Since the arrival of that letter, on a certain autumn morning long
ago, the reddleman and Thomasin had not met till today. During the
interval he had shifted his position even further from hers than it
had originally been, by adopting the reddle trade; though he was
really in very good circumstances still. Indeed, seeing that his
expenditure was only one-fourth of his income, he might have been
called a prosperous man.
Rejected suitors take to roaming as naturally as unhived bees; and
the business to which he had cynically devoted himself was in many
ways congenial to Venn. But his wanderings, by mere stress of old
emotions, had frequently taken an Egdon direction, though he never
intruded upon her who attracted him thither. To be in Thomasin's
heath, and near her, yet unseen, was the one ewe-lamb of pleasure
left to him.
Then came the incident of that day, and the reddleman, still loving
her well, was excited by this accidental service to her at a critical
juncture to vow an active devotion to her cause, instead of, as
hitherto, sighing and holding aloof. After what had happened, it
was impossible that he should not doubt the honesty of Wildeve's
intentions. But her hope was apparently centred upon him; and
dismissing his regrets Venn determined to aid her to be happy in
her own chosen way. That this way was, of all others, the most
distressing to himself, was awkward enough; but the reddleman's love
was generous.
His first active step in watching over Thomasin's interests was taken
about seven o'clock the next evening, and was dictated by the news
which he had learnt from the sad boy. That Eustacia was somehow the
cause of Wildeve's carelessness in relation to the marriage had at
once been Venn's conclusion on hearing of the secret meeting between
them. It did not occur to his mind that Eustacia's love-signal
to Wildeve was the tender effect upon the deserted beauty of the
intelligence which her grandfather had brought home. His instinct was
to regard her as a conspirator against rather than as an antecedent
obstacle to Thomasin's happiness.
During the day he had been exceedingly anxious to learn the condition
of Thomasin; but he did not venture to intrude upon a threshold to
which he was a stranger, particularly at such an unpleasant moment as
this. He had occupied his time in moving with his ponies and load to
a new point in the heath, eastward to his previous station; and here
he selected a nook with a careful eye to shelter from wind and rain,
which seemed to mean that his stay there was to be a comparatively
extended one. After this he returned on foot some part of the way
that he had come; and, it being now dark, he diverged to the left till
he stood behind a holly-bush on the edge of a pit not twenty yards
from Rainbarrow.
He watched for a meeting there, but he watched in vain. Nobody except
himself came near the spot that night.
But the loss of his labour produced little effect upon the reddleman.
He had stood in the shoes of Tantalus, and seemed to look upon
a certain mass of disappointment as the natural preface to all
realizations, without which preface they would give cause for alarm.
The same hour the next evening found him again at the same place; but
Eustacia and Wildeve, the expected trysters, did not appear.
He pursued precisely the same course yet four nights longer, and
without success. But on the next, being the day-week of their
previous meeting, he saw a female shape floating along the ridge and
the outline of a young man ascending from the valley. They met in the
little ditch encircling the tumulus--the original excavation from
which it had been thrown up by the ancient British people.
The reddleman, stung with suspicion of wrong to Thomasin, was aroused
to strategy in a moment. He instantly left the bush and crept forward
on his hands and knees. When he had got as close as he might safely
venture without discovery he found that, owing to a cross-wind, the
conversation of the trysting pair could not be overheard.
Near him, as in divers places about the heath, were areas strewn with
large turves, which lay edgeways and upside down awaiting removal by
Timothy Fairway, previous to the winter weather. He took two of these
as he lay, and dragged them over him till one covered his head and
shoulders, the other his back and legs. The reddleman would now have
been quite invisible, even by daylight; the turves, standing upon him
with the heather upwards, looked precisely as if they were growing.
He crept along again, and the turves upon his back crept with him.
Had he approached without any covering the chances are that he would
not have been perceived in the dusk; approaching thus, it was as
though he burrowed underground. In this manner he came quite close to
where the two were standing.
"Wish to consult me on the matter?" reached his ears in the rich,
impetuous accents of Eustacia Vye. "Consult me? It is an indignity
to me to talk so: I won't bear it any longer!" She began weeping.
"I have loved you, and have shown you that I loved you, much to my
regret; and yet you can come and say in that frigid way that you wish
to consult with me whether it would not be better to marry Thomasin.
Better--of course it would be. Marry her: she is nearer to your own
position in life than I am!"
"Yes, yes; that's very well," said Wildeve peremptorily. "But we
must look at things as they are. Whatever blame may attach to me for
having brought it about, Thomasin's position is at present much worse
than yours. I simply tell you that I am in a strait."
"But you shall not tell me! You must see that it is only harassing me.
Damon, you have not acted well; you have sunk in my opinion. You have
not valued my courtesy--the courtesy of a lady in loving you--who used
to think of far more ambitious things. But it was Thomasin's fault.
She won you away from me, and she deserves to suffer for it. Where
is she staying now? Not that I care, nor where I am myself. Ah, if I
were dead and gone how glad she would be! Where is she, I ask?"
"Thomasin is now staying at her aunt's shut up in a bedroom, and
keeping out of everybody's sight," he said indifferently.
"I don't think you care much about her even now," said Eustacia with
sudden joyousness: "for if you did you wouldn't talk so coolly about
her. Do you talk so coolly to her about me? Ah, I expect you do! Why
did you originally go away from me? I don't think I can ever forgive
you, except on one condition, that whenever you desert me, you come
back again, sorry that you served me so."
"I never wish to desert you."
"I do not thank you for that. I should hate it to be all smooth.
Indeed, I think I like you to desert me a little once now and then.
Love is the dismallest thing where the lover is quite honest. O, it
is a shame to say so; but it is true!" She indulged in a little laugh.
"My low spirits begin at the very idea. Don't you offer me tame love,
or away you go!"
"I wish Tamsie were not such a confoundedly good little woman," said
Wildeve, "so that I could be faithful to you without injuring a worthy
person. It is I who am the sinner after all; I am not worth the
little finger of either of you."
"But you must not sacrifice yourself to her from any sense of
justice," replied Eustacia quickly. "If you do not love her it is the
most merciful thing in the long run to leave her as she is. That's
always the best way. There, now I have been unwomanly, I suppose.
When you have left me I am always angry with myself for things that I
have said to you."
Wildeve walked a pace or two among the heather without replying. The
pause was filled up by the intonation of a pollard thorn a little way
to windward, the breezes filtering through its unyielding twigs as
through a strainer. It was as if the night sang dirges with clenched
teeth.
She continued, half sorrowfully, "Since meeting you last, it has
occurred to me once or twice that perhaps it was not for love of me
you did not marry her. Tell me, Damon: I'll try to bear it. Had I
nothing whatever to do with the matter?"
"Do you press me to tell?"
"Yes, I must know. I see I have been too ready to believe in my own
power."
"Well, the immediate reason was that the license would not do for the
place, and before I could get another she ran away. Up to that point
you had nothing to do with it. Since then her aunt has spoken to me
in a tone which I don't at all like."
"Yes, yes! I am nothing in it--I am nothing in it. You only trifle
with me. Heaven, what can I, Eustacia Vye, be made of to think so
much of you!"
"Nonsense; do not be so passionate... Eustacia, how we roved among
these bushes last year, when the hot days had got cool, and the shades
of the hills kept us almost invisible in the hollows!"
She remained in moody silence till she said, "Yes; and how I used to
laugh at you for daring to look up to me! But you have well made me
suffer for that since."
"Yes, you served me cruelly enough until I thought I had found some
one fairer than you. A blessed find for me, Eustacia."
"Do you still think you found somebody fairer?"
"Sometimes I do, sometimes I don't. The scales are balanced so nicely
that a feather would turn them."
"But don't you really care whether I meet you or whether I don't?" she
said slowly.
"I care a little, but not enough to break my rest," replied the young
man languidly. "No, all that's past. I find there are two flowers
where I thought there was only one. Perhaps there are three, or four,
or any number as good as the first... Mine is a curious fate. Who
would have thought that all this could happen to me?"
She interrupted with a suppressed fire of which either love or anger
seemed an equally possible issue, "Do you love me now?"
"Who can say?"
"Tell me; I will know it!"
"I do, and I do not," said he mischievously. "That is, I have my
times and my seasons. One moment you are too tall, another moment you
are too do-nothing, another too melancholy, another too dark, another
I don't know what, except--that you are not the whole world to me that
you used to be, my dear. But you are a pleasant lady to know, and nice
to meet, and I dare say as sweet as ever--almost."
Eustacia was silent, and she turned from him, till she said, in a
voice of suspended mightiness, "I am for a walk, and this is my way."
"Well, I can do worse than follow you."
"You know you can't do otherwise, for all your moods and changes!"
she answered defiantly. "Say what you will; try as you may; keep away
from me all that you can--you will never forget me. You will love me
all your life long. You would jump to marry me!"
"So I would!" said Wildeve. "Such strange thoughts as I've had from
time to time, Eustacia; and they come to me this moment. You hate the
heath as much as ever; that I know."
"I do," she murmured deeply. "'Tis my cross, my shame, and will be my
death!"
"I abhor it too," said he. "How mournfully the wind blows round us
now!"
She did not answer. Its tone was indeed solemn and pervasive.
Compound utterances addressed themselves to their senses, and it was
possible to view by ear the features of the neighbourhood. Acoustic
pictures were returned from the darkened scenery; they could hear
where the tracts of heather began and ended; where the furze was
growing stalky and tall; where it had been recently cut; in what
direction the fir-clump lay, and how near was the pit in which the
hollies grew; for these differing features had their voices no less
than their shapes and colours.
"God, how lonely it is!" resumed Wildeve. "What are picturesque
ravines and mists to us who see nothing else? Why should we stay
here? Will you go with me to America? I have kindred in Wisconsin."
"That wants consideration."
"It seems impossible to do well here, unless one were a wild bird or a
landscape-painter. Well?"
"Give me time," she softly said, taking his hand. "America is so far
away. Are you going to walk with me a little way?"
As Eustacia uttered the latter words she retired from the base of the
barrow, and Wildeve followed her, so that the reddleman could hear no
more.
He lifted the turves and arose. Their black figures sank and
disappeared from against the sky. They were as two horns which the
sluggish heath had put forth from its crown, like a mollusc, and had
now again drawn in.
The reddleman's walk across the vale, and over into the next where his
cart lay, was not sprightly for a slim young fellow of twenty-four.
His spirit was perturbed to aching. The breezes that blew around his
mouth in that walk carried off upon them the accents of a commination.
He entered the van, where there was a fire in a stove. Without
lighting his candle he sat down at once on the three-legged stool, and
pondered on what he had seen and heard touching that still loved-one
of his. He uttered a sound which was neither sigh nor sob, but was
even more indicative than either of a troubled mind.
"My Tamsie," he whispered heavily. "What can be done? Yes, I will see
that Eustacia Vye."
X