Thomas Hardy - The Return of the Native

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"I will run down myself," said Eustacia.

She went down. Wildeve had alighted, and was standing before the
horse's head when Eustacia opened the door. He did not turn for a
moment, thinking the comer Thomasin. Then he looked, started ever
so little, and said one word: "Well?"

"I have not yet told him," she replied in a whisper.

"Then don't do so till he is well--it will be fatal. You are ill
yourself."

"I am wretched... O Damon," she said, bursting into tears, "I--I can't
tell you how unhappy I am! I can hardly bear this. I can tell nobody
of my trouble--nobody knows of it but you."

"Poor girl!" said Wildeve, visibly affected at her distress, and at
last led on so far as to take her hand. "It is hard, when you have
done nothing to deserve it, that you should have got involved in such
a web as this. You were not made for these sad scenes. I am to blame
most. If I could only have saved you from it all!"

"But, Damon, please pray tell me what I must do? To sit by him hour
after hour, and hear him reproach himself as being the cause of her
death, and to know that I am the sinner, if any human being is at all,
drives me into cold despair. I don't know what to do. Should I tell
him or should I not tell him? I always am asking myself that. O, I
want to tell him; and yet I am afraid. If he find it out he must
surely kill me, for nothing else will be in proportion to his feelings
now. 'Beware the fury of a patient man' sounds day by day in my ears
as I watch him."

"Well, wait till he is better, and trust to chance. And when you
tell, you must only tell part--for his own sake."

"Which part should I keep back?"

Wildeve paused. "That I was in the house at the time," he said in a
low tone.

"Yes; it must be concealed, seeing what has been whispered. How much
easier are hasty actions than speeches that will excuse them!"

"If he were only to die--" Wildeve murmured.

"Do not think of it! I would not buy hope of immunity by so cowardly a
desire even if I hated him. Now I am going up to him again. Thomasin
bade me tell you she would be down in a few minutes. Good-bye."

She returned, and Thomasin soon appeared. When she was seated in the
gig with her husband, and the horse was turning to go off, Wildeve
lifted his eyes to the bedroom windows. Looking from one of them he
could discern a pale, tragic face watching him drive away. It was
Eustacia's.

II

A Lurid Light Breaks In upon a Darkened Understanding

Clym's grief became mitigated by wearing itself out. His strength
returned, and a month after the visit of Thomasin he might have been
seen walking about the garden. Endurance and despair, equanimity and
gloom, the tints of health and the pallor of death, mingled weirdly
in his face. He was now unnaturally silent upon all of the past that
related to his mother; and though Eustacia knew that he was thinking
of it none the less, she was only too glad to escape the topic ever to
bring it up anew. When his mind had been weaker his heart had led him
to speak out; but reason having now somewhat recovered itself he sank
into taciturnity.

One evening when he was thus standing in the garden, abstractedly
spudding up a weed with his stick, a bony figure turned the corner of
the house and came up to him.

"Christian, isn't it?" said Clym. "I am glad you have found me out.
I shall soon want you to go to Blooms-End and assist me in putting
the house in order. I suppose it is all locked up as I left it?"

"Yes, Mister Clym."

"Have you dug up the potatoes and other roots?"

"Yes, without a drop o' rain, thank God. But I was coming to tell 'ee
of something else which is quite different from what we have lately
had in the family. I am sent by the rich gentleman at the Woman, that
we used to call the landlord, to tell 'ee that Mrs. Wildeve is doing
well of a girl, which was born punctually at one o'clock at noon,
or a few minutes more or less; and 'tis said that expecting of this
increase is what have kept 'em there since they came into their
money."

"And she is getting on well, you say?"

"Yes, sir. Only Mr. Wildeve is twanky because 'tisn't a boy--that's
what they say in the kitchen, but I was not supposed to notice that."

"Christian, now listen to me."

"Yes, sure, Mr. Yeobright."

"Did you see my mother the day before she died?"

"No, I did not."

Yeobright's face expressed disappointment.

"But I zeed her the morning of the same day she died."

Clym's look lighted up. "That's nearer still to my meaning," he said.

"Yes, I know 'twas the same day; for she said, 'I be going to see him,
Christian; so I shall not want any vegetables brought in for dinner.'"

"See whom?"

"See you. She was going to your house, you understand."

Yeobright regarded Christian with intense surprise. "Why did you
never mention this?" he said. "Are you sure it was my house she was
coming to?"

"O yes. I didn't mention it because I've never zeed you lately. And
as she didn't get there it was all nought, and nothing to tell."

"And I have been wondering why she should have walked in the heath
on that hot day! Well, did she say what she was coming for? It is a
thing, Christian, I am very anxious to know."

"Yes, Mister Clym. She didn't say it to me, though I think she did to
one here and there."

"Do you know one person to whom she spoke of it?"

"There is one man, please, sir, but I hope you won't mention my name
to him, as I have seen him in strange places, particular in dreams.
One night last summer he glared at me like Famine and Sword, and it
made me feel so low that I didn't comb out my few hairs for two days.
He was standing, as it might be, Mister Yeobright, in the middle of
the path to Mistover, and your mother came up, looking as pale--"

"Yes, when was that?"

"Last summer, in my dream."

"Pooh! Who's the man?"

"Diggory, the reddleman. He called upon her and sat with her the
evening before she set out to see you. I hadn't gone home from work
when he came up to the gate."

"I must see Venn--I wish I had known it before," said Clym anxiously.
"I wonder why he has not come to tell me?"

"He went out of Egdon Heath the next day, so would not be likely to
know you wanted him."

"Christian," said Clym, "you must go and find Venn. I am otherwise
engaged, or I would go myself. Find him at once, and tell him I want
to speak to him."

"I am a good hand at hunting up folk by day," said Christian, looking
dubiously round at the declining light; "but as to nighttime, never
is such a bad hand as I, Mister Yeobright."

"Search the heath when you will, so that you bring him soon. Bring
him tomorrow, if you can."

Christian then departed. The morrow came, but no Venn. In the
evening Christian arrived, looking very weary. He had been searching
all day, and had heard nothing of the reddleman.

"Inquire as much as you can tomorrow without neglecting your work,"
said Yeobright. "Don't come again till you have found him."

The next day Yeobright set out for the old house at Blooms-End, which,
with the garden, was now his own. His severe illness had hindered all
preparations for his removal thither; but it had become necessary
that he should go and overlook its contents, as administrator to his
mother's little property; for which purpose he decided to pass the
next night on the premises.

He journeyed onward, not quickly or decisively, but in the slow walk
of one who has been awakened from a stupefying sleep. It was early
afternoon when he reached the valley. The expression of the place,
the tone of the hour, were precisely those of many such occasions in
days gone by; and these antecedent similarities fostered the illusion
that she, who was there no longer, would come out to welcome him.
The garden gate was locked and the shutters were closed, just as he
himself had left them on the evening after the funeral. He unlocked
the gate, and found that a spider had already constructed a large web,
tying the door to the lintel, on the supposition that it was never
to be opened again. When he had entered the house and flung back
the shutters he set about his task of overhauling the cupboards and
closets, burning papers, and considering how best to arrange the place
for Eustacia's reception, until such time as he might be in a position
to carry out his long-delayed scheme, should that time ever arrive.

As he surveyed the rooms he felt strongly disinclined for the
alterations which would have to be made in the time-honoured
furnishing of his parents and grandparents, to suit Eustacia's modern
ideas. The gaunt oak-cased clock, with the picture of the Ascension
on the door-panel and the Miraculous Draught of Fishes on the base;
his grandmother's corner cupboard with the glass door, through which
the spotted china was visible; the dumb-waiter; the wooden tea-trays;
the hanging fountain with the brass tap--whither would these venerable
articles have to be banished?

He noticed that the flowers in the window had died for want of water,
and he placed them out upon the ledge, that they might be taken away.
While thus engaged he heard footsteps on the gravel without, and
somebody knocked at the door.

Yeobright opened it, and Venn was standing before him.

"Good morning," said the reddleman. "Is Mrs. Yeobright at home?"

Yeobright looked upon the ground. "Then you have not seen Christian
or any of the Egdon folks?" he said.

"No. I have only just returned after a long stay away. I called here
the day before I left."

"And you have heard nothing?"

"Nothing."

"My mother is--dead."

"Dead!" said Venn mechanically.

"Her home now is where I shouldn't mind having mine."

Venn regarded him, and then said, "If I didn't see your face I could
never believe your words. Have you been ill?"

"I had an illness."

"Well, the change! When I parted from her a month ago everything
seemed to say that she was going to begin a new life."

"And what seemed came true."

"You say right, no doubt. Trouble has taught you a deeper vein of
talk than mine. All I meant was regarding her life here. She has
died too soon."

"Perhaps through my living too long. I have had a bitter experience
on that score this last month, Diggory. But come in; I have been
wanting to see you."

He conducted the reddleman into the large room where the dancing had
taken place the previous Christmas; and they sat down in the settle
together. "There's the cold fireplace, you see," said Clym. "When
that half-burnt log and those cinders were alight she was alive!
Little has been changed here yet. I can do nothing. My life creeps
like a snail."

"How came she to die?" said Venn.

Yeobright gave him some particulars of her illness and death, and
continued: "After this no kind of pain will ever seem more than
an indisposition to me.--I began saying that I wanted to ask you
something, but I stray from subjects like a drunken man. I am anxious
to know what my mother said to you when she last saw you. You talked
with her a long time, I think?"

"I talked with her more than half an hour."

"About me?"

"Yes. And it must have been on account of what we said that she was
on the heath. Without question she was coming to see you."

"But why should she come to see me if she felt so bitterly against
me? There's the mystery."

"Yet I know she quite forgave 'ee."

"But, Diggory--would a woman, who had quite forgiven her son, say,
when she felt herself ill on the way to his house, that she was
broken-hearted because of his ill-usage? Never!"

"What I know is that she didn't blame you at all. She blamed herself
for what had happened, only herself. I had it from her own lips."

"You had it from her lips that I had NOT ill-treated her; and at the
same time another had it from her lips that I HAD ill-treated her?
My mother was no impulsive woman who changed her opinion every hour
without reason. How can it be, Venn, that she should have told such
different stories in close succession?"

"I cannot say. It is certainly odd, when she had forgiven you, and
had forgiven your wife, and was going to see ye on purpose to make
friends."

"If there was one thing wanting to bewilder me it was this
incomprehensible thing!... Diggory, if we, who remain alive, were only
allowed to hold conversation with the dead--just once, a bare minute,
even through a screen of iron bars, as with persons in prison--what we
might learn! How many who now ride smiling would hide their heads! And
this mystery--I should then be at the bottom of it at once. But the
grave has for ever shut her in; and how shall it be found out now?"

No reply was returned by his companion, since none could be given; and
when Venn left, a few minutes later, Clym had passed from the dullness
of sorrow to the fluctuation of carking incertitude.

He continued in the same state all the afternoon. A bed was made up
for him in the same house by a neighbour, that he might not have to
return again the next day; and when he retired to rest in the deserted
place it was only to remain awake hour after hour thinking the same
thoughts. How to discover a solution to this riddle of death seemed a
query of more importance than highest problems of the living. There
was housed in his memory a vivid picture of the face of a little boy
as he entered the hovel where Clym's mother lay. The round eyes,
eager gaze, the piping voice which enunciated the words, had operated
like stilettos on his brain.

A visit to the boy suggested itself as a means of gleaning new
particulars; though it might be quite unproductive. To probe a
child's mind after the lapse of six weeks, not for facts which the
child had seen and understood, but to get at those which were in
their nature beyond him, did not promise much; yet when every obvious
channel is blocked we grope towards the small and obscure. There was
nothing else left to do; after that he would allow the enigma to drop
into the abyss of undiscoverable things.

It was about daybreak when he had reached this decision, and he
at once arose. He locked up the house and went out into the green
patch which merged in heather further on. In front of the white
garden-palings the path branched into three like a broad-arrow. The
road to the right led to the Quiet Woman and its neighbourhood; the
middle track led to Mistover Knap; the left-hand track led over
the hill to another part of Mistover, where the child lived. On
inclining into the latter path Yeobright felt a creeping chilliness,
familiar enough to most people, and probably caused by the unsunned
morning air. In after days he thought of it as a thing of singular
significance.

When Yeobright reached the cottage of Susan Nunsuch, the mother of the
boy he sought, he found that the inmates were not yet astir. But in
upland hamlets the transition from a-bed to abroad is surprisingly
swift and easy. There no dense partition of yawns and toilets divides
humanity by night from humanity by day. Yeobright tapped at the upper
window-sill, which he could reach with his walking-stick; and in three
or four minutes the woman came down.

It was not till this moment that Clym recollected her to be the person
who had behaved so barbarously to Eustacia. It partly explained the
insuavity with which the woman greeted him. Moreover, the boy had
been ailing again; and Susan now, as ever since the night when he had
been pressed into Eustacia's service at the bonfire, attributed his
indispositions to Eustacia's influence as a witch. It was one of
those sentiments which lurk like moles underneath the visible surface
of manners, and may have been kept alive by Eustacia's entreaty to the
captain, at the time that he had intended to prosecute Susan for the
pricking in church, to let the matter drop; which he accordingly had
done.

Yeobright overcame his repugnance, for Susan had at least borne his
mother no ill-will. He asked kindly for the boy; but her manner did
not improve.

"I wish to see him," continued Yeobright, with some hesitation; "to
ask him if he remembers anything more of his walk with my mother than
what he has previously told."

She regarded him in a peculiar and criticizing manner. To anybody but
a half-blind man it would have said, "You want another of the knocks
which have already laid you so low."

She called the boy downstairs, asked Clym to sit down on a stool, and
continued, "Now, Johnny, tell Mr. Yeobright anything you can call to
mind."

"You have not forgotten how you walked with the poor lady on that hot
day?" said Clym.

"No," said the boy.

"And what she said to you?"

The boy repeated the exact words he had used on entering the hut.
Yeobright rested his elbow on the table and shaded his face with his
hand; and the mother looked as if she wondered how a man could want
more of what had stung him so deeply.

"She was going to Alderworth when you first met her?"

"No; she was coming away."

"That can't be."

"Yes; she walked along with me. I was coming away too."

"Then where did you first see her?"

"At your house."

"Attend, and speak the truth!" said Clym sternly.

"Yes, sir; at your house was where I seed her first."

Clym started up, and Susan smiled in an expectant way which did not
embellish her face; it seemed to mean, "Something sinister is coming!"

"What did she do at my house?"

"She went and sat under the trees at the Devil's Bellows."

"Good God! this is all news to me!"

"You never told me this before?" said Susan.

"No, mother; because I didn't like to tell 'ee I had been so far. I
was picking black-hearts, and went further than I meant."

"What did she do then?" said Yeobright.

"Looked at a man who came up and went into your house."

"That was myself--a furze-cutter, with brambles in his hand."

"No; 'twas not you. 'Twas a gentleman. You had gone in afore."

"Who was he?"

"I don't know."

"Now tell me what happened next."

"The poor lady went and knocked at your door, and the lady with black
hair looked out of the side window at her."

The boy's mother turned to Clym and said, "This is something you
didn't expect?"

Yeobright took no more notice of her than if he had been of stone.
"Go on, go on," he said hoarsely to the boy.

"And when she saw the young lady look out of the window the old lady
knocked again; and when nobody came she took up the furze-hook and
looked at it, and put it down again, and then she looked at the
faggot-bonds; and then she went away, and walked across to me, and
blowed her breath very hard, like this. We walked on together, she
and I, and I talked to her and she talked to me a bit, but not much,
because she couldn't blow her breath."

"O!" murmured Clym, in a low tone, and bowed his head. "Let's have
more," he said.

"She couldn't talk much, and she couldn't walk; and her face was, O
so queer!"

"How was her face?"

"Like yours is now."

The woman looked at Yeobright, and beheld him colourless, in a cold
sweat. "Isn't there meaning in it?" she said stealthily. "What do
you think of her now?"

"Silence!" said Clym fiercely. And, turning to the boy, "And then you
left her to die?"

"No," said the woman, quickly and angrily. "He did not leave her to
die! She sent him away. Whoever says he forsook her says what's not
true."

"Trouble no more about that," answered Clym, with a quivering mouth.
"What he did is a trifle in comparison with what he saw. Door kept
shut, did you say? Kept shut, she looking out of window? Good heart
of God!--what does it mean?"

The child shrank away from the gaze of his questioner.

"He said so," answered the mother, "and Johnny's a God-fearing boy
and tells no lies."

"'Cast off by my son!' No, by my best life, dear mother, it is not so!
But by your son's, your son's--May all murderesses get the torment
they deserve!"

With these words Yeobright went forth from the little dwelling. The
pupils of his eyes, fixed steadfastly on blankness, were vaguely
lit with an icy shine; his mouth had passed into the phase more or
less imaginatively rendered in studies of Oedipus. The strangest
deeds were possible to his mood. But they were not possible to
his situation. Instead of there being before him the pale face
of Eustacia, and a masculine shape unknown, there was only the
imperturbable countenance of the heath, which, having defied the
cataclysmal onsets of centuries, reduced to insignificance by its
seamed and antique features the wildest turmoil of a single man.

III

Eustacia Dresses Herself on a Black Morning

A consciousness of a vast impassivity in all which lay around him took
possession even of Yeobright in his wild walk towards Alderworth. He
had once before felt in his own person this overpowering of the fervid
by the inanimate; but then it had tended to enervate a passion far
sweeter than that which at present pervaded him. It was once when he
stood parting from Eustacia in the moist still levels beyond the
hills.

But dismissing all this he went onward home, and came to the front of
his house. The blinds of Eustacia's bedroom were still closely drawn,
for she was no early riser. All the life visible was in the shape of
a solitary thrush cracking a small snail upon the door-stone for his
breakfast, and his tapping seemed a loud noise in the general silence
which prevailed; but on going to the door Clym found it unfastened,
the young girl who attended upon Eustacia being astir in the back part
of the premises. Yeobright entered and went straight to his wife's
room.

The noise of his arrival must have aroused her, for when he opened the
door she was standing before the looking-glass in her night-dress, the
ends of her hair gathered into one hand, with which she was coiling
the whole mass round her head, previous to beginning toilette
operations. She was not a woman given to speaking first at a meeting,
and she allowed Clym to walk across in silence, without turning her
head. He came behind her, and she saw his face in the glass. It was
ashy, haggard, and terrible. Instead of starting towards him in
sorrowful surprise, as even Eustacia, undemonstrative wife as she was,
would have done in days before she burdened herself with a secret,
she remained motionless, looking at him in the glass. And while
she looked the carmine flush with which warmth and sound sleep had
suffused her cheeks and neck dissolved from view, and the deathlike
pallor in his face flew across into hers. He was close enough to see
this, and the sight instigated his tongue.

"You know what is the matter," he said huskily. "I see it in your
face."

Her hand relinquished the rope of hair and dropped to her side, and
the pile of tresses, no longer supported, fell from the crown of her
head about her shoulders and over the white night-gown. She made no
reply.

"Speak to me," said Yeobright peremptorily.

The blanching process did not cease in her, and her lips now became as
white as her face. She turned to him and said, "Yes, Clym, I'll speak
to you. Why do you return so early? Can I do anything for you?"

"Yes, you can listen to me. It seems that my wife is not very well?"

"Why?"

"Your face, my dear; your face. Or perhaps it is the pale morning
light which takes your colour away? Now I am going to reveal a secret
to you. Ha-ha!"

"O, that is ghastly!"

"What?"

"Your laugh."

"There's reason for ghastliness. Eustacia, you have held my happiness
in the hollow of your hand, and like a devil you have dashed it down!"

She started back from the dressing-table, retreated a few steps from
him, and looked him in the face. "Ah! you think to frighten me," she
said, with a slight laugh. "Is it worth while? I am undefended, and
alone."

"How extraordinary!"

"What do you mean?"

"As there is ample time I will tell you, though you know well enough.
I mean that it is extraordinary that you should be alone in my
absence. Tell me, now, where is he who was with you on the afternoon
of the thirty-first of August? Under the bed? Up the chimney?"

A shudder overcame her and shook the light fabric of her night-dress
throughout. "I do not remember dates so exactly," she said. "I
cannot recollect that anybody was with me besides yourself."

"The day I mean," said Yeobright, his voice growing louder and
harsher, "was the day you shut the door against my mother and killed
her. O, it is too much--too bad!" He leant over the footpiece of the
bedstead for a few moments, with his back towards her; then rising
again: "Tell me, tell me! tell me--do you hear?" he cried, rushing up
to her and seizing her by the loose folds of her sleeve.

The superstratum of timidity which often overlies those who are daring
and defiant at heart had been passed through, and the mettlesome
substance of the woman was reached. The red blood inundated her face,
previously so pale.

"What are you going to do?" she said in a low voice, regarding him
with a proud smile. "You will not alarm me by holding on so; but it
would be a pity to tear my sleeve."

Instead of letting go he drew her closer to him. "Tell me the
particulars of--my mother's death," he said in a hard, panting
whisper; "or--I'll--I'll--"

"Clym," she answered slowly, "do you think you dare do anything to
me that I dare not bear? But before you strike me listen. You will
get nothing from me by a blow, even though it should kill me, as it
probably will. But perhaps you do not wish me to speak--killing may
be all you mean?"

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