got ready for me tonight, Grandfather?
I shall want to occupy it again."
He did not ask what it all meant, or why she had left her husband, but
ordered the room to be prepared.
5 - An Old Move Inadvertently Repeated
Charley's attentions to his former mistress were unbounded.
The only solace to his own trouble lay in his attempts to relieve hers.
Hour after hour he considered her wants; he thought of her presence
there with a sort of gratitude, and, while uttering imprecations on
the cause of her unhappiness, in some measure blessed the result. Perhaps
she would always remain there, he thought, and then he would be as happy
as he had been before. His dread was lest she should think fit to return
to Alderworth, and in that dread his eyes, with all the inquisitiveness
of affection, frequently sought her face when she was not observing
him, as he would have watched the head of a stockdove to learn if it
contemplated flight. Having once really succoured her, and possibly
preserved her from the rashest of acts, he mentally assumed in addition
a guardian's responsibility for her welfare.
For this reason he busily endeavoured to provide her with pleasant distractions,
bringing home curious objects which he found in the heath, such as white
trumpet-shaped mosses, redheaded lichens, stone arrowheads used by the
old tribes on Egdon, and faceted crystals from the hollows of flints.
These he deposited on the premises in such positions that she should
see them as if by accident.
A week passed, Eustacia never going out of the house. Then she walked
into the enclosed plot and looked through her grandfather's spyglass,
as she had been in the habit of doing before her marriage. One day she
saw, at a place where the highroad crossed the distant valley, a heavily
laden wagon passing along. It was piled with household furniture. She
looked again and again, and recognized it to be her own. In the evening
her grandfather came indoors with a rumour that Yeobright had removed
that day from Alderworth to the old house at Blooms-End.
On another occasion when reconnoitring thus she beheld two female figures
walking in the vale. The day was fine and clear; and the persons not
being more than half a mile off she could see their every detail with
the telescope. The woman walking in front carried a white bundle in
her arms, from one end of which hung a long appendage of drapery; and
when the walkers turned, so that the sun fell more directly upon them,
Eustacia could see that the object was a baby. She called Charley, and
asked him if he knew who they were, though she well guessed.
"Mrs. Wildeve and the nurse-girl," said Charley.
"The nurse is carrying the baby?" said Eustacia.
"No, 'tis Mrs. Wildeve carrying that," he answered, "and
the nurse walks behind carrying nothing."
The lad was in good spirits that day, for the Fifth of November had
again come round, and he was planning yet another scheme to divert her
from her too absorbing thoughts. For two successive years his mistress
had seemed to take pleasure in lighting a bonfire on the bank overlooking
the valley; but this year she had apparently quite forgotten the day
and the customary deed. He was careful not to remind her, and went on
with his secret preparations for a cheerful surprise, the more zealously
that he had been absent last time and unable to assist. At every vacant
minute he hastened to gather furze-stumps, thorn-tree roots, and other
solid materials from the adjacent slopes, hiding them from cursory view.
The evening came, and Eustacia was still seemingly unconscious of the
anniversary. She had gone indoors after her survey through the glass,
and had not been visible since. As soon as it was quite dark Charley
began to build the bonfire, choosing precisely that spot on the bank
which Eustacia had chosen at previous times.
When all the surrounding bonfires had burst into existence Charley kindled
his, and arranged its fuel so that it should not require tending for
some time. He then went back to the house, and lingered round the door
and windows till she should by some means or other learn of his achievement
and come out to witness it. But the shutters were closed, the door remained
shut, and no heed whatever seemed to be taken of his performance. Not
liking to call her he went back and replenished the fire, continuing
to do this for more than half an hour. It was not till his stock of
fuel had greatly diminished that he went to the back door and sent in
to beg that Mrs. Yeobright would open the window-shutters and see the
sight outside.
Eustacia, who had been sitting listlessly in the parlour, started up
at the intelligence and flung open the shutters. Facing her on the bank
blazed the fire, which at once sent a ruddy glare into the room where
she was, and overpowered the candles.
"Well done, Charley!" said Captain Vye from the chimney-corner.
"But I hope it is not my wood that he's burning....Ah, it was this
time last year that I met with that man Venn, bringing home Thomasin
Yeobright-to be sure it was! Well, who would have thought that girl's
troubles would have ended so well? What a snipe you were in that matter,
Eustacia! Has your husband written to you yet?"
"No," said Eustacia, looking vaguely through the window at
the fire, which just then so much engaged her mind that she did not
resent her grandfather's blunt opinion. She could see Charley's form
on the bank, shovelling and stirring the fire; and there flashed upon
her imagination some other form which that fire might call up.
She left the room, put on her garden bonnet and cloak, and went out.
Reaching the bank, she looked over with a wild curiosity and misgiving,
when Charley said to her, with a pleased sense of himself, "I made
it o' purpose for you, ma'am."
"Thank you," she said hastily. "But I wish you to put
it out now."
"It will soon burn down," said Charley, rather disappointed.
"Is it not a pity to knock it out?"
"I don't know," she musingly answered.
They stood in silence, broken only by the crackling of the flames, till
Charley, perceiving that she did not want to talk to him, moved reluctantly
away.
Eustacia remained within the bank looking at the fire, intending to
go indoors, yet lingering still. Had she not by her situation been inclined
to hold in indifference all things honoured of the gods and of men she
would probably have come away. But her state was so hopeless that she
could play with it. To have lost is less disturbing than to wonder if
we may possibly have won; and Eustacia could now, like other people
at such a stage, take a standing-point outside herself, observe herself
as a disinterested spectator, and think what a sport for Heaven this
woman Eustacia was.
While she stood she heard a sound. It was the splash of a stone in the
pond.
Had Eustacia received the stone full in the bosom her heart could not
have given a more decided thump. She had thought of the possibility
of such a signal in answer to that which had been unwittingly given
by Charley; but she had not expected it yet. How prompt Wildeve was!
Yet how could he think her capable of deliberately wishing to renew
their assignations now? An impulse to leave the spot, a desire to stay,
struggled within her; and the desire held its own. More than that it
did not do, for she refrained even from ascending the bank and looking
over. She remained motionless, not disturbing a muscle of her face or
raising her eyes; for were she to turn up her face the fire on the bank
would shine upon it, and Wildeve might be looking down.
There was a second splash into the pond.
Why did he stay so long without advancing and looking over? Curiosity
had its way-she ascended one or two of the earth-steps in the bank and
glanced out.
Wildeve was before her. He had come forward after throwing the last
pebble, and the fire now shone into each of their faces from the bank
stretching breast-high between them.
"I did not light it!" cried Eustacia quickly. "It was
lit without my knowledge. Don't, don't come over to me!"
"Why have you been living here all these days without telling me?
You have left your home. I fear I am something to blame in this?"
"I did not let in his mother; that's how it is!"
"You do not deserve what you have got, Eustacia; you are in great
misery; I see it in your eyes, your mouth, and all over you. My poor,
poor girl!" He stepped over the bank. "You are beyond everything
unhappy!"
"No, no; not exactly-"
"It has been pushed too far-it is killing you-I do think it!"
Her usually quiet breathing had grown quicker with his words. "I-I-"
she began, and then burst into quivering sobs, shaken to the very heart
by the unexpected voice of pity-a sentiment whose existence in relation
to herself she had almost forgotten.
This outbreak of weeping took Eustacia herself so much by surprise that
she could not leave off, and she turned aside from him in some shame,
though turning hid nothing from him. She sobbed on desperately; then
the outpour lessened, and she became quieter. Wildeve had resisted the
impulse to clasp her, and stood without speaking.
"Are you not ashamed of me, who used never to be a crying animal?"
she asked in a weak whisper as she wiped her eyes. "Why didn't
you go away? I wish you had not seen quite all that; it reveals too
much by half."
"You might have wished it, because it makes me as sad as you,"
he said with emotion and deference. "As for revealing-the word
is impossible between us two."
"I did not send for you-don't forget it, Damon; I am in pain, but
I did not send for you! As a wife, at least, I've been straight."
"Never mind-I came. O, Eustacia, forgive me for the harm I have
done you in these two past years! I see more and more that I have been
your ruin."
"Not you. This place I live in."
"Ah, your generosity may naturally make you say that. But I am
the culprit. I should either have done more or nothing at all."
"In what way?"
"I ought never to have hunted you out, or, having done it, I ought
to have persisted in retaining you. But of course I have no right to
talk of that now. I will only ask this-can I do anything for you? Is
there anything on the face of the earth that a man can do to make you
happier than you are at present? If there is, I will do it. You may
command me, Eustacia, to the limit of my influence; and don't forget
that I am richer now. Surely something can be done to save you from
this! Such a rare plant in such a wild place it grieves me to see. Do
you want anything bought? Do you want to go anywhere? Do you want to
escape the place altogether? Only say it, and I'll do anything to put
an end to those tears, which but for me would never have been at all."
"We are each married to another person," she said faintly;
"and assistance from you would have an evil sound-after-after-"
"Well, there's no preventing slanderers from having their fill
at any time; but you need not be afraid. Whatever I may feel I promise
you on my word of honour never to speak to you about-or act upon-until
you say I may. I know my duty to Thomasin quite as well as I know my
duty to you as a woman unfairly treated. What shall I assist you in?"
"In getting away from here."
"Where do you wish to go to?"
"I have a place in my mind. If you could help me as far as Budmouth
I can do all the rest. Steamers sail from there across the Channel,
and so I can get to Paris, where I want to be. Yes," she pleaded
earnestly, "help me to get to Budmouth harbour without my grandfather's
or my husband's knowledge, and I can do all the rest."
"Will it be safe to leave you there alone?"
"Yes, yes. I know Budmouth well."
"Shall I go with you? I am rich now."
She was silent.
"Say yes, sweet!"
She was silent still.
"Well, let me know when you wish to go. We shall be at our present
house till December; after that we remove to Casterbridge. Command me
in anything till that time."
"I will think of this," she said hurriedly. "Whether
I can honestly make use of you as a friend, or must close with you as
a lover-that is what I must ask myself. If I wish to go and decide to
accept your company I will signal to you some evening at eight o'clock
punctually, and this will mean that you are to be ready with a horse
and trap at twelve o'clock the same night to drive me to Budmouth harbour
in time for the morning boat."
"I will look out every night at eight, and no signal shall escape
me."
"Now please go away. If I decide on this escape I can only meet
you once more unless-I cannot go without you. Go-I cannot bear it longer.
Go-go!"
Wildeve slowly went up the steps and descended into the darkness on
the other side; and as he walked he glanced back, till the bank blotted
out her form from his further view.
6 - Thomasin Argues with Her Cousin, and He Writes a Letter
Yeobright was at this time at Blooms-End, hoping that
Eustacia would return to him. The removal of furniture had been accomplished
only that day, though Clym had lived in the old house for more than
a week. He had spent the time in working about the premises, sweeping
leaves from the garden paths, cutting dead stalks from the flower beds,
and nailing up creepers which had been displaced by the autumn winds.
He took no particular pleasure in these deeds, but they formed a screen
between himself and despair. Moreover, it had become a religion with
him to preserve in good condition all that had lapsed from his mother's
hands to his own.
During these operations he was constantly on the watch for Eustacia.
That there should be no mistake about her knowing where to find him
he had ordered a notice board to be affixed to the garden gate at Alderworth,
signifying in white letters whither he had removed. When a leaf floated
to the earth he turned his head, thinking it might be her foot-fall.
A bird searching for worms in the mould of the flower-beds sounded like
her hand on the latch of the gate; and at dusk, when soft, strange ventriloquisms
came from holes in the ground, hollow stalks, curled dead leaves, and
other crannies wherein breezes, worms, and insects can work their will,
he fancied that they were Eustacia, standing without and breathing wishes
of reconciliation.
Up to this hour he had persevered in his resolve not to invite her back.
At the same time the severity with which he had treated her lulled the
sharpness of his regret for his mother, and awoke some of his old solicitude
for his mother's supplanter. Harsh feelings produce harsh usage, and
this by reaction quenches the sentiments that gave it birth. The more
he reflected the more he softened. But to look upon his wife as innocence
in distress was impossible, though he could ask himself whether he had
given her quite time enough-if he had not come a little too suddenly
upon her on that sombre morning.
Now that the first flush of his anger had paled he was disinclined to
ascribe to her more than an indiscreet friendship with Wildeve, for
there had not appeared in her manner the signs of dishonour. And this
once admitted, an absolutely dark interpretation of her act towards
his mother was no longer forced upon him.
On the evening of the fifth November his thoughts of Eustacia were intense.
Echoes from those past times when they had exchanged tender words all
the day long came like the diffused murmur of a seashore left miles
behind. "Surely," he said, "she might have brought herself
to communicate with me before now, and confess honestly what Wildeve
was to her."
Instead of remaining at home that night he determined to go and see
Thomasin and her husband. If he found opportunity he would allude to
the cause of the separation between Eustacia and himself, keeping silence,
however, on the fact that there was a third person in his house when
his mother was turned away. If it proved that Wildeve was innocently
there he would doubtless openly mention it. If he were there with unjust
intentions Wildeve, being a man of quick feeling, might possibly say
something to reveal the extent to which Eustacia was compromised.
But on reaching his cousin's house he found that only Thomasin was at
home, Wildeve being at that time on his way towards the bonfire innocently
lit by Charley at Mistover. Thomasin then, as always, was glad to see
Clym, and took him to inspect the sleeping baby, carefully screening
the candlelight from the infant's eyes with her hand.
"Tamsin, have you heard that Eustacia is not with me. now?"
he said when they had sat down again.
"No," said Thomasin, alarmed.
"And not that I have left Alderworth?"
"No. I never hear tidings from Alderworth unless you bring them.
What is the matter?"
Clym in a disturbed voice related to her his visit to Susan Nunsuch's
boy, the revelation he had made, and what had resulted from his charging
Eustacia with having wilfully and heartlessly done the deed. He suppressed
all mention of Wildeve's presence with her.
"All this, and I not knowing it!" murmured Thomasin in an
awestruck tone, "Terrible! What could have made her-O, Eustacia!
And when you found it out you went in hot haste to her? Were you too
cruel?--or is she really so wicked as she seems?"
"Can a man be too cruel to his mother's enemy?"
"I can fancy so."
"Very well, then-I'll admit that he can. But now what is to be
done?"
"Make it up again-if a quarrel so deadly can ever be made up. I
almost wish you had not told me. But do try to be reconciled. There
are ways, after all, if you both wish to."
"I don't know that we do both wish to make it up," said Clym.
"If she had wished it, would she not have sent to me by this time?"
"You seem to wish to, and yet you have not sent to her."
"True; but I have been tossed to and fro in doubt if I ought, after
such strong provocation. To see me now, Thomasin, gives you no idea
of what I have been; of what depths I have descended to in these few
last days. O, it was a bitter shame to shut out my mother like that!
Can I ever forget it, or even agree to see her again?"
"She might not have known that anything serious would come of it,
and perhaps she did not mean to keep Aunt out altogether."
"She says herself that she did not. But the fact remains that keep
her out she did."
"Believe her sorry, and send for her."
"How if she will not come?"
"It will prove her guilty, by showing that it is her habit to nourish
enmity. But I do not think that for a moment."
"I will do this. I will wait for a day or two longer- not longer
than two days certainly; and if she does not send to me in that time
I will indeed send to her. I thought to have seen Wildeve here tonight.
Is he from home?"
Thomasin blushed a little. "No," she said. "He is merely
gone out for a walk."
"Why didn't he take you with him? The evening is fine.
You want fresh air as well as he."
"Oh, I don't care for going anywhere; besides, there is baby."
"Yes, yes. Well, I have been thinking whether I should not consult
your husband about this as well as you," said Clym steadily.
"I fancy I would not," she quickly answered. "It can
do no good."
Her cousin looked her in the face. No doubt Thomasin was ignorant that
her husband had any share in the events of that tragic afternoon; but
her countenance seemed to signify that she concealed some suspicion
or thought of the reputed tender relations between Wildeve and Eustacia
in days gone by.
Clym, however, could make nothing of it, and he rose to depart, more
in doubt than when he came.
"You will write to her in a day or two?" said the young woman
earnestly. "I do so hope the wretched separation may come to an
end."
"I will," said Clym; "I don't rejoice in my present state
at all."
And he left her and climbed over the hill to Blooms-End. Before going
to bed he sat down and wrote the following letter:--
MY DEAR EUSTACIA,--I must obey my heart without consulting my reason
too closely. Will you come back to me? Do so, and the past shall never
be mentioned. I was too severe; but O, Eustacia, the provocation! You
don't know, you never will know, what those words of anger cost me which
you drew down upon yourself. All that an honest man can promise you I
promise now, which is that from me you shall never suffer anything on
this score again. After all the vows we have made, Eustacia, I think we
had better pass the remainder of our lives in trying to keep them. Come
to me, then, even if you reproach me. I have thought of your sufferings
that morning on which I parted from you; I know they were genuine, and
they are as much as you ought to bear. Our love must still continue. Such
hearts as ours would never have been given us but to be concerned with
each other. I could not ask you back at first, Eustacia, for I was unable
to persuade myself that he who was with you was not there as a lover.
But if you will come and explain distracting appearances I do not question
that you can show your honesty to me. Why have you not come before? Do
you think I will not listen to you? Surely not, when you remember the
kisses and vows we exchanged under the summer moon. Return then, and you
shall be warmly welcomed.
I can no longer think of you to your prejudice-I am but too much absorbed
in justifying you.-Your husband as ever,
CLYM.
"There," he said, as he laid it in his desk, "that's a
good thing done. If she does not come before tomorrow night I will send
it to her."
Meanwhile, at the house he had just left Thomasin sat sighing uneasily.
Fidelity to her husband had that evening induced her to conceal all suspicion
that Wildeve's interest in Eustacia had not ended with his marriage. But
she knew nothing positive; and though Clym was her well-beloved cousin
there was one nearer to her still.
When, a little later, Wildeve returned from his walk to Mistover, Thomasin
said, "Damon, where have you been? I was getting quite frightened,
and thought you had fallen into the river. I dislike being in the house
by myself."
"Frightened?" he said, touching her cheek as if she were some
domestic animal. "Why, I thought nothing could frighten you. It is
that you are getting proud, I am sure, and don't like living here since
we have risen above our business. Well, it is a tedious matter, this getting
a new house; but I couldn't have set about it sooner, unless our ten thousand
pounds had been a hundred thousand, when we could have afforded to despise
caution."
"No-I don't mind waiting-I would rather stay here twelve months longer
than run any risk with baby. But I don't like your vanishing so in the
evenings.
There's something on your mind-I know there is, Damon. You go about so
gloomily, and look at the heath as if it were somebody's gaol instead
of a nice wild place to walk in."
He looked towards her with pitying surprise. "What, do you like Egdon
Heath?" he said.
"I like what I was born near to; I admire its grim old face."
"Pooh, my dear. You don't know what you like."
"I am sure I do. There's only one thing unpleasant about Egdon."
"What's that?"
"You never take me with you when you walk there. Why do you wander
so much in it yourself if you so dislike it?"
The inquiry, though a simple one, was plainly disconcerting, and he sat
down before replying. "I don't think you often see me there. Give
an instance."
"I will," she answered triumphantly. "When you went out
this evening I thought that as baby was asleep I would see where you were
going to so mysteriously without telling me. So I ran out and followed
behind you. You stopped at the place where the road forks, looked round
at the bonfires, and then said, 'Damn it, I'll go!' And you went quickly
up the left-hand road. Then I stood and watched you."
Wildeve frowned, afterwards saying, with a forced smile, "Well, what
wonderful discovery did you make?"
"There-now you are angry, and we won't talk of this any more."
She went across to him, sat on a footstool, and looked up in his face.
"Nonsense!" he said, "that's how you always back out. We
will go on with it now we have begun. What did you next see? I particularly
want to know."
"Don't be like that, Damon!" she murmured. "I didn't see
anything. You vanished out of sight, and then I looked round at the bonfires
and came in."
"Perhaps this is not the only time you have dogged my steps.
Are you trying to find out something bad about me?"
"Not at all! I have never done such a thing before, and I shouldn't
have done it now if words had not sometimes been dropped about you."
"What DO you mean?" he impatiently asked.
"They say-they say you used to go to Alderworth in
the evenings, and it puts into my mind what I have heard about-"
Wildeve turned angrily and stood up in front of her. "Now,"
he said, flourishing his hand in the air, "just out with it, madam!
I demand to know what remarks you have heard."
"Well, I heard that you used to be very fond of Eustacia-nothing
more than that, though dropped in a bit-by-bit way. You ought not to be
angry!"
He observed that her eyes were brimming with tears. "Well,"
he said, "there is nothing new in that, and of course I don't mean
to be rough towards you, so you need not cry. Now, don't let us speak
of the subject any more."
And no more was said, Thomasin being glad enough of a reason for not mentioning
Clym's visit to her that evening, and his story.
7 - The Night of the Sixth of November
Having resolved on flight Eustacia at times seemed anxious that something
should happen to thwart her own intention. The only event that could really
change her position was the appearance of Clym. The glory which had encircled
him as her lover was departed now; yet some good simple quality of his
would occasionally return to her memory and stir a momentary throb of
hope that he would again present himself before her. But calmly considered
it was not likely that such a severance as now existed would ever close
up-she would have to live on as a painful object, isolated, and out of
place. She had used to think of the heath alone as an uncongenial spot
to be in; she felt it now of the whole world.
Towards evening on the sixth her determination to go away again revived.
About four o'clock she packed up anew the few small articles she had brought
in her flight from Alderworth, and also some belonging to her which had
been left here; the whole formed a bundle not too large to be carried
in her hand for a distance of a mile or two. The scene without grew darker;
mud-coloured clouds bellied downwards from the sky like vast hammocks
slung across it, and with the increase of night a stormy wind arose; but
as yet there was no rain.
Eustacia could not rest indoors, having nothing more to do, and she wandered
to and fro on the hill, not far from the house she was soon to leave.
In these desultory ramblings she passed the cottage of Susan Nunsuch,
a little lower down than her grandfather's. The door was ajar, and a riband
of bright firelight fell over the ground without. As Eustacia crossed
the firebeams she appeared for an instant as distinct as a figure in a
phantasmagoria-a creature of light surrounded by an area of darkness;
the moment passed, and she was absorbed in night again.
A woman who was sitting inside the cottage had seen and recognized her
in that momentary irradiation. This was Susan herself, occupied in preparing
a posset for her little boy, who, often ailing, was now seriously unwell.
Susan dropped the spoon, shook her fist at the vanished figure, and then
proceeded with her work in a musing, absent way.
At eight o'clock, the hour at which Eustacia had promised to signal Wildeve
if ever she signalled at all, she looked around the premises to learn
if the coast was clear, went to the furze-rick, and pulled thence a long-stemmed
bough of that fuel. This she carried to the corner of the bank, and, glancing
behind to see if the shutters were all closed, she struck a light, and
kindled the furze. When it was thoroughly ablaze Eustacia took it by the
stem and waved it in the air above her head till it had burned itself
out.
She was gratified, if gratification were possible to such a mood, by seeing
a similar light in the vicinity of Wildeve's residence a minute or two
later. Having agreed to keep watch at this hour every night, in case she
should require assistance, this promptness proved how strictly he had
held to his word. Four hours after the present time, that is, at midnight,
he was to be ready to drive her to Budmouth, as prearranged.
Eustacia returned to the house. Supper having been got over she retired
early, and sat in her bedroom waiting for the time to go by. The night
being dark and threatening, Captain Vye had not strolled out to gossip
in any cottage or to call at the inn, as was sometimes his custom on these
long autumn nights; and he sat sipping grog alone downstairs. About ten
o'clock there was a knock at the door. When the servant opened it the
rays of the candle fell upon the form of Fairway.
"I was a-forced to go to Lower Mistover tonight," he said, "and
Mr. Yeobright asked me to leave this here on my way; but, faith, I put
it in the lining of my hat, and thought no more about it till I got back
and was hasping my gate before going to bed. So I have run back with it
at once."
He handed in a letter and went his way. The girl brought it to the captain,
who found that it was directed to Eustacia. He turned it over and over,
and fancied that the writing was her husband's, though he could not be
sure. However, he decided to let her have it at once if possible, and
took it upstairs for that purpose; but on reaching the door of her room
and looking in at the keyhole he found there was no light within, the
fact being that Eustacia, without undressing, had flung herself upon the
bed, to rest and gather a little strength for her coming journey. Her
grandfather concluded from what he saw that he ought not to disturb her;
and descending again to the parlour he placed the letter on the mantelpiece
to give it to her in the morning.
At eleven o'clock he went to bed himself, smoked for some time in his
bedroom, put out his light at half-past eleven, and then, as was his invariable
custom, pulled up the blind before getting into bed, that he might see
which way the wind blew on opening his eyes in the morning, his bedroom
window commanding a view of the flagstaff and vane. Just as he had lain
down he was surprised to observe the white pole of the staff flash into
existence like a streak of phosphorus drawn downwards across the shade
of night without. Only one explanation met this-a light had been suddenly
thrown upon the pole from the direction of the house. As everybody had
retired to rest the old man felt it necessary to get out of bed, open
the window softly, and look to the right and left. Eustacia's bedroom
was lighted up, and it was the shine from her window which had lighted
the pole. Wondering what had aroused her, he remained undecided at the
window, and was thinking of fetching the letter to slip it under her door,
when he heard a slight brushing of garments on the partition dividing
his room from the passage.
The captain concluded that Eustacia, feeling wakeful, had gone for a book,
and would have dismissed the matter as unimportant if he had not also
heard her distinctly weeping as she passed.
"She is thinking of that husband of hers," he said to himself.
"Ah, the silly goose! she had no business to marry him.
I wonder if that letter is really his?"
He arose, threw his boat-cloak round him, opened the door, and said, "Eustacia!"
There was no answer. "Eustacia!" he repeated louder, "there
is a letter on the mantelpiece for you."
But no response was made to this statement save an imaginary one from
the wind, which seemed to gnaw at the corners of the house, and the stroke
of a few drops of rain upon the windows.
He went on to the landing, and stood waiting nearly five minutes. Still
she did not return. He went back for a light, and prepared to follow her;
but first he looked into her bedroom. There, on the outside of the quilt,
was the impression of her form, showing that the bed had not been opened;
and, what was more significant, she had not taken her candlestick downstairs.
He was now thoroughly alarmed; and hastily putting on his clothes he descended
to the front door, which he himself had bolted and locked. It was now
unfastened. There was no longer any doubt that Eustacia had left the house
at this midnight hour; and whither could she have gone? To follow her
was almost impossible. Had the dwelling stood in an ordinary road, two
persons setting out, one in each direction, might have made sure of overtaking
her; but it was a hopeless task to seek for anybody on a heath in the
dark, the practicable directions for flight across it from any point being
as numerous as the meridians radiating from the pole. Perplexed what to
do, he looked into the parlour, and was vexed to find that the letter
still lay there untouched.
At half-past eleven, finding that the house was silent, Eustacia had
lighted her candle, put on some warm outer wrappings, taken her bag in
her hand, and, extinguishing the light again, descended the staircase.
When she got into the outer air she found that it had begun to rain, and
as she stood pausing at the door it increased, threatening to come on
heavily. But having committed herself to this line of action there was
no retreating for bad weather. Even the receipt of Clym's letter would
not have stopped her now. The gloom of the night was funereal; all nature
seemed clothed in crape. The spiky points of the fir trees behind the
house rose into the sky like the turrets and pinnacles of an abbey. Nothing
below the horizon was visible save a light which was still burning in
the cottage of Susan Nunsuch.
Eustacia opened her umbrella and went out from the enclosure by the steps
over the bank, after which she was beyond all danger of being perceived.
Skirting the pool, she followed the path towards Rainbarrow, occasionally
stumbling over twisted furze roots, tufts of rushes, or oozing lumps of
fleshy fungi, which at this season lay scattered about the heath like
the rotten liver and lungs of some colossal animal. The moon and stars
were closed up by cloud and rain to the degree of extinction. It was a
night which led the traveller's thoughts instinctively to dwell on nocturnal
scenes of disaster in the chronicles of the world, on all that is terrible
and dark in history and legend-the last plague of Egypt, the destruction
of Sennacherib's host, the agony in Gethsemane.
Eustacia at length reached Rainbarrow, and stood still there to think.
Never was harmony more perfect than that between the chaos of her mind
and the chaos of the world without. A sudden recollection had flashed
on her this moment-she had not money enough for undertaking a long journey.
Amid the fluctuating sentiments of the day her unpractical mind had not
dwelt on the necessity of being well-provided, and now that she thoroughly
realized the conditions she sighed bitterly and ceased to stand erect,
gradually crouching down under the umbrella as if she were drawn into
the Barrow by a hand from beneath. Could it be that she was to remain
a captive still? Money-she had never felt its value before. Even to efface
herself from the country means were required. To ask Wildeve for pecuniary
aid without allowing him to accompany her was impossible to a woman with
a shadow of pride left in her; to fly as his mistress-and she knew that
he loved her-was of the nature of humiliation.
Anyone who had stood by now would have pitied her, not so much on account
of her exposure to weather, and isolation from all of humanity except
the mouldered remains inside the tumulus; but for that other form of misery
which was denoted by the slightly rocking movement that her feelings imparted
to her person. Extreme unhappiness weighed visibly upon her. Between the
drippings of the rain from her umbrella to her mantle, from her mantle
to the heather, from the heather to the earth, very similar sounds could
be heard coming from her lips; and the tearfulness of the outer scene
was repeated upon her face. The wings of her soul were broken by the cruel
obstructiveness of all about her; and even had she seen herself in a promising
way of getting to Budmouth, entering a steamer, and sailing to some opposite
port, she would have been but little more buoyant, so fearfully malignant
were other things. She uttered words aloud. When a woman in such a situation,
neither old, deaf, crazed, nor whimsical, takes upon herself to sob and
soliloquize aloud there is something grievous the matter.
"Can I go, can I go?" she moaned. "He's not GREAT enough
for me to give myself to-he does not suffice for my desire!...If he had
been a Saul or a Bonaparte- ah! But to break my marriage vow for him-it
is too poor a luxury!...And I have no money to go alone! And if I could,
what comfort to me? I must drag on next year, as I have dragged on this
year, and the year after that as before. How I have tried and tried to
be a splendid woman, and how destiny has been against me!...I do not deserve
my lot!" she cried in a frenzy of bitter revolt. "O, the cruelty
of putting me into this ill-conceived world! I was capable of much; but
I have been injured and blighted and crushed by things beyond my control!
O, how hard it is of Heaven to devise such tortures for me, who have done
no harm to Heaven at all!"
The distant light which Eustacia had cursorily observed in leaving the
house came, as she had divined, from the cottage window of Susan Nunsuch.
What Eustacia did not divine was the occupation of the woman within at
that moment. Susan's sight of her passing figure earlier in the evening,
not five minutes after the sick boy's exclamation, "Mother, I do
feel so bad!" persuaded the matron that an evil influence was certainly
exercised by Eustacia's propinquity.
On this account Susan did not go to bed as soon as the evening's work
was over, as she would have done at ordinary times. To counteract the
malign spell which she imagined poor Eustacia to be working, the boy's
mother busied herself with a ghastly invention of superstition, calculated
to bring powerlessness, atrophy, and annihilation on any human being against
whom it was directed. It was a practice well known on Egdon at that date,
and one that is not quite extinct at the present day.
She passed with her candle into an inner room, where, among other utensils,
were two large brown pans, containing together perhaps a hundredweight
of liquid honey, the produce of the bees during the foregoing summer.
On a shelf over the pans was a smooth and solid yellow mass of a hemispherical
form, consisting of beeswax from the same take of honey. Susan took down
the lump, and cutting off several thin slices, heaped them in an iron
ladle, with which she returned to the living-room, and placed the vessel
in the hot ashes of the fireplace. As soon as the wax had softened to
the plasticity of dough she kneaded the pieces together. And now her face
became more intent. She began moulding the wax; and it was evident from
her manner of manipulation that she was endeavouring to give it some preconceived
form. The form was human.
By warming and kneading, cutting and twisting, dismembering and re-joining
the incipient image she had in about a quarter of an hour produced a shape
which tolerably well resembled a woman, and was about six inches high.
She laid it on the table to get cold and hard. Meanwhile she took the
candle and went upstairs to where the little boy was lying.
"Did you notice, my dear, what Mrs. Eustacia wore this afternoon
besides the dark dress?"
"A red ribbon round her neck."
"Anything else?"
"No-except sandal-shoes."
"A red ribbon and sandal-shoes," she said to herself.
Mrs. Nunsuch went and searched till she found a fragment of the narrowest
red ribbon, which she took downstairs and tied round the neck of the image.
Then fetching ink and a quilt from the rickety bureau by the window, she
blackened the feet of the image to the extent presumably covered by shoes;
and on the instep of each foot marked cross-lines in the shape taken by
the sandalstrings of those days. Finally she tied a bit of black thread
round the upper part of the head, in faint resemblance to a snood worn
for confining the hair.
Susan held the object at arm's length and contemplated it with a satisfaction
in which there was no smile. To anybody acquainted with the inhabitants
of Egdon Heath the image would have suggested Eustacia Yeobright.
From her workbasket in the window-seat the woman took a paper of pins,
of the old long and yellow sort, whose heads were disposed to come off
at their first usage. These she began to thrust into the image in all
directions, with apparently excruciating energy. Probably as many as fifty
were thus inserted, some into the head of the wax model, some into the
shoulders, some into the trunk, some upwards through the soles of the
feet, till the figure was completely permeated with pins.
She turned to the fire. It had been of turf; and though the high heap
of ashes which turf fires produce was somewhat dark and dead on the outside,
upon raking it abroad with the shovel the inside of the mass showed a
glow of red heat. She took a few pieces of fresh turf from the chimney-corner
and built them together over the glow, upon which the fire brightened.
Seizing with the tongs the image that she had made of Eustacia, she held
it in the heat, and watched it as it began to waste slowly away. And while
she stood thus engaged there came from between her lips a murmur of words.
It was a strange jargon-the Lord's Prayer repeated backwards-the incantation
usual in proceedings for obtaining unhallowed assistance against an enemy.
Susan uttered the lugubrious discourse three times slowly, and when it
was completed the image had considerably diminished. As the wax dropped
into the fire a long flame arose from the spot, and curling its tongue
round the figure ate still further into its substance. A pin occasionally
dropped with the wax, and the embers heated it red as it lay.
8 - Rain, Darkness, and Anxious Wanderers
While the effigy of Eustacia was melting to nothing, and the fair woman
herself was standing on Rainbarrow, her soul in an abyss of desolation
seldom plumbed by one so young, Yeobright sat lonely at Blooms-End. He
had fulfilled his word to Thomasin by sending off Fairway with the letter
to his wife, and now waited with increased impatience for some sound or
signal of her return. Were Eustacia still at Mistover the very least he
expected was that she would send him back a reply tonight by the same
hand; though, to leave all to her inclination, he had cautioned Fairway
not to ask for an answer. If one were handed to him he was to bring it
immediately; if not, he was to go straight home without troubling to come
round to Blooms-End again that night.
But secretly Clym had a more pleasing hope. Eustacia might possibly decline
to use her pen-it was rather her way to work silently-and surprise him
by appearing at his door. How fully her mind was made up to do otherwise
he did not know.
To Clym's regret it began to rain and blow hard as the evening advanced.
The wind rasped and scraped at the corners of the house, and filliped
the eavesdroppings like peas against the panes. He walked restlessly about
the untenanted rooms, stopping strange noises in windows and doors by
jamming splinters of wood into the casements and crevices, and pressing
together the leadwork of the quarries where it had become loosened from
the glass. It was one of those nights when cracks in the walls of old
churches widen, when ancient stains on the ceilings of decayed manor houses
are renewed and enlarged from the size of a man's hand to an area of many
feet. The little gate in the palings before his dwelling continually opened
and clicked together again, but when he looked out eagerly nobody was
there; it was as if invisible shapes of the dead were passing in on their
way to visit him.
Between ten and eleven o'clock, finding that neither Fairway nor anybody
else came to him, he retired to rest, and despite his anxieties soon fell
asleep. His sleep, however, was not very sound, by reason of the expectancy
he had given way to, and he was easily awakened by a knocking which began
at the door about an hour after. Clym arose and looked out of the window.
Rain was still falling heavily, the whole expanse of heath before him
emitting a subdued hiss under the downpour. It was too dark to see anything
at all.
"Who's there?" he cried.
Light footsteps shifted their position in the porch, and he could just
distinguish in a plaintive female voice the words, "O Clym, come
down and let me in!"
He flushed hot with agitation. "Surely it is Eustacia!" he murmured.
If so, she had indeed come to him unawares.
He hastily got a light, dressed himself, and went down. On his flinging
open the door the rays of the candle fell upon a woman closely wrapped
up, who at once came forward.
"Thomasin!" he exclaimed in an indescribable tone of disappointment.
"It is Thomasin, and on such a night as this! O, where is Eustacia?"
Thomasin it was, wet, frightened, and panting.
"Eustacia? I don't know, Clym; but I can think," she said with
much perturbation. "Let me come in and rest-I will explain this.
There is a great trouble brewing-my husband and Eustacia!"
"What, what?"
"I think my husband is going to leave me or do something dreadful-I
don't know what-Clym, will you go and see? I have nobody to help me but
you; Eustacia has not yet come home?"
"No."
She went on breathlessly: "Then they are going to run off together!
He came indoors tonight about eight o'clock and said in an off-hand way,
'Tamsie, I have just found that I must go a journey.' 'When?' I said.
'Tonight,' he said. 'Where?' I asked him. 'I cannot tell you at present,'
he said; 'I shall be back again tomorrow.' He then went and busied himself
in looking up his things, and took no notice of me at all. I expected
to see him start, but he did not, and then it came to be ten o'clock,
when he said, 'You had better go to bed.' I didn't know what to do, and
I went to bed. I believe he thought I fell asleep, for half an hour after
that he came up and unlocked the oak chest we keep money in when we have
much in the house and took out a roll of something which I believe was
banknotes, though I was not aware that he had 'em there. These he must
have got from the bank when he went there 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 path.
Show me quickly, Diggory, please."
"Yes, of course. I will go with 'ee. But you came to me before this,
Mrs. Wildeve?"
"I only came this minute."
"That's strange. I was lying down here asleep about five minutes
ago, with the door shut to keep out the weather, when the brushing of
a woman's clothes over the heath-bushes just outside woke me up, for I
don't sleep heavy, and at the same time I heard a sobbing or crying from
the same woman. I opened my door and held out my lantern, and just as
far as the light would reach I saw a woman; she turned her head when the
light sheened on her, and then hurried on downhill. I hung up the lantern,
and was curious enough to pull on my things and dog her a few steps, but
I could see nothing of her any more. That was where I had been when you
came up; and when I saw you I thought you were the same one."
"Perhaps it was one of the heathfolk going home?"
"No, it couldn't be. 'Tis too late. The noise of her gown over the
he'th was of a whistling sort that nothing but silk will make."
"It wasn't I, then. My dress is not silk, you see....Are we anywhere
in a line between Mistover and the inn?"
"Well, yes; not far out."
"Ah, I wonder if it was she! Diggory, I must go at once!"
She jumped down from the van before he was aware, when Venn unhooked the
lantern and leaped down after her. "I'll take the baby, ma'am,"
he said. "You must be tired out by the weight."
Thomasin hesitated a moment, and then delivered the baby into Venn's hands.
"Don't squeeze her, Diggory," she said, "or hurt her little
arm; and keep the cloak close over her like this, so that the rain may
not drop in her face."
"I will," said Venn earnestly. "As if I could hurt anything
belonging to you!"
"I only meant accidentally," said Thomasin.
"The baby is dry enough, but you are pretty wet," said the reddleman
when, in closing the door of his cart to padlock it, he noticed on the
floor a ring of water drops where her cloak had hung from her.
Thomasin followed him as he wound right and left to avoid the larger bushes,
stopping occasionally and covering the lantern, while he looked over his
shoulder to gain some idea of the position of Rainbarrow above them, which
it was necessary to keep directly behind their backs to preserve a proper
course.
"You are sure the rain does not fall upon baby?"
"Quite sure. May I ask how old he is, ma'am?"
"He!" said Thomasin reproachfully. "Anybody can see better
than that in a moment. She is nearly two months old. How far is it now
to the inn?"
"A little over a quarter of a mile."
"Will you walk a little faster?"
"I was afraid you could not keep up."
"I am very anxious to get there. Ah, there is a light from the window!"
"'Tis not from the window. That's a gig-lamp, to the best of my belief."
"O!" said Thomasin in despair. "I wish I had been there
sooner-give me the baby, Diggory-you can go back now."
"I must go all the way," said Venn. "There is a quag between
us and that light, and you will walk into it up to your neck unless I
take you round."
"But the light is at the inn, and there is no quag in front of that."
"No, the light is below the inn some two or three hundred yards."
"Never mind," said Thomasin hurriedly. "Go towards the
light, and not towards the inn."
"Yes," answered Venn, swerving round in obedience; and, after
a pause, "I wish you would tell me what this great trouble is. I
think you have proved that I can be trusted."
"There are some things that cannot be-cannot be told to-" And
then her heart rose into her throat, and she could say no more.
9 - Sights and Sounds Draw the Wanderers Together
Having seen Eustacia's signal from the hill at eight o'clock, Wildeve
immediately prepared to assist her in her flight, and, as he hoped, accompany
her. He was somewhat perturbed, and his manner of informing Thomasin that
he was going on a journey was in itself sufficient to rouse her suspicions.
When she had gone to bed he collected the few articles he would require,
and went upstairs to the money-chest, whence he took a tolerably bountiful
sum in notes, which had been advanced to him on the property he was so
soon to have in possession, to defray expenses incidental to the removal.
He then went to the stable and coach-house to assure himself that the
horse, gig, and harness were in a fit condition for a long drive. Nearly
half an hour was spent thus, and on returning to the house Wildeve had
no thought of Thomasin being anywhere but in bed. He had told the stable
lad not to stay up, leading the boy to understand that his departure would
be at three or four in the morning; for this, though an exceptional hour,
was less strange than midnight, the time actually agreed on, the packet
from Budmouth sailing between one and two.
At last all was quiet, and he had nothing to do but to wait. By no effort
could he shake off the oppression of spirits which he had experienced
ever since his last meeting with Eustacia, but he hoped there was that
in his situation which money could cure. He had persuaded himself that
to act not ungenerously towards his gentle wife by settling on her the
half of his property, and with chivalrous devotion towards another and
greater woman by sharing her fate, was possible. And though he meant to
adhere to Eustacia's instructions to the letter, to deposit her where
she wished and to leave her, should that be her will, the spell that she
had cast over him intensified, and his heart was beating fast in the anticipated
futility of such commands in the face of a mutual wish that they should
throw in their lot together.
He would not allow himself to dwell long upon these conjectures, maxims,
and hopes, and at twenty minutes to twelve he again went softly to the
stable, harnessed the horse, and lit the lamps; whence, taking the horse
by the head, he led him with the covered car out of the yard to a spot
by the roadside some quarter of a mile below the inn.
Here Wildeve waited, slightly sheltered from the driving rain by a high
bank that had been cast up at this place. Along the surface of the road
where lit by the lamps the loosened gravel and small stones scudded and
clicked together before the wind, which, leaving them in heaps, plunged
into the heath and boomed across the bushes into darkness. Only one sound
rose above this din of weather, and that was the roaring of a ten-hatch
weir to the southward, from a river in the meads which formed the boundary
of the heath in this direction.
He lingered on in perfect stillness till he began to fancy that the midnight
hour must have struck. A very strong doubt had arisen in his mind if Eustacia
would venture down the hill in such weather; yet knowing her nature he
felt that she might. "Poor thing! 'tis like her ill-luck," he
murmured.
At length he turned to the lamp and looked at his watch.
To his surprise it was nearly a quarter past midnight. He now wished that
he had driven up the circuitous road to Mistover, a plan not adopted because
of the enormous length of the route in proportion to that of the pedestrian's
path down the open hillside, and the consequent increase of labour for
the horse.
At this moment a footstep approached; but the light of the lamps being
in a different direction the comer was not visible. The step paused, then
came on again.
"Eustacia?" said Wildeve.
The person came forward, and the light fell upon the form of Clym, glistening
with wet, whom Wildeve immediately recognized; but Wildeve, who stood
behind the lamp, was not at once recognized by Yeobright.
He stopped as if in doubt whether this waiting vehicle could have anything
to do with the flight of his wife or not. The sight of Yeobright at once
banished Wildeve's sober feelings, who saw him again as the deadly rival
from whom Eustacia was to be kept at all hazards. Hence Wildeve did not
speak, in the hope that Clym would pass by without particular inquiry.
While they both hung thus in hesitation a dull sound became audible above
the storm and wind. Its origin was unmistakable-it was the fall of a body
into the stream in the adjoining mead, apparently at a point near the
weir.
Both started. "Good God! can it be she?" said Clym.
"Why should it be she?" said Wildeve, in his alarm forgetting
that he had hitherto screened himself.
"Ah!--that's you, you traitor, is it?" cried Yeobright. "Why
should it be she? Because last week she would have put an end to her life
if she had been able. She ought to have been watched! Take one of the
lamps and come with me."
Yeobright seized the one on his side and hastened on;
Wildeve did not wait to unfasten the other, but followed at once along
the meadow track to the weir, a little in the rear of Clym.
Shadwater Weir had at its foot a large circular pool, fifty feet in diameter,
into which the water flowed through ten huge hatches, raised and lowered
by a winch and cogs in the ordinary manner. The sides of the pool were
of masonry, to prevent the water from washing away the bank; but the force
of the stream in winter was sometimes such as to undermine the retaining
wall and precipitate it into the hole. Clym reached the hatches, the framework
of which was shaken to its foundations by the velocity of the current.
Nothing but the froth of the waves could be discerned in the pool below.
He got upon the plank bridge over the race, and holding to the rail, that
the wind might not blow him off, crossed to the other side of the river.
There he leant over the wall and lowered the lamp, only to behold the
vortex formed at the curl of the returning current.
Wildeve meanwhile had arrived on the former side, and the light from Yeobright's
lamp shed a flecked and agitated radiance across the weir pool, revealing
to the ex-engineer the tumbling courses of the currents from the hatches
above. Across this gashed and puckered mirror a dark body was slowly borne
by one of the backward currents.
"O, my darling!" exclaimed Wildeve in an agonized voice; and,
without showing sufficient presence of mind even to throw off his greatcoat,
he leaped into the boiling caldron.
Yeobright could now also discern the floating body, though but indistinctly;
and imagining from Wildeve's plunge that there was life to be saved he
was about to leap after. Bethinking himself of a wiser plan, he placed
the lamp against a post to make it stand upright, and running round to
the lower part of the pool, where there was no wall, he sprang in and
boldly waded upwards towards the deeper portion. Here he was taken off
his legs, and in swimming was carried round into the centre of the basin,
where he perceived Wildeve struggling.
While these hasty actions were in progress here, Venn and Thomasin had
been toiling through the lower corner of the heath in the direction of
the light. They had not been near enough to the river to hear the plunge,
but they saw the removal of the carriage lamp, and watched its motion
into the mead. As soon as they reached the car and horse Venn guessed
that something new was amiss, and hastened to follow in the course of
the moving light. Venn walked faster than Thomasin, and came to the weir
alone.
The lamp placed against the post by Clym still shone across the water,
and the reddleman observed something floating motionless. Being encumbered
with the infant, he ran back to meet Thomasin.
"Take the baby, please, Mrs. Wildeve," he said hastily. "Run
home with her, call the stable lad, and make him send down to me any men
who may be living near. Somebody has fallen into the weir."
Thomasin took the child and ran. When she came to the covered car the
horse, though fresh from the stable, was standing perfectly still, as
if conscious of misfortune. She saw for the first time whose it was. She
nearly fainted, and would have been unable to proceed another step but
that the necessity of preserving the little girl from harm nerved her
to an amazing self-control. In this agony of suspense she entered the
house, put the baby in a place of safety, woke the lad and the female
domestic, and ran out to give the alarm at the nearest cottage.
Diggory, having returned to the brink of the pool, observed that the small
upper hatches or floats were withdrawn. He found one of these lying upon
the grass, and taking it under one arm, and with his lantern in his hand,
entered at the bottom of the pool as Clym had done. As soon as he began
to be in deep water he flung himself across the hatch; thus supported
he was able to keep afloat as long as he chose, holding the lantern aloft
with his disengaged hand. Propelled by his feet, he steered round and
round the pool, ascending each time by one of the back streams and descending
in the middle of the current.
At first he could see nothing. Then amidst the glistening of the whirlpools
and the white clots of foam he distinguished a woman's bonnet floating
alone. His search was now under the left wall, when something came to
the surface almost close beside him. It was not, as he had expected, a
woman, but a man. The reddleman put the ring of the lantern between his
teeth, seized the floating man by the collar, and, holding on to the hatch
with his remaining arm, struck out into the strongest race, by which the
unconscious man, the hatch, and himself were carried down the stream.
As soon as Venn found his feet dragging over the pebbles of the shallower
part below he secured his footing and waded towards the brink. There,
where the water stood at about the height of his waist, he flung away
the hatch, and attempted to drag forth the man. This was a matter of great
difficulty, and he found as the reason that the legs of the unfortunate
stranger were tightly embraced by the arms of another man, who had hitherto
been entirely beneath the surface.
At this moment his heart bounded to hear footsteps running towards him,
and two men, roused by Thomasin, appeared at the brink above. They ran
to where Venn was, and helped him in lifting out the apparently drowned
persons, separating them, and laying them out upon the grass. Venn turned
the light upon their faces. The one who had been uppermost was Yeobright;
he who had been completely submerged was Wildeve.
"Now we must search the hole again," said Venn.
"A woman is in there somewhere. Get a pole."
One of the men went to the footbridge and tore off the handrail. The reddleman
and the two others then entered the water together from below as before,
and with their united force probed the pool forwards to where it sloped
down to its central depth. Venn was not mistaken in supposing that any
person who had sunk for the last time would be washed down to this point,
for when they had examined to about halfway across something impeded their
thrust.
"Pull it forward," said Venn, and they raked it in with the
pole till it was close to their feet.
Venn vanished under the stream, and came up with an armful of wet drapery
enclosing a woman's cold form, which was all that remained of the desperate
Eustacia.
When they reached the bank there stood Thomasin, in a stress of grief,
bending over the two unconscious ones who already lay there. The horse
and cart were brought to the nearest point in the road, and it was the
work of a few minutes only to place the three in the vehicle. Venn led
on the horse, supporting Thomasin upon his arm, and the two men followed,
till they reached the inn.
The woman who had been shaken out of her sleep by Thomasin had hastily
dressed herself and lighted a fire, the other servant being left to snore
on in peace at the back of the house. The insensible forms of Eustacia,
Clym, and Wildeve were then brought in and laid on the carpet, with their
feet to the fire, when such restorative processes as could be thought
of were adopted at once, the stableman being in the meantime sent for
a doctor. But there seemed to be not a whiff of life in either of the
bodies. Then Thomasin, whose stupor of grief had been thrust off awhile
by frantic action, applied a bottle of hartshorn to Clym's nostrils, having
tried it in vain upon the other two. He sighed.
"Clym's alive!" she exclaimed.
He soon breathed distinctly, and again and again did she attempt to revive
her husband by the same means; but Wildeve gave no sign. There was too
much reason to think that he and Eustacia both were for ever beyond the
reach of stimulating perfumes. Their exertions did not relax till the
doctor arrived, when one by one, the senseless three were taken upstairs
and put into warm beds.
Venn soon felt himself relieved from further attendance, and went to the
door, scarcely able yet to realize the strange catastrophe that had befallen
the family in which he took so great an interest. Thomasin surely would
be broken down by the sudden and overwhelming nature of this event. No
firm and sensible Mrs. Yeobright lived now to support the gentle girl
through the ordeal; and, whatever an unimpassioned spectator might think
of her loss of such a husband as Wildeve, there could be no doubt that
for the moment she was distracted and horrified by the blow. As for himself,
not being privileged to go to her and comfort her, he saw no reason for
waiting longer in a house where he remained only as a stranger.
He returned across the heath to his van. The fire was not yet out, and
everything remained as he had left it. Venn now bethought himself of his
clothes, which were saturated with water to the weight of lead. He changed
them, spread them before the fire, and lay down to sleep. But it was more
than he could do to rest here while excited by a vivid imagination of
the turmoil they were in at the house he had quitted, and, blaming himself
for coming away, he dressed in another suit, locked up the door, and again
hastened across to the inn. Rain was still falling heavily when he entered
the kitchen. A bright fire was shining from the hearth, and two women
were bustling about, one of whom was Olly Dowden.
"Well, how is it going on now?" said Venn in a whisper.
"Mr. Yeobright is better; but Mrs. Yeobright and Mr. Wildeve are
dead and cold. The doctor says they were quite gone before they were out
of the water."
"Ah! I thought as much when I hauled 'em up. And Mrs. Wildeve?"
"She is as well as can be expected. The doctor had her put between
blankets, for she was almost as wet as they that had been in the river,
poor young thing. You don't seem very dry, reddleman."
"Oh, 'tis not much. I have changed my things. This is only a little
dampness I've got coming through the rain again."
"Stand by the fire. Mis'ess says you be to have whatever you want,
and she was sorry when she was told that you'd gone away."
Venn drew near to the fireplace, and looked into the flames in an absent
mood. The steam came from his leggings and ascended the chimney with the
smoke, while he thought of those who were upstairs. Two were corpses,
one had barely escaped the jaws of death, another was sick and a widow.
The last occasion on which he had lingered by that fireplace was when
the raffle was in progress; when Wildeve was alive and well; Thomasin
active and smiling in the next room;
Yeobright and Eustacia just made husband and wife, and Mrs. Yeobright
living at Blooms-End. It had seemed at that time that the then position
of affairs was good for at least twenty years to come. Yet, of all the
circle, he himself was the only one whose situation had not materially
changed.
While he ruminated a footstep descended the stairs. It was the nurse,
who brought in her hand a rolled mass of wet paper. The woman was so engrossed
with her occupation that she hardly saw Venn. She took from a cupboard
some pieces of twine, which she strained across the fireplace, tying the
end of each piece to the firedog, previously pulled forward for the purpose,
and, unrolling the wet papers, she began pinning them one by one to the
strings in a manner of clothes on a line.
"What be they?" said Venn.
"Poor master's banknotes," she answered. "They were found
in his pocket when they undressed him."
"Then he was not coming back again for some time?" said Venn.
"That we shall never know," said she.
Venn was loth to depart, for all on earth that interested him lay under
this roof. As nobody in the house had any more sleep that night, except
the two who slept for ever, there was no reason why he should not remain.
So he retired into the niche of the fireplace where he had used to sit,
and there he continued, watching the steam from the double row of banknotes
as they waved backwards and forwards in the draught of the chimney till
their flaccidity was changed to dry crispness throughout. Then the woman
came and unpinned them, and, folding them together, carried the handful
upstairs. Presently the doctor appeared from above with the look of a
man who could do no more, and, pulling on his gloves, went out of the
house, the trotting of his horse soon dying away upon the road.
At four o'clock there was a gentle knock at the door. It was from Charley,
who had been sent by Captain Vye to inquire if anything had been heard
of Eustacia. The girl who admitted him looked in his face as if she did
not know what answer to return, and showed him in to where Venn was seated,
saying to the reddleman, "Will you tell him, please?"
Venn told. Charley's only utterance was a feeble, indistinct sound. He
stood quite still; then he burst out spasmodically, "I shall see
her once more?"
"I dare say you may see her," said Diggory gravely.
"But hadn't you better run and tell Captain Vye?"
"Yes, yes. Only I do hope I shall see her just once again."
"You shall," said a low voice behind; and starting round they
beheld by the dim light, a thin, pallid, almost spectral form, wrapped
in a blanket, and looking like Lazarus coming from the tomb.
It was Yeobright. Neither Venn nor Charley spoke, and Clym continued,
"You shall see her. There will be time enough to tell the captain
when it gets daylight. You would like to see her too-would you not, Diggory?
She looks very beautiful now."
Venn assented by rising to his feet, and with Charley he followed Clym
to the foot of the staircase, where he took off his boots; Charley did
the same. They followed Yeobright upstairs to the landing, where there
was a candle burning, which Yeobright took in his hand, and with it led
the way into an adjoining room. Here he went to the bedside and folded
back the sheet.
They stood silently looking upon Eustacia, who, as she lay there still
in death, eclipsed all her living phases. Pallor did not include all the
quality of her complexion, which seemed more than whiteness; it was almost
light. The expression of her finely carved mouth was pleasant, as if a
sense of dignity had just compelled her to leave off speaking. Eternal
rigidity had seized upon it in a momentary transition between fervour
and resignation. Her black hair was looser now than either of them had
ever seen it before, and surrounded her brow like a forest. The stateliness
of look which had been almost too marked for a dweller in a country domicile
had at last found an artistically happy background.
Nobody spoke, till at length Clym covered her and turned aside. "Now
come here," he said.
They went to a recess in the same room, and there, on a smaller bed, lay
another figure-Wildeve. Less repose was visible in his face than in Eustacia's,
but the same luminous youthfulness overspread it, and the least sympathetic
observer would have felt at sight of him now that he was born for a higher
destiny than this. The only sign upon him of his 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!"
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