The man regarded her with tender reluctance, but stopped them

Aunt and niece then descended from the van, Mrs. Yeobright saying to

its owner, “I quite recognize you now. What made you change from the

nice business your father left you?”

“Well, I did,” he said, and looked at Thomasin, who blushed a little.

“Then you’ll not be wanting me any more tonight, ma’am?”

Mrs. Yeobright glanced around at the dark sky, at the hills, at the

perishing bonfires, and at the lighted window of the inn they had

neared. “I think not,” she said, “since Thomasin wishes to walk. We can

soon run up the path and reach home—we know it well.”

And after a few further words they parted, the reddleman moving onwards

with his van, and the two women remaining standing in the road. As soon

as the vehicle and its driver had withdrawn so far as to be beyond all

possible reach of her voice, Mrs. Yeobright turned to her niece.

“Now, Thomasin,” she said sternly, “what’s the meaning of this

disgraceful performance?”

V.

Perplexity among Honest People

Thomasin looked as if quite overcome by her aunt’s change of manner.

“It means just what it seems to mean: I am—not married,” she replied

faintly. “Excuse me—for humiliating you, Aunt, by this mishap—I am

sorry for it. But I cannot help it.”

“Me? Think of yourself first.”

“It was nobody’s fault. When we got there the parson wouldn’t marry us

because of some trifling irregularity in the license.”

“What irregularity?”

“I don’t know. Mr. Wildeve can explain. I did not think when I went

away this morning that I should come back like this.” It being dark,

Thomasin allowed her emotion to escape her by the silent way of tears,

which could roll down her cheek unseen.

“I could almost say that it serves you right—if I did not feel that you

don’t deserve it,” continued Mrs. Yeobright, who, possessing two

distinct moods in close contiguity, a gentle mood and an angry, flew

from one to the other without the least warning. “Remember, Thomasin,

this business was none of my seeking; from the very first, when you

began to feel foolish about that man, I warned you he would not make

you happy. I felt it so strongly that I did what I would never have

believed myself capable of doing—stood up in the church, and made

myself the public talk for weeks. But having once consented, I don’t

submit to these fancies without good reason. Marry him you must after

this.”

“Do you think I wish to do otherwise for one moment?” said Thomasin,

with a heavy sigh. “I know how wrong it was of me to love him, but

don’t pain me by talking like that, Aunt! You would not have had me

stay there with him, would you?—and your house is the only home I have

to return to. He says we can be married in a day or two.”

“I wish he had never seen you.”

“Very well; then I will be the miserablest woman in the world, and not

let him see me again. No, I won’t have him!”

“It is too late to speak so. Come with me. I am going to the inn to see

if he has returned. Of course I shall get to the bottom of this story

at once. Mr. Wildeve must not suppose he can play tricks upon me, or

any belonging to me.”

“It was not that. The license was wrong, and he couldn’t get another

the same day. He will tell you in a moment how it was, if he comes.”

“Why didn’t he bring you back?”

“That was me!” again sobbed Thomasin. “When I found we could not be

married I didn’t like to come back with him, and I was very ill. Then I

saw Diggory Venn, and was glad to get him to take me home. I cannot

explain it any better, and you must be angry with me if you will.”

“I shall see about that,” said Mrs. Yeobright; and they turned towards

the inn, known in the neighbourhood as the Quiet Woman, the sign of

which represented the figure of a matron carrying her head under her

arm. The front of the house was towards the heath and Rainbarrow, whose

dark shape seemed to threaten it from the sky. Upon the door was a

neglected brass plate, bearing the unexpected inscription, “Mr.

Wildeve, Engineer”—a useless yet cherished relic from the time when he

had been started in that profession in an office at Budmouth by those

who had hoped much from him, and had been disappointed. The garden was

at the back, and behind this ran a still deep stream, forming the

margin of the heath in that direction, meadow-land appearing beyond the

stream.

But the thick obscurity permitted only skylines to be visible of any

scene at present. The water at the back of the house could be heard,

idly spinning whirpools in its creep between the rows of dry

feather-headed reeds which formed a stockade along each bank. Their

presence was denoted by sounds as of a congregation praying humbly,

produced by their rubbing against each other in the slow wind.

The window, whence the candlelight had shone up the vale to the eyes of

the bonfire group, was uncurtained, but the sill lay too high for a

pedestrian on the outside to look over it into the room. A vast shadow,

in which could be dimly traced portions of a masculine contour, blotted

half the ceiling.

“He seems to be at home,” said Mrs. Yeobright.

“Must I come in, too, Aunt?” asked Thomasin faintly. “I suppose not; it

would be wrong.”

“You must come, certainly—to confront him, so that he may make no false

representations to me. We shall not be five minutes in the house, and

then we’ll walk home.”

Entering the open passage, she tapped at the door of the private

parlour, unfastened it, and looked in.

The back and shoulders of a man came between Mrs. Yeobright’s eyes and

the fire. Wildeve, whose form it was, immediately turned, arose, and

advanced to meet his visitors.

He was quite a young man, and of the two properties, form and motion,

the latter first attracted the eye in him. The grace of his movement

was singular—it was the pantomimic expression of a lady-killing career.

Next came into notice the more material qualities, among which was a

profuse crop of hair impending over the top of his face, lending to his

forehead the high-cornered outline of an early Gothic shield; and a

neck which was smooth and round as a cylinder. The lower half of his

figure was of light build. Altogether he was one in whom no man would

have seen anything to admire, and in whom no woman would have seen

anything to dislike.

He discerned the young girl’s form in the passage, and said, “Thomasin,

then, has reached home. How could you leave me in that way, darling?”

And turning to Mrs. Yeobright—“It was useless to argue with her. She

would go, and go alone.”

“But what’s the meaning of it all?” demanded Mrs. Yeobright haughtily.

“Take a seat,” said Wildeve, placing chairs for the two women. “Well,

it was a very stupid mistake, but such mistakes will happen. The

license was useless at Anglebury. It was made out for Budmouth, but as

I didn’t read it I wasn’t aware of that.”

“But you had been staying at Anglebury?”

“No. I had been at Budmouth—till two days ago—and that was where I had

intended to take her; but when I came to fetch her we decided upon

Anglebury, forgetting that a new license would be necessary. There was

not time to get to Budmouth afterwards.”

“I think you are very much to blame,” said Mrs. Yeobright.

“It was quite my fault we chose Anglebury,” Thomasin pleaded. “I

proposed it because I was not known there.”

“I know so well that I am to blame that you need not remind me of it,”

replied Wildeve shortly.

“Such things don’t happen for nothing,” said the aunt. “It is a great

slight to me and my family; and when it gets known there will be a very

unpleasant time for us. How can she look her friends in the face

tomorrow? It is a very great injury, and one I cannot easily forgive.

It may even reflect on her character.”

“Nonsense,” said Wildeve.

Thomasin’s large eyes had flown from the face of one to the face of the

other during this discussion, and she now said anxiously, “Will you

allow me, Aunt, to talk it over alone with Damon for five minutes? Will

you, Damon?”

“Certainly, dear,” said Wildeve, “if your aunt will excuse us.” He led

her into an adjoining room, leaving Mrs. Yeobright by the fire.

As soon as they were alone, and the door closed, Thomasin said, turning

up her pale, tearful face to him, “It is killing me, this, Damon! I did

not mean to part from you in anger at Anglebury this morning; but I was

frightened and hardly knew what I said. I’ve not let Aunt know how much

I suffered today; and it is so hard to command my face and voice, and

to smile as if it were a slight thing to me; but I try to do so, that

she may not be still more indignant with you. I know you could not help

it, dear, whatever Aunt may think.”

“She is very unpleasant.”

“Yes,” Thomasin murmured, “and I suppose I seem so now.... Damon, what

do you mean to do about me?”

“Do about you?”

“Yes. Those who don’t like you whisper things which at moments make me

doubt you. We mean to marry, I suppose, don’t we?”

“Of course we do. We have only to go to Budmouth on Monday, and we

marry at once.”

“Then do let us go!—O Damon, what you make me say!” She hid her face in

her handkerchief. “Here am I asking you to marry me, when by rights you

ought to be on your knees imploring me, your cruel mistress, not to

refuse you, and saying it would break your heart if I did. I used to

think it would be pretty and sweet like that; but how different!”

“Yes, real life is never at all like that.”

“But I don’t care personally if it never takes place,” she added with a

little dignity; “no, I can live without you. It is Aunt I think of. She

is so proud, and thinks so much of her family respectability, that she

will be cut down with mortification if this story should get abroad

before—it is done. My cousin Clym, too, will be much wounded.”

“Then he will be very unreasonable. In fact, you are all rather

unreasonable.”

Thomasin coloured a little, and not with love. But whatever the

momentary feeling which caused that flush in her, it went as it came,

and she humbly said, “I never mean to be, if I can help it. I merely

feel that you have my aunt to some extent in your power at last.”

“As a matter of justice it is almost due to me,” said Wildeve. “Think

what I have gone through to win her consent; the insult that it is to

any man to have the banns forbidden—the double insult to a man unlucky

enough to be cursed with sensitiveness, and blue demons, and Heaven

knows what, as I am. I can never forget those banns. A harsher man

would rejoice now in the power I have of turning upon your aunt by

going no further in the business.”

She looked wistfully at him with her sorrowful eyes as he said those

words, and her aspect showed that more than one person in the room

could deplore the possession of sensitiveness. Seeing that she was

really suffering he seemed disturbed and added, “This is merely a

reflection you know. I have not the least intention to refuse to

complete the marriage, Tamsie mine—I could not bear it.”

“You could not, I know!” said the fair girl, brightening. “You, who

cannot bear the sight of pain in even an insect, or any disagreeable

sound, or unpleasant smell even, will not long cause pain to me and

mine.”

“I will not, if I can help it.”

“Your hand upon it, Damon.”

He carelessly gave her his hand.

“Ah, by my crown, what’s that?” he said suddenly.

There fell upon their ears the sound of numerous voices singing in

front of the house. Among these, two made themselves prominent by their

peculiarity: one was a very strong bass, the other a wheezy thin

piping. Thomasin recognized them as belonging to Timothy Fairway and

Grandfer Cantle respectively.

“What does it mean—it is not skimmity-riding, I hope?” she said, with a

frightened gaze at Wildeve.

“Of course not; no, it is that the heath-folk have come to sing to us a

welcome. This is intolerable!” He began pacing about, the men outside

singing cheerily—

“He told′ her that she′ was the joy′ of his life′,

And if′ she’d con-sent′ he would make her his wife′;

She could′ not refuse′ him; to church′ so they went′,

Young Will was forgot′, and young Sue′ was content′;

And then′ was she kiss’d′ and set down′ on his knee′,

No man′ in the world′ was so lov′-ing as he′!”

Mrs. Yeobright burst in from the outer room. “Thomasin, Thomasin!” she

said, looking indignantly at Wildeve; “here’s a pretty exposure! Let us

escape at once. Come!”

It was, however, too late to get away by the passage. A rugged knocking

had begun upon the door of the front room. Wildeve, who had gone to the

window, came back.

“Stop!” he said imperiously, putting his hand upon Mrs. Yeobright’s

arm. “We are regularly besieged. There are fifty of them out there if

there’s one. You stay in this room with Thomasin; I’ll go out and face

them. You must stay now, for my sake, till they are gone, so that it

may seem as if all was right. Come, Tamsie dear, don’t go making a

scene—we must marry after this; that you can see as well as I. Sit

still, that’s all—and don’t speak much. I’ll manage them. Blundering

fools!”

He pressed the agitated girl into a seat, returned to the outer room

and opened the door. Immediately outside, in the passage, appeared

Grandfer Cantle singing in concert with those still standing in front

of the house. He came into the room and nodded abstractedly to Wildeve,

his lips still parted, and his features excruciatingly strained in the

emission of the chorus. This being ended, he said heartily, “Here’s

welcome to the new-made couple, and God bless ’em!”

“Thank you,” said Wildeve, with dry resentment, his face as gloomy as a

thunderstorm.

At the Grandfer’s heels now came the rest of the group, which included

Fairway, Christian, Sam the turf-cutter, Humphrey, and a dozen others.

All smiled upon Wildeve, and upon his tables and chairs likewise, from

a general sense of friendliness towards the articles as well as towards

their owner.

“We be not here afore Mrs. Yeobright after all,” said Fairway,

recognizing the matron’s bonnet through the glass partition which

divided the public apartment they had entered from the room where the

women sat. “We struck down across, d’ye see, Mr. Wildeve, and she went

round by the path.”

“And I see the young bride’s little head!” said Grandfer, peeping in

the same direction, and discerning Thomasin, who was waiting beside her

aunt in a miserable and awkward way. “Not quite settled in yet—well,

well, there’s plenty of time.”

Wildeve made no reply; and probably feeling that the sooner he treated

them the sooner they would go, he produced a stone jar, which threw a

warm halo over matters at once.

“That’s a drop of the right sort, I can see,” said Grandfer Cantle,

with the air of a man too well-mannered to show any hurry to taste it.

“Yes,” said Wildeve, “’tis some old mead. I hope you will like it.”

“O ay!” replied the guests, in the hearty tones natural when the words

demanded by politeness coincide with those of deepest feeling. “There

isn’t a prettier drink under the sun.”

“I’ll take my oath there isn’t,” added Grandfer Cantle. “All that can

be said against mead is that ’tis rather heady, and apt to lie about a

man a good while. But tomorrow’s Sunday, thank God.”

“I feel’d for all the world like some bold soldier after I had had some

once,” said Christian.

“You shall feel so again,” said Wildeve, with condescension, “Cups or

glasses, gentlemen?”

“Well, if you don’t mind, we’ll have the beaker, and pass ’en round;

’tis better than heling it out in dribbles.”

“Jown the slippery glasses,” said Grandfer Cantle. “What’s the good of

a thing that you can’t put down in the ashes to warm, hey, neighbours;

that’s what I ask?”

“Right, Grandfer,” said Sam; and the mead then circulated.

“Well,” said Timothy Fairway, feeling demands upon his praise in some

form or other, “’tis a worthy thing to be married, Mr. Wildeve; and the

woman you’ve got is a dimant, so says I. Yes,” he continued, to

Grandfer Cantle, raising his voice so as to be heard through the

partition, “her father (inclining his head towards the inner room) was

as good a feller as ever lived. He always had his great indignation

ready against anything underhand.”

“Is that very dangerous?” said Christian.

“And there were few in these parts that were upsides with him,” said

Sam. “Whenever a club walked he’d play the clarinet in the band that

marched before ’em as if he’d never touched anything but a clarinet all

his life. And then, when they got to church door he’d throw down the

clarinet, mount the gallery, snatch up the bass viol, and rozum away as

if he’d never played anything but a bass viol. Folk would say—folk that

knowed what a true stave was—‘Surely, surely that’s never the same man

that I saw handling the clarinet so masterly by now!’”

“I can mind it,” said the furze-cutter. “’Twas a wonderful thing that

one body could hold it all and never mix the fingering.”

“There was Kingsbere church likewise,” Fairway recommenced, as one

opening a new vein of the same mine of interest.

Wildeve breathed the breath of one intolerably bored, and glanced

through the partition at the prisoners.

“He used to walk over there of a Sunday afternoon to visit his old

acquaintance Andrew Brown, the first clarinet there; a good man enough,

but rather screechy in his music, if you can mind?”

“’A was.”

“And neighbour Yeobright would take Andrey’s place for some part of the

service, to let Andrey have a bit of a nap, as any friend would

naturally do.”

“As any friend would,” said Grandfer Cantle, the other listeners

expressing the same accord by the shorter way of nodding their heads.

“No sooner was Andrey asleep and the first whiff of neighbour

Yeobright’s wind had got inside Andrey’s clarinet than everyone in

church feeled in a moment there was a great soul among ’em. All heads

would turn, and they’d say, ‘Ah, I thought ’twas he!’ One Sunday I can

well mind—a bass viol day that time, and Yeobright had brought his own.

’Twas the Hundred-and-thirty-third to ‘Lydia’; and when they’d come to

‘Ran down his beard and o’er his robes its costly moisture shed,’

neighbour Yeobright, who had just warmed to his work, drove his bow

into them strings that glorious grand that he e’en a’most sawed the

bass viol into two pieces. Every winder in church rattled as if ’twere

a thunderstorm. Old Pa’son Williams lifted his hands in his great holy

surplice as natural as if he’d been in common clothes, and seemed to

say hisself, ‘Oh for such a man in our parish!’ But not a soul in

Kingsbere could hold a candle to Yeobright.”

“Was it quite safe when the winder shook?” Christian inquired.

He received no answer, all for the moment sitting rapt in admiration of

the performance described. As with Farinelli’s singing before the

princesses, Sheridan’s renowned Begum Speech, and other such examples,

the fortunate condition of its being for ever lost to the world

invested the deceased Mr. Yeobright’s tour de force on that memorable

afternoon with a cumulative glory which comparative criticism, had that

been possible, might considerably have shorn down.

“He was the last you’d have expected to drop off in the prime of life,”

said Humphrey.

“Ah, well; he was looking for the earth some months afore he went. At

that time women used to run for smocks and gown-pieces at Greenhill

Fair, and my wife that is now, being a long-legged slittering maid,

hardly husband-high, went with the rest of the maidens, for ’a was a

good runner afore she got so heavy. When she came home I said—we were

then just beginning to walk together—‘What have ye got, my honey?’

‘I’ve won—well, I’ve won—a gown-piece,’ says she, her colours coming up

in a moment. ’Tis a smock for a crown, I thought; and so it turned out.

Ay, when I think what she’ll say to me now without a mossel of red in

her face, it do seem strange that ’a wouldn’t say such a little thing

then.... However, then she went on, and that’s what made me bring up

the story, ‘Well, whatever clothes I’ve won, white or figured, for eyes

to see or for eyes not to see’ (’a could do a pretty stroke of modesty

in those days), ‘I’d sooner have lost it than have seen what I have.

Poor Mr. Yeobright was took bad directly he reached the fair ground,

and was forced to go home again.’ That was the last time he ever went

out of the parish.”

“’A faltered on from one day to another, and then we heard he was

gone.”

“D’ye think he had great pain when ’a died?” said Christian.

“O no—quite different. Nor any pain of mind. He was lucky enough to be

God A’mighty’s own man.”

“And other folk—d’ye think ’twill be much pain to ’em, Mister Fairway?”

“That depends on whether they be afeard.”

“I bain’t afeard at all, I thank God!” said Christian strenuously. “I’m

glad I bain’t, for then ’twon’t pain me.... I don’t think I be

afeard—or if I be I can’t help it, and I don’t deserve to suffer. I

wish I was not afeard at all!”

There was a solemn silence, and looking from the window, which was

unshuttered and unblinded, Timothy said, “Well, what a fess little

bonfire that one is, out by Cap’n Vye’s! ’Tis burning just the same now

as ever, upon my life.”

All glances went through the window, and nobody noticed that Wildeve

disguised a brief, telltale look. Far away up the sombre valley of

heath, and to the right of Rainbarrow, could indeed be seen the light,

small, but steady and persistent as before.

“It was lighted before ours was,” Fairway continued; “and yet every one

in the country round is out afore ’n.”

“Perhaps there’s meaning in it!” murmured Christian.

“How meaning?” said Wildeve sharply.

Christian was too scattered to reply, and Timothy helped him.

“He means, sir, that the lonesome dark-eyed creature up there that some

say is a witch—ever I should call a fine young woman such a name—is

always up to some odd conceit or other; and so perhaps ’tis she.”

“I’d be very glad to ask her in wedlock, if she’d hae me and take the

risk of her wild dark eyes ill-wishing me,” said Grandfer Cantle

staunchly.

“Don’t ye say it, Father!” implored Christian.

“Well, be dazed if he who do marry the maid won’t hae an uncommon

picture for his best parlour,” said Fairway in a liquid tone, placing

down the cup of mead at the end of a good pull.

“And a partner as deep as the North Star,” said Sam, taking up the cup

and finishing the little that remained. “Well, really, now I think we

must be moving,” said Humphrey, observing the emptiness of the vessel.

“But we’ll gie ’em another song?” said Grandfer Cantle. “I’m as full of

notes as a bird!”

“Thank you, Grandfer,” said Wildeve. “But we will not trouble you now.

Some other day must do for that—when I have a party.”

“Be jown’d if I don’t learn ten new songs for’t, or I won’t learn a

line!” said Grandfer Cantle. “And you may be sure I won’t disappoint ye

by biding away, Mr. Wildeve.”

“I quite believe you,” said that gentleman.

All then took their leave, wishing their entertainer long life and

happiness as a married man, with recapitulations which occupied some

time. Wildeve attended them to the door, beyond which the deep-dyed

upward stretch of heath stood awaiting them, an amplitude of darkness

reigning from their feet almost to the zenith, where a definite form

first became visible in the lowering forehead of Rainbarrow. Diving

into the dense obscurity in a line headed by Sam the turf-cutter, they

pursued their trackless way home.

When the scratching of the furze against their leggings had fainted

upon the ear, Wildeve returned to the room where he had left Thomasin

and her aunt. The women were gone.

They could only have left the house in one way, by the back window; and

this was open.

Wildeve laughed to himself, remained a moment thinking, and idly

returned to the front room. Here his glance fell upon a bottle of wine

which stood on the mantelpiece. “Ah—old Dowden!” he murmured; and going

to the kitchen door shouted, “Is anybody here who can take something to

old Dowden?”

There was no reply. The room was empty, the lad who acted as his

factotum having gone to bed. Wildeve came back, put on his hat, took

the bottle, and left the house, turning the key in the door, for there

was no guest at the inn tonight. As soon as he was on the road the

little bonfire on Mistover Knap again met his eye.

“Still waiting, are you, my lady?” he murmured.

However, he did not proceed that way just then; but leaving the hill to

the left of him, he stumbled over a rutted road that brought him to a

cottage which, like all other habitations on the heath at this hour,

was only saved from being visible by a faint shine from its bedroom

window. This house was the home of Olly Dowden, the besom-maker, and he

entered.

The lower room was in darkness; but by feeling his way he found a

table, whereon he placed the bottle, and a minute later emerged again

upon the heath. He stood and looked northeast at the undying little

fire—high up above him, though not so high as Rainbarrow.

We have been told what happens when a woman deliberates; and the

epigram is not always terminable with woman, provided that one be in

the case, and that a fair one. Wildeve stood, and stood longer, and

breathed perplexedly, and then said to himself with resignation,

“Yes—by Heaven, I must go to her, I suppose!”

Instead of turning in the direction of home he pressed on rapidly by a

path under Rainbarrow towards what was evidently a signal light.

VI.

The Figure against the Sky

When the whole Egdon concourse had left the site of the bonfire to its

accustomed loneliness, a closely wrapped female figure approached the

barrow from that quarter of the heath in which the little fire lay. Had

the reddleman been watching he might have recognized her as the woman

who had first stood there so singularly, and vanished at the approach

of strangers. She ascended to her old position at the top, where the

red coals of the perishing fire greeted her like living eyes in the

corpse of day. There she stood still around her stretching the vast

night atmosphere, whose incomplete darkness in comparison with the

total darkness of the heath below it might have represented a venial

beside a mortal sin.

That she was tall and straight in build, that she was lady-like in her

movements, was all that could be learnt of her just now, her form being

wrapped in a shawl folded in the old cornerwise fashion, and her head

in a large kerchief, a protection not superfluous at this hour and

place. Her back was towards the wind, which blew from the northwest;

but whether she had avoided that aspect because of the chilly gusts

which played about her exceptional position, or because her interest

lay in the southeast, did not at first appear.

Her reason for standing so dead still as the pivot of this circle of

heath-country was just as obscure. Her extraordinary fixity, her

conspicuous loneliness, her heedlessness of night, betokened among

other things an utter absence of fear. A tract of country unaltered

from that sinister condition which made Cæsar anxious every year to get

clear of its glooms before the autumnal equinox, a kind of landscape

and weather which leads travellers from the South to describe our

island as Homer’s Cimmerian land, was not, on the face of it, friendly

to women.

It might reasonably have been supposed that she was listening to the

wind, which rose somewhat as the night advanced, and laid hold of the

attention. The wind, indeed, seemed made for the scene, as the scene

seemed made for the hour. Part of its tone was quite special; what was

heard there could be heard nowhere else. Gusts in innumerable series

followed each other from the northwest, and when each one of them raced

past the sound of its progress resolved into three. Treble, tenor, and

bass notes were to be found therein. The general ricochet of the whole

over pits and prominences had the gravest pitch of the chime. Next

there could be heard the baritone buzz of a holly tree. Below these in

force, above them in pitch, a dwindled voice strove hard at a husky

tune, which was the peculiar local sound alluded to. Thinner and less

immediately traceable than the other two, it was far more impressive

than either. In it lay what may be called the linguistic peculiarity of

the heath; and being audible nowhere on earth off a heath, it afforded

a shadow of reason for the woman’s tenseness, which continued as

unbroken as ever.

Throughout the blowing of these plaintive November winds that note bore

a great resemblance to the ruins of human song which remain to the

throat of fourscore and ten. It was a worn whisper, dry and papery, and

it brushed so distinctly across the ear that, by the accustomed, the

material minutiæ in which it originated could be realized as by touch.

It was the united products of infinitesimal vegetable causes, and these

were neither stems, leaves, fruit, blades, prickles, lichen, nor moss.

They were the mummied heathbells of the past summer, originally tender

and purple, now washed colourless by Michaelmas rains, and dried to

dead skins by October suns. So low was an individual sound from these

that a combination of hundreds only just emerged from silence, and the

myriads of the whole declivity reached the woman’s ear but as a

shrivelled and intermittent recitative. Yet scarcely a single accent

among the many afloat tonight could have such power to impress a

listener with thoughts of its origin. One inwardly saw the infinity of

those combined multitudes; and perceived that each of the tiny trumpets

was seized on entered, scoured and emerged from by the wind as

thoroughly as if it were as vast as a crater.

“The spirit moved them.” A meaning of the phrase forced itself upon the

attention; and an emotional listener’s fetichistic mood might have

ended in one of more advanced quality. It was not, after all, that the

left-hand expanse of old blooms spoke, or the right-hand, or those of

the slope in front; but it was the single person of something else

speaking through each at once.

Suddenly, on the barrow, there mingled with all this wild rhetoric of

night a sound which modulated so naturally into the rest that its

beginning and ending were hardly to be distinguished. The bluffs, and

the bushes, and the heather-bells had broken silence; at last, so did

the woman; and her articulation was but as another phrase of the same

discourse as theirs. Thrown out on the winds it became twined in with

them, and with them it flew away.

What she uttered was a lengthened sighing, apparently at something in

her mind which had led to her presence here. There was a spasmodic

abandonment about it as if, in allowing herself to utter the sound the

woman’s brain had authorized what it could not regulate. One point was

evident in this; that she had been existing in a suppressed state, and

not in one of languor, or stagnation.

Far away down the valley the faint shine from the window of the inn

still lasted on; and a few additional moments proved that the window,

or what was within it, had more to do with the woman’s sigh than had

either her own actions or the scene immediately around. She lifted her

left hand, which held a closed telescope. This she rapidly extended, as

if she were well accustomed to the operation, and raising it to her eye

directed it towards the light beaming from the inn.

The handkerchief which had hooded her head was now a little thrown

back, her face being somewhat elevated. A profile was visible against

the dull monochrome of cloud around her; and it was as though side

shadows from the features of Sappho and Mrs. Siddons had converged

upwards from the tomb to form an image like neither but suggesting

both. This, however, was mere superficiality. In respect of character a

face may make certain admissions by its outline; but it fully confesses

only in its changes. So much is this the case that what is called the

play of the features often helps more in understanding a man or woman

than the earnest labours of all the other members together. Thus the

night revealed little of her whose form it was embracing, for the

mobile parts of her countenance could not be seen.

At last she gave up her spying attitude, closed the telescope, and

turned to the decaying embers. From these no appreciable beams now

radiated, except when a more than usually smart gust brushed over their

faces and raised a fitful glow which came and went like the blush of a

girl. She stooped over the silent circle, and selecting from the brands

a piece of stick which bore the largest live coal at its end, brought

it to where she had been standing before.

She held the brand to the ground, blowing the red coal with her mouth

at the same time; till it faintly illuminated the sod, and revealed a

small object, which turned out to be an hourglass, though she wore a

watch. She blew long enough to show that the sand had all slipped

through.

“Ah!” she said, as if surprised.

The light raised by her breath had been very fitful, and a momentary

irradiation of flesh was all that it had disclosed of her face. That

consisted of two matchless lips and a cheek only, her head being still

enveloped. She threw away the stick, took the glass in her hand, the

telescope under her arm, and moved on.

Along the ridge ran a faint foot-track, which the lady followed. Those

who knew it well called it a path; and, while a mere visitor would have

passed it unnoticed even by day, the regular haunters of the heath were

at no loss for it at midnight. The whole secret of following these

incipient paths, when there was not light enough in the atmosphere to

show a turnpike road, lay in the development of the sense of touch in

the feet, which comes with years of night-rambling in little-trodden

spots. To a walker practised in such places a difference between impact

on maiden herbage, and on the crippled stalks of a slight footway, is

perceptible through the thickest boot or shoe.

The solitary figure who walked this beat took no notice of the windy

tune still played on the dead heathbells. She did not turn her head to

look at a group of dark creatures further on, who fled from her

presence as she skirted a ravine where they fed. They were about a

score of the small wild ponies known as heath-croppers. They roamed at

large on the undulations of Egdon, but in numbers too few to detract

much from the solitude.

The pedestrian noticed nothing just now, and a clue to her abstraction

was afforded by a trivial incident. A bramble caught hold of her skirt,

and checked her progress. Instead of putting it off and hastening

along, she yielded herself up to the pull, and stood passively still.

When she began to extricate herself it was by turning round and round,

and so unwinding the prickly switch. She was in a desponding reverie.

Her course was in the direction of the small undying fire which had

drawn the attention of the men on Rainbarrow and of Wildeve in the

valley below. A faint illumination from its rays began to glow upon her

face, and the fire soon revealed itself to be lit, not on the level

ground, but on a salient corner or redan of earth, at the junction of

two converging bank fences. Outside was a ditch, dry except immediately

under the fire, where there was a large pool, bearded all round by

heather and rushes. In the smooth water of the pool the fire appeared

upside down.

The banks meeting behind were bare of a hedge, save such as was formed

by disconnected tufts of furze, standing upon stems along the top, like

impaled heads above a city wall. A white mast, fitted up with spars and

other nautical tackle, could be seen rising against the dark clouds

whenever the flames played brightly enough to reach it. Altogether the

scene had much the appearance of a fortification upon which had been

kindled a beacon fire.

Nobody was visible; but ever and anon a whitish something moved above

the bank from behind, and vanished again. This was a small human hand,

in the act of lifting pieces of fuel into the fire, but for all that

could be seen the hand, like that which troubled Belshazzar, was there

alone. Occasionally an ember rolled off the bank, and dropped with a

hiss into the pool.

At one side of the pool rough steps built of clods enabled everyone who

wished to do so to mount the bank; which the woman did. Within was a

paddock in an uncultivated state, though bearing evidence of having

once been tilled; but the heath and fern had insidiously crept in, and

were reasserting their old supremacy. Further ahead were dimly visible

an irregular dwelling-house, garden, and outbuildings, backed by a

clump of firs.

The young lady—for youth had revealed its presence in her buoyant bound

up the bank—walked along the top instead of descending inside, and came

to the corner where the fire was burning. One reason for the permanence

of the blaze was now manifest: the fuel consisted of hard pieces of

wood, cleft and sawn—the knotty boles of old thorn trees which grew in

twos and threes about the hillsides. A yet unconsumed pile of these lay

in the inner angle of the bank; and from this corner the upturned face

of a little boy greeted her eyes. He was dilatorily throwing up a piece

of wood into the fire every now and then, a business which seemed to

have engaged him a considerable part of the evening, for his face was

somewhat weary.

“I am glad you have come, Miss Eustacia,” he said, with a sigh of

relief. “I don’t like biding by myself.”

“Nonsense. I have only been a little way for a walk. I have been gone

only twenty minutes.”

“It seemed long,” murmured the sad boy. “And you have been so many

times.”

“Why, I thought you would be pleased to have a bonfire. Are you not

much obliged to me for making you one?”

“Yes; but there’s nobody here to play wi’ me.”

“I suppose nobody has come while I’ve been away?”

“Nobody except your grandfather—he looked out of doors once for ’ee. I

told him you were walking round upon the hill to look at the other

bonfires.”

“A good boy.”

“I think I hear him coming again, miss.”

An old man came into the remoter light of the fire from the direction

of the homestead. He was the same who had overtaken the reddleman on

the road that afternoon. He looked wistfully to the top of the bank at

the woman who stood there, and his teeth, which were quite unimpaired,

showed like parian from his parted lips.

“When are you coming indoors, Eustacia?” he asked. “’Tis almost

bedtime. I’ve been home these two hours, and am tired out. Surely ’tis

somewhat childish of you to stay out playing at bonfires so long, and

wasting such fuel. My precious thorn roots, the rarest of all firing,

that I laid by on purpose for Christmas—you have burnt ’em nearly all!”

“I promised Johnny a bonfire, and it pleases him not to let it go out

just yet,” said Eustacia, in a way which told at once that she was

absolute queen here. “Grandfather, you go in to bed. I shall follow you

soon. You like the fire, don’t you, Johnny?”

The boy looked up doubtfully at her and murmured, “I don’t think I want

it any longer.”

Her grandfather had turned back again, and did not hear the boy’s

reply. As soon as the white-haired man had vanished she said in a tone

of pique to the child, “Ungrateful little boy, how can you contradict

me? Never shall you have a bonfire again unless you keep it up now.

Come, tell me you like to do things for me, and don’t deny it.”

The repressed child said, “Yes, I do, miss,” and continued to stir the

fire perfunctorily.

“Stay a little longer and I will give you a crooked six-pence,” said

Eustacia, more gently. “Put in one piece of wood every two or three

minutes, but not too much at once. I am going to walk along the ridge a

little longer, but I shall keep on coming to you. And if you hear a

frog jump into the pond with a flounce like a stone thrown in, be sure

you run and tell me, because it is a sign of rain.”

“Yes, Eustacia.”

“Miss Vye, sir.”

“Miss Vy—stacia.”

“That will do. Now put in one stick more.”

The little slave went on feeding the fire as before. He seemed a mere

automaton, galvanized into moving and speaking by the wayward

Eustacia’s will. He might have been the brass statue which Albertus

Magnus is said to have animated just so far as to make it chatter, and

move, and be his servant.

Before going on her walk again the young girl stood still on the bank

for a few instants and listened. It was to the full as lonely a place

as Rainbarrow, though at rather a lower level; and it was more

sheltered from wind and weather on account of the few firs to the

north. The bank which enclosed the homestead, and protected it from the

lawless state of the world without, was formed of thick square clods,

dug from the ditch on the outside, and built up with a slight batter or

incline, which forms no slight defense where hedges will not grow

because of the wind and the wilderness, and where wall materials are

unattainable. Otherwise the situation was quite open, commanding the

whole length of the valley which reached to the river behind Wildeve’s

house. High above this to the right, and much nearer thitherward than

the Quiet Woman Inn, the blurred contour of Rainbarrow obstructed the

sky.

After her attentive survey of the wild slopes and hollow ravines a

gesture of impatience escaped Eustacia. She vented petulant words every

now and then, but there were sighs between her words, and sudden

listenings between her sighs. Descending from her perch she again

sauntered off towards Rainbarrow, though this time she did not go the

whole way.

Twice she reappeared at intervals of a few minutes and each time she

said—

“Not any flounce into the pond yet, little man?”

“No, Miss Eustacia,” the child replied.

“Well,” she said at last, “I shall soon be going in, and then I will

give you the crooked sixpence, and let you go home.”

“Thank’ee, Miss Eustacia,” said the tired stoker, breathing more

easily. And Eustacia again strolled away from the fire, but this time

not towards Rainbarrow. She skirted the bank and went round to the

wicket before the house, where she stood motionless, looking at the

scene.

Fifty yards off rose the corner of the two converging banks, with the

fire upon it; within the bank, lifting up to the fire one stick at a

time, just as before, the figure of the little child. She idly watched

him as he occasionally climbed up in the nook of the bank and stood

beside the brands. The wind blew the smoke, and the child’s hair, and

the corner of his pinafore, all in the same direction; the breeze died,

and the pinafore and hair lay still, and the smoke went up straight.

While Eustacia looked on from this distance the boy’s form visibly

started—he slid down the bank and ran across towards the white gate.

“Well?” said Eustacia.

“A hopfrog have jumped into the pond. Yes, I heard ’en!”

“Then it is going to rain, and you had better go home. You will not be

afraid?” She spoke hurriedly, as if her heart had leapt into her throat

at the boy’s words.

“No, because I shall hae the crooked sixpence.”

“Yes, here it is. Now run as fast as you can—not that way—through the

garden here. No other boy in the heath has had such a bonfire as

yours.”

The boy, who clearly had had too much of a good thing, marched away

into the shadows with alacrity. When he was gone Eustacia, leaving her

telescope and hourglass by the gate, brushed forward from the wicket

towards the angle of the bank, under the fire.

Here, screened by the outwork, she waited. In a few moments a splash

was audible from the pond outside. Had the child been there he would

have said that a second frog had jumped in; but by most people the

sound would have been likened to the fall of a stone into the water.

Eustacia stepped upon the bank.

“Yes?” she said, and held her breath.

Thereupon the contour of a man became dimly visible against the

low-reaching sky over the valley, beyond the outer margin of the pool.

He came round it and leapt upon the bank beside her. A low laugh

escaped her—the third utterance which the girl had indulged in tonight.

The first, when she stood upon Rainbarrow, had expressed anxiety; the

second, on the ridge, had expressed impatience; the present was one of

triumphant pleasure. She let her joyous eyes rest upon him without

speaking, as upon some wondrous thing she had created out of chaos.

“I have come,” said the man, who was Wildeve. “You give me no peace.

Why do you not leave me alone? I have seen your bonfire all the

evening.” The words were not without emotion, and retained their level

tone as if by a careful equipoise between imminent extremes.

At this unexpectedly repressing manner in her lover the girl seemed to

repress herself also. “Of course you have seen my fire,” she answered

with languid calmness, artificially maintained. “Why shouldn’t I have a

bonfire on the Fifth of November, like other denizens of the heath?”

“I knew it was meant for me.”

“How did you know it? I have had no word with you since you—you chose

her, and walked about with her, and deserted me entirely, as if I had

never been yours life and soul so irretrievably!”

“Eustacia! could I forget that last autumn at this same day of the

month and at this same place you lighted exactly such a fire as a

signal for me to come and see you? Why should there have been a bonfire

again by Captain Vye’s house if not for the same purpose?”

“Yes, yes—I own it,” she cried under her breath, with a drowsy fervour

of manner and tone which was quite peculiar to her. “Don’t begin

speaking to me as you did, Damon; you will drive me to say words I

would not wish to say to you. I had given you up, and resolved not to

think of you any more; and then I heard the news, and I came out and

got the fire ready because I thought that you had been faithful to me.”

“What have you heard to make you think that?” said Wildeve, astonished.

“That you did not marry her!” she murmured exultingly. “And I knew it

was because you loved me best, and couldn’t do it.... Damon, you have

been cruel to me to go away, and I have said I would never forgive you.

I do not think I can forgive you entirely, even now—it is too much for

a woman of any spirit to quite overlook.”

“If I had known you wished to call me up here only to reproach me, I

wouldn’t have come.”

“But I don’t mind it, and I do forgive you now that you have not

married her, and have come back to me!”

“Who told you that I had not married her?”

“My grandfather. He took a long walk today, and as he was coming home

he overtook some person who told him of a broken-off wedding—he thought

it might be yours, and I knew it was.”

“Does anybody else know?”

“I suppose not. Now Damon, do you see why I lit my signal fire? You did

not think I would have lit it if I had imagined you to have become the

husband of this woman. It is insulting my pride to suppose that.”

Wildeve was silent; it was evident that he had supposed as much.

“Did you indeed think I believed you were married?” she again demanded

earnestly. “Then you wronged me; and upon my life and heart I can

hardly bear to recognize that you have such ill thoughts of me! Damon,

you are not worthy of me—I see it, and yet I love you. Never mind, let

it go—I must bear your mean opinion as best I may.... It is true, is it

not,” she added with ill-concealed anxiety, on his making no

demonstration, “that you could not bring yourself to give me up, and

are still going to love me best of all?”

“Yes; or why should I have come?” he said touchily. “Not that fidelity

will be any great merit in me after your kind speech about my

unworthiness, which should have been said by myself if by anybody, and

comes with an ill grace from you. However, the curse of inflammability

is upon me, and I must live under it, and take any snub from a woman.

It has brought me down from engineering to innkeeping—what lower stage

it has in store for me I have yet to learn.” He continued to look upon

her gloomily.

She seized the moment, and throwing back the shawl so that the

firelight shone full upon her face and throat, said with a smile, “Have

you seen anything better than that in your travels?”

Eustacia was not one to commit herself to such a position without good

ground. He said quietly, “No.”

“Not even on the shoulders of Thomasin?”

“Thomasin is a pleasing and innocent woman.”

“That’s nothing to do with it,” she cried with quick passionateness.

“We will leave her out; there are only you and me now to think of.”

After a long look at him she resumed with the old quiescent warmth,

“Must I go on weakly confessing to you things a woman ought to conceal;

and own that no words can express how gloomy I have been because of

that dreadful belief I held till two hours ago—that you had quite

deserted me?”

“I am sorry I caused you that pain.”

“But perhaps it is not wholly because of you that I get gloomy,” she

archly added. “It is in my nature to feel like that. It was born in my

blood, I suppose.”

“Hypochondriasis.”

“Or else it was coming into this wild heath. I was happy enough at

Budmouth. O the times, O the days at Budmouth! But Egdon will be

brighter again now.”

“I hope it will,” said Wildeve moodily. “Do you know the consequence of

this recall to me, my old darling? I shall come to see you again as

before, at Rainbarrow.”

“Of course you will.”

“And yet I declare that until I got here tonight I intended, after this

one good-bye, never to meet you again.”

“I don’t thank you for that,” she said, turning away, while indignation

spread through her like subterranean heat. “You may come again to

Rainbarrow if you like, but you won’t see me; and you may call, but I

shall not listen; and you may tempt me, but I won’t give myself to you

any more.”

“You have said as much before, sweet; but such natures as yours don’t

so easily adhere to their words. Neither, for the matter of that, do

such natures as mine.”

“This is the pleasure I have won by my trouble,” she whispered

bitterly. “Why did I try to recall you? Damon, a strange warring takes

place in my mind occasionally. I think when I become calm after you

woundings, ‘Do I embrace a cloud of common fog after all?’ You are a

chameleon, and now you are at your worst colour. Go home, or I shall

hate you!”

He looked absently towards Rainbarrow while one might have counted

twenty, and said, as if he did not much mind all this, “Yes, I will go

home. Do you mean to see me again?”

“If you own to me that the wedding is broken off because you love me

best.”

“I don’t think it would be good policy,” said Wildeve, smiling. “You

would get to know the extent of your power too clearly.”

“But tell me!”

“You know.”

“Where is she now?”

“I don’t know. I prefer not to speak of her to you. I have not yet

married her; I have come in obedience to your call. That is enough.”

“I merely lit that fire because I was dull, and thought I would get a

little excitement by calling you up and triumphing over you as the

Witch of Endor called up Samuel. I determined you should come; and you

have come! I have shown my power. A mile and half hither, and a mile

and half back again to your home—three miles in the dark for me. Have I

not shown my power?”

He shook his head at her. “I know you too well, my Eustacia; I know you

too well. There isn’t a note in you which I don’t know; and that hot

little bosom couldn’t play such a cold-blooded trick to save its life.

I saw a woman on Rainbarrow at dusk looking down towards my house. I

think I drew out you before you drew out me.”

The revived embers of an old passion glowed clearly in Wildeve now; and

he leant forward as if about to put his face towards her cheek.

“O no,” she said, intractably moving to the other side of the decayed

fire. “What did you mean by that?”

“Perhaps I may kiss your hand?”

“No, you may not.”

“Then I may shake your hand?”

“No.”

“Then I wish you good night without caring for either. Good-bye,

good-bye.”

She returned no answer, and with the bow of a dancing-master he

vanished on the other side of the pool as he had come.

Eustacia sighed—it was no fragile maiden sigh, but a sigh which shook

her like a shiver. Whenever a flash of reason darted like an electric

light upon her lover—as it sometimes would—and showed his

imperfections, she shivered thus. But it was over in a second, and she

loved on. She knew that he trifled with her; but she loved on. She

scattered the half-burnt brands, went indoors immediately, and up to

her bedroom without a light. Amid the rustles which denoted her to be

undressing in the darkness other heavy breaths frequently came; and the

same kind of shudder occasionally moved through her when, ten minutes

later, she lay on her bed asleep.

VII.

Queen of Night

Eustacia Vye was the raw material of a divinity. On Olympus she would

have done well with a little preparation. She had the passions and

instincts which make a model goddess, that is, those which make not

quite a model woman. Had it been possible for the earth and mankind to

be entirely in her grasp for a while, she had handled the distaff, the

spindle, and the shears at her own free will, few in the world would

have noticed the change of government. There would have been the same

inequality of lot, the same heaping up of favours here, of contumely

there, the same generosity before justice, the same perpetual dilemmas,

the same captious alteration of caresses and blows that we endure now.

She was in person full-limbed and somewhat heavy; without ruddiness, as

without pallor; and soft to the touch as a cloud. To see her hair was

to fancy that a whole winter did not contain darkness enough to form

its shadow—it closed over her forehead like nightfall extinguishing the

western glow.

Her nerves extended into those tresses, and her temper could always be

softened by stroking them down. When her hair was brushed she would

instantly sink into stillness and look like the Sphinx. If, in passing

under one of the Egdon banks, any of its thick skeins were caught, as

they sometimes were, by a prickly tuft of the large _Ulex

Europæus_—which will act as a sort of hairbrush—she would go back a few

steps, and pass against it a second time.

She had pagan eyes, full of nocturnal mysteries, and their light, as it

came and went, and came again, was partially hampered by their

oppressive lids and lashes; and of these the under lid was much fuller

than it usually is with English women. This enabled her to indulge in

reverie without seeming to do so—she might have been believed capable

of sleeping without closing them up. Assuming that the souls of men and

women were visible essences, you could fancy the colour of Eustacia’s

soul to be flamelike. The sparks from it that rose into her dark pupils

gave the same impression.

The mouth seemed formed less to speak than to quiver, less to quiver

than to kiss. Some might have added, less to kiss than to curl. Viewed

sideways, the closing-line of her lips formed, with almost geometric

precision, the curve so well known in the arts of design as the

cima-recta, or ogee. The sight of such a flexible bend as that on grim

Egdon was quite an apparition. It was felt at once that the mouth did

not come over from Sleswig with a band of Saxon pirates whose lips met

like the two halves of a muffin. One had fancied that such lip-curves

were mostly lurking underground in the South as fragments of forgotten

marbles. So fine were the lines of her lips that, though full, each

corner of her mouth was as clearly cut as the point of a spear. This

keenness of corner was only blunted when she was given over to sudden

fits of gloom, one of the phases of the night-side of sentiment which

she knew too well for her years.

Her presence brought memories of such things as Bourbon roses, rubies,

and tropical midnight; her moods recalled lotus-eaters and the march in

Athalie; her motions, the ebb and flow of the sea; her voice, the

viola. In a dim light, and with a slight rearrangement of her hair, her

general figure might have stood for that of either of the higher female

deities. The new moon behind her head, an old helmet upon it, a diadem

of accidental dewdrops round her brow, would have been adjuncts

sufficient to strike the note of Artemis, Athena, or Hera respectively,

with as close an approximation to the antique as that which passes

muster on many respected canvases.

But celestial imperiousness, love, wrath, and fervour had proved to be

somewhat thrown away on netherward Egdon. Her power was limited, and

the consciousness of this limitation had biassed her development. Egdon

was her Hades, and since coming there she had imbibed much of what was

dark in its tone, though inwardly and eternally unreconciled thereto.

Her appearance accorded well with this smouldering rebelliousness, and

the shady splendour of her beauty was the real surface of the sad and

stifled warmth within her. A true Tartarean dignity sat upon her brow,

and not factitiously or with marks of constraint, for it had grown in

her with years.

Across the upper part of her head she wore a thin fillet of black

velvet, restraining the luxuriance of her shady hair, in a way which

added much to this class of majesty by irregularly clouding her

forehead. “Nothing can embellish a beautiful face more than a narrow

band drawn over the brow,” says Richter. Some of the neighbouring girls

wore coloured ribbon for the same purpose, and sported metallic

ornaments elsewhere; but if anyone suggested coloured ribbon and

metallic ornaments to Eustacia Vye she laughed and went on.

Why did a woman of this sort live on Egdon Heath? Budmouth was her

native place, a fashionable seaside resort at that date. She was the

daughter of the bandmaster of a regiment which had been quartered

there—a Corfiote by birth, and a fine musician—who met his future wife

during her trip thither with her father the captain, a man of good

family. The marriage was scarcely in accord with the old man’s wishes,

for the bandmaster’s pockets were as light as his occupation. But the

musician did his best; adopted his wife’s name, made England

permanently his home, took great trouble with his child’s education,

the expenses of which were defrayed by the grandfather, and throve as

the chief local musician till her mother’s death, when he left off

thriving, drank, and died also. The girl was left to the care of her

grandfather, who, since three of his ribs became broken in a shipwreck,

had lived in this airy perch on Egdon, a spot which had taken his fancy

because the house was to be had for next to nothing, and because a

remote blue tinge on the horizon between the hills, visible from the

cottage door, was traditionally believed to be the English Channel. She

hated the change; she felt like one banished; but here she was forced

to abide.

Thus it happened that in Eustacia’s brain were juxtaposed the strangest

assortment of ideas, from old time and from new. There was no middle

distance in her perspective—romantic recollections of sunny afternoons

on an esplanade, with military bands, officers, and gallants around,

stood like gilded letters upon the dark tablet of surrounding Egdon.

Every bizarre effect that could result from the random intertwining of

watering-place glitter with the grand solemnity of a heath, was to be

found in her. Seeing nothing of human life now, she imagined all the

more of what she had seen.

Where did her dignity come from? By a latent vein from Alcinous’ line,

her father hailing from Phæacia’s isle?—or from Fitzalan and De Vere,

her maternal grandfather having had a cousin in the peerage? Perhaps it

was the gift of Heaven—a happy convergence of natural laws. Among other

things opportunity had of late years been denied her of learning to be

undignified, for she lived lonely. Isolation on a heath renders

vulgarity well-nigh impossible. It would have been as easy for the

heath-ponies, bats, and snakes to be vulgar as for her. A narrow life

in Budmouth might have completely demeaned her.

The only way to look queenly without realms or hearts to queen it over

is to look as if you had lost them; and Eustacia did that to a triumph.

In the captain’s cottage she could suggest mansions she had never seen.

Perhaps that was because she frequented a vaster mansion than any of

them, the open hills. Like the summer condition of the place around

her, she was an embodiment of the phrase “a populous

solitude”—apparently so listless, void, and quiet, she was really busy

and full.

To be loved to madness—such was her great desire. Love was to her the

one cordial which could drive away the eating loneliness of her days.

And she seemed to long for the abstraction called passionate love more

than for any particular lover.

She could show a most reproachful look at times, but it was directed

less against human beings than against certain creatures of her mind,

the chief of these being Destiny, through whose interference she dimly

fancied it arose that love alighted only on gliding youth—that any love

she might win would sink simultaneously with the sand in the glass. She

thought of it with an ever-growing consciousness of cruelty, which

tended to breed actions of reckless unconventionality, framed to snatch

a year’s, a week’s, even an hour’s passion from anywhere while it could

be won. Through want of it she had sung without being merry, possessed

without enjoying, outshone without triumphing. Her loneliness deepened

her desire. On Egdon, coldest and meanest kisses were at famine prices,

and where was a mouth matching hers to be found?

Fidelity in love for fidelity’s sake had less attraction for her than

for most women; fidelity because of love’s grip had much. A blaze of

love, and extinction, was better than a lantern glimmer of the same

which should last long years. On this head she knew by prevision what

most women learn only by experience—she had mentally walked round love,

told the towers thereof, considered its palaces, and concluded that

love was but a doleful joy. Yet she desired it, as one in a desert

would be thankful for brackish water.

She often repeated her prayers; not at particular times, but, like the

unaffectedly devout, when she desired to pray. Her prayer was always

spontaneous, and often ran thus, “O deliver my heart from this fearful

gloom and loneliness; send me great love from somewhere, else I shall

die.”

Her high gods were William the Conqueror, Strafford, and Napoleon

Buonaparte, as they had appeared in the Lady’s History used at the

establishment in which she was educated. Had she been a mother she

would have christened her boys such names as Saul or Sisera in

preference to Jacob or David, neither of whom she admired. At school

she had used to side with the Philistines in several battles, and had

wondered if Pontius Pilate were as handsome as he was frank and fair.

Thus she was a girl of some forwardness of mind, indeed, weighed in

relation to her situation among the very rearward of thinkers, very

original. Her instincts towards social non-comformity were at the root

of this. In the matter of holidays, her mood was that of horses who,

when turned out to grass, enjoy looking upon their kind at work on the

highway. She only valued rest to herself when it came in the midst of

other people’s labour. Hence she hated Sundays when all was at rest,

and often said they would be the death of her. To see the heathmen in

their Sunday condition, that is, with their hands in their pockets,

their boots newly oiled, and not laced up (a particularly Sunday sign),

walking leisurely among the turves and furze-faggots they had cut

during the week, and kicking them critically as if their use were

unknown, was a fearful heaviness to her. To relieve the tedium of this

untimely day she would overhaul the cupboards containing her

grandfather’s old charts and other rubbish, humming Saturday-night

ballads of the country people the while. But on Saturday nights she

would frequently sing a psalm, and it was always on a weekday that she

read the Bible, that she might be unoppressed with a sense of doing her

duty.

Such views of life were to some extent the natural begettings of her

situation upon her nature. To dwell on a heath without studying its

meanings was like wedding a foreigner without learning his tongue. The

subtle beauties of the heath were lost to Eustacia; she only caught its

vapours. An environment which would have made a contented woman a poet,

a suffering woman a devotee, a pious woman a psalmist, even a giddy

woman thoughtful, made a rebellious woman saturnine.

Eustacia had got beyond the vision of some marriage of inexpressible

glory; yet, though her emotions were in full vigour, she cared for no

meaner union. Thus we see her in a strange state of isolation. To have

lost the godlike conceit that we may do what we will, and not to have

acquired a homely zest for doing what we can, shows a grandeur of

temper which cannot be objected to in the abstract, for it denotes a

mind that, though disappointed, forswears compromise. But, if congenial

to philosophy, it is apt to be dangerous to the commonwealth. In a

world where doing means marrying, and the commonwealth is one of hearts

and hands, the same peril attends the condition.

And so we see our Eustacia—for at times she was not altogether

unlovable—arriving at that stage of enlightenment which feels that

nothing is worth while, and filling up the spare hours of her existence

by idealizing Wildeve for want of a better object. This was the sole

reason of his ascendency: she knew it herself. At moments her pride

rebelled against her passion for him, and she even had longed to be

free. But there was only one circumstance which could dislodge him, and

that was the advent of a greater man.

For the rest, she suffered much from depression of spirits, and took

slow walks to recover them, in which she carried her grandfather’s

telescope and her grandmother’s hourglass—the latter because of a

peculiar pleasure she derived from watching a material representation

of time’s gradual glide away. She seldom schemed, but when she did

scheme, her plans showed rather the comprehensive strategy of a general

than the small arts called womanish, though she could utter oracles of

Delphian ambiguity when she did not choose to be direct. In heaven she

will probably sit between the Héloïses and the Cleopatras.

VIII.

Those Who Are Found Where There Is Said to Be Nobody

As soon as the sad little boy had withdrawn from the fire he clasped

the money tight in the palm of his hand, as if thereby to fortify his

courage, and began to run. There was really little danger in allowing a

child to go home alone on this part of Egdon Heath. The distance to the

boy’s house was not more than three-eighths of a mile, his father’s

cottage, and one other a few yards further on, forming part of the

small hamlet of Mistover Knap: the third and only remaining house was

that of Captain Vye and Eustacia, which stood quite away from the small

cottages and was the loneliest of lonely houses on these thinly

populated slopes.

He ran until he was out of breath, and then, becoming more courageous,

walked leisurely along, singing in an old voice a little song about a

sailor-boy and a fair one, and bright gold in store. In the middle of

this the child stopped—from a pit under the hill ahead of him shone a

light, whence proceeded a cloud of floating dust and a smacking noise.

Only unusual sights and sounds frightened the boy. The shrivelled voice

of the heath did not alarm him, for that was familiar. The thornbushes

which arose in his path from time to time were less satisfactory, for

they whistled gloomily, and had a ghastly habit after dark of putting

on the shapes of jumping madmen, sprawling giants, and hideous

cripples. Lights were not uncommon this evening, but the nature of all

of them was different from this. Discretion rather than terror prompted

the boy to turn back instead of passing the light, with a view of

asking Miss Eustacia Vye to let her servant accompany him home.

When the boy had reascended to the top of the valley he found the fire

to be still burning on the bank, though lower than before. Beside it,

instead of Eustacia’s solitary form, he saw two persons, the second

being a man. The boy crept along under the bank to ascertain from the

nature of the proceedings if it would be prudent to interrupt so

splendid a creature as Miss Eustacia on his poor trivial account.

After listening under the bank for some minutes to the talk he turned

in a perplexed and doubting manner and began to withdraw as silently as

he had come. That he did not, upon the whole, think it advisable to

interrupt her conversation with Wildeve, without being prepared to bear

the whole weight of her displeasure, was obvious.

Here was a Scyllæo-Charybdean position for a poor boy. Pausing when

again safe from discovery, he finally decided to face the pit

phenomenon as the lesser evil. With a heavy sigh he retraced the slope,

and followed the path he had followed before.

The light had gone, the rising dust had disappeared—he hoped for ever.

He marched resolutely along, and found nothing to alarm him till,

coming within a few yards of the sandpit, he heard a slight noise in

front, which led him to halt. The halt was but momentary, for the noise

resolved itself into the steady bites of two animals grazing.

“Two he’th-croppers down here,” he said aloud. “I have never known ’em

come down so far afore.”

The animals were in the direct line of his path, but that the child

thought little of; he had played round the fetlocks of horses from his

infancy. On coming nearer, however, the boy was somewhat surprised to

find that the little creatures did not run off, and that each wore a

clog, to prevent his going astray; this signified that they had been

broken in. He could now see the interior of the pit, which, being in

the side of the hill, had a level entrance. In the innermost corner the

square outline of a van appeared, with its back towards him. A light

came from the interior, and threw a moving shadow upon the vertical

face of gravel at the further side of the pit into which the vehicle

faced.

The child assumed that this was the cart of a gipsy, and his dread of

those wanderers reached but to that mild pitch which titillates rather

than pains. Only a few inches of mud wall kept him and his family from

being gipsies themselves. He skirted the gravel pit at a respectful

distance, ascended the slope, and came forward upon the brow, in order

to look into the open door of the van and see the original of the

shadow.

The picture alarmed the boy. By a little stove inside the van sat a

figure red from head to heels—the man who had been Thomasin’s friend.

He was darning a stocking, which was red like the rest of him.

Moreover, as he darned he smoked a pipe, the stem and bowl of which

were red also.

At this moment one of the heath-croppers feeding in the outer shadows

was audibly shaking off the clog attached to its foot. Aroused by the

sound, the reddleman laid down his stocking, lit a lantern which hung

beside him, and came out from the van. In sticking up the candle he

lifted the lantern to his face, and the light shone into the whites of

his eyes and upon his ivory teeth, which, in contrast with the red

surrounding, lent him a startling aspect enough to the gaze of a

juvenile. The boy knew too well for his peace of mind upon whose lair

he had lighted. Uglier persons than gipsies were known to cross Egdon

at times, and a reddleman was one of them.

“How I wish ’twas only a gipsy!” he murmured.

The man was by this time coming back from the horses. In his fear of

being seen the boy rendered detection certain by nervous motion. The

heather and peat stratum overhung the brow of the pit in mats, hiding

the actual verge. The boy had stepped beyond the solid ground; the

heather now gave way, and down he rolled over the scarp of grey sand to

the very foot of the man.

The red man opened the lantern and turned it upon the figure of the

prostrate boy.

“Who be ye?” he said.

“Johnny Nunsuch, master!”

“What were you doing up there?”

“I don’t know.”

“Watching me, I suppose?”

“Yes, master.”

“What did you watch me for?”

“Because I was coming home from Miss Vye’s bonfire.”

“Beest hurt?”

“No.”

“Why, yes, you be—your hand is bleeding. Come under my tilt and let me

tie it up.”

“Please let me look for my sixpence.”

“How did you come by that?”

“Miss Vye gied it to me for keeping up her bonfire.”

The sixpence was found, and the man went to the van, the boy behind,

almost holding his breath.

The man took a piece of rag from a satchel containing sewing materials,

tore off a strip, which, like everything else, was tinged red, and

proceeded to bind up the wound.

“My eyes have got foggy-like—please may I sit down, master?” said the

boy.

“To be sure, poor chap. ’Tis enough to make you feel fainty. Sit on

that bundle.”

The man finished tying up the gash, and the boy said, “I think I’ll go

home now, master.”

“You are rather afraid of me. Do you know what I be?”

The child surveyed his vermilion figure up and down with much misgiving

and finally said, “Yes.”

“Well, what?”

“The reddleman!” he faltered.

“Yes, that’s what I be. Though there’s more than one. You little

children think there’s only one cuckoo, one fox, one giant, one devil,

and one reddleman, when there’s lots of us all.”

“Is there? You won’t carry me off in your bags, will ye, master? ’Tis

said that the reddleman will sometimes.”

“Nonsense. All that reddlemen do is sell reddle. You see all these bags

at the back of my cart? They are not full of little boys—only full of

red stuff.”

“Was you born a reddleman?”

“No, I took to it. I should be as white as you if I were to give up the

trade—that is, I should be white in time—perhaps six months; not at

first, because ’tis grow’d into my skin and won’t wash out. Now, you’ll

never be afraid of a reddleman again, will ye?”

“No, never. Willy Orchard said he seed a red ghost here t’other

day—perhaps that was you?”

“I was here t’other day.”

“Were you making that dusty light I saw by now?”

“Oh yes, I was beating out some bags. And have you had a good bonfire

up there? I saw the light. Why did Miss Vye want a bonfire so bad that

she should give you sixpence to keep it up?”

“I don’t know. I was tired, but she made me bide and keep up the fire

just the same, while she kept going up across Rainbarrow way.”

“And how long did that last?”

“Until a hopfrog jumped into the pond.”

The reddleman suddenly ceased to talk idly. “A hopfrog?” he inquired.

“Hopfrogs don’t jump into ponds this time of year.”

“They do, for I heard one.”

“Certain-sure?”

“Yes. She told me afore that I should hear’n; and so I did. They say

she’s clever and deep, and perhaps she charmed ’en to come.”

“And what then?”

“Then I came down here, and I was afeard, and I went back; but I didn’t

like to speak to her, because of the gentleman, and I came on here

again.”

“A gentleman—ah! What did she say to him, my man?”

“Told him she supposed he had not married the other woman because he

liked his old sweetheart best; and things like that.”

“What did the gentleman say to her, my sonny?”

“He only said he did like her best, and how he was coming to see her

again under Rainbarrow o’ nights.”

“Ha!” cried the reddleman, slapping his hand against the side of his

van so that the whole fabric shook under the blow. “That’s the secret

o’t!”

The little boy jumped clean from the stool.

“My man, don’t you be afraid,” said the dealer in red, suddenly

becoming gentle. “I forgot you were here. That’s only a curious way

reddlemen have of going mad for a moment; but they don’t hurt anybody.

And what did the lady say then?”

“I can’t mind. Please, Master Reddleman, may I go home-along now?”

“Ay, to be sure you may. I’ll go a bit of ways with you.”

He conducted the boy out of the gravel pit and into the path leading to

his mother’s cottage. When the little figure had vanished in the

darkness the reddleman returned, resumed his seat by the fire, and

proceeded to darn again.

IX.

Love Leads a Shrewd Man into Strategy

Reddlemen of the old school are now but seldom seen. Since the

introduction of railways Wessex farmers have managed to do without

these Mephistophelian visitants, and the bright pigment so largely used

by shepherds in preparing sheep for the fair is obtained by other

routes. Even those who yet survive are losing the poetry of existence

which characterized them when the pursuit of the trade meant periodical

journeys to the pit whence the material was dug, a regular camping out

from month to month, except in the depth of winter, a peregrination

among farms which could be counted by the hundred, and in spite of this

Arab existence the preservation of that respectability which is insured

by the never-failing production of a well-lined purse.

Reddle spreads its lively hues over everything it lights on, and stamps

unmistakably, as with the mark of Cain, any person who has handled it

half an hour.

A child’s first sight of a reddleman was an epoch in his life. That

blood-coloured figure was a sublimation of all the horrid dreams which

had afflicted the juvenile spirit since imagination began. “The

reddleman is coming for you!” had been the formulated threat of Wessex

mothers for many generations. He was successfully supplanted for a

while, at the beginning of the present century, by Buonaparte; but as

process of time rendered the latter personage stale and ineffective the

older phrase resumed its early prominence. And now the reddleman has in

his turn followed Buonaparte to the land of worn-out bogeys, and his

place is filled by modern inventions.

The reddleman lived like a gipsy; but gipsies he scorned. He was about

as thriving as travelling basket and mat makers; but he had nothing to

do with them. He was more decently born and brought up than the

cattledrovers who passed and repassed him in his wanderings; but they

merely nodded to him. His stock was more valuable than that of pedlars;

but they did not think so, and passed his cart with eyes straight

ahead. He was such an unnatural colour to look at that the men of

roundabouts and waxwork shows seemed gentlemen beside him; but he

considered them low company, and remained aloof. Among all these

squatters and folks of the road the reddleman continually found

himself; yet he was not of them. His occupation tended to isolate him,

and isolated he was mostly seen to be.

It was sometimes suggested that reddlemen were criminals for whose

misdeeds other men wrongfully suffered—that in escaping the law they

had not escaped their own consciences, and had taken to the trade as a

lifelong penance. Else why should they have chosen it? In the present

case such a question would have been particularly apposite. The

reddleman who had entered Egdon that afternoon was an instance of the

pleasing being wasted to form the ground-work of the singular, when an

ugly foundation would have done just as well for that purpose. The one

point that was forbidding about this reddleman was his colour. Freed

from that he would have been as agreeable a specimen of rustic manhood

as one would often see. A keen observer might have been inclined to

think—which was, indeed, partly the truth—that he had relinquished his

proper station in life for want of interest in it. Moreover, after

looking at him one would have hazarded the guess that good nature, and

an acuteness as extreme as it could be without verging on craft, formed

the framework of his character.

While he darned the stocking his face became rigid with thought. Softer

expressions followed this, and then again recurred the tender sadness

which had sat upon him during his drive along the highway that

afternoon. Presently his needle stopped. He laid down the stocking,

arose from his seat, and took a leathern pouch from a hook in the

corner of the van. This contained among other articles a brown-paper

packet, which, to judge from the hinge-like character of its worn

folds, seemed to have been carefully opened and closed a good many

times. He sat down on a three-legged milking stool that formed the only

seat in the van, and, examining his packet by the light of a candle,

took thence an old letter and spread it open. The writing had

originally been traced on white paper, but the letter had now assumed a

pale red tinge from the accident of its situation; and the black

strokes of writing thereon looked like the twigs of a winter hedge

against a vermilion sunset. The letter bore a date some two years

previous to that time, and was signed “Thomasin Yeobright.” It ran as

follows:—

DEAR DIGGORY VENN,—The question you put when you overtook me coming

home from Pond-close gave me such a surprise that I am afraid I did not

make you exactly understand what I meant. Of course, if my aunt had not

met me I could have explained all then at once, but as it was there was

no chance. I have been quite uneasy since, as you know I do not wish to

pain you, yet I fear I shall be doing so now in contradicting what I

seemed to say then. I cannot, Diggory, marry you, or think of letting

you call me your sweetheart. I could not, indeed, Diggory. I hope you

will not much mind my saying this, and feel in a great pain. It makes

me very sad when I think it may, for I like you very much, and I always

put you next to my cousin Clym in my mind. There are so many reasons

why we cannot be married that I can hardly name them all in a letter. I

did not in the least expect that you were going to speak on such a

thing when you followed me, because I had never thought of you in the

sense of a lover at all. You must not becall me for laughing when you

spoke; you mistook when you thought I laughed at you as a foolish man.

I laughed because the idea was so odd, and not at you at all. The great

reason with my own personal self for not letting you court me is, that

I do not feel the things a woman ought to feel who consents to walk

with you with the meaning of being your wife. It is not as you think,

that I have another in my mind, for I do not encourage anybody, and

never have in my life. Another reason is my aunt. She would not, I

know, agree to it, even if I wished to have you. She likes you very

well, but she will want me to look a little higher than a small

dairy-farmer, and marry a professional man. I hope you will not set

your heart against me for writing plainly, but I felt you might try to

see me again, and it is better that we should not meet. I shall always

think of you as a good man, and be anxious for your well-doing. I send

this by Jane Orchard’s little maid,—And remain Diggory, your faithful

friend,