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
north-west; 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 south-east, 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 Caesar 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 north-west, 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 minutiae 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 heath-bells 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 to-night 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 heath-bells. 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 any one
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 hop-frog 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 hour-glass 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
your 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 coldblooded 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.