I.
Tidings of the Comer
On the fine days at this time of the year, and earlier, certain
ephemeral operations were apt to disturb, in their trifling way, the
majestic calm of Egdon Heath. They were activities which, beside those
of a town, a village, or even a farm, would have appeared as the
ferment of stagnation merely, a creeping of the flesh of somnolence.
But here, away from comparisons, shut in by the stable hills, among
which mere walking had the novelty of pageantry, and where any man
could imagine himself to be Adam without the least difficulty, they
attracted the attention of every bird within eyeshot, every reptile not
yet asleep, and set the surrounding rabbits curiously watching from
hillocks at a safe distance.
The performance was that of bringing together and building into a stack
the furze faggots which Humphrey had been cutting for the captain’s use
during the foregoing fine days. The stack was at the end of the
dwelling, and the men engaged in building it were Humphrey and Sam, the
old man looking on.
It was a fine and quiet afternoon, about three o’clock; but the winter
solstice having stealthily come on, the lowness of the sun caused the
hour to seem later than it actually was, there being little here to
remind an inhabitant that he must unlearn his summer experience of the
sky as a dial. In the course of many days and weeks sunrise had
advanced its quarters from northeast to southeast, sunset had receded
from northwest to southwest; but Egdon had hardly heeded the change.
Eustacia was indoors in the dining-room, which was really more like a
kitchen, having a stone floor and a gaping chimney-corner. The air was
still, and while she lingered a moment here alone sounds of voices in
conversation came to her ears directly down the chimney. She entered
the recess, and, listening, looked up the old irregular shaft, with its
cavernous hollows, where the smoke blundered about on its way to the
square bit of sky at the top, from which the daylight struck down with
a pallid glare upon the tatters of soot draping the flue as seaweed
drapes a rocky fissure.
She remembered: the furze-stack was not far from the chimney, and the
voices were those of the workers.
Her grandfather joined in the conversation. “That lad ought never to
have left home. His father’s occupation would have suited him best, and
the boy should have followed on. I don’t believe in these new moves in
families. My father was a sailor, so was I, and so should my son have
been if I had had one.”
“The place he’s been living at is Paris,” said Humphrey, “and they tell
me ’tis where the king’s head was cut off years ago. My poor mother
used to tell me about that business. ‘Hummy,’ she used to say, ‘I was a
young maid then, and as I was at home ironing Mother’s caps one
afternoon the parson came in and said, “They’ve cut the king’s head
off, Jane; and what ’twill be next God knows.’”
“A good many of us knew as well as He before long,” said the captain,
chuckling. “I lived seven years under water on account of it in my
boyhood—in that damned surgery of the Triumph, seeing men brought down
to the cockpit with their legs and arms blown to Jericho.... And so the
young man has settled in Paris. Manager to a diamond merchant, or some
such thing, is he not?”
“Yes, sir, that’s it. ’Tis a blazing great business that he belongs to,
so I’ve heard his mother say—like a king’s palace, as far as diments
go.”
“I can well mind when he left home,” said Sam.
“’Tis a good thing for the feller,” said Humphrey. “A sight of times
better to be selling diments than nobbling about here.”
“It must cost a good few shillings to deal at such a place.”
“A good few indeed, my man,” replied the captain. “Yes, you may make
away with a deal of money and be neither drunkard nor glutton.”
“They say, too, that Clym Yeobright is become a real perusing man, with
the strangest notions about things. There, that’s because he went to
school early, such as the school was.”
“Strange notions, has he?” said the old man. “Ah, there’s too much of
that sending to school in these days! It only does harm. Every gatepost
and barn’s door you come to is sure to have some bad word or other
chalked upon it by the young rascals—a woman can hardly pass for shame
sometimes. If they’d never been taught how to write they wouldn’t have
been able to scribble such villainy. Their fathers couldn’t do it, and
the country was all the better for it.”
“Now, I should think, Cap’n, that Miss Eustacia had about as much in
her head that comes from books as anybody about here?”
“Perhaps if Miss Eustacia, too, had less romantic nonsense in her head
it would be better for her,” said the captain shortly; after which he
walked away.
“I say, Sam,” observed Humphrey when the old man was gone, “she and
Clym Yeobright would make a very pretty pigeon-pair—hey? If they
wouldn’t I’ll be dazed! Both of one mind about niceties for certain,
and learned in print, and always thinking about high doctrine—there
couldn’t be a better couple if they were made o’ purpose. Clym’s family
is as good as hers. His father was a farmer, that’s true; but his
mother was a sort of lady, as we know. Nothing would please me better
than to see them two man and wife.”
“They’d look very natty, arm-in-crook together, and their best clothes
on, whether or no, if he’s at all the well-favoured fellow he used to
be.”
“They would, Humphrey. Well, I should like to see the chap terrible
much after so many years. If I knew for certain when he was coming I’d
stroll out three or four miles to meet him and help carry anything
for’n; though I suppose he’s altered from the boy he was. They say he
can talk French as fast as a maid can eat blackberries; and if so,
depend upon it we who have stayed at home shall seem no more than
scroff in his eyes.”
“Coming across the water to Budmouth by steamer, isn’t he?”
“Yes; but how he’s coming from Budmouth I don’t know.”
“That’s a bad trouble about his cousin Thomasin. I wonder such a
nice-notioned fellow as Clym likes to come home into it. What a
nunnywatch we were in, to be sure, when we heard they weren’t married
at all, after singing to ’em as man and wife that night! Be dazed if I
should like a relation of mine to have been made such a fool of by a
man. It makes the family look small.”
“Yes. Poor maid, her heart has ached enough about it. Her health is
suffering from it, I hear, for she will bide entirely indoors. We never
see her out now, scampering over the furze with a face as red as a
rose, as she used to do.”
“I’ve heard she wouldn’t have Wildeve now if he asked her.”
“You have? ’Tis news to me.”
While the furze-gatherers had desultorily conversed thus Eustacia’s
face gradually bent to the hearth in a profound reverie, her toe
unconsciously tapping the dry turf which lay burning at her feet.
The subject of their discourse had been keenly interesting to her. A
young and clever man was coming into that lonely heath from, of all
contrasting places in the world, Paris. It was like a man coming from
heaven. More singular still, the heathmen had instinctively coupled her
and this man together in their minds as a pair born for each other.
That five minutes of overhearing furnished Eustacia with visions enough
to fill the whole blank afternoon. Such sudden alternations from mental
vacuity do sometimes occur thus quietly. She could never have believed
in the morning that her colourless inner world would before night
become as animated as water under a microscope, and that without the
arrival of a single visitor. The words of Sam and Humphrey on the
harmony between the unknown and herself had on her mind the effect of
the invading Bard’s prelude in the Castle of Indolence, at which
myriads of imprisoned shapes arose where had previously appeared the
stillness of a void.
Involved in these imaginings she knew nothing of time. When she became
conscious of externals it was dusk. The furze-rick was finished; the
men had gone home. Eustacia went upstairs, thinking that she would take
a walk at this her usual time; and she determined that her walk should
be in the direction of Blooms-End, the birthplace of young Yeobright
and the present home of his mother. She had no reason for walking
elsewhere, and why should she not go that way? The scene of the
daydream is sufficient for a pilgrimage at nineteen. To look at the
palings before the Yeobrights’ house had the dignity of a necessary
performance. Strange that such a piece of idling should have seemed an
important errand.
She put on her bonnet, and, leaving the house, descended the hill on
the side towards Blooms-End, where she walked slowly along the valley
for a distance of a mile and a half. This brought her to a spot in
which the green bottom of the dale began to widen, the furze bushes to
recede yet further from the path on each side, till they were
diminished to an isolated one here and there by the increasing
fertility of the soil. Beyond the irregular carpet of grass was a row
of white palings, which marked the verge of the heath in this latitude.
They showed upon the dusky scene that they bordered as distinctly as
white lace on velvet. Behind the white palings was a little garden;
behind the garden an old, irregular, thatched house, facing the heath,
and commanding a full view of the valley. This was the obscure, removed
spot to which was about to return a man whose latter life had been
passed in the French capital—the centre and vortex of the fashionable
world.
II.
The People at Blooms-End Make Ready
All that afternoon the expected arrival of the subject of Eustacia’s
ruminations created a bustle of preparation at Blooms-End. Thomasin had
been persuaded by her aunt, and by an instinctive impulse of loyalty
towards her cousin Clym, to bestir herself on his account with an
alacrity unusual in her during these most sorrowful days of her life.
At the time that Eustacia was listening to the rick-makers’
conversation on Clym’s return, Thomasin was climbing into a loft over
her aunt’s fuelhouse, where the store-apples were kept, to search out
the best and largest of them for the coming holiday-time.
The loft was lighted by a semicircular hole, through which the pigeons
crept to their lodgings in the same high quarters of the premises; and
from this hole the sun shone in a bright yellow patch upon the figure
of the maiden as she knelt and plunged her naked arms into the soft
brown fern, which, from its abundance, was used on Egdon in packing
away stores of all kinds. The pigeons were flying about her head with
the greatest unconcern, and the face of her aunt was just visible above
the floor of the loft, lit by a few stray motes of light, as she stood
halfway up the ladder, looking at a spot into which she was not climber
enough to venture.
“Now a few russets, Tamsin. He used to like them almost as well as
ribstones.”
Thomasin turned and rolled aside the fern from another nook, where more
mellow fruit greeted her with its ripe smell. Before picking them out
she stopped a moment.
“Dear Clym, I wonder how your face looks now?” she said, gazing
abstractedly at the pigeon-hole, which admitted the sunlight so
directly upon her brown hair and transparent tissues that it almost
seemed to shine through her.
“If he could have been dear to you in another way,” said Mrs. Yeobright
from the ladder, “this might have been a happy meeting.”
“Is there any use in saying what can do no good, Aunt?”
“Yes,” said her aunt, with some warmth. “To thoroughly fill the air
with the past misfortune, so that other girls may take warning and keep
clear of it.”
Thomasin lowered her face to the apples again. “I am a warning to
others, just as thieves and drunkards and gamblers are,” she said in a
low voice. “What a class to belong to! Do I really belong to them? ’Tis
absurd! Yet why, Aunt, does everybody keep on making me think that I
do, by the way they behave towards me? Why don’t people judge me by my
acts? Now, look at me as I kneel here, picking up these apples—do I
look like a lost woman?... I wish all good women were as good as I!”
she added vehemently.
“Strangers don’t see you as I do,” said Mrs. Yeobright; “they judge
from false report. Well, it is a silly job, and I am partly to blame.”
“How quickly a rash thing can be done!” replied the girl. Her lips were
quivering, and tears so crowded themselves into her eyes that she could
hardly distinguish apples from fern as she continued industriously
searching to hide her weakness.
“As soon as you have finished getting the apples,” her aunt said,
descending the ladder, “come down, and we’ll go for the holly. There is
nobody on the heath this afternoon, and you need not fear being stared
at. We must get some berries, or Clym will never believe in our
preparations.”
Thomasin came down when the apples were collected, and together they
went through the white palings to the heath beyond. The open hills were
airy and clear, and the remote atmosphere appeared, as it often appears
on a fine winter day, in distinct planes of illumination independently
toned, the rays which lit the nearer tracts of landscape streaming
visibly across those further off; a stratum of ensaffroned light was
imposed on a stratum of deep blue, and behind these lay still remoter
scenes wrapped in frigid grey.
They reached the place where the hollies grew, which was in a conical
pit, so that the tops of the trees were not much above the general
level of the ground. Thomasin stepped up into a fork of one of the
bushes, as she had done under happier circumstances on many similar
occasions, and with a small chopper that they had brought she began to
lop off the heavily berried boughs.
“Don’t scratch your face,” said her aunt, who stood at the edge of the
pit, regarding the girl as she held on amid the glistening green and
scarlet masses of the tree. “Will you walk with me to meet him this
evening?”
“I should like to. Else it would seem as if I had forgotten him,” said
Thomasin, tossing out a bough. “Not that that would matter much; I
belong to one man; nothing can alter that. And that man I must marry,
for my pride’s sake.”
“I am afraid—” began Mrs. Yeobright.
“Ah, you think, ‘That weak girl—how is she going to get a man to marry
her when she chooses?’ But let me tell you one thing, Aunt: Mr. Wildeve
is not a profligate man, any more than I am an improper woman. He has
an unfortunate manner, and doesn’t try to make people like him if they
don’t wish to do it of their own accord.”
“Thomasin,” said Mrs. Yeobright quietly, fixing her eye upon her niece,
“do you think you deceive me in your defence of Mr. Wildeve?”
“How do you mean?”
“I have long had a suspicion that your love for him has changed its
colour since you have found him not to be the saint you thought him,
and that you act a part to me.”
“He wished to marry me, and I wish to marry him.”
“Now, I put it to you: would you at this present moment agree to be his
wife if that had not happened to entangle you with him?”
Thomasin looked into the tree and appeared much disturbed. “Aunt,” she
said presently, “I have, I think, a right to refuse to answer that
question.”
“Yes, you have.”
“You may think what you choose. I have never implied to you by word or
deed that I have grown to think otherwise of him, and I never will. And
I shall marry him.”
“Well, wait till he repeats his offer. I think he may do it, now that
he knows—something I told him. I don’t for a moment dispute that it is
the most proper thing for you to marry him. Much as I have objected to
him in bygone days, I agree with you now, you may be sure. It is the
only way out of a false position, and a very galling one.”
“What did you tell him?”
“That he was standing in the way of another lover of yours.”
“Aunt,” said Thomasin, with round eyes, “what _do_ you mean?”
“Don’t be alarmed; it was my duty. I can say no more about it now, but
when it is over I will tell you exactly what I said, and why I said
it.”
Thomasin was perforce content.
“And you will keep the secret of my would-be marriage from Clym for the
present?” she next asked.
“I have given my word to. But what is the use of it? He must soon know
what has happened. A mere look at your face will show him that
something is wrong.”
Thomasin turned and regarded her aunt from the tree. “Now, hearken to
me,” she said, her delicate voice expanding into firmness by a force
which was other than physical. “Tell him nothing. If he finds out that
I am not worthy to be his cousin, let him. But, since he loved me once,
we will not pain him by telling him my trouble too soon. The air is
full of the story, I know; but gossips will not dare to speak of it to
him for the first few days. His closeness to me is the very thing that
will hinder the tale from reaching him early. If I am not made safe
from sneers in a week or two I will tell him myself.”
The earnestness with which Thomasin spoke prevented further objections.
Her aunt simply said, “Very well. He should by rights have been told at
the time that the wedding was going to be. He will never forgive you
for your secrecy.”
“Yes, he will, when he knows it was because I wished to spare him, and
that I did not expect him home so soon. And you must not let me stand
in the way of your Christmas party. Putting it off would only make
matters worse.”
“Of course I shall not. I do not wish to show myself beaten before all
Egdon, and the sport of a man like Wildeve. We have enough berries now,
I think, and we had better take them home. By the time we have decked
the house with this and hung up the mistletoe, we must think of
starting to meet him.”
Thomasin came out of the tree, shook from her hair and dress the loose
berries which had fallen thereon, and went down the hill with her aunt,
each woman bearing half the gathered boughs. It was now nearly four
o’clock, and the sunlight was leaving the vales. When the west grew red
the two relatives came again from the house and plunged into the heath
in a different direction from the first, towards a point in the distant
highway along which the expected man was to return.
III.
How a Little Sound Produced a Great Dream
Eustacia stood just within the heath, straining her eyes in the
direction of Mrs. Yeobright’s house and premises. No light, sound, or
movement was perceptible there. The evening was chilly; the spot was
dark and lonely. She inferred that the guest had not yet come; and
after lingering ten or fifteen minutes she turned again towards home.
She had not far retraced her steps when sounds in front of her
betokened the approach of persons in conversation along the same path.
Soon their heads became visible against the sky. They were walking
slowly; and though it was too dark for much discovery of character from
aspect, the gait of them showed that they were not workers on the
heath. Eustacia stepped a little out of the foot-track to let them
pass. They were two women and a man; and the voices of the women were
those of Mrs. Yeobright and Thomasin.
They went by her, and at the moment of passing appeared to discern her
dusky form. There came to her ears in a masculine voice, “Good night!”
She murmured a reply, glided by them, and turned round. She could not,
for a moment, believe that chance, unrequested, had brought into her
presence the soul of the house she had gone to inspect, the man without
whom her inspection would not have been thought of.
She strained her eyes to see them, but was unable. Such was her
intentness, however, that it seemed as if her ears were performing the
functions of seeing as well as hearing. This extension of power can
almost be believed in at such moments. The deaf Dr. Kitto was probably
under the influence of a parallel fancy when he described his body as
having become, by long endeavour, so sensitive to vibrations that he
had gained the power of perceiving by it as by ears.
She could follow every word that the ramblers uttered. They were
talking no secrets. They were merely indulging in the ordinary
vivacious chat of relatives who have long been parted in person though
not in soul. But it was not to the words that Eustacia listened; she
could not even have recalled, a few minutes later, what the words were.
It was to the alternating voice that gave out about one-tenth of
them—the voice that had wished her good night. Sometimes this throat
uttered Yes, sometimes it uttered No; sometimes it made inquiries about
a time-worn denizen of the place. Once it surprised her notions by
remarking upon the friendliness and geniality written in the faces of
the hills around.
The three voices passed on, and decayed and died out upon her ear. Thus
much had been granted her; and all besides withheld. No event could
have been more exciting. During the greater part of the afternoon she
had been entrancing herself by imagining the fascination which must
attend a man come direct from beautiful Paris—laden with its
atmosphere, familiar with its charms. And this man had greeted her.
With the departure of the figures the profuse articulations of the
women wasted away from her memory; but the accents of the other stayed
on. Was there anything in the voice of Mrs. Yeobright’s son—for Clym it
was—startling as a sound? No; it was simply comprehensive. All
emotional things were possible to the speaker of that “good night.”
Eustacia’s imagination supplied the rest—except the solution to one
riddle. What _could_ the tastes of that man be who saw friendliness and
geniality in these shaggy hills?
On such occasions as this a thousand ideas pass through a highly
charged woman’s head; and they indicate themselves on her face; but the
changes, though actual, are minute. Eustacia’s features went through a
rhythmical succession of them. She glowed; remembering the mendacity of
the imagination, she flagged; then she freshened; then she fired; then
she cooled again. It was a cycle of aspects, produced by a cycle of
visions.
Eustacia entered her own house; she was excited. Her grandfather was
enjoying himself over the fire, raking about the ashes and exposing the
red-hot surface of the turves, so that their lurid glare irradiated the
chimney-corner with the hues of a furnace.
“Why is it that we are never friendly with the Yeobrights?” she said,
coming forward and stretching her soft hands over the warmth. “I wish
we were. They seem to be very nice people.”
“Be hanged if I know why,” said the captain. “I liked the old man well
enough, though he was as rough as a hedge. But you would never have
cared to go there, even if you might have, I am well sure.”
“Why shouldn’t I?”
“Your town tastes would find them far too countrified. They sit in the
kitchen, drink mead and elder-wine, and sand the floor to keep it
clean. A sensible way of life; but how would you like it?”
“I thought Mrs. Yeobright was a ladylike woman? A curate’s daughter,
was she not?”
“Yes; but she was obliged to live as her husband did; and I suppose she
has taken kindly to it by this time. Ah, I recollect that I once
accidentally offended her, and I have never seen her since.”
That night was an eventful one to Eustacia’s brain, and one which she
hardly ever forgot. She dreamt a dream; and few human beings, from
Nebuchadnezzar to the Swaffham tinker, ever dreamt a more remarkable
one. Such an elaborately developed, perplexing, exciting dream was
certainly never dreamed by a girl in Eustacia’s situation before. It
had as many ramifications as the Cretan labyrinth, as many fluctuations
as the northern lights, as much colour as a parterre in June, and was
as crowded with figures as a coronation. To Queen Scheherazade the
dream might have seemed not far removed from commonplace; and to a girl
just returned from all the courts of Europe it might have seemed not
more than interesting. But amid the circumstances of Eustacia’s life it
was as wonderful as a dream could be.
There was, however, gradually evolved from its transformation scenes a
less extravagant episode, in which the heath dimly appeared behind the
general brilliancy of the action. She was dancing to wondrous music,
and her partner was the man in silver armour who had accompanied her
through the previous fantastic changes, the visor of his helmet being
closed. The mazes of the dance were ecstatic. Soft whispering came into
her ear from under the radiant helmet, and she felt like a woman in
Paradise. Suddenly these two wheeled out from the mass of dancers,
dived into one of the pools of the heath, and came out somewhere into
an iridescent hollow, arched with rainbows. “It must be here,” said the
voice by her side, and blushingly looking up she saw him removing his
casque to kiss her. At that moment there was a cracking noise, and his
figure fell into fragments like a pack of cards.
She cried aloud. “O that I had seen his face!”
Eustacia awoke. The cracking had been that of the window shutter
downstairs, which the maid-servant was opening to let in the day, now
slowly increasing to Nature’s meagre allowance at this sickly time of
the year. “O that I had seen his face!” she said again. “’Twas meant
for Mr. Yeobright!”
When she became cooler she perceived that many of the phases of the
dream had naturally arisen out of the images and fancies of the day
before. But this detracted little from its interest, which lay in the
excellent fuel it provided for newly kindled fervour. She was at the
modulating point between indifference and love, at the stage called
“having a fancy for.” It occurs once in the history of the most
gigantic passions, and it is a period when they are in the hands of the
weakest will.
The perfervid woman was by this time half in love with a vision. The
fantastic nature of her passion, which lowered her as an intellect,
raised her as a soul. If she had had a little more self-control she
would have attenuated the emotion to nothing by sheer reasoning, and so
have killed it off. If she had had a little less pride she might have
gone and circumambulated the Yeobrights’ premises at Blooms-End at any
maidenly sacrifice until she had seen him. But Eustacia did neither of
these things. She acted as the most exemplary might have acted, being
so influenced; she took an airing twice or thrice a day upon the Egdon
hills, and kept her eyes employed.
The first occasion passed, and he did not come that way.
She promenaded a second time, and was again the sole wanderer there.
The third time there was a dense fog; she looked around, but without
much hope. Even if he had been walking within twenty yards of her she
could not have seen him.
At the fourth attempt to encounter him it began to rain in torrents,
and she turned back.
The fifth sally was in the afternoon; it was fine, and she remained out
long, walking to the very top of the valley in which Blooms-End lay.
She saw the white paling about half a mile off; but he did not appear.
It was almost with heart-sickness that she came home and with a sense
of shame at her weakness. She resolved to look for the man from Paris
no more.
But Providence is nothing if not coquettish; and no sooner had Eustacia
formed this resolve than the opportunity came which, while sought, had
been entirely withholden.
IV.
Eustacia Is Led on to an Adventure
In the evening of this last day of expectation, which was the
twenty-third of December, Eustacia was at home alone. She had passed
the recent hour in lamenting over a rumour newly come to her ears—that
Yeobright’s visit to his mother was to be of short duration, and would
end some time the next week. “Naturally,” she said to herself. A man in
the full swing of his activities in a gay city could not afford to
linger long on Egdon Heath. That she would behold face to face the
owner of the awakening voice within the limits of such a holiday was
most unlikely, unless she were to haunt the environs of his mother’s
house like a robin, to do which was difficult and unseemly.
The customary expedient of provincial girls and men in such
circumstances is churchgoing. In an ordinary village or country town
one can safely calculate that, either on Christmas day or the Sunday
contiguous, any native home for the holidays, who has not through age
or ennui lost the appetite for seeing and being seen, will turn up in
some pew or other, shining with hope, self-consciousness, and new
clothes. Thus the congregation on Christmas morning is mostly a Tussaud
collection of celebrities who have been born in the neighbourhood.
Hither the mistress, left neglected at home all the year, can steal and
observe the development of the returned lover who has forgotten her,
and think as she watches him over her prayer book that he may throb
with a renewed fidelity when novelties have lost their charm. And
hither a comparatively recent settler like Eustacia may betake herself
to scrutinize the person of a native son who left home before her
advent upon the scene, and consider if the friendship of his parents be
worth cultivating during his next absence in order to secure a
knowledge of him on his next return.
But these tender schemes were not feasible among the scattered
inhabitants of Egdon Heath. In name they were parishioners, but
virtually they belonged to no parish at all. People who came to these
few isolated houses to keep Christmas with their friends remained in
their friends’ chimney-corners drinking mead and other comforting
liquors till they left again for good and all. Rain, snow, ice, mud
everywhere around, they did not care to trudge two or three miles to
sit wet-footed and splashed to the nape of their necks among those who,
though in some measure neighbours, lived close to the church, and
entered it clean and dry. Eustacia knew it was ten to one that Clym
Yeobright would go to no church at all during his few days of leave,
and that it would be a waste of labour for her to go driving the pony
and gig over a bad road in hope to see him there.
It was dusk, and she was sitting by the fire in the dining-room or
hall, which they occupied at this time of the year in preference to the
parlour, because of its large hearth, constructed for turf-fires, a
fuel the captain was partial to in the winter season. The only visible
articles in the room were those on the window-sill, which showed their
shapes against the low sky, the middle article being the old hourglass,
and the other two a pair of ancient British urns which had been dug
from a barrow near, and were used as flowerpots for two razor-leaved
cactuses. Somebody knocked at the door. The servant was out; so was her
grandfather. The person, after waiting a minute, came in and tapped at
the door of the room.
“Who’s there?” said Eustacia.
“Please, Cap’n Vye, will you let us——”
Eustacia arose and went to the door. “I cannot allow you to come in so
boldly. You should have waited.”
“The cap’n said I might come in without any fuss,” was answered in a
lad’s pleasant voice.
“Oh, did he?” said Eustacia more gently. “What do you want, Charley?”
“Please will your grandfather lend us his fuelhouse to try over our
parts in, tonight at seven o’clock?”
“What, are you one of the Egdon mummers for this year?”
“Yes, miss. The cap’n used to let the old mummers practise here.”
“I know it. Yes, you may use the fuelhouse if you like,” said Eustacia
languidly.
The choice of Captain Vye’s fuelhouse as the scene of rehearsal was
dictated by the fact that his dwelling was nearly in the centre of the
heath. The fuelhouse was as roomy as a barn, and was a most desirable
place for such a purpose. The lads who formed the company of players
lived at different scattered points around, and by meeting in this spot
the distances to be traversed by all the comers would be about equally
proportioned.
For mummers and mumming Eustacia had the greatest contempt. The mummers
themselves were not afflicted with any such feeling for their art,
though at the same time they were not enthusiastic. A traditional
pastime is to be distinguished from a mere revival in no more striking
feature than in this, that while in the revival all is excitement and
fervour, the survival is carried on with a stolidity and absence of
stir which sets one wondering why a thing that is done so perfunctorily
should be kept up at all. Like Balaam and other unwilling prophets, the
agents seem moved by an inner compulsion to say and do their allotted
parts whether they will or no. This unweeting manner of performance is
the true ring by which, in this refurbishing age, a fossilized survival
may be known from a spurious reproduction.
The piece was the well-known play of Saint George, and all who were
behind the scenes assisted in the preparations, including the women of
each household. Without the co-operation of sisters and sweethearts the
dresses were likely to be a failure; but on the other hand, this class
of assistance was not without its drawbacks. The girls could never be
brought to respect tradition in designing and decorating the armour;
they insisted on attaching loops and bows of silk and velvet in any
situation pleasing to their taste. Gorget, gusset, basinet, cuirass,
gauntlet, sleeve, all alike in the view of these feminine eyes were
practicable spaces whereon to sew scraps of fluttering colour.
It might be that Joe, who fought on the side of Christendom, had a
sweetheart, and that Jim, who fought on the side of the Moslem, had one
likewise. During the making of the costumes it would come to the
knowledge of Joe’s sweetheart that Jim’s was putting brilliant silk
scallops at the bottom of her lover’s surcoat, in addition to the
ribbons of the visor, the bars of which, being invariably formed of
coloured strips about half an inch wide hanging before the face, were
mostly of that material. Joe’s sweetheart straight-way placed brilliant
silk on the scallops of the hem in question, and, going a little
further, added ribbon tufts to the shoulder pieces. Jim’s, not to be
outdone, would affix bows and rosettes everywhere.
The result was that in the end the Valiant Soldier, of the Christian
army, was distinguished by no peculiarity of accoutrement from the
Turkish Knight; and what was worse, on a casual view Saint George
himself might be mistaken for his deadly enemy, the Saracen. The
guisers themselves, though inwardly regretting this confusion of
persons, could not afford to offend those by whose assistance they so
largely profited, and the innovations were allowed to stand.
There was, it is true, a limit to this tendency to uniformity. The
Leech or Doctor preserved his character intact—his darker habiliments,
peculiar hat, and the bottle of physic slung under his arm, could never
be mistaken. And the same might be said of the conventional figure of
Father Christmas, with his gigantic club, an older man, who accompanied
the band as general protector in long night journeys from parish to
parish, and was bearer of the purse.
Seven o’clock, the hour of the rehearsal, came round, and in a short
time Eustacia could hear voices in the fuelhouse. To dissipate in some
trifling measure her abiding sense of the murkiness of human life she
went to the “linhay” or lean-to shed, which formed the root-store of
their dwelling and abutted on the fuelhouse. Here was a small rough
hole in the mud wall, originally made for pigeons, through which the
interior of the next shed could be viewed. A light came from it now;
and Eustacia stepped upon a stool to look in upon the scene.
On a ledge in the fuelhouse stood three tall rushlights and by the
light of them seven or eight lads were marching about, haranguing, and
confusing each other, in endeavours to perfect themselves in the play.
Humphrey and Sam, the furze- and turf-cutters, were there looking on,
so also was Timothy Fairway, who leant against the wall and prompted
the boys from memory, interspersing among the set words remarks and
anecdotes of the superior days when he and others were the Egdon
mummers-elect that these lads were now.
“Well, ye be as well up to it as ever ye will be,” he said. “Not that
such mumming would have passed in our time. Harry as the Saracen should
strut a bit more, and John needn’t holler his inside out. Beyond that
perhaps you’ll do. Have you got all your clothes ready?”
“We shall by Monday.”
“Your first outing will be Monday night, I suppose?”
“Yes. At Mrs. Yeobright’s.”
“Oh, Mrs. Yeobright’s. What makes her want to see ye? I should think a
middle-aged woman was tired of mumming.”
“She’s got up a bit of a party, because ’tis the first Christmas that
her son Clym has been home for a long time.”
“To be sure, to be sure—her party! I am going myself. I almost forgot
it, upon my life.”
Eustacia’s face flagged. There was to be a party at the Yeobrights’;
she, naturally, had nothing to do with it. She was a stranger to all
such local gatherings, and had always held them as scarcely
appertaining to her sphere. But had she been going, what an opportunity
would have been afforded her of seeing the man whose influence was
penetrating her like summer sun! To increase that influence was coveted
excitement; to cast it off might be to regain serenity; to leave it as
it stood was tantalizing.
The lads and men prepared to leave the premises, and Eustacia returned
to her fireside. She was immersed in thought, but not for long. In a
few minutes the lad Charley, who had come to ask permission to use the
place, returned with the key to the kitchen. Eustacia heard him, and
opening the door into the passage said, “Charley, come here.”
The lad was surprised. He entered the front room not without blushing;
for he, like many, had felt the power of this girl’s face and form.
She pointed to a seat by the fire, and entered the other side of the
chimney-corner herself. It could be seen in her face that whatever
motive she might have had in asking the youth indoors would soon
appear.
“Which part do you play, Charley—the Turkish Knight, do you not?”
inquired the beauty, looking across the smoke of the fire to him on the
other side.
“Yes, miss, the Turkish Knight,” he replied diffidently.
“Is yours a long part?”
“Nine speeches, about.”
“Can you repeat them to me? If so I should like to hear them.”