The Return of the Native - Thomas Hardy (red seas under red skies txt) 📗

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.

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