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, had she 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
Europaeus_--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 flame-like. 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 midnights; 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 Phaeacia'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 week-day 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.