Return of the Native
by Thomas Hardy
Hypertext Meanings and Commentaries
from the Encyclopedia of the Self
by Mark Zimmerman

PREFACE

The date at which the following events are assumed to
have occurred may be set down as between 1840 and 1850,
when the old watering place herein called "Budmouth" still
retained sufficient afterglow from its Georgian gaiety
and prestige to lend it an absorbing attractiveness to
the romantic and imaginative soul of a lonely dweller inland.

Under the general name of "Egdon Heath," which has been
given to the sombre scene of the story, are united
or typified heaths of various real names, to the number
of at least a dozen; these being virtually one in character
and aspect, though their original unity, or partial unity,
is now somewhat disguised by intrusive strips and slices
brought under the plough with varying degrees of success,
or planted to woodland.

It is pleasant to dream that some spot in the extensive
tract whose southwestern quarter is here described,
may be the heath of that traditionary King of Wessex--Lear.

July, 1895.

         "To sorrow
          I bade good morrow,
And thought to leave her far away behind;
          But cheerly, cheerly,
          She loves me dearly;
She is so constant to me, and so kind.
          I would deceive her,
          And so leave her,
But ah! she is so constant and so kind."

book one

THE THREE WOMEN

1 - A Face on Which Time Makes but Little Impression

A Saturday afternoon in November was approaching the time
of twilight, and the vast tract of unenclosed wild known
as Egdon Heath embrowned itself moment by moment.
Overhead the hollow stretch of whitish cloud shutting
out the sky was as a tent which had the whole heath
for its floor.

The heaven being spread with this pallid screen and the
earth with the darkest vegetation, their meeting-line
at the horizon was clearly marked. In such contrast
the heath wore the appearance of an instalment of night
which had taken up its place before its astronomical hour
was come: darkness had to a great extent arrived hereon,
while day stood distinct in the sky. Looking upwards,
a furze-cutter would have been inclined to continue work;
looking down, he would have decided to finish his
faggot and go home. The distant rims of the world
and of the firmament seemed to be a division in time no
less than a division in matter. The face of the heath
by its mere complexion added half an hour to evening;
it could in like manner retard the dawn, sadden noon,
anticipate the frowning of storms scarcely generated,
and intensify the opacity of a moonless midnight to a cause
of shaking and dread.

In fact, precisely at this transitional point of its
nightly roll into darkness the great and particular glory
of the Egdon waste began, and nobody could be said to
understand the heath who had not been there at such a time.
It could best be felt when it could not clearly be seen,
its complete effect and explanation lying in this and the
succeeding hours before the next dawn; then, and only then,
did it tell its true tale. The spot was, indeed, a near
relation of night, and when night showed itself an apparent
tendency to gravitate together could be perceived in its
shades and the scene. The sombre stretch of rounds
and hollows seemed to rise and meet the evening gloom
in pure sympathy, the heath exhaling darkness as rapidly
as the heavens precipitated it. And so the obscurity
in the air and the obscurity in the land closed together
in a black fraternization towards which each advanced halfway.

The place became full of a watchful intentness now;
for when other things sank blooding to sleep the heath
appeared slowly to awake and listen. Every night
its Titanic form seemed to await something; but it
had waited thus, unmoved, during so many centuries,
through the crises of so many things, that it could only
be imagined to await one last crisis--the final overthrow.

It was a spot which returned upon the memory of those who
loved it with an aspect of peculiar and kindly congruity.
Smiling champaigns of flowers and fruit hardly do this,
for they are permanently harmonious only with an existence
of better reputation as to its issues than the present.
Twilight combined with the scenery of Egdon Heath
to evolve a thing majestic without severity, impressive
without showiness, emphatic in its admonitions, grand in
its simplicity. The qualifications which frequently
invest the facade of a prison with far more dignity
than is found in the facade of a palace double its size
lent to this heath a sublimity in which spots renowned
for beauty of the accepted kind are utterly wanting.
Fair prospects wed happily with fair times; but alas,
if times be not fair! Men have oftener suffered from,
the mockery of a place too smiling for their reason than
from the oppression of surroundings oversadly tinged.
Haggard Egdon appealed to a subtler and scarcer instinct,
to a more recently learnt emotion, than that which responds
to the sort of beauty called charming and fair.

Indeed, it is a question if the exclusive reign of this
orthodox beauty is not approaching its last quarter.
The new Vale of Tempe may be a gaunt waste in Thule;
human souls may find themselves in closer and closer harmony
with external things wearing a sombreness distasteful
to our race when it was young. The time seems near,
if it has not actually arrived, when the chastened
sublimity of a moor, a sea, or a mountain will be all
of nature that is absolutely in keeping with the moods
of the more thinking among mankind. And ultimately,
to the commonest tourist, spots like Iceland may become
what the vineyards and myrtle gardens of South Europe
are to him now; and Heidelberg and Baden be passed
unheeded as he hastens from the Alps to the sand dunes
of Scheveningen.

The most thoroughgoing ascetic could feel that he had
a natural right to wander on Egdon--he was keeping within
the line of legitimate indulgence when he laid himself
open to influences such as these. Colours and beauties
so far subdued were, at least, the birthright of all.
Only in summer days of highest feather did its mood
touch the level of gaiety. Intensity was more usually
reached by way of the solemn than by way of the brilliant,
and such a sort of intensity was often arrived at during
winter darkness, tempests, and mists. Then Egdon was aroused
to reciprocity; for the storm was its lover, and the wind
its friend. Then it became the home of strange phantoms;
and it was found to be the hitherto unrecognized original
of those wild regions of obscurity which are vaguely felt
to be compassing us about in midnight dreams of flight
and disaster, and are never thought of after the dream
till revived by scenes like this.

It was at present a place perfectly accordant with
man's nature--neither ghastly, hateful, nor ugly;
neither commonplace, unmeaning, nor tame; but, like man,
slighted and enduring; and withal singularly colossal
and mysterious in its swarthy monotony. As with some
persons who have long lived apart, solitude seemed
to look out of its countenance. It had a lonely face,
suggesting tragical possibilities.

This obscure, obsolete, superseded country figures in Domesday.
Its condition is recorded therein as that of heathy, furzy,
briary wilderness--"Bruaria."  Then follows the length
and breadth in leagues; and, though some uncertainty exists
as to the exact extent of this ancient lineal measure,
it appears from the figures that the area of Egdon
down to the present day has but little diminished.
"Turbaria Bruaria"--the right of cutting heath-turf--occurs
in charters relating to the district. "Overgrown with
heth and mosse," says Leland of the same dark sweep of country.

Here at least were intelligible facts regarding
landscape--far-reaching proofs productive of genuine
satisfaction. The untameable, Ishmaelitish thing that Egdon
now was it always had been. Civilization was its enemy;
and ever since the beginning of vegetation its soil
had worn the same antique brown dress, the natural
and invariable garment of the particular formation.
In its venerable one coat lay a certain vein of satire
on human vanity in clothes. A person on a heath in
raiment of modern cut and colours has more or less an
anomalous look. We seem to want the oldest and simplest
human clothing where the clothing of the earth is so primitive.

To recline on a stump of thorn in the central valley
of Egdon, between afternoon and night, as now, where the
eye could reach nothing of the world outside the summits
and shoulders of heathland which filled the whole
circumference of its glance, and to know that everything
around and underneath had been from prehistoric times as
unaltered as the stars overhead, gave ballast to the mind
adrift on change, and harassed by the irrepressible New.
The great inviolate place had an ancient permanence which
the sea cannot claim. Who can say of a particular sea
that it is old? Distilled by the sun, kneaded by the moon,
it is renewed in a year, in a day, or in an hour.
The sea changed, the fields changed, the rivers,
the villages, and the people changed, yet Egdon remained.
Those surfaces were neither so steep as to be destructible
by weather, nor so flat as to be the victims of floods
and deposits. With the exception of an aged highway,
and a still more aged barrow presently to be referred
to--themselves almost crystallized to natural products
by long continuance--even the trifling irregularities
were not caused by pickaxe, plough, or spade, but remained
as the very finger-touches of the last geological change.

The above-mentioned highway traversed the lower levels
of the heath, from one horizon to another. In many
portions of its course it overlaid an old vicinal way,
which branched from the great Western road of the Romans,
the Via Iceniana, or Ikenild Street, hard by.
On the evening under consideration it would have been
noticed that, though the gloom had increased sufficiently
to confuse the minor features of the heath, the white
surface of the road remained almost as clear as ever.

2 - Humanity Appears upon the Scene, Hand in Hand with Trouble

Along the road walked an old man. He was white-headed
as a mountain, bowed in the shoulders, and faded
in general aspect. He wore a glazed hat, an ancient
boat-cloak, and shoes; his brass buttons bearing an
anchor upon their face. In his hand was a silver-headed
walking stick, which he used as a veritable third leg,
perseveringly dotting the ground with its point at every
few inches' interval. One would have said that he had been,
in his day, a naval officer of some sort or other.

Before him stretched the long, laborious road, dry, empty,
and white. It was quite open to the heath on each side,
and bisected that vast dark surface like the parting-line
on a head of black hair, diminishing and bending away
on the furthest horizon.

The old man frequently stretched his eyes ahead to gaze
over the tract that he had yet to traverse. At length
he discerned, a long distance in front of him, a moving spot,
which appeared to be a vehicle, and it proved to be going
the same way as that in which he himself was journeying.
It was the single atom of life that the scene contained,
and it only served to render the general loneliness
more evident. Its rate of advance was slow, and the old
man gained upon it sensibly.

When he drew nearer he perceived it to be a spring van,
ordinary in shape, but singular in colour, this being a
lurid red. The driver walked beside it; and, like his van,
he was completely red. One dye of that tincture covered
his clothes, the cap upon his head, his boots, his face,
and his hands. He was not temporarily overlaid with
the colour; it permeated him.

The old man knew the meaning of this. The traveller
with the cart was a reddleman--a person whose vocation
it was to supply farmers with redding for their sheep.
He was one of a class rapidly becoming extinct in Wessex,
filling at present in the rural world the place which,
during the last century, the dodo occupied in the world
of animals. He is a curious, interesting, and nearly
perished link between obsolete forms of life and those which
generally prevail.

The decayed officer, by degrees, came up alongside his
fellow-wayfarer, and wished him good evening. The reddleman
turned his head, and replied in sad and occupied tones.
He was young, and his face, if not exactly handsome,
approached so near to handsome that nobody would have
contradicted an assertion that it really was so in its
natural colour. His eye, which glared so strangely
through his stain, was in itself attractive--keen
as that of a bird of prey, and blue as autumn mist.
He had neither whisker nor moustache, which allowed the soft
curves of the lower part of his face to be apparent.
His lips were thin, and though, as it seemed, compressed
by thought, there was a pleasant twitch at their corners
now and then. He was clothed throughout in a tight-fitting
suit of corduroy, excellent in quality, not much worn,
and well-chosen for its purpose, but deprived of its
original colour by his trade. It showed to advantage the
good shape of his figure. A certain well-to-do air about
the man suggested that he was not poor for his degree.
The natural query of an observer would have been,
Why should such a promising being as this have hidden
his prepossessing exterior by adopting that singular occupation?

After replying to the old man's greeting he showed no
inclination to continue in talk, although they still
walked side by side, for the elder traveller seemed
to desire company. There were no sounds but that of the
booming wind upon the stretch of tawny herbage around them,
the crackling wheels, the tread of the men, and the
footsteps of the two shaggy ponies which drew the van.
They were small, hardy animals, of a breed between Galloway
and Exmoor, and were known as "heath-croppers" here.

Now, as they thus pursued their way, the reddleman occasionally
left his companion's side, and, stepping behind the van,
looked into its interior through a small window. The look
was always anxious. He would then return to the old man,
who made another remark about the state of the country
and so on, to which the reddleman again abstractedly
replied, and then again they would lapse into silence.
The silence conveyed to neither any sense of awkwardness;
in these lonely places wayfarers, after a first greeting,
frequently plod on for miles without speech; contiguity amounts
to a tacit conversation where, otherwise than in cities,
such contiguity can be put an end to on the merest inclination,
and where not to put an end to it is intercourse in itself.

Possibly these two might not have spoken again till their parting,
had it not been for the reddleman's visits to his van.
When he returned from his fifth time of looking in the old
man said, "You have something inside there besides your load?"

"Yes."

"Somebody who wants looking after?"

"Yes."

Not long after this a faint cry sounded from the interior.
The reddleman hastened to the back, looked in, and came
away again.

"You have a child there, my man?"

"No, sir, I have a woman."

"The deuce you have! Why did she cry out?"

"Oh, she has fallen asleep, and not being used to traveling,
she's uneasy, and keeps dreaming."

"A young woman?"

"Yes, a young woman."

"That would have interested me forty years ago.
Perhaps she's your wife?"

"My wife!" said the other bitterly. "She's above mating
with such as I. But there's no reason why I should tell
you about that."

"That's true. And there's no reason why you should not.
What harm can I do to you or to her?"

The reddleman looked in the old man's face. "Well, sir,"
he said at last, "I knew her before today, though perhaps
it would have been better if I had not. But she's
nothing to me, and I am nothing to her; and she wouldn't
have been in my van if any better carriage had been there
to take her."

"Where, may I ask?"

"At Anglebury."

"I know the town well. What was she doing there?"

"Oh, not much--to gossip about. However, she's tired to death now,
and not at all well, and that's what makes her so restless.
She dropped off into a nap about an hour ago, and 'twill do her good."

"A nice-looking girl, no doubt?"

"You would say so."

The other traveller turned his eyes with interest
towards the van window, and, without withdrawing them,
said, "I presume I might look in upon her?"

"No," said the reddleman abruptly. "It is getting too
dark for you to see much of her; and, more than that,
I have no right to allow you. Thank God she sleeps so well,
I hope she won't wake till she's home."

"Who is she? One of the neighbourhood?"

"'Tis no matter who, excuse me."

"It is not that girl of Blooms-End, who has been talked
about more or less lately? If so, I know her; and I can
guess what has happened."

"'Tis no matter....Now, sir, I am sorry to say that we
shall soon have to part company. My ponies are tired,
and I have further to go, and I am going to rest them
under this bank for an hour."

The elder traveller nodded his head indifferently,
and the reddleman turned his horses and van in upon
the turf, saying, "Good night."  The old man replied,
and proceeded on his way as before.

The reddleman watched his form as it diminished to a
speck on the road and became absorbed in the thickening
films of night. He then took some hay from a truss
which was slung up under the van, and, throwing a portion
of it in front of the horses, made a pad of the rest,
which he laid on the ground beside his vehicle.
Upon this he sat down, leaning his back against the wheel.
From the interior a low soft breathing came to his ear.
It appeared to satisfy him, and he musingly surveyed
the scene, as if considering the next step that he
should take.

To do things musingly, and by small degrees, seemed, indeed,
to be a duty in the Egdon valleys at this transitional hour,
for there was that in the condition of the heath itself
which resembled protracted and halting dubiousness.
It was the quality of the repose appertaining to the scene.
This was not the repose of actual stagnation, but the
apparent repose of incredible slowness. A condition
of healthy life so nearly resembling the torpor of death
is a noticeable thing of its sort; to exhibit the inertness
of the desert, and at the same time to be exercising powers
akin to those of the meadow, and even of the forest,
awakened in those who thought of it the attentiveness
usually engendered by understatement and reserve.

The scene before the reddleman's eyes was a gradual series
of ascents from the level of the road backward into the
heart of the heath. It embraced hillocks, pits, ridges,
acclivities, one behind the other, till all was finished
by a high hill cutting against the still light sky.
The traveller's eye hovered about these things for a time,
and finally settled upon one noteworthy object up there.
It was a barrow. This bossy projection of earth above
its natural level occupied the loftiest ground of the
loneliest height that the heath contained. Although from
the vale it appeared but as a wart on an Atlantean brow,
its actual bulk was great. It formed the pole and axis
of this heathery world.

As the resting man looked at the barrow he became aware
that its summit, hitherto the highest object in the whole
prospect round, was surmounted by something higher. It rose
from the semiglobular mound like a spike from a helmet.
The first instinct of an imaginative stranger might have
been to suppose it the person of one of the Celts who
built the barrow, so far had all of modern date withdrawn
from the scene. It seemed a sort of last man among them,
musing for a moment before dropping into eternal night
with the rest of his race.

There the form stood, motionless as the hill beneath.
Above the plain rose the hill, above the hill rose
the barrow, and above the barrow rose the figure.
Above the figure was nothing that could be mapped elsewhere
than on a celestial globe.

Such a perfect, delicate, and necessary finish did
the figure give to the dark pile of hills that it seemed
to be the only obvious justification of their outline.
Without it, there was the dome without the lantern; with it
the architectural demands of the mass were satisfied.
The scene was strangely homogeneous, in that the vale,
the upland, the barrow, and the figure above it amounted
only to unity. Looking at this or that member of the group
was not observing a complete thing, but a fraction of
a thing.

The form was so much like an organic part of the
entire motionless structure that to see it move would
have impressed the mind as a strange phenomenon.
Immobility being the chief characteristic of that whole
which the person formed portion of, the discontinuance
of immobility in any quarter suggested confusion.

Yet that is what happened. The figure perceptibly gave
up its fixity, shifted a step or two, and turned round.
As if alarmed, it descended on the right side of the barrow,
with the glide of a water-drop down a bud, and then vanished.
The movement had been sufficient to show more clearly
the characteristics of the figure, and that it was a
woman's.

The reason of her sudden displacement now appeared.
With her dropping out of sight on the right side, a newcomer,
bearing a burden, protruded into the sky on the left side,
ascended the tumulus, and deposited the burden on the top.
A second followed, then a third, a fourth, a fifth,
and ultimately the whole barrow was peopled with
burdened figures.

The only intelligible meaning in this sky-backed pantomime
of silhouettes was that the woman had no relation to the forms
who had taken her place, was sedulously avoiding these,
and had come thither for another object than theirs.
The imagination of the observer clung by preference
to that vanished, solitary figure, as to something
more interesting, more important, more likely to have a
history worth knowing than these newcomers, and unconsciously
regarded them as intruders. But they remained,
and established themselves; and the lonely person who hitherto
had been queen of the solitude did not at present seem likely
to return.

3 - The Custom of the Country

Had a looker-on been posted in the immediate vicinity
of the barrow, he would have learned that these persons
were boys and men of the neighbouring hamlets.
Each, as he ascended the barrow, had been heavily laden
with furze faggots, carried upon the shoulder by means
of a long stake sharpened at each end for impaling them
easily--two in front and two behind. They came from
a part of the heath a quarter of a mile to the rear,
where furze almost exclusively prevailed as a product.

Every individual was so involved in furze by his method
of carrying the faggots that he appeared like a bush on
legs till he had thrown them down. The party had marched
in trail, like a travelling flock of sheep; that is to say,
the strongest first, the weak and young behind.

The loads were all laid together, and a pyramid of furze
thirty feet in circumference now occupied the crown
of the tumulus, which was known as Rainbarrow for many
miles round. Some made themselves busy with matches,
and in selecting the driest tufts of furze, others in
loosening the bramble bonds which held the faggots together.
Others, again, while this was in progress, lifted their
eyes and swept the vast expanse of country commanded
by their position, now lying nearly obliterated by shade.
In the valleys of the heath nothing save its own wild
face was visible at any time of day; but this spot
commanded a horizon enclosing a tract of far extent,
and in many cases lying beyond the heath country.
None of its features could be seen now, but the whole
made itself felt as a vague stretch of remoteness.

While the men and lads were building the pile,
a change took place in the mass of shade which denoted
the distant landscape. Red suns and tufts of fire one
by one began to arise, flecking the whole country round.
They were the bonfires of other parishes and hamlets
that were engaged in the same sort of commemoration.
Some were distant, and stood in a dense atmosphere,
so that bundles of pale straw-like beams radiated around
them in the shape of a fan. Some were large and near,
glowing scarlet-red from the shade, like wounds in a black hide.
Some were Maenades, with winy faces and blown hair.
These tinctured the silent bosom of the clouds above
them and lit up their ephemeral caves, which seemed
thenceforth to become scalding caldrons. Perhaps as many
as thirty bonfires could be counted within the whole
bounds of the district; and as the hour may be told on
a clock-face when the figures themselves are invisible,
so did the men recognize the locality of each fire by its
angle and direction, though nothing of the scenery could
be viewed.

The first tall flame from Rainbarrow sprang into the sky,
attracting all eyes that had been fixed on the distant
conflagrations back to their own attempt in the same kind.
The cheerful blaze streaked the inner surface of the human
circle--now increased by other stragglers, male and female--with
its own gold livery, and even overlaid the dark turf
around with a lively luminousness, which softened off into
obscurity where the barrow rounded downwards out of sight.
It showed the barrow to be the segment of a globe,
as perfect as on the day when it was thrown up, even the
little ditch remaining from which the earth was dug.
Not a plough had ever disturbed a grain of that stubborn soil.
In the heath's barrenness to the farmer lay its fertility
to the historian. There had been no obliteration,
because there had been no tending.

It seemed as if the bonfire-makers were standing in some
radiant upper story of the world, detached from and
independent of the dark stretches below. The heath down
there was now a vast abyss, and no longer a continuation
of what they stood on; for their eyes, adapted to the blaze,
could see nothing of the deeps beyond its influence.
Occasionally, it is true, a more vigorous flare than usual
from their faggots sent darting lights like aides-de-camp
down the inclines to some distant bush, pool, or patch
of white sand, kindling these to replies of the same colour,
till all was lost in darkness again. Then the whole black
phenomenon beneath represented Limbo as viewed from the brink
by the sublime Florentine in his vision, and the muttered
articulations of the wind in the hollows were as complaints
and petitions from the "souls of mighty worth" suspended therein.

It was as if these men and boys had suddenly dived into
past ages, and fetched therefrom an hour and deed which had
before been familiar with this spot. The ashes of the
original British pyre which blazed from that summit lay
fresh and undisturbed in the barrow beneath their tread.
The flames from funeral piles long ago kindled there had
shone down upon the lowlands as these were shining now.
Festival fires to Thor and Woden had followed on the same
ground and duly had their day. Indeed, it is pretty
well known that such blazes as this the heathmen were now
enjoying are rather the lineal descendants from jumbled
Druidical rites and Saxon ceremonies than the invention
of popular feeling about Gunpowder Plot.

Moreover to light a fire is the instinctive and resistant
act of man when, at the winter ingress, the curfew is
sounded throughout Nature. It indicates a spontaneous,
Promethean rebelliousness against that fiat that this
recurrent season shall bring foul times, cold darkness,
misery and death. Black chaos comes, and the fettered gods
of the earth say, Let there be light.

The brilliant lights and sooty shades which struggled
upon the skin and clothes of the persons standing round
caused their lineaments and general contours to be drawn
with Dureresque vigour and dash. Yet the permanent moral
expression of each face it was impossible to discover,
for as the nimble flames towered, nodded, and swooped
through the surrounding air, the blots of shade and flakes
of light upon the countenances of the group changed shape
and position endlessly. All was unstable; quivering as leaves,
evanescent as lightning. Shadowy eye-sockets, deep
as those of a death's head, suddenly turned into pits of
lustre: a lantern-jaw was cavernous, then it was shining;
wrinkles were emphasized to ravines, or obliterated
entirely by a changed ray. Nostrils were dark wells;
sinews in old necks were gilt mouldings; things with no
particular polish on them were glazed; bright objects,
such as the tip of a furze-hook one of the men carried,
were as glass; eyeballs glowed like little lanterns.
Those whom Nature had depicted as merely quaint
became grotesque, the grotesque became preternatural;
for all was in extremity.

Hence it may be that the face of an old man, who had like
others been called to the heights by the rising flames,
was not really the mere nose and chin that it appeared
to be, but an appreciable quantity of human countenance.
He stood complacently sunning himself in the heat.
With a speaker, or stake, he tossed the outlying scraps of fuel
into the conflagration, looking at the midst of the pile,
occasionally lifting his eyes to measure the height
of the flame, or to follow the great sparks which rose
with it and sailed away into darkness. The beaming sight,
and the penetrating warmth, seemed to breed in him a
cumulative cheerfulness, which soon amounted to delight.
With his stick in his hand he began to jig a private minuet,
a bunch of copper seals shining and swinging like a
pendulum from under his waistcoat: he also began to sing,
in the voice of a bee up a flue--

  "The king' call'd down' his no-bles all',
     By one', by two', by three';
  Earl Mar'-shal, I'll' go shrive'-the queen',
     And thou' shalt wend' with me'.

  "A boon', a boon', quoth Earl' Mar-shal',
     And fell' on his bend'-ded knee',
  That what'-so-e'er' the queen' shall say',
     No harm' there-of' may be'."

Want of breath prevented a continuance of the song;
and the breakdown attracted the attention of a firm-
standing man of middle age, who kept each corner of his
crescent-shaped mouth rigorously drawn back into his cheek,
as if to do away with any suspicion of mirthfulness
which might erroneously have attached to him.

"A fair stave, Grandfer Cantle; but I am afeard 'tis too
much for the mouldy weasand of such a old man as you,"
he said to the wrinkled reveller. "Dostn't wish th'
wast three sixes again, Grandfer, as you was when you first
learnt to sing it?"

"Hey?" said Grandfer Cantle, stopping in his dance.

"Dostn't wish wast young again, I say? There's a hole
in thy poor bellows nowadays seemingly."

"But there's good art in me? If I couldn't make
a little wind go a long ways I should seem no younger
than the most aged man, should I, Timothy?"

"And how about the new-married folks down there at the
Quiet Woman Inn?" the other inquired, pointing towards
a dim light in the direction of the distant highway,
but considerably apart from where the reddleman was at
that moment resting. "What's the rights of the matter
about 'em? You ought to know, being an understanding man."

"But a little rakish, hey? I own to it. Master Cantle
is that, or he's nothing. Yet 'tis a gay fault,
neigbbour Fairway, that age will cure."

"I heard that they were coming home tonight. By this
time they must have come. What besides?"

"The next thing is for us to go and wish 'em joy,
I suppose?"

"Well, no."

"No? Now, I thought we must. I must, or 'twould be
very unlike me--the first in every spree that's going!

  "Do thou' put on' a fri'-ar's coat',
     And I'll' put on' a-no'-ther,
  And we' will to' Queen Ele'anor go',
     Like Fri'ar and' his bro'ther.

I met Mis'ess Yeobright, the young bride's aunt,
last night, and she told me that her son Clym was coming
home a' Christmas. Wonderful clever, 'a believe--ah, I
should like to have all that's under that young man's hair.
Well, then, I spoke to her in my well-known merry way,
and she said, 'O that what's shaped so venerable should
talk like a fool!'--that's what she said to me. I don't
care for her, be jowned if I do, and so I told her.
'Be jowned if I care for 'ee,' I said. I had her there--hey?"

"I rather think she had you," said Fairway.

"No," said Grandfer Cantle, his countenance slightly flagging.
"'Tisn't so bad as that with me?"

"Seemingly 'tis, however, is it because of the wedding
that Clym is coming home a' Christmas--to make a new
arrangement because his mother is now left in the house alone?"

"Yes, yes--that's it. But, Timothy, hearken to me,"
said the Grandfer earnestly. "Though known as such a joker,
I be an understanding man if you catch me serious, and I am
serious now. I can tell 'ee lots about the married couple.
Yes, this morning at six o'clock they went up the country
to do the job, and neither vell nor mark have been seen
of 'em since, though I reckon that this afternoon has
brought 'em home again man and woman--wife, that is.
Isn't it spoke like a man, Timothy, and wasn't Mis'ess
Yeobright wrong about me?"

"Yes, it will do. I didn't know the two had walked
together since last fall, when her aunt forbad the banns.
How long has this new set-to been in mangling then? Do
you know, Humphrey?"

"Yes, how long?" said Grandfer Cantle smartly,
likewise turning to Humphrey. "I ask that question."

"Ever since her aunt altered her mind, and said she might have
the man after all," replied Humphrey, without removing his
eyes from the fire. He was a somewhat solemn young fellow,
and carried the hook and leather gloves of a furze-cutter,
his legs, by reason of that occupation, being sheathed
in bulging leggings as stiff as the Philistine's greaves
of brass. "That's why they went away to be married,
I count. You see, after kicking up such a nunny-watch
and forbidding the banns 'twould have made Mis'ess
Yeobright seem foolish-like to have a banging wedding
in the same parish all as if she'd never gainsaid it."

"Exactly--seem foolish-like; and that's very bad for the
poor things that be so, though I only guess as much,
to be sure," said Grandfer Cantle, still strenuously
preserving a sensible bearing and mien.

"Ah, well, I was at church that day," said Fairway,
"which was a very curious thing to happen."

"If 'twasn't my name's Simple," said the
Grandfer emphatically. "I ha'n't been there to-year;
and now the winter is a-coming on I won't say I shall."

"I ha'n't been these three years," said Humphrey;
"for I'm so dead sleepy of a Sunday; and 'tis so terrible
far to get there; and when you do get there 'tis such
a mortal poor chance that you'll be chose for up above,
when so many bain't, that I bide at home and don't go
at all."

"I not only happened to be there," said Fairway,
with a fresh collection of emphasis, "but I was sitting
in the same pew as Mis'ess Yeobright. And though you
may not see it as such, it fairly made my blood run
cold to hear her. Yes, it is a curious thing; but it
made my blood run cold, for I was close at her elbow."
The speaker looked round upon the bystanders, now drawing
closer to hear him, with his lips gathered tighter than
ever in the rigorousness of his descriptive moderation.

"'Tis a serious job to have things happen to 'ee there,"
said a woman behind.

"'Ye are to declare it,' was the parson's words,"
Fairway continued. "And then up stood a woman at my
side--a-touching of me. 'Well, be damned if there isn't Mis'ess
Yeobright a-standing up,' I said to myself. Yes, neighbours,
though I was in the temple of prayer that's what I said.
'Tis against my conscience to curse and swear in company,
and I hope any woman here will overlook it. Still what
I did say I did say, and 'twould be a lie if I didn't own it."

"So 'twould, neighbour Fairway."

"'Be damned if there isn't Mis'ess Yeobright a-standing up,'
I said," the narrator repeated, giving out the bad word
with the same passionless severity of face as before,
which proved how entirely necessity and not gusto had to
do with the iteration. "And the next thing I heard was,
'I forbid the banns,' from her. 'I'll speak to you
after the service,' said the parson, in quite a homely
way--yes, turning all at once into a common man no holier
than you or I. Ah, her face was pale! Maybe you can
call to mind that monument in Weatherbury church--the
cross-legged soldier that have had his arm knocked away
by the schoolchildren? Well, he would about have matched
that woman's face, when she said, 'I forbid the banns.'"

The audience cleared their throats and tossed a few stalks
into the fire, not because these deeds were urgent,
but to give themselves time to weigh the moral of the story.

"I'm sure when I heard they'd been forbid I felt as glad
as if anybody had gied me sixpence," said an earnest
voice--that of Olly Dowden, a woman who lived by making
heath brooms, or besoms. Her nature was to be civil
to enemies as well as to friends, and grateful to all
the world for letting her remain alive.

"And now the maid have married him just the same,"
said Humphrey.

"After that Mis'ess Yeobright came round and was
quite agreeable," Fairway resumed, with an unheeding air,
to show that his words were no appendage to Humphrey's,
but the result of independent reflection.

"Supposing they were ashamed, I don't see why they shouldn't
have done it here-right," said a wide-spread woman whose
stays creaked like shoes whenever she stooped or turned.
"'Tis well to call the neighbours together and to hae
a good racket once now and then; and it may as well be
when there's a wedding as at tide-times. I don't care
for close ways."

"Ah, now, you'd hardly believe it, but I don't care
for gay weddings," said Timothy Fairway, his eyes again
travelling round. "I hardly blame Thomasin Yeobright and
neighbour Wildeve for doing it quiet, if I must own it.
A wedding at home means five and six-handed reels by the hour;
and they do a man's legs no good when he's over forty."

"True. Once at the woman's house you can hardly say nay
to being one in a jig, knowing all the time that you
be expected to make yourself worth your victuals."

"You be bound to dance at Christmas because 'tis the time o'
year; you must dance at weddings because 'tis the time o' life.
At christenings folk will even smuggle in a reel or two,
if 'tis no further on than the first or second chiel.
And this is not naming the songs you've got to sing....For
my part I like a good hearty funeral as well as anything.
You've as splendid victuals and drink as at other parties,
and even better. And it don't wear your legs to stumps
in talking over a poor fellow's ways as it do to stand up
in hornpipes."

"Nine folks out of ten would own 'twas going too far
to dance then, I suppose?" suggested Grandfer Cantle.

"'Tis the only sort of party a staid man can feel safe
at after the mug have been round a few times."

"Well, I can't understand a quiet ladylike little body like
Tamsin Yeobright caring to be married in such a mean way,"
said Susan Nunsuch, the wide woman, who preferred the
original subject. "'Tis worse than the poorest do.
And I shouldn't have cared about the man, though some
may say he's good-looking."

"To give him his due he's a clever, learned fellow in his
way--a'most as clever as Clym Yeobright used to be.
He was brought up to better things than keeping the
Quiet Woman. An engineer--that's what the man was,
as we know; but he threw away his chance, and so 'a took
a public house to live. His learning was no use to him
at all."

"Very often the case," said Olly, the besom-maker. "And yet
how people do strive after it and get it! The class of folk
that couldn't use to make a round O to save their bones from
the pit can write their names now without a sputter of the pen,
oftentimes without a single blot--what do I say?--why,
almost without a desk to lean their stomachs and elbows upon."

"True--'tis amazing what a polish the world have been
brought to," said Humphrey.

"Why, afore I went a soldier in the Bang-up Locals (as
we was called), in the year four," chimed in Grandfer
Cantle brightly, "I didn't know no more what the world
was like than the commonest man among ye. And now,
jown it all, I won't say what I bain't fit for, hey?"

"Couldst sign the book, no doubt," said Fairway, "if wast
young enough to join hands with a woman again, like Wildeve
and Mis'ess Tamsin, which is more than Humph there could do,
for he follows his father in learning. Ah, Humph, well I
can mind when I was married how I zid thy father's mark
staring me in the face as I went to put down my name.
He and your mother were the couple married just afore we
were and there stood they father's cross with arms stretched
out like a great banging scarecrow. What a terrible
black cross that was--thy father's very likeness in en!
To save my soul I couldn't help laughing when I zid en,
though all the time I was as hot as dog-days, what with
the marrying, and what with the woman a-hanging to me,
and what with Jack Changley and a lot more chaps grinning
at me through church window. But the next moment a
strawmote would have knocked me down, for I called to mind
that if thy father and mother had had high words once,
they'd been at it twenty times since they'd been man
and wife, and I zid myself as the next poor stunpoll
to get into the same mess....Ah--well, what a day 'twas!"

"Wildeve is older than Tamsin Yeobright by a good-few summers.
A pretty maid too she is. A young woman with a home
must be a fool to tear her smock for a man like that."

The speaker, a peat- or turf-cutter, who had newly
joined the group, carried across his shoulder
the singular heart-shaped spade of large dimensions
used in that species of labour, and its well-whetted
edge gleamed like a silver bow in the beams of the fire.

"A hundred maidens would have had him if he'd asked 'em,"
said the wide woman.

"Didst ever know a man, neighbour, that no woman at all
would marry?" inquired Humphrey.

"I never did," said the turf-cutter.

"Nor I," said another.

"Nor I," said Grandfer Cantle.

"Well, now, I did once," said Timothy Fairway, adding more
firmness to one of his legs. "I did know of such a man.
But only once, mind."  He gave his throat a thorough rake round,
as if it were the duty of every person not to be mistaken
through thickness of voice. "Yes, I knew of such a man,"
he said.

"And what ghastly gallicrow might the poor fellow have
been like, Master Fairway?" asked the turf-cutter.

"Well, 'a was neither a deaf man, nor a dumb man,
nor a blind man. What 'a was I don't say."

"Is he known in these parts?" said Olly Dowden.

"Hardly," said Timothy; "but I name no name....Come,
keep the fire up there, youngsters."

"Whatever is Christian Cantle's teeth a-chattering for?"
said a boy from amid the smoke and shades on the other side
of the blaze. "Be ye a-cold, Christian?"

A thin jibbering voice was heard to reply, "No, not at all."

"Come forward, Christian, and show yourself. I didn't
know you were here," said Fairway, with a humane look
across towards that quarter.

Thus requested, a faltering man, with reedy hair,
no shoulders, and a great quantity of wrist and ankle
beyond his clothes, advanced a step or two by his own will,
and was pushed by the will of others half a dozen steps more.
He was Grandfer Cantle's youngest son.

"What be ye quaking for, Christian?" said the turf-
cutter kindly.

"I'm the man."

"What man?"

"The man no woman will marry."

"The deuce you be!" said Timothy Fairway, enlarging his
gaze to cover Christian's whole surface and a great
deal more, Grandfer Cantle meanwhile staring as a hen
stares at the duck she has hatched.

"Yes, I be he; and it makes me afeard," said Christian.
"D'ye think 'twill hurt me? I shall always say I don't care,
and swear to it, though I do care all the while."

"Well, be damned if this isn't the queerest start ever
I know'd," said Mr. Fairway. "I didn't mean you at all.
There's another in the country, then! Why did ye reveal
yer misfortune, Christian?"

"'Twas to be if 'twas, I suppose. I can't help it,
can I?" He turned upon them his painfully circular eyes,
surrounded by concentric lines like targets.

"No, that's true. But 'tis a melancholy thing,
and my blood ran cold when you spoke, for I felt there
were two poor fellows where I had thought only one.
'Tis a sad thing for ye, Christian. How'st know the women
won't hae thee?"

"I've asked 'em."

"Sure I should never have thought you had the face.
Well, and what did the last one say to ye? Nothing
that can't be got over, perhaps, after all?"

"'Get out of my sight, you slack-twisted, slim-looking
maphrotight fool,' was the woman's words to me."

"Not encouraging, I own," said Fairway. "'Get out of
my sight, you slack-twisted, slim-looking maphrotight fool,'
is rather a hard way of saying No. But even that might
be overcome by time and patience, so as to let a few
grey hairs show themselves in the hussy's head.
How old be you, Christian?"

"Thirty-one last tatie-digging, Mister Fairway."

"Not a boy--not a boy. Still there's hope yet."

"That's my age by baptism, because that's put down in the
great book of the Judgment that they keep in church vestry;
but Mother told me I was born some time afore I was christened."

"Ah!"

"But she couldn't tell when, to save her life,
except that there was no moon."

"No moon--that's bad. Hey, neighbours, that's bad for him!"

"Yes, 'tis bad," said Grandfer Cantle, shaking his head.

"Mother know'd 'twas no moon, for she asked another
woman that had an almanac, as she did whenever a boy
was born to her, because of the saying, 'No moon,
no man,' which made her afeard every man-child she had.
Do ye really think it serious, Mister Fairway, that there
was no moon?"

"Yes. 'No moon, no man.' 'Tis one of the truest sayings
ever spit out. The boy never comes to anything that's
born at new moon. A bad job for thee, Christian, that you
should have showed your nose then of all days in the month."

"I suppose the moon was terrible full when you were born?"
said Christian, with a look of hopeless admiration
at Fairway.

"Well, 'a was not new," Mr. Fairway replied, with a
disinterested gaze.

"I'd sooner go without drink at Lammas-tide than be
a man of no moon," continued Christian, in the same
shattered recitative. "'Tis said I be only the rames
of a man, and no good for my race at all; and I suppose
that's the cause o't."

"Ay," said Grandfer Cantle, somewhat subdued in spirit;
"and yet his mother cried for scores of hours when 'a
was a boy, for fear he should outgrow hisself and go for
a soldier."

"Well, there's many just as bad as he."  said Fairway.

"Wethers must live their time as well as other sheep,
poor soul."

"So perhaps I shall rub on? Ought I to be afeared o'
nights, Master Fairway?"

"You'll have to lie alone all your life; and 'tis not to
married couples but to single sleepers that a ghost shows
himself when 'a do come. One has been seen lately, too.
A very strange one."

"No--don't talk about it if 'tis agreeable of ye not to!
'Twill make my skin crawl when I think of it in bed alone.
But you will--ah, you will, I know, Timothy; and I shall
dream all night o't! A very strange one? What sort of
a spirit did ye mean when ye said, a very strange one,
Timothy?--no, no--don't tell me."

"I don't half believe in spirits myself. But I think
it ghostly enough--what I was told. 'Twas a little boy
that zid it."

"What was it like?--no, don't--"

"A red one. Yes, most ghosts be white; but this
is as if it had been dipped in blood."

Christian drew a deep breath without letting it expand
his body, and Humphrey said, "Where has it been seen?"

"Not exactly here; but in this same heth. But 'tisn't
a thing to talk about. What do ye say," continued Fairway
in brisker tones, and turning upon them as if the idea
had not been Grandfer Cantle's--"what do you say to giving
the new man and wife a bit of a song tonight afore we
go to bed--being their wedding-day? When folks are just
married 'tis as well to look glad o't, since looking
sorry won't unjoin 'em. I am no drinker, as we know,
but when the womenfolk and youngsters have gone home we
can drop down across to the Quiet Woman, and strike up
a ballet in front of the married folks' door. 'Twill please
the young wife, and that's what I should like to do,
for many's the skinful I've had at her hands when she
lived with her aunt at Blooms-End."

"Hey? And so we will!" said Grandfer Cantle, turning so
briskly that his copper seals swung extravagantly.
"I'm as dry as a kex with biding up here in the wind,
and I haven't seen the colour of drink since nammet-
time today. 'Tis said that the last brew at the Woman
is very pretty drinking. And, neighbours, if we should be
a little late in the finishing, why, tomorrow's Sunday,
and we can sleep it off?"

"Grandfer Cantle! you take things very careless
for an old man," said the wide woman.

"I take things careless; I do--too careless to please the
women! Klk! I'll sing the 'Jovial Crew,' or any other song,
when a weak old man would cry his eyes out. Jown it;
I am up for anything.

  "The king' look'd o'-ver his left' shoul-der',
    And a grim' look look'-ed hee',
  Earl Mar'-shal, he said', but for' my oath'
    Or hang'-ed thou' shouldst bee'."

"Well, that's what we'll do," said Fairway. "We'll give
'em a song, an' it please the Lord. What's the good of
Thomasin's cousin Clym a-coming home after the deed's done?
He should have come afore, if so be he wanted to stop it,
and marry her himself."

"Perhaps he's coming to bide with his mother a little time,
as she must feel lonely now the maid's gone."

"Now, 'tis very odd, but I never feel lonely--no, not at all,"
said Grandfer Cantle. "I am as brave in the nighttime
as a' admiral!"

The bonfire was by this time beginning to sink low,
for the fuel had not been of that substantial sort which can
support a blaze long. Most of the other fires within the wide
horizon were also dwindling weak. Attentive observation
of their brightness, colour, and length of existence
would have revealed the quality of the material burnt,
and through that, to some extent the natural produce
of the district in which each bonfire was situate.
The clear, kingly effulgence that had characterized the
majority expressed a heath and furze country like their own,
which in one direction extended an unlimited number of miles;
the rapid flares and extinctions at other points of the
compass showed the lightest of fuel--straw, beanstalks,
and the usual waste from arable land. The most enduring
of all--steady unaltering eyes like Planets--signified wood,
such as hazel-branches, thorn-faggots, and stout billets.
Fires of the last-mentioned materials were rare, and though
comparatively small in magnitude beside the transient blazes,
now began to get the best of them by mere long continuance.
The great ones had perished, but these remained.
They occupied the remotest visible positions--sky-backed
summits rising out of rich coppice and plantation districts
to the north, where the soil was different, and heath
foreign and strange.

Save one; and this was the nearest of any, the moon of the
whole shining throng. It lay in a direction precisely
opposite to that of the little window in the vale below.
Its nearness was such that, notwithstanding its
actual smallness, its glow infinitely transcended theirs.

This quiet eye had attracted attention from time to time;
and when their own fire had become sunken and dim it
attracted more; some even of the wood fires more recently
lighted had reached their decline, but no change was
perceptible here.

"To be sure, how near that fire is!" said Fairway.
"Seemingly. I can see a fellow of some sort walking round it.
Little and good must be said of that fire, surely."

"I can throw a stone there," said the boy.

"And so can I!" said Grandfer Cantle.

"No, no, you can't, my sonnies. That fire is not much
less than a mile off, for all that 'a seems so near."

"'Tis in the heath, but no furze," said the turf-cutter.

"'Tis cleft-wood, that's what 'tis," said Timothy Fairway.
"Nothing would burn like that except clean timber. And 'tis
on the knap afore the old captain's house at Mistover.
Such a queer mortal as that man is! To have a little
fire inside your own bank and ditch, that nobody else
may enjoy it or come anigh it! And what a zany an old chap
must be, to light a bonfire when there's no youngsters
to please."

"Cap'n Vye has been for a long walk today, and is quite
tired out," said Grandfer Cantle, "so 'tisn't likely
to be he."

"And he would hardly afford good fuel like that,"
said the wide woman.

"Then it must be his granddaughter," said Fairway.
"Not that a body of her age can want a fire much."

"She is very strange in her ways, living up there by herself,
and such things please her," said Susan.

"She's a well-favoured maid enough," said Humphrey the
furze-cutter, "especially when she's got one of her dandy gowns on."

"That's true," said Fairway. "Well, let her bonfire burn
an't will. Ours is well-nigh out by the look o't."

"How dark 'tis now the fire's gone down!" said Christian Cantle,
looking behind him with his hare eyes. "Don't ye think we'd
better get home-along, neighbours? The heth isn't haunted,
I know; but we'd better get home....Ah, what was that?"

"Only the wind," said the turf-cutter.

"I don't think Fifth-of-Novembers ought to be kept up
by night except in towns. It should be by day in outstep,
ill-accounted places like this!"

"Nonsense, Christian. Lift up your spirits like a man! Susy,
dear, you and I will have a jig--hey, my honey?--before
'tis quite too dark to see how well-favoured you be still,
though so many summers have passed since your husband,
a son of a witch, snapped you up from me."

This was addressed to Susan Nunsuch; and the next
circumstance of which the beholders were conscious
was a vision of the matron's broad form whisking off
towards the space whereon the fire had been kindled.
She was lifted bodily by Mr. Fairway's arm, which had
been flung round her waist before she had become aware
of his intention. The site of the fire was now merely
a circle of ashes flecked with red embers and sparks,
the furze having burnt completely away. Once within
the circle he whirled her round and round in a dance.
She was a woman noisily constructed; in addition to her
enclosing framework of whalebone and lath, she wore
pattens summer and winter, in wet weather and in dry,
to preserve her boots from wear; and when Fairway began
to jump about with her, the clicking of the pattens,
the creaking of the stays, and her screams of surprise,
formed a very audible concert.

"I'll crack thy numskull for thee, you mandy chap!"
said Mrs. Nunsuch, as she helplessly danced round with him,
her feet playing like drumsticks among the sparks.
"My ankles were all in a fever before, from walking
through that prickly furze, and now you must make 'em
worse with these vlankers!"

The vagary of Timothy Fairway was infectious. The turf-cutter
seized old Olly Dowden, and, somewhat more gently,
poussetted with her likewise. The young men were not slow
to imitate the example of their elders, and seized the maids;
Grandfer Cantle and his stick jigged in the form of a
three-legged object among the rest; and in half a minute
all that could be seen on Rainbarrow was a whirling
of dark shapes amid a boiling confusion of sparks,
which leapt around the dancers as high as their waists.
The chief noises were women's shrill cries, men's laughter,
Susan's stays and pattens, Olly Dowden's "heu-heu-heu!"
and the strumming of the wind upon the furze-bushes, which
formed a kind of tune to the demoniac measure they trod.
Christian alone stood aloof, uneasily rocking himself
as he murmured, "They ought not to do it--how the vlankers
do fly! 'tis tempting the Wicked one, 'tis."

"What was that?" said one of the lads, stopping.

"Ah--where?" said Christian, hastily closing up to the rest.

The dancers all lessened their speed.

"'Twas behind you, Christian, that I heard it--down here."

"Yes--'tis behind me!" Christian said. "Matthew, Mark,
Luke, and John, bless the bed that I lie on; four angels guard--"

"Hold your tongue. What is it?" said Fairway.

"Hoi-i-i-i!" cried a voice from the darkness.

"Halloo-o-o-o!" said Fairway.

"Is there any cart track up across here to Mis'ess
Yeobright's, of Blooms-End?" came to them in the same voice,
as a long, slim indistinct figure approached the barrow.

"Ought we not to run home as hard as we can, neighbours,
as 'tis getting late?" said Christian. "Not run away
from one another, you know; run close together, I mean."
"Scrape up a few stray locks of furze, and make a blaze,
so that we can see who the man is," said Fairway.

When the flame arose it revealed a young man in tight
raiment, and red from top to toe. "Is there a track
across here to Mis'ess Yeobright's house?" he repeated.

"Ay--keep along the path down there."

"I mean a way two horses and a van can travel over?"

"Well, yes; you can get up the vale below here with time.
The track is rough, but if you've got a light your horses
may pick along wi' care. Have ye brought your cart far up,
neighbour reddleman?"

"I've left it in the bottom, about half a mile back,
I stepped on in front to make sure of the way, as 'tis
night-time, and I han't been here for so long."

"Oh, well you can get up," said Fairway. "What a turn it
did give me when I saw him!" he added to the whole group,
the reddleman included. "Lord's sake, I thought,
whatever fiery mommet is this come to trouble us? No
slight to your looks, reddleman, for ye bain't bad-looking
in the groundwork, though the finish is queer. My meaning
is just to say how curious I felt. I half thought it
'twas the devil or the red ghost the boy told of."

"It gied me a turn likewise," said Susan Nunsuch, "for I
had a dream last night of a death's head."

"Don't ye talk o't no more," said Christian. "If he had
a handkerchief over his head he'd look for all the world
like the Devil in the picture of the Temptation."

"Well, thank you for telling me," said the young reddleman,
smiling faintly. "And good night t'ye all."

He withdrew from their sight down the barrow.

"I fancy I've seen that young man's face before,"
said Humphrey. "But where, or how, or what his name is,
I don't know."

The reddleman had not been gone more than a few
minutes when another person approached the partially
revived bonfire. It proved to be a well-known and
respected widow of the neighbourhood, of a standing which
can only be expressed by the word genteel. Her face,
encompassed by the blackness of the receding heath,
showed whitely, and with-out half-lights, like a cameo.

She was a woman of middle-age, with well-formed features
of the type usually found where perspicacity is the chief
quality enthroned within. At moments she seemed to be
regarding issues from a Nebo denied to others around.
She had something of an estranged mien; the solitude
exhaled from the heath was concentrated in this face that
had risen from it. The air with which she looked at the
heathmen betokened a certain unconcern at their presence,
or at what might be their opinions of her for walking in
that lonely spot at such an hour, thus indirectly implying
that in some respect or other they were not up to her level.
The explanation lay in the fact that though her husband
had been a small farmer she herself was a curate's daughter,
who had once dreamt of doing better things.

Persons with any weight of character carry, like planets,
their atmospheres along with them in their orbits;
and the matron who entered now upon the scene could,
and usually did, bring her own tone into a company.
Her normal manner among the heathfolk had that reticence
which results from the consciousness of superior
communicative power. But the effect of coming into
society and light after lonely wandering in darkness
is a sociability in the comer above its usual pitch,
expressed in the features even more than in words.

"Why, 'tis Mis'ess Yeobright," said Fairway. "Mis'ess Yeobright,
not ten minutes ago a man was here asking for you--a reddleman."

"What did he want?" said she.

"He didn't tell us."

"Something to sell, I suppose; what it can be I am
at a loss to understand."

"I am glad to hear that your son Mr. Clym is coming home
at Christmas, ma'am," said Sam, the turf-cutter. "What
a dog he used to be for bonfires!"

"Yes. I believe he is coming," she said.

"He must be a fine fellow by this time," said Fairway.

"He is a man now," she replied quietly.

"'Tis very lonesome for 'ee in the heth tonight,
mis'ess," said Christian, coming from the seclusion he
had hitherto maintained. "Mind you don't get lost.
Egdon Heth is a bad place to get lost in, and the winds
do huffle queerer tonight than ever I heard 'em afore.
Them that know Egdon best have been pixy-led here at times."

"Is that you, Christian?" said Mrs. Yeobright.
"What made you hide away from me?"

"'Twas that I didn't know you in this light, mis'ess;
and being a man of the mournfullest make, I was scared
a little, that's all. Oftentimes if you could see
how terrible down I get in my mind, 'twould make
'ee quite nervous for fear I should die by my hand."

"You don't take after your father," said Mrs. Yeobright,
looking towards the fire, where Grandfer Cantle, with some
want of originality, was dancing by himself among the sparks,
as the others had done before.

"Now, Grandfer," said Timothy Fairway, "we are ashamed
of ye. A reverent old patriarch man as you be--seventy
if a day--to go hornpiping like that by yourself!"

"A harrowing old man, Mis'ess Yeobright,"
said Christian despondingly. "I wouldn't
live with him a week, so playward as he is, if I could get away."

"'Twould be more seemly in ye to stand still and welcome
Mis'ess Yeobright, and you the venerablest here,
Grandfer Cantle," said the besom-woman.

"Faith, and so it would," said the reveller checking
himself repentantly. "I've such a bad memory,
Mis'ess Yeobright, that I forget how I'm looked up to
by the rest of 'em. My spirits must be wonderful good,
you'll say? But not always. 'Tis a weight upon a man
to be looked up to as commander, and I often feel it."

"I am sorry to stop the talk," said Mrs. Yeobright. "But I must
be leaving you now. I was passing down the Anglebury Road,
towards my niece's new home, who is returning tonight with
her husband; and seeing the bonfire and hearing Olly's voice
among the rest I came up here to learn what was going on.
I should like her to walk with me, as her way is mine."

"Ay, sure, ma'am, I'm just thinking of moving," said Olly.

"Why, you'll be safe to meet the reddleman that I told ye of,"
said Fairway. "He's only gone back to get his van.
We heard that your niece and her husband were coming
straight home as soon as they were married, and we are
going down there shortly, to give 'em a song o' welcome."

"Thank you indeed," said Mrs. Yeobright.

"But we shall take a shorter cut through the furze than you
can go with long clothes; so we won't trouble you to wait."

"Very well--are you ready, Olly?"

"Yes, ma'am. And there's a light shining from your
niece's window, see. It will help to keep us in the path."

She indicated the faint light at the bottom of the valley
which Fairway had pointed out; and the two women descended
the tumulus.

4 - The Halt on the Turnpike Road

Down, downward they went, and yet further down--their
descent at each step seeming to outmeasure their advance.
Their skirts were scratched noisily by the furze,
their shoulders brushed by the ferns, which, though dead
and dry, stood erect as when alive, no sufficient winter
weather having as yet arrived to beat them down.
Their Tartarean situation might by some have been called
an imprudent one for two unattended women. But these
shaggy recesses were at all seasons a familiar surrounding
to Olly and Mrs. Yeobright; and the addition of darkness
lends no frightfulness to the face of a friend.

"And so Tamsin has married him at last," said Olly,
when the incline had become so much less steep that their
foot-steps no longer required undivided attention.

Mrs. Yeobright answered slowly, "Yes; at last."

"How you will miss her--living with 'ee as a daughter,
as she always have."

"I do miss her."

Olly, though without the tact to perceive when remarks
were untimely, was saved by her very simplicity from
rendering them offensive. Questions that would have
been resented in others she could ask with impunity.
This accounted for Mrs. Yeobright's acquiescence in the
revival of an evidently sore subject.

"I was quite strook to hear you'd agreed to it,
ma'am, that I was," continued the besom-maker.

"You were not more struck by it than I should have been
last year this time, Olly. There are a good many sides
to that wedding. I could not tell you all of them,
even if I tried."

"I felt myself that he was hardly solid-going enough
to mate with your family. Keeping an inn--what is it?
But 'a's clever, that's true, and they say he was an
engineering gentleman once, but has come down by being
too outwardly given."

"I saw that, upon the whole, it would be better she
should marry where she wished."

"Poor little thing, her feelings got the better of her,
no doubt. 'Tis nature. Well, they may call him what they
will--he've several acres of heth-ground broke up here,
besides the public house, and the heth-croppers, and his
manners be quite like a gentleman's. And what's done cannot
be undone."

"It cannot," said Mrs. Yeobright. "See, here's
the wagon-track at last. Now we shall get along better."

The wedding subject was no further dwelt upon;
and soon a faint diverging path was reached, where they
parted company, Olly first begging her companion to remind
Mr. Wildeve that he had not sent her sick husband the
bottle of wine promised on the occasion of his marriage.
The besom-maker turned to the left towards her own house,
behind a spur of the hill, and Mrs. Yeobright followed
the straight track, which further on joined the highway by
the Quiet Woman Inn, whither she supposed her niece to have
returned with Wildeve from their wedding at Anglebury that day.

She first reached Wildeve's Patch, as it was called,
a plot of land redeemed from the heath, and after long
and laborious years brought into cultivation. The man who
had discovered that it could be tilled died of the labour;
the man who succeeded him in possession ruined himself
in fertilizing it. Wildeve came like Amerigo Vespucci,
and received the honours due to those who had gone before.

When Mrs. Yeobright had drawn near to the inn,
and was about to enter, she saw a horse and vehicle
some two hundred yards beyond it, coming towards her,
a man walking alongside with a lantern in his hand.
It was soon evident that this was the reddleman who had
inquired for her. Instead of entering the inn at once,
she walked by it and towards the van.

The conveyance came close, and the man was about to pass
her with little notice, when she turned to him and said,
"I think you have been inquiring for me? I am Mrs. Yeobright
of Blooms-End."

The reddleman started, and held up his finger.
He stopped the horses, and beckoned to her to withdraw
with him a few yards aside, which she did, wondering.

"You don't know me, ma'am, I suppose?" he said.

"I do not," said she. "Why, yes, I do! You are young
Venn--your father was a dairyman somewhere here?"

"Yes; and I knew your niece, Miss Tamsin, a little.
I have something bad to tell you."

"About her--no! She has just come home, I believe,
with her husband. They arranged to return this
afternoon--to the inn beyond here."

"She's not there."

"How do you know?"

"Because she's here. She's in my van," he added slowly.

"What new trouble has come?" murmured Mrs. Yeobright,
putting her hand over her eyes.

"I can't explain much, ma'am. All I know is that, as I
was going along the road this morning, about a mile out
of Anglebury, I heard something trotting after me like a doe,
and looking round there she was, white as death itself.
'Oh, Diggory Venn!' she said, 'I thought 'twas you--will
you help me? I am in trouble.'"

"How did she know your Christian name?" said Mrs. Yeobright
doubtingly.

"I had met her as a lad before I went away in this trade.
She asked then if she might ride, and then down she fell
in a faint. I picked her up and put her in, and there
she has been ever since. She has cried a good deal,
but she has hardly spoke; all she has told me being
that she was to have been married this morning.
I tried to get her to eat something, but she couldn't;
and at last she fell asleep."

"Let me see her at once," said Mrs. Yeobright,
hastening towards the van.

The reddleman followed with the lantern, and, stepping
up first, assisted Mrs. Yeobright to mount beside him.
On the door being opened she perceived at the end
of the van an extemporized couch, around which was hung
apparently all the drapery that the reddleman possessed,
to keep the occupant of the little couch from contact
with the red materials of his trade. A young girl
lay thereon, covered with a cloak. She was asleep,
and the light of the lantern fell upon her features.

A fair, sweet, and honest country face was revealed,
reposing in a nest of wavy chestnut hair. It was between
pretty and beautiful. Though her eyes were closed,
one could easily imagine the light necessarily shining in them
as the culmination of the luminous workmanship around.
The groundwork of the face was hopefulness; but over it
now I ay like a foreign substance a film of anxiety
and grief. The grief had been there so shortly as to
have abstracted nothing of the bloom, and had as yet but
given a dignity to what it might eventually undermine.
The scarlet of her lips had not had time to abate,
and just now it appeared still more intense by the absence
of the neighbouring and more transient colour of her cheek.
The lips frequently parted, with a murmur of words.
She seemed to belong rightly to a madrigal--to require
viewing through rhyme and harmony.

One thing at least was obvious: she was not made to be
looked at thus. The reddleman had appeared conscious
of as much, and, while Mrs. Yeobright looked in upon her,
he cast his eyes aside with a delicacy which well became him.
The sleeper apparently thought so too, for the next moment
she opened her own.

The lips then parted with something of anticipation,
something more of doubt; and her several thoughts and fractions
of thoughts, as signalled by the changes on her face,
were exhibited by the light to the utmost nicety.
An ingenuous, transparent life was disclosed, as if the
flow of her existence could be seen passing within her.
She understood the scene in a moment.

"O yes, it is I, Aunt," she cried. "I know how frightened
you are, and how you cannot believe it; but all the same,
it is I who have come home like this!"

"Tamsin, Tamsin!" said Mrs. Yeobright, stooping over
the young woman and kissing her. "O my dear girl!"

Thomasin was now on the verge of a sob, but by an unexpected
self-command she uttered no sound. With a gentle panting
breath she sat upright.

"I did not expect to see you in this state, any more
than you me," she went on quickly. "Where am I, Aunt?"

"Nearly home, my dear. In Egdon Bottom. What dreadful
thing is it?"

"I'll tell you in a moment. So near, are we? Then I
will get out and walk. I want to go home by the path."

"But this kind man who has done so much will, I am sure,
take you right on to my house?" said the aunt, turning to
the reddleman, who had withdrawn from the front of the van
on the awakening of the girl, and stood in the road.

"Why should you think it necessary to ask me? I will,
of course," said he.

"He is indeed kind," murmured Thomasin. "I was once
acquainted with him, Aunt, and when I saw him today I thought
I should prefer his van to any conveyance of a stranger.
But I'll walk now. Reddleman, stop the horses, please."

The man regarded her with tender reluctance, but stopped
them

Aunt and niece then descended from the van, Mrs. Yeobright
saying to its owner, "I quite recognize you now.
What made you change from the nice business your father
left you?"

"Well, I did," he said, and looked at Thomasin,
who blushed a little. "Then you'll not be wanting
me any more tonight, ma'am?"

Mrs. Yeobright glanced around at the dark sky, at the hills,
at the perishing bonfires, and at the lighted window
of the inn they had neared. "I think not," she said,
"since Thomasin wishes to walk. We can soon run up
the path and reach home--we know it well."

And after a few further words they parted, the reddleman
moving onwards with his van, and the two women remaining
standing in the road. As soon as the vehicle and its
driver had withdrawn so far as to be beyond all possible
reach of her voice, Mrs. Yeobright turned to her niece.

"Now, Thomasin," she said sternly, "what's the meaning
of this disgraceful performance?"

5 - Perplexity among Honest People

Thomasin looked as if quite overcome by her aunt's change
of manner. "It means just what it seems to mean: I
am--not married," she replied faintly. "Excuse me--for
humiliating you, Aunt, by this mishap--I am sorry for it.
But I cannot help it."

"Me? Think of yourself first."

"It was nobody's fault. When we got there the parson
wouldn't marry us because of some trifling irregularity
in the license."

"What irregularity?"

"I don't know. Mr. Wildeve can explain. I did not think
when I went away this morning that I should come back
like this."  It being dark, Thomasin allowed her emotion
to escape her by the silent way of tears, which could
roll down her cheek unseen.

"I could almost say that it serves you right--if I did not
feel that you don't deserve it," continued Mrs. Yeobright,
who, possessing two distinct moods in close contiguity,
a gentle mood and an angry, flew from one to the other
without the least warning. "Remember, Thomasin,
this business was none of my seeking; from the very first,
when you began to feel foolish about that man, I warned
you he would not make you happy. I felt it so strongly
that I did what I would never have believed myself
capable of doing--stood up in the church, and made myself
the public talk for weeks. But having once consented,
I don't submit to these fancies without good reason.
Marry him you must after this."

"Do you think I wish to do otherwise for one moment?"
said Thomasin, with a heavy sigh. "I know how wrong
it was of me to love him, but don't pain me by talking
like that, Aunt! You would not have had me stay there
with him, would you?--and your house is the only home I
have to return to. He says we can be married in a day
or two."

"I wish he had never seen you."

"Very well; then I will be the miserablest woman in the world,
and not let him see me again. No, I won't have him!"

"It is too late to speak so. Come with me. I am
going to the inn to see if he has returned. Of course
I shall get to the bottom of this story at once.
Mr. Wildeve must not suppose he can play tricks upon me,
or any belonging to me."

"It was not that. The license was wrong, and he couldn't
get another the same day. He will tell you in a moment
how it was, if he comes."

"Why didn't he bring you back?"

"That was me!" again sobbed Thomasin. "When I found we
could not be married I didn't like to come back with him,
and I was very ill. Then I saw Diggory Venn, and was glad
to get him to take me home. I cannot explain it any better,
and you must be angry with me if you will."

"I shall see about that," said Mrs. Yeobright; and they
turned towards the inn, known in the neighbourhood
as the Quiet Woman, the sign of which represented
the figure of a matron carrying her head under her arm,
beneath which gruesome design was written the couplet
so well known to frequenters of the inn:--

SINCE THE WOMAN'S QUIET
LET NO MAN BREED A RIOT.[1]

[1] The inn which really bore this sign and legend
stood some miles to the northwest of the present scene,
wherein the house more immediately referred to is now no
longer an inn; and the surroundings are much changed.
But another inn, some of whose features are also embodied
in this description, the RED LION at Winfrith,
still remains as a haven for the wayfarer (1912).

The front of the house was towards the heath and Rainbarrow,
whose dark shape seemed to threaten it from the sky.
Upon the door was a neglected brass plate, bearing the
unexpected inscription, "Mr. Wildeve, Engineer"--a useless
yet cherished relic from the time when he had been started
in that profession in an office at Budmouth by those who
had hoped much from him, and had been disappointed.
The garden was at the back, and behind this ran a still
deep stream, forming the margin of the heath in that direction,
meadow-land appearing beyond the stream.

But the thick obscurity permitted only skylines to be
visible of any scene at present. The water at the back
of the house could be heard, idly spinning whirpools
in its creep between the rows of dry feather-headed reeds
which formed a stockade along each bank. Their presence
was denoted by sounds as of a congregation praying humbly,
produced by their rubbing against each other in the slow wind.

The window, whence the candlelight had shone up the vale
to the eyes of the bonfire group, was uncurtained,
but the sill lay too high for a pedestrian on the outside
to look over it into the room. A vast shadow, in which
could be dimly traced portions of a masculine contour,
blotted half the ceiling.

"He seems to be at home," said Mrs. Yeobright.

"Must I come in, too, Aunt?" asked Thomasin faintly.
"I suppose not; it would be wrong."

"You must come, certainly--to confront him, so that he
may make no false representations to me. We shall not
be five minutes in the house, and then we'll walk home."

Entering the open passage, she tapped at the door
of the private parlour, unfastened it, and looked in.

The back and shoulders of a man came between Mrs. Yeobright's
eyes and the fire. Wildeve, whose form it was,
immediately turned, arose, and advanced to meet his visitors.

He was quite a young man, and of the two properties,
form and motion, the latter first attracted the eye
in him. The grace of his movement was singular--it
was the pantomimic expression of a lady-killing career.
Next came into notice the more material qualities,
among which was a profuse crop of hair impending
over the top of his face, lending to his forehead
the high-cornered outline of an early Gothic shield;
and a neck which was smooth and round as a cylinder.
The lower half of his figure was of light build.
Altogether he was one in whom no man would have seen
anything to admire, and in whom no woman would have seen
anything to dislike.

He discerned the young girl's form in the passage,
and said, "Thomasin, then, has reached home.
How could you leave me in that way, darling?" And turning
to Mrs. Yeobright--"It was useless to argue with her.
She would go, and go alone."

"But what's the meaning of it all?" demanded Mrs. Yeobright haughtily.

"Take a seat," said Wildeve, placing chairs for the two women.
"Well, it was a very stupid mistake, but such mistakes
will happen. The license was useless at Anglebury.
It was made out for Budmouth, but as I didn't read it I
wasn't aware of that."

"But you had been staying at Anglebury?"

"No. I had been at Budmouth--till two days ago--and
that was where I had intended to take her; but when
I came to fetch her we decided upon Anglebury,
forgetting that a new license would be necessary.
There was not time to get to Budmouth afterwards."

"I think you are very much to blame," said Mrs. Yeobright.

"It was quite my fault we chose Anglebury," Thomasin pleaded.
"I proposed it because I was not known there."

"I know so well that I am to blame that you need not
remind me of it," replied Wildeve shortly.

"Such things don't happen for nothing," said the aunt.
"It is a great slight to me and my family; and when it
gets known there will be a very unpleasant time for us.
How can she look her friends in the face tomorrow? It
is a very great injury, and one I cannot easily forgive.
It may even reflect on her character."

"Nonsense," said Wildeve.

Thomasin's large eyes had flown from the face of one
to the face of the other during this discussion, and she
now said anxiously, "Will you allow me, Aunt, to talk it
over alone with Damon for five minutes? Will you, Damon?"

"Certainly, dear," said Wildeve, "if your aunt will excuse us."
He led her into an adjoining room, leaving Mrs. Yeobright
by the fire.

As soon as they were alone, and the door closed,
Thomasin said, turning up her pale, tearful face
to him, "It is killing me, this, Damon! I did not mean
to part from you in anger at Anglebury this morning;
but I was frightened and hardly knew what I said.
I've not let Aunt know how much I suffered today; and it
is so hard to command my face and voice, and to smile
as if it were a slight thing to me; but I try to do so,
that she may not be still more indignant with you.
I know you could not help it, dear, whatever Aunt
may think."

"She is very unpleasant."

"Yes," Thomasin murmured, "and I suppose I seem
so now....Damon, what do you mean to do about me?"

"Do about you?"

"Yes. Those who don't like you whisper things which at
moments make me doubt you. We mean to marry, I suppose,
don't we?"

"Of course we do. We have only to go to Budmouth on Monday,
and we marry at once."

"Then do let us go!--O Damon, what you make me say!"
She hid her face in her handkerchief. "Here am I asking
you to marry me, when by rights you ought to be on your
knees imploring me, your cruel mistress, not to refuse you,
and saying it would break your heart if I did.
I used to think it would be pretty and sweet like that;
but how different!"

"Yes, real life is never at all like that."

"But I don't care personally if it never takes place,"
she added with a little dignity; "no, I can live without you.
It is Aunt I think of. She is so proud, and thinks
so much of her family respectability, that she will be
cut down with mortification if this story should get
abroad before--it is done. My cousin Clym, too, will be
much wounded."

"Then he will be very unreasonable. In fact, you are
all rather unreasonable."

Thomasin coloured a little, and not with love. But whatever
the momentary feeling which caused that flush in her,
it went as it came, and she humbly said, "I never mean
to be, if I can help it. I merely feel that you have
my aunt to some extent in your power at last."

"As a matter of justice it is almost due to me," said Wildeve.
"Think what I have gone through to win her consent;
the insult that it is to any man to have the banns
forbidden--the double insult to a man unlucky enough to be
cursed with sensitiveness, and blue demons, and Heaven
knows what, as I am. I can never forget those banns.
A harsher man would rejoice now in the power I have of
turning upon your aunt by going no further in the business."

She looked wistfully at him with her sorrowful eyes as he said
those words, and her aspect showed that more than one person
in the room could deplore the possession of sensitiveness.
Seeing that she was really suffering he seemed disturbed
and added, "This is merely a reflection you know.
I have not the least intention to refuse to complete
the marriage, Tamsie mine--I could not bear it."

"You could not, I know!" said the fair girl, brightening.
"You, who cannot bear the sight of pain in even an insect,
or any disagreeable sound, or unpleasant smell even,
will not long cause pain to me and mine."

"I will not, if I can help it."

"Your hand upon it, Damon."

He carelessly gave her his hand.

"Ah, by my crown, what's that?" he said suddenly.

There fell upon their ears the sound of numerous
voices singing in front of the house. Among these,
two made themselves prominent by their peculiarity: one
was a very strong bass, the other a wheezy thin piping.
Thomasin recognized them as belonging to Timothy Fairway
and Grandfer Cantle respectively.

"What does it mean--it is not skimmity-riding, I hope?"
she said, with a frightened gaze at Wildeve.

"Of course not; no, it is that the heath-folk have come
to sing to us a welcome. This is intolerable!" He began
pacing about, the men outside singing cheerily--

"He told' her that she' was the joy' of his life', And if'
she'd con-sent' he would make her his wife'; She could'
not refuse' him; to church' so they went', Young Will
was forgot', and young Sue' was content'; And then'
was she kiss'd' and set down' on his knee', No man'
in the world' was so lov'-ing as he'!"

Mrs. Yeobright burst in from the outer room.
"Thomasin, Thomasin!" she said, looking indignantly at Wildeve;
"here's a pretty exposure! Let us escape at once. Come!"

It was, however, too late to get away by the passage.
A rugged knocking had begun upon the door of the front room.
Wildeve, who had gone to the window, came back.

"Stop!" he said imperiously, putting his hand upon
Mrs. Yeobright's arm. "We are regularly besieged.
There are fifty of them out there if there's one.
You stay in this room with Thomasin; I'll go out and
face them. You must stay now, for my sake, till they
are gone, so that it may seem as if all was right.
Come, Tamsie dear, don't go making a scene--we must marry
after this; that you can see as well as I. Sit still,
that's all--and don't speak much. I'll manage them.
Blundering fools!"

He pressed the agitated girl into a seat, returned to the
outer room and opened the door. Immediately outside,
in the passage, appeared Grandfer Cantle singing in
concert with those still standing in front of the house.
He came into the room and nodded abstractedly to Wildeve,
his lips still parted, and his features excruciatingly
strained in the emission of the chorus. This being ended,
he said heartily, "Here's welcome to the new-made couple,
and God bless 'em!"

"Thank you," said Wildeve, with dry resentment, his face
as gloomy as a thunderstorm.

At the Grandfer's heels now came the rest of the group,
which included Fairway, Christian, Sam the turf-cutter,
Humphrey, and a dozen others. All smiled upon Wildeve,
and upon his tables and chairs likewise, from a general
sense of friendliness towards the articles as well
as towards their owner.

"We be not here afore Mrs. Yeobright after all,"
said Fairway, recognizing the matron's bonnet through
the glass partition which divided the public apartment
they had entered from the room where the women sat.
"We struck down across, d'ye see, Mr. Wildeve, and she
went round by the path."

"And I see the young bride's little head!" said Grandfer,
peeping in the same direction, and discerning Thomasin,
who was waiting beside her aunt in a miserable and awkward way.
"Not quite settled in yet--well, well, there's plenty
of time."

Wildeve made no reply; and probably feeling that the sooner
he treated them the sooner they would go, he produced
a stone jar, which threw a warm halo over matters at once.

"That's a drop of the right sort, I can see,"
said Grandfer Cantle, with the air of a man too well-
mannered to show any hurry to taste it.

"Yes," said Wildeve, "'tis some old mead. I hope you
will like it."

"O ay!" replied the guests, in the hearty tones natural
when the words demanded by politeness coincide with those
of deepest feeling. "There isn't a prettier drink under the sun."

"I'll take my oath there isn't," added Grandfer Cantle.
"All that can be said against mead is that 'tis
rather heady, and apt to lie about a man a good while.
But tomorrow's Sunday, thank God."

"I feel'd for all the world like some bold soldier after
I had had some once," said Christian.

"You shall feel so again," said Wildeve, with condescension,
"Cups or glasses, gentlemen?"

"Well, if you don't mind, we'll have the beaker, and pass
'en round; 'tis better than heling it out in dribbles."

"Jown the slippery glasses," said Grandfer Cantle.
"What's the good of a thing that you can't put down in
the ashes to warm, hey, neighbours; that's what I ask?"

"Right, Grandfer," said Sam; and the mead then circulated.

"Well," said Timothy Fairway, feeling demands upon his praise
in some form or other, "'tis a worthy thing to be married,
Mr. Wildeve; and the woman you've got is a dimant,
so says I. Yes," he continued, to Grandfer Cantle,
raising his voice so as to be heard through the partition,
"her father (inclining his head towards the inner room)
was as good a feller as ever lived. He always had his
great indignation ready against anything underhand."

"Is that very dangerous?" said Christian.

"And there were few in these parts that were upsides with him,"
said Sam. "Whenever a club walked he'd play the clarinet
in the band that marched before 'em as if he'd never
touched anything but a clarinet all his life. And then,
when they got to church door he'd throw down the clarinet,
mount the gallery, snatch up the bass viol, and rozum
away as if he'd never played anything but a bass viol.
Folk would say--folk that knowed what a true stave
was--'Surely, surely that's never the same man that I saw
handling the clarinet so masterly by now!"

"I can mind it," said the furze-cutter. "'Twas a wonderful
thing that one body could hold it all and never mix
the fingering."

"There was Kingsbere church likewise," Fairway recommenced,
as one opening a new vein of the same mine of interest.

Wildeve breathed the breath of one intolerably bored,
and glanced through the partition at the prisoners.

"He used to walk over there of a Sunday afternoon to visit
his old acquaintance Andrew Brown, the first clarinet there;
a good man enough, but rather screechy in his music,
if you can mind?"

"'A was."

"And neighbour Yeobright would take Andrey's place for some
part of the service, to let Andrey have a bit of a nap,
as any friend would naturally do."

"As any friend would," said Grandfer Cantle, the other
listeners expressing the same accord by the shorter way
of nodding their heads.

"No sooner was Andrey asleep and the first whiff
of neighbour Yeobright's wind had got inside Andrey's
clarinet than everyone in church feeled in a moment
there was a great soul among 'em. All heads would turn,
and they'd say, 'Ah, I thought 'twas he!' One Sunday I
can well mind--a bass viol day that time, and Yeobright
had brought his own. 'Twas the Hundred-and-thirty-third
to 'Lydia'; and when they'd come to 'Ran down his
beard and o'er his robes its costly moisture shed,'
neighbour Yeobright, who had just warmed to his work,
drove his bow into them strings that glorious grand
that he e'en a'most sawed the bass viol into two pieces.
Every winder in church rattled as if 'twere a thunderstorm.
Old Pa'son Williams lifted his hands in his great holy
surplice as natural as if he'd been in common clothes,
and seemed to say hisself, 'O for such a man in our parish!'
But not a soul in Kingsbere could hold a candle to Yeobright."

"Was it quite safe when the winder shook?" Christian inquired.

He received no answer, all for the moment sitting
rapt in admiration of the performance described.
As with Farinelli's singing before the princesses,
Sheridan's renowned Begum Speech, and other such examples,
the fortunate condition of its being for ever lost to
the world invested the deceased Mr. Yeobright's tour
de force on that memorable afternoon with a cumulative
glory which comparative criticism, had that been possible,
might considerably have shorn down.

"He was the last you'd have expected to drop off
in the prime of life," said Humphrey.

"Ah, well; he was looking for the earth some months
afore he went. At that time women used to run for
smocks and gown-pieces at Greenhill Fair, and my wife
that is now, being a long-legged slittering maid,
hardly husband-high, went with the rest of the maidens,
for 'a was a good, runner afore she got so heavy.
When she came home I said--we were then just beginning
to walk together--'What have ye got, my honey?'
'I've won--well, I've won--a gown-piece,' says she,
her colours coming up in a moment. 'Tis a smock for a crown,
I thought; and so it turned out. Ay, when I think what
she'll say to me now without a mossel of red in her face,
it do seem strange that 'a wouldn't say such a little thing
then....However, then she went on, and that's what made
me bring up the story. Well, whatever clothes I've won,
white or figured, for eyes to see or for eyes not to see'
('a could do a pretty stroke of modesty in those days),
'I'd sooner have lost it than have seen what I have.
Poor Mr. Yeobright was took bad directly he reached the
fair ground, and was forced to go home again.' That was
the last time he ever went out of the parish."

"'A faltered on from one day to another, and then we
heard he was gone."

"D'ye think he had great pain when 'a died?" said Christian.

"O no--quite different. Nor any pain of mind.
He was lucky enough to be God A'mighty's own man."

"And other folk--d'ye think 'twill be much pain to 'em,
Mister Fairway?"

"That depends on whether they be afeard."

"I bain't afeard at all, I thank God!" said Christian strenuously.
"I'm glad I bain't, for then 'twon't pain me....I
don't think I be afeard--or if I be I can't help it,
and I don't deserve to suffer. I wish I was not afeard at all!"

There was a solemn silence, and looking from the window,
which was unshuttered and unblinded, Timothy said,
"Well, what a fess little bonfire that one is, out by
Cap'n Vye's! 'Tis burning just the same now as ever,
upon my life."

All glances went through the window, and nobody noticed
that Wildeve disguised a brief, telltale look.
Far away up the sombre valley of heath, and to the
right of Rainbarrow, could indeed be seen the light,
small, but steady and persistent as before.

"It was lighted before ours was," Fairway continued;
"and yet every one in the country round is out afore
'n."

"Perhaps there's meaning in it!" murmured Christian.

"How meaning?" said Wildeve sharply.

Christian was too scattered to reply, and Timothy helped him.

"He means, sir, that the lonesome dark-eyed creature
up there that some say is a witch--ever I should call
a fine young woman such a name--is always up to some odd
conceit or other; and so perhaps 'tis she."

"I'd be very glad to ask her in wedlock, if she'd hae me
and take the risk of her wild dark eyes ill-wishing me,"
said Grandfer Cantle staunchly.

"Don't ye say it, Father!" implored Christian.

"Well, be dazed if he who do marry the maid won't hae
an uncommon picture for his best parlour," said Fairway
in a liquid tone, placing down the cup of mead at the end
of a good pull.

"And a partner as deep as the North Star," said Sam,
taking up the cup and finishing the little that remained.
"Well, really, now I think we must be moving," said Humphrey,
observing the emptiness of the vessel.

"But we'll gie 'em another song?" said Grandfer Cantle.
"I'm as full of notes as a bird!"

"Thank you, Grandfer," said Wildeve. "But we will not
trouble you now. Some other day must do for that--when
I have a party."

"Be jown'd if I don't learn ten new songs for't, or I
won't learn a line!" said Grandfer Cantle. "And you may
be sure I won't disappoint ye by biding away, Mr. Wildeve."

"I quite believe you," said that gentleman.

All then took their leave, wishing their entertainer long
life and happiness as a married man, with recapitulations
which occupied some time. Wildeve attended them to the door,
beyond which the deep-dyed upward stretch of heath stood
awaiting them, an amplitude of darkness reigning from their
feet almost to the zenith, where a definite form first
became visible in the lowering forehead of Rainbarrow.
Diving into the dense obscurity in a line headed by Sam
the turf-cutter, they pursued their trackless way home.

When the scratching of the furze against their leggings
had fainted upon the ear, Wildeve returned to the room
where he had left Thomasin and her aunt. The women
were gone.

They could only have left the house in one way,
by the back window; and this was open.

Wildeve laughed to himself, remained a moment thinking,
and idly returned to the front room. Here his glance fell
upon a bottle of wine which stood on the mantelpiece.
"Ah--old Dowden!" he murmured; and going to the kitchen
door shouted, "Is anybody here who can take something to
old Dowden?"

There was no reply. The room was empty, the lad who acted
as his factotum having gone to bed. Wildeve came back
put on his hat, took the bottle, and left the house,
turning the key in the door, for there was no guest at
the inn tonight. As soon as he was on the road the little
bonfire on Mistover Knap again met his eye.

"Still waiting, are you, my lady?" he murmured.

However, he did not proceed that way just then;
but leaving the hill to the left of him, he stumbled
over a rutted road that brought him to a cottage which,
like all other habitations on the heath at this hour,
was only saved from being visible by a faint shine from its
bedroom window. This house was the home of Olly Dowden,
the besom-maker, and he entered.

The lower room was in darkness; but by feeling his way he
found a table, whereon he placed the bottle, and a minute
later emerged again upon the heath. He stood and looked
northeast at the undying little fire--high up above him,
though not so high as Rainbarrow.

We have been told what happens when a woman deliberates;
and the epigram is not always terminable with woman,
provided that one be in the case, and that a fair one.
Wildeve stood, and stood longer, and breathed perplexedly,
and then said to himself with resignation, "Yes--by Heaven,
I must go to her, I suppose!"

Instead of turning in the direction of home he pressed
on rapidly by a path under Rainbarrow towards what was
evidently a signal light.

6 - The Figure against the Sky

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 northwest;
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 southeast, 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 northwest, 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 heathbells 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 tonight
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 heathbells.
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
everyone 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 eves. 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 hopfrog 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 hourglass
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 you 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 cold-blooded 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.

7 - Queen of Night

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, she had 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 Europoeus--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 flamelike.
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 midnight; 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 weekday 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 Heloises and the Cleopatras.

8 - Those Who Are Found Where There Is Said to Be Nobody

As soon as the sad little boy had withdrawn from the fire
he clasped the money tight in the palm of his hand,
as if thereby to fortify his courage, and began to run.
There was really little danger in allowing a child to go
home alone on this part of Egdon Heath. The distance to
the boy's house was not more than three-eighths of a mile,
his father's cottage, and one other a few yards further on,
forming part of the small hamlet of Mistover Knap: the
third and only remaining house was that of Captain Vye
and Eustacia, which stood quite away from the small cottages.
and was the loneliest of lonely houses on these thinly
populated slopes.

He ran until he was out of breath, and then, becoming
more courageous, walked leisurely along, singing in an old
voice a little song about a sailor-boy and a fair one,
and bright gold in store. In the middle of this the child
stopped--from a pit under the hill ahead of him shone a light,
whence proceeded a cloud of floating dust and a smacking noise.

Only unusual sights and sounds frightened the boy.
The shrivelled voice of the heath did not alarm him,
for that was familiar. The thornbushes which arose
in his path from time to time were less satisfactory,
for they whistled gloomily, and had a ghastly habit
after dark of putting on the shapes of jumping madmen,
sprawling giants, and hideous cripples. Lights were not
uncommon this evening, but the nature of all of them
was different from this. Discretion rather than terror
prompted the boy to turn back instead of passing the light,
with a view of asking Miss Eustacia Vye to let her servant
accompany him home.

When the boy had reascended to the top of the valley
he found the fire to be still burning on the bank,
though lower than before. Beside it, instead of Eustacia's
solitary form, he saw two persons, the second being a man.
The boy crept along under the bank to ascertain from
the nature of the proceedings if it would be prudent
to interrupt so splendid a creature as Miss Eustacia
on his poor trivial account.

After listening under the bank for some minutes to the talk
he turned in a perplexed and doubting manner and began
to withdraw as silently as he had come. That he did not,
upon the whole, think it advisable to interrupt her
conversation with Wildeve, without being prepared to bear
the whole weight of her displeasure, was obvious.

Here was a Scyllaeo-Charybdean position for a poor boy.
Pausing when again safe from discovery, he finally
decided to face the pit phenomenon as the lesser evil.
With a heavy sigh he retraced the slope, and followed
the path he had followed before.

The light had gone, the rising dust had disappeared--he hoped
for ever. He marched resolutely along, and found nothing
to alarm him till, coming within a few yards of the sandpit,
he heard a slight noise in front, which led him to halt.
The halt was but momentary, for the noise resolved itself
into the steady bites of two animals grazing.

"Two he'th-croppers down here," he said aloud.
"I have never known 'em come down so far afore."

The animals were in the direct line of his path,
but that the child thought little of; he had played
round the fetlocks of horses from his infancy.
On coming nearer, however, the boy was somewhat surprised
to find that the little creatures did not run off,
and that each wore a clog, to prevent his going astray;
this signified that they had been broken in. He could
now see the interior of the pit, which, being in the side
of the hill, had a level entrance. In the innermost
corner the square outline of a van appeared, with its
back towards him. A light came from the interior,
and threw a moving shadow upon the vertical face of gravel
at the further side of the pit into which the vehicle faced.

The child assumed that this was the cart of a gipsy,
and his dread of those wanderers reached but to that
mild pitch which titillates rather than pains.
Only a few inches of mud wall kept him and his family
from being gipsies themselves. He skirted the gravel
pit at a respectful distance, ascended the slope,
and came forward upon the brow, in order to look into
the open door of the van and see the original of the shadow.

The picture alarmed the boy. By a little stove inside
the van sat a figure red from head to heels--the man who
had been Thomasin's friend. He was darning a stocking,
which was red like the rest of him. Moreover, as he
darned he smoked a pipe, the stem and bowl of which were
red also.

At this moment one of the heath-croppers feeding in the
outer shadows was audibly shaking off the clog attached
to its foot. Aroused by the sound, the reddleman laid
down his stocking, lit a lantern which hung beside him,
and came out from the van. In sticking up the candle
he lifted the lantern to his face, and the light shone
into the whites of his eyes and upon his ivory teeth,
which, in contrast with the red surrounding, lent him
a startling aspect enough to the gaze of a juvenile.
The boy knew too well for his peace of mind upon whose lair
he had lighted. Uglier persons than gipsies were known
to cross Egdon at times, and a reddleman was one of them.

"How I wish 'twas only a gipsy!" he murmured.

The man was by this time coming back from the horses.
In his fear of being seen the boy rendered detection certain
by nervous motion. The heather and peat stratum overhung
the brow of the pit in mats, hiding the actual verge.
The boy had stepped beyond the solid ground; the heather
now gave way, and down he rolled over the scarp of grey sand
to the very foot of the man.

The red man opened the lantern and turned it upon
the figure of the prostrate boy.

"Who be ye?" he said.

"Johnny Nunsuch, master!"

"What were you doing up there?"

"I don't know."

"Watching me, I suppose?"

"Yes, master."

"What did you watch me for?"

"Because I was coming home from Miss Vye's bonfire."

"Beest hurt?"

"No."

"Why, yes, you be--your hand is bleeding. Come under
my tilt and let me tie it up."

"Please let me look for my sixpence."

"How did you come by that?"

"Miss Vye gied it to me for keeping up her bonfire."

The sixpence was found, and the man went to the van,
the boy behind, almost holding his breath.

The man took a piece of rag from a satchel containing
sewing materials, tore off a strip, which, like everything
else, was tinged red, and proceeded to bind up the wound.

"My eyes have got foggy-like--please may I sit down,
master?" said the boy.

"To be sure, poor chap. 'Tis enough to make you feel fainty.
Sit on that bundle."

The man finished tying up the gash, and the boy said,
"I think I'll go home now, master."

"You are rather afraid of me. Do you know what I be?"

The child surveyed his vermilion figure up and down
with much misgiving and finally said, "Yes."

"Well, what?"

"The reddleman!" he faltered.

"Yes, that's what I be. Though there's more than one.
You little children think there's only one cuckoo, one fox,
one giant, one devil, and one reddleman, when there's lots
of us all."

"Is there? You won't carry me off in your bags, will ye,
master? 'Tis said that the reddleman will sometimes."

"Nonsense. All that reddlemen do is sell reddle.
You see all these bags at the back of my cart? They are
not full of little boys--only full of red stuff."

"Was you born a reddleman?"

"No, I took to it. I should be as white as you if I
were to give up the trade--that is, I should be white
in time--perhaps six months; not at first, because 'tis
grow'd into my skin and won't wash out. Now, you'll never
be afraid of a reddleman again, will ye?"

"No, never. Willy Orchard said he seed a red ghost
here t'other day--perhaps that was you?"

"I was here t'other day."

"Were you making that dusty light I saw by now?"

"Oh yes, I was beating out some bags. And have you had a good
bonfire up there? I saw the light. Why did Miss Vye want
a bonfire so bad that she should give you sixpence to keep it up?"

"I don't know. I was tired, but she made me bide
and keep up the fire just the same, while she kept
going up across Rainbarrow way."

"And how long did that last?"

"Until a hopfrog jumped into the pond."

The reddleman suddenly ceased to talk idly. "A hopfrog?"
he inquired. "Hopfrogs don't jump into ponds this time
of year."

"They do, for I heard one."

"Certain-sure?"

"Yes. She told me afore that I should hear'n; and so I did.
They say she's clever and deep, and perhaps she charmed
'en to come."

"And what then?"

"Then I came down here, and I was afeard, and I went back;
but I didn't like to speak to her, because of the gentleman,
and I came on here again."

"A gentleman--ah! What did she say to him, my man?"

"Told him she supposed he had not married the other woman
because he liked his old sweetheart best; and things
like that."

"What did the gentleman say to her, my sonny?"

"He only said he did like her best, and how he was coming
to see her again under Rainbarrow o' nights."

"Ha!" cried the reddleman, slapping his hand against the side
of his van so that the whole fabric shook under the blow.
"That's the secret o't!"

The little boy jumped clean from the stool.

"My man, don't you be afraid," said the dealer in red,
suddenly becoming gentle. "I forgot you were here.
That's only a curious way reddlemen have of going mad
for a moment; but they don't hurt anybody. And what did
the lady say then?"

"I can't mind. Please, Master Reddleman, may I go
home-along now?"

"Ay, to be sure you may. I'll go a bit of ways with you."

He conducted the boy out of the gravel pit and into the path
leading to his mother's cottage. When the little figure
had vanished in the darkness the reddleman returned,
resumed his seat by the fire, and proceeded to darn again.

9 - Love Leads a Shrewd Man into Strategy

Reddlemen of the old school are now but seldom seen.
Since the introduction of railways Wessex farmers have
managed to do without these Mephistophelian visitants,
and the bright pigment so largely used by shepherds in
preparing sheep for the fair is obtained by other routes.
Even those who yet survive are losing the poetry of existence
which characterized them when the pursuit of the trade
meant periodical journeys to the pit whence the material
was dug, a regular camping out from month to month,
except in the depth of winter, a peregrination among farms
which could be counted by the hundred, and in spite of this
Arab existence the preservation of that respectability
which is insured by the never-failing production of a
well-lined purse.

Reddle spreads its lively hues over everything it lights on,
and stamps unmistakably, as with the mark of Cain,
any person who has handled it half an hour.

A child's first sight of a reddleman was an epoch in
his life. That blood-coloured figure was a sublimation
of all the horrid dreams which had afflicted the juvenile
spirit since imagination began. "The reddleman is coming
for you!" had been the formulated threat of Wessex mothers
for many generations. He was successfully supplanted
for a while, at the beginning of the present century,
by Buonaparte; but as process of time rendered the latter
personage stale and ineffective the older phrase resumed
its early prominence. And now the reddleman has in his
turn followed Buonaparte to the land of worn-out bogeys,
and his place is filled by modern inventions.

The reddleman lived like a gipsy; but gipsies he scorned.
He was about as thriving as travelling basket and mat makers;
but he had nothing to do with them. He was more decently
born and brought up than the cattledrovers who passed
and repassed him in his wanderings; but they merely nodded
to him. His stock was more valuable than that of pedlars;
but they did not think so, and passed his cart with eyes
straight ahead. He was such an unnatural colour to look
at that the men of roundabouts and waxwork shows seemed
gentlemen beside him; but he considered them low company,
and remained aloof. Among all these squatters and folks
of the road the reddleman continually found himself; yet he
was not of them. His occupation tended to isolate him,
and isolated he was mostly seen to be.

It was sometimes suggested that reddlemen were criminals
for whose misdeeds other men wrongfully suffered--that in
escaping the law they had not escaped their own consciences,
and had taken to the trade as a lifelong penance.
Else why should they have chosen it? In the present case
such a question would have been particularly apposite.
The reddleman who had entered Egdon that afternoon was
an instance of the pleasing being wasted to form the
ground-work of the singular, when an ugly foundation would
have done just as well for that purpose. The one point
that was forbidding about this reddleman was his colour.
Freed from that he would have been as agreeable a specimen
of rustic manhood as one would often see. A keen observer
might have been inclined to think--which was, indeed,
partly the truth--that he had relinquished his proper station
in life for want of interest in it. Moreover, after looking
at him one would have hazarded the guess that good nature,
and an acuteness as extreme as it could be without
verging on craft, formed the framework of his character.

While he darned the stocking his face became rigid
with thought. Softer expressions followed this, and then
again recurred the tender sadness which had sat upon
him during his drive along the highway that afternoon.
Presently his needle stopped. He laid down the stocking,
arose from his seat, and took a leathern pouch from a hook
in the corner of the van. This contained among other
articles a brown-paper packet, which, to judge from the
hinge-like character of its worn folds, seemed to have
been carefully opened and closed a good many times.
He sat down on a three-legged milking stool that formed
the only seat in the van, and, examining his packet
by the light of a candle, took thence an old letter
and spread it open. The writing had originally been
traced on white paper, but the letter had now assumed
a pale red tinge from the accident of its situation;
and the black strokes of writing thereon looked like the
twigs of a winter hedge against a vermilion sunset.
The letter bore a date some two years previous to that time,
and was signed "Thomasin Yeobright."  It ran as follows:--

DEAR DIGGORY VENN,--The question you put when you
overtook me coming home from Pond-close gave me such
a surprise that I am afraid I did not make you exactly
understand what I meant. Of course, if my aunt had
not met me I could have explained all then at once,
but as it was there was no chance. I have been quite
uneasy since, as you know I do not wish to pain you,
yet I fear I shall be doing so now in contradicting
what I seemed to say then. I cannot, Diggory, marry you,
or think of letting you call me your sweetheart.
I could not, indeed, Diggory. I hope you will not
much mind my saying this, and feel in a great pain.
It makes me very sad when I think it may, for I like you
very much, and I always put you next to my cousin Clym
in my mind. There are so many reasons why we cannot
be married that I can hardly name them all in a letter.
I did not in the least expect that you were going to
speak on such a thing when you followed me, because I
had never thought of you in the sense of a lover at all.
You must not becall me for laughing when you spoke;
you mistook when you thought I laughed at you as a
foolish man. I laughed because the idea was so odd,
and not at you at all. The great reason with my own
personal self for not letting you court me is, that I
do not feel the things a woman ought to feel who consents
to walk with you with the meaning of being your wife.
It is not as you think, that I have another in my mind,
for I do not encourage anybody, and never have in my life.
Another reason is my aunt. She would not, I know, agree to it,
even if I wished to have you. She likes you very well,
but she will want me to look a little higher than a small
dairy-farmer, and marry a professional man. I hope you
will not set your heart against me for writing plainly,
but I felt you might try to see me again, and it is better
that we should not meet. I shall always think of you
as a good man, and be anxious for your well-doing. I send
this by Jane Orchard's little maid,--And remain Diggory,
your faithful friend,

THOMASIN YEOBRIGHT.

To MR. VENN, Dairy-farmer.

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 someone 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."

10 - A Desperate Attempt at Persuasion

The next morning, at the time when the height of the
sun appeared very insignificant from any part of the
heath as compared with the altitude of Rainbarrow,
and when all the little hills in the lower levels
were like an archipelago in a fog-formed Aegean,
the reddleman came from the brambled nook which he
had adopted as his quarters and ascended the slopes of Mistover Knap.

Though these shaggy hills were apparently so solitary,
several keen round eyes were always ready on such a
wintry morning as this to converge upon a passer-by.
Feathered species sojourned here in hiding which would
have created wonder if found elsewhere. A bustard
haunted the spot, and not many years before this five
and twenty might have been seen in Egdon at one time.
Marsh-harriers looked up from the valley by Wildeve's.
A cream-coloured courser had used to visit this hill,
a bird so rare that not more than a dozen have ever been
seen in England; but a barbarian rested neither night
nor day till he had shot the African truant, and after
that event cream-coloured coursers thought fit to enter
Egdon no more.

A traveller who should walk and observe any of these
visitants as Venn observed them now could feel himself
to be in direct communication with regions unknown to man.
Here in front of him was a wild mallard--just arrived from
the home of the north wind. The creature brought within him
an amplitude of Northern knowledge. Glacial catastrophes,
snowstorm episodes, glittering auroral effects, Polaris in
the zenith, Franklin underfoot--the category of his commonplaces
was wonderful. But the bird, like many other philosophers,
seemed as he looked at the reddleman to think that a present
moment of comfortable reality was worth a decade of memories.

Venn passed on through these towards the house of the
isolated beauty who lived up among them and despised them.
The day was Sunday; but as going to church, except to be
married or buried, was exceptional at Egdon, this made
little difference. He had determined upon the bold stroke
of asking for an interview with Miss Vye--to attack her
position as Thomasin's rival either by art or by storm,
showing therein, somewhat too conspicuously, the want of
gallantry characteristic of a certain astute sort of men,
from clowns to kings. The great Frederick making war
on the beautiful Archduchess, Napoleon refusing terms
to the beautiful Queen of Prussia, were not more dead
to difference of sex than the reddleman was, in his
peculiar way, in planning the displacement of Eustacia.

To call at the captain's cottage was always more or
less an undertaking for the inferior inhabitants.
Though occasionally chatty, his moods were erratic,
and nobody could be certain how he would behave at any
particular moment. Eustacia was reserved, and lived very much
to herself. Except the daughter of one of the cotters,
who was their servant, and a lad who worked in the garden
and stable, scarcely anyone but themselves ever entered
the house. They were the only genteel people of the
district except the Yeobrights, and though far from rich,
they did not feel that necessity for preserving a friendly
face towards every man, bird, and beast which influenced
their poorer neighbours.

When the reddleman entered the garden the old man was
looking through his glass at the stain of blue sea in
the distant landscape, the little anchors on his buttons
twinkling in the sun. He recognized Venn as his companion
on the highway, but made no remark on that circumstance,
merely saying, "Ah, reddleman--you here? Have a glass
of grog?"

Venn declined, on the plea of it being too early, and stated
that his business was with Miss Vye. The captain surveyed
him from cap to waistcoat and from waistcoat to leggings
for a few moments, and finally asked him to go indoors.

Miss Vye was not to be seen by anybody just then;
and the reddleman waited in the window-bench of the kitchen,
his hands hanging across his divergent knees, and his cap
hanging from his hands.

"I suppose the young lady is not up yet?" he presently
said to the servant.

"Not quite yet. Folks never call upon ladies at this
time of day."

"Then I'll step outside," said Venn. "If she is willing
to see me, will she please send out word, and I'll come in."

The reddleman left the house and loitered on the
hill adjoining. A considerable time elapsed, and no
request for his presence was brought. He was beginning
to think that his scheme had failed, when he beheld the
form of Eustacia herself coming leisurely towards him.
A sense of novelty in giving audience to that singular
figure had been sufficient to draw her forth.

She seemed to feel, after a bare look at Diggory Venn,
that the man had come on a strange errand, and that he was
not so mean as she had thought him; for her close approach
did not cause him to writhe uneasily, or shift his feet,
or show any of those little signs which escape an ingenuous
rustic at the advent of the uncommon in womankind.
On his inquiring if he might have a conversation with
her she replied, "Yes, walk beside me," and continued
to move on.

Before they had gone far it occurred to the perspicacious
reddleman that he would have acted more wisely
by appearing less unimpressionable, and he resolved
to correct the error as soon as he could find opportunity.

"I have made so bold, miss, as to step across and tell
you some strange news which has come to my ears about
that man."

"Ah! what man?"

He jerked his elbow to the southeast--the direction
of the Quiet Woman.

Eustacia turned quickly to him. "Do you mean Mr. Wildeve?"

"Yes, there is trouble in a household on account of him,
and I have come to let you know of it, because I believe
you might have power to drive it away."

"I? What is the trouble?"

"It is quite a secret. It is that he may refuse to marry
Thomasin Yeobright after all."

Eustacia, though set inwardly pulsing by his words,
was equal to her part in such a drama as this.
She replied coldly, "I do not wish to listen to this,
and you must not expect me to interfere."

"But, miss, you will hear one word?"

"I cannot. I am not interested in the marriage, and even
if I were I could not compel Mr. Wildeve to do my bidding."

"As the only lady on the heath I think you might," said Venn
with subtle indirectness. "This is how the case stands.
Mr. Wildeve would marry Thomasin at once, and make all
matters smooth, if so be there were not another woman
in the case. This other woman is some person he has
picked up with, and meets on the heath occasionally,
I believe. He will never marry her, and yet through
her he may never marry the woman who loves him dearly.
Now, if you, miss, who have so much sway over us menfolk,
were to insist that he should treat your young neighbour
Tamsin with honourable kindness and give up the other woman,
he would perhaps do it, and save her a good deal of misery."

"Ah, my life!" said Eustacia, with a laugh which unclosed
her lips so that the sun shone into her mouth as into
a tulip, and lent it a similar scarlet fire. "You think
too much of my influence over menfolk indeed, reddleman.
If I had such a power as you imagine I would go straight
and use it for the good of anybody who has been kind
to me--which Thomasin Yeobright has not particularly,
to my knowledge."

"Can it be that you really don't know of it--how much
she had always thought of you?"

"I have never heard a word of it. Although we live
only two miles apart I have never been inside her aunt's
house in my life."

The superciliousness that lurked in her manner told Venn
that thus far he had utterly failed. He inwardly sighed
and felt it necessary to unmask his second argument.

"Well, leaving that out of the question, 'tis in your power,
I assure you, Miss Vye, to do a great deal of good
to another woman."

She shook her head.

"Your comeliness is law with Mr. Wildeve. It is law
with all men who see 'ee. They say, 'This well-
favoured lady coming--what's her name? How handsome!'
Handsomer than Thomasin Yeobright," the reddleman persisted,
saying to himself, "God forgive a rascal for lying!" And she
was handsomer, but the reddleman was far from thinking so.
There was a certain obscurity in Eustacia's beauty,
and Venn's eye was not trained. In her winter dress, as now,
she was like the tiger-beetle, which, when observed in
dull situations, seems to be of the quietest neutral colour,
but under a full illumination blazes with dazzling splendour.

Eustacia could not help replying, though conscious that she
endangered her dignity thereby. "Many women are lovelier
than Thomasin," she said, "so not much attaches to that."

The reddleman suffered the wound and went on: "He is a man
who notices the looks of women, and you could twist him
to your will like withywind, if you only had the mind."

"Surely what she cannot do who has been so much with him
I cannot do living up here away from him."

The reddleman wheeled and looked her in the face.
"Miss Vye!" he said.

"Why do you say that--as if you doubted me?" She spoke faintly,
and her breathing was quick. "The idea of your speaking in
that tone to me!" she added, with a forced smile of hauteur.
"What could have been in your mind to lead you to speak like that?"

"Miss Vye, why should you make believe that you don't know
this man?--I know why, certainly. He is beneath you,
and you are ashamed."

"You are mistaken. What do you mean?"

The reddleman had decided to play the card of truth.
"I was at the meeting by Rainbarrow last night and heard
every word," he said. "The woman that stands between
Wildeve and Thomasin is yourself."

It was a disconcerting lift of the curtain, and the
mortification of Candaules' wife glowed in her.
The moment had arrived when her lip would tremble in spite
of herself, and when the gasp could no longer be kept down.

"I am unwell," she said hurriedly. "No--it is not that--I
am not in a humour to hear you further. Leave me, please."

"I must speak, Miss Vye, in spite of paining you.
What I would put before you is this. However it may come
about--whether she is to blame, or you--her case is without
doubt worse than yours. Your giving up Mr. Wildeve will
be a real advantage to you, for how could you marry him?
Now she cannot get off so easily--everybody will blame
her if she loses him. Then I ask you--not because her
right is best, but because her situation is worst--to
give him up to her."

"No--I won't, I won't!" she said impetuously, quite forgetful
of her previous manner towards the reddleman as an underling.
"Nobody has ever been served so! It was going on well--I
will not be beaten down--by an inferior woman like her.
It is very well for you to come and plead for her,
but is she not herself the cause of all her own trouble?
Am I not to show favour to any person I may choose without
asking permission of a parcel of cottagers? She has come
between me and my inclination, and now that she finds
herself rightly punished she gets you to plead for her!"

"Indeed," said Venn earnestly, "she knows nothing whatever
about it. It is only I who ask you to give him up.
It will be better for her and you both. People will say
bad things if they find out that a lady secretly meets
a man who has ill-used another woman."

"I have NOT injured her--he was mine before he was
hers! He came back--because--because he liked me best!"
she said wildly. "But I lose all self-respect in talking
to you. What am I giving way to!"

"I can keep secrets," said Venn gently. "You need not fear.
I am the only man who knows of your meetings with him.
There is but one thing more to speak of, and then I will
be gone. I heard you say to him that you hated living
here--that Egdon Heath was a jail to you."

"I did say so. There is a sort of beauty in the scenery,
I know; but it is a jail to me. The man you mention does
not save me from that feeling, though he lives here.
I should have cared nothing for him had there been a better
person near."

The reddleman looked hopeful; after these words from
her his third attempt seemed promising. "As we have
now opened our minds a bit, miss," he said, "I'll tell
you what I have got to propose. Since I have taken
to the reddle trade I travel a good deal, as you know."

She inclined her head, and swept round so that her eyes
rested in the misty vale beneath them.

"And in my travels I go near Budmouth. Now Budmouth is
a wonderful place--wonderful--a great salt sheening sea
bending into the land like a bow--thousands of gentlepeople
walking up and down--bands of music playing--officers
by sea and officers by land walking among the rest--out
of every ten folks you meet nine of 'em in love."

"I know it," she said disdainfully. "I know Budmouth
better than you. I was born there. My father came to
be a military musician there from abroad. Ah, my soul,
Budmouth! I wish I was there now."

The reddleman was surprised to see how a slow fire could
blaze on occasion. "If you were, miss," he replied,
"in a week's time you would think no more of Wildeve
than of one of those he'th-croppers that we see yond.
Now, I could get you there."

"How?" said Eustacia, with intense curiosity in her
heavy eyes.

"My uncle has been for five and twenty years the trusty
man of a rich widow-lady who has a beautiful house
facing the sea. This lady has become old and lame,
and she wants a young company-keeper to read and sing
to her, but can't get one to her mind to save her life,
though she've advertised in the papers, and tried half
a dozen. She would jump to get you, and Uncle would make
it all easy."

"I should have to work, perhaps?"

"No, not real work--you'd have a little to do, such as reading
and that. You would not be wanted till New Year's Day."

"I knew it meant work," she said, drooping to languor again.

"I confess there would be a trifle to do in the way of
amusing her; but though idle people might call it work,
working people would call it play. Think of the company
and the life you'd lead, miss; the gaiety you'd see,
and the gentleman you'd marry. My uncle is to inquire
for a trustworthy young lady from the country, as she don't
like town girls."

"It is to wear myself out to please her! and I won't go.
O, if I could live in a gay town as a lady should,
and go my own ways, and do my own doings, I'd give
the wrinkled half of my life! Yes, reddleman, that would I."

"Help me to get Thomasin happy, miss, and the chance
shall be yours," urged her companion.

"Chance--'tis no chance," she said proudly. "What can
a poor man like you offer me, indeed?--I am going indoors.
I have nothing more to say. Don't your horses want feeding,
or your reddlebags want mending, or don't you want
to find buyers for your goods, that you stay idling here
like this?"

Venn spoke not another word. With his hands behind him
he turned away, that she might not see the hopeless
disappointment in his face. The mental clearness and power
he had found in this lonely girl had indeed filled his manner
with misgiving even from the first few minutes of close
quarters with her. Her youth and situation had led him
to expect a simplicity quite at the beck of his method.
But a system of inducement which might have carried weaker
country lasses along with it had merely repelled Eustacia.
As a rule, the word Budmouth meant fascination on Egdon.
That Royal port and watering place, if truly mirrored in the
minds of the heathfolk, must have combined, in a charming
and indescribable manner a Carthaginian bustle of building
with Tarentine luxuriousness and Baian health and beauty.
Eustacia felt little less extravagantly about the place;
but she would not sink her independence to get there.

When Diggory Venn had gone quite away, Eustacia walked
to the bank and looked down the wild and picturesque
vale towards the sun, which was also in the direction
of Wildeve's. The mist had now so far collapsed that
the tips of the trees and bushes around his house
could just be discerned, as if boring upwards through
a vast white cobweb which cloaked them from the day.
There was no doubt that her mind was inclined thitherward;
indefinitely, fancifully--twining and untwining about
him as the single object within her horizon on which
dreams might crystallize. The man who had begun by
being merely her amusement, and would never have been
more than her hobby but for his skill in deserting
her at the right moments, was now again her desire.
Cessation in his love-making had revivified her love.
Such feeling as Eustacia had idly given to Wildeve was dammed
into a flood by Thomasin. She had used to tease Wildeve,
but that was before another had favoured him. Often a drop
of irony into an indifferent situation renders the whole piquant.

"I will never give him up--never!" she said impetuously.

The reddleman's hint that rumour might show her to disadvantage
had no permanent terror for Eustacia. She was as unconcerned
at that contingency as a goddess at a lack of linen.
This did not originate in inherent shamelessness,
but in her living too far from the world to feel the impact
of public opinion. Zenobia in the desert could hardly have
cared what was said about her at Rome. As far as social
ethics were concerned Eustacia approached the savage state,
though in emotion she was all the while an epicure.
She had advanced to the secret recesses of sensuousness,
yet had hardly crossed the threshold of conventionality.

11 - The Dishonesty of an Honest Woman

The reddleman had left Eustacia's presence with desponding
views on Thomasin's future happiness; but he was awakened
to the fact that one other channel remained untried
by seeing, as he followed the way to his van, the form
of Mrs. Yeobright slowly walking towards the Quiet Woman.
He went across to her; and could almost perceive in her
anxious face that this journey of hers to Wildeve was
undertaken with the same object as his own to Eustacia.

She did not conceal the fact. "Then," said the reddleman,
"you may as well leave it alone, Mrs. Yeobright."

"I half think so myself," she said. "But nothing else
remains to be done besides pressing the question upon him."

"I should like to say a word first," said Venn firmly.
"Mr. Wildeve is not the only man who has asked Thomasin
to marry him; and why should not another have a chance?
Mrs. Yeobright, I should be glad to marry your niece.
and would have done it any time these last two years.
There, now it is out, and I have never told anybody before
but herself."

Mrs. Yeobright was not demonstrative, but her eyes
involuntarily glanced towards his singular though shapely figure.

"Looks are not everything," said the reddleman,
noticing the glance. "There's many a calling that don't
bring in so much as mine, if it comes to money; and perhaps
I am not so much worse off than Wildeve. There is nobody
so poor as these professional fellows who have failed;
and if you shouldn't like my redness--well, I am not red
by birth, you know; I only took to this business for a freak;
and I might turn my hand to something else in good time."

"I am much obliged to you for your interest in my niece;
but I fear there would be objections. More than that,
she is devoted to this man."

"True; or I shouldn't have done what I have this morning."

"Otherwise there would be no pain in the case, and you
would not see me going to his house now. What was
Thomasin's answer when you told her of your feelings?"

"She wrote that you would object to me; and other things."

"She was in a measure right. You must not take this
unkindly--I merely state it as a truth. You have been
good to her, and we do not forget it. But as she
was unwilling on her own account to be your wife,
that settles the point without my wishes being concerned."

"Yes. But there is a difference between then and now,
ma'am. She is distressed now, and I have thought that if
you were to talk to her about me, and think favourably of
me yourself, there might be a chance of winning her round,
and getting her quite independent of this Wildeve's
backward and forward play, and his not knowing whether
he'll have her or no."

Mrs. Yeobright shook her head. "Thomasin thinks, and I
think with her, that she ought to be Wildeve's wife,
if she means to appear before the world without a slur
upon her name. If they marry soon, everybody will believe
that an accident did really prevent the wedding. If not,
it may cast a shade upon her character--at any rate make
her ridiculous. In short, if it is anyhow possible they
must marry now."

"I thought that till half an hour ago. But, after all,
why should her going off with him to Anglebury for a few
hours do her any harm? Anybody who knows how pure she
is will feel any such thought to be quite unjust.
I have been trying this morning to help on this marriage with
Wildeve--yes, I, ma'am--in the belief that I ought to do it,
because she was so wrapped up in him. But I much question
if I was right, after all. However, nothing came of it.
And now I offer myself."

Mrs. Yeobright appeared disinclined to enter further
into the question. "I fear I must go on," she said.
"I do not see that anything else can be done."

And she went on. But though this conversation did
not divert Thomasin's aunt from her purposed interview
with Wildeve, it made a considerable difference in her
mode of conducting that interview. She thanked God
for the weapon which the reddleman had put into her hands.

Wildeve was at home when she reached the inn. He showed
her silently into the parlour, and closed the door.
Mrs. Yeobright began--

"I have thought it my duty to call today. A new proposal
has been made to me, which has rather astonished me.
It will affect Thomasin greatly; and I have decided that it
should at least be mentioned to you."

"Yes? What is it?" he said civilly.

"It is, of course, in reference to her future. You may
not be aware that another man has shown himself anxious to
marry Thomasin. Now, though I have not encouraged him yet,
I cannot conscientiously refuse him a chance any longer.
I don't wish to be short with you; but I must be fair
to him and to her."

"Who is the man?" said Wildeve with surprise.

"One who has been in love with her longer than she
has with you. He proposed to her two years ago.
At that time she refused him."

"Well?"

"He has seen her lately, and has asked me for permission
to pay his addresses to her. She may not refuse him twice."

"What is his name?"

Mrs. Yeobright declined to say. "He is a man Thomasin likes,"
she added, "and one whose constancy she respects at least.
It seems to me that what she refused then she would be glad
to get now. She is much annoyed at her awkward position."

"She never once told me of this old lover."

"The gentlest women are not such fools as to show EVERY card."

"Well, if she wants him I suppose she must have him."

"It is easy enough to say that; but you don't see
the difficulty. He wants her much more than she wants him;
and before I can encourage anything of the sort I must have
a clear understanding from you that you will not interfere
to injure an arrangement which I promote in the belief
that it is for the best. Suppose, when they are engaged,
and everything is smoothly arranged for their marriage,
that you should step between them and renew your suit? You
might not win her back, but you might cause much unhappiness."

"Of course I should do no such thing," said Wildeve "But
they are not engaged yet. How do you know that Thomasin
would accept him?"

"That's a question I have carefully put to myself;
and upon the whole the probabilities are in favour
of her accepting him in time. I flatter myself that I
have some influence over her. She is pliable, and I
can be strong in my recommendations of him."

"And in your disparagement of me at the same time."

"Well, you may depend upon my not praising you,"
she said drily. "And if this seems like manoeuvring,
you must remember that her position is peculiar,
and that she has been hardly used. I shall also be
helped in making the match by her own desire to escape
from the humiliation of her present state; and a woman's
pride in these cases will lead her a very great way.
A little managing may be required to bring her round;
but I am equal to that, provided that you agree to the one
thing indispensable; that is, to make a distinct declaration
that she is to think no more of you as a possible husband.
That will pique her into accepting him."

"I can hardly say that just now, Mrs. Yeobright.
It is so sudden."

"And so my whole plan is interfered with! It is very
inconvenient that you refuse to help my family even to the
small extent of saying distinctly you will have nothing to
do with us."

Wildeve reflected uncomfortably. "I confess I was not
prepared for this," he said. "Of course I'll give
her up if you wish, if it is necessary. But I thought
I might be her husband."

"We have heard that before."

"Now, Mrs. Yeobright, don't let us disagree. Give me
a fair time. I don't want to stand in the way of any
better chance she may have; only I wish you had let me
know earlier. I will write to you or call in a day or two.
Will that suffice?"

"Yes," she replied, "provided you promise not to communicate
with Thomasin without my knowledge."

"I promise that," he said. And the interview then terminated,
Mrs. Yeobright returning homeward as she had come.

By far the greatest effect of her simple strategy
on that day was, as often happens, in a quarter quite
outside her view when arranging it. In the first place,
her visit sent Wildeve the same evening after dark
to Eustacia's house at Mistover.

At this hour the lonely dwelling was closely blinded
and shuttered from the chill and darkness without.
Wildeve's clandestine plan with her was to take a little
gravel in his hand and hold it to the crevice at the
top of the window shutter, which was on the outside,
so that it should fall with a gentle rustle,
resembling that of a mouse, between shutter and glass.
This precaution in attracting her attention was to avoid
arousing the suspicions of her grandfather.

The soft words, "I hear; wait for me," in Eustacia's
voice from within told him that she was alone.

He waited in his customary manner by walking round the
enclosure and idling by the pool, for Wildeve was never asked
into the house by his proud though condescending mistress.
She showed no sign of coming out in a hurry. The time
wore on, and he began to grow impatient. In the course
of twenty minutes she appeared from round the corner,
and advanced as if merely taking an airing.

"You would not have kept me so long had you known what I
come about," he said with bitterness. "Still, you are
worth waiting for."

"What has happened?" said Eustacia. "I did not know you
were in trouble. I too am gloomy enough."

"I am not in trouble," said he. "It is merely that affairs
have come to a head, and I must take a clear course."

"What course is that?" she asked with attentive interest.

"And can you forget so soon what I proposed to you the
other night? Why, take you from this place, and carry
you away with me abroad."

"I have not forgotten. But why have you come so unexpectedly
to repeat the question, when you only promised to come
next Saturday? I thought I was to have plenty of time
to consider."

"Yes, but the situation is different now."

"Explain to me."

"I don't want to explain, for I may pain you."

"But I must know the reason of this hurry."

"It is simply my ardour, dear Eustacia. Everything is
smooth now."

"Then why are you so ruffled?"

"I am not aware of it. All is as it should be.
Mrs. Yeobright--but she is nothing to us."

"Ah, I knew she had something to do with it! Come,
I don't like reserve."

"No--she has nothing. She only says she wishes me to give
up Thomasin because another man is anxious to marry her.
The woman, now she no longer needs me, actually shows off!"
Wildeve's vexation has escaped him in spite of himself.

Eustacia was silent a long while. "You are in the awkward
position of an official who is no longer wanted,"
she said in a changed tone.

"It seems so. But I have not yet seen Thomasin."

"And that irritates you. Don't deny it, Damon. You are
actually nettled by this slight from an unexpected quarter."

"Well?"

"And you come to get me because you cannot get her.
This is certainly a new position altogether. I am to be
a stop-gap."

"Please remember that I proposed the same thing the other day."

Eustacia again remained in a sort of stupefied silence.
What curious feeling was this coming over her? Was it
really possible that her interest in Wildeve had been
so entirely the result of antagonism that the glory
and the dream departed from the man with the first sound
that he was no longer coveted by her rival? She was, then,
secure of him at last. Thomasin no longer required him.
What a humiliating victory! He loved her best, she thought;
and yet--dared she to murmur such treacherous criticism ever
so softly?--what was the man worth whom a woman inferior to
herself did not value? The sentiment which lurks more or less
in all animate nature--that of not desiring the undesired
of others--was lively as a passion in the supersubtle,
epicurean heart of Eustacia. Her social superiority
over him, which hitherto had scarcely ever impressed her,
became unpleasantly insistent, and for the first time
she felt that she had stooped in loving him.

"Well, darling, you agree?" said Wildeve.

"If it could be London, or even Budmouth, instead of America,"
she murmured languidly. "Well, I will think.
It is too great a thing for me to decide offhand.
I wish I hated the heath less--or loved you more."

"You can be painfully frank. You loved me a month ago
warmly enough to go anywhere with me."

"And you loved Thomasin."

"Yes, perhaps that was where the reason lay," he returned,
with almost a sneer. "I don't hate her now."

"Exactly. The only thing is that you can no longer get her."

"Come--no taunts, Eustacia, or we shall quarrel.
If you don't agree to go with me, and agree shortly,
I shall go by myself."

"Or try Thomasin again. Damon, how strange it seems
that you could have married her or me indifferently,
and only have come to me because I am--cheapest! Yes,
yes--it is true. There was a time when I should have
exclaimed against a man of that sort, and been quite wild;
but it is all past now."

"Will you go, dearest? Come secretly with me to Bristol,
marry me, and turn our backs upon this dog-hole of England
for ever? Say Yes."

"I want to get away from here at almost any cost,"
she said with weariness, "but I don't like to go with you.
Give me more time to decide."

"I have already," said Wildeve. "Well, I give you one
more week."

"A little longer, so that I may tell you decisively.
I have to consider so many things. Fancy Thomasin being
anxious to get rid of you! I cannot forget it."

"Never mind that. Say Monday week. I will be here
precisely at this time."

"Let it be at Rainbarrow," said she. "This is too near home;
my grandfather may be walking out."

"Thank you, dear. On Monday week at this time I will
be at the Barrow. Till then good-bye."

"Good-bye. No, no, you must not touch me now.
Shaking hands is enough till I have made up my mind."

Eustacia watched his shadowy form till it had disappeared.
She placed her hand to her forehead and breathed heavily;
and then her rich, romantic lips parted under that homely
impulse--a yawn. She was immediately angry at having
betrayed even to herself the possible evanescence of her
passion for him. She could not admit at once that she
might have overestimated Wildeve, for to perceive his
mediocrity now was to admit her own great folly heretofore.
And the discovery that she was the owner of a disposition
so purely that of the dog in the manger had something in it
which at first made her ashamed.

The fruit of Mrs. Yeobright's diplomacy was indeed remarkable,
though not as yet of the kind she had anticipated.
It had appreciably influenced Wildeve, but it was
influencing Eustacia far more. Her lover was no longer
to her an exciting man whom many women strove for,
and herself could only retain by striving with them.
He was a superfluity.

She went indoors in that peculiar state of misery which
is not exactly grief, and which especially attends the
dawnings of reason in the latter days of an ill-judged,
transient love. To be conscious that the end of the dream
is approaching, and yet has not absolutely come, is one
of the most wearisome as well as the most curious stages
along the course between the beginning of a passion and its end.

Her grandfather had returned, and was busily engaged in
pouring some gallons of newly arrived rum into the square
bottles of his square cellaret. Whenever these home
supplies were exhausted he would go to the Quiet Woman,
and, standing with his back to the fire, grog in hand,
tell remarkable stories of how he had lived seven years
under the waterline of his ship, and other naval wonders,
to the natives, who hoped too earnestly for a treat
of ale from the teller to exhibit any doubts of his truth.

He had been there this evening. "I suppose you have heard
the Egdon news, Eustacia?" he said, without looking up
from the bottles. "The men have been talking about it
at the Woman as if it were of national importance."

"I have heard none," she said.

"Young Clym Yeobright, as they call him, is coming
home next week to spend Christmas with his mother.
He is a fine fellow by this time, it seems. I suppose
you remember him?"

"I never saw him in my life."

"Ah, true; he left before you came here. I well remember
him as a promising boy."

"Where has he been living all these years?"

"In that rookery of pomp and vanity, Paris, I believe."

book two

THE ARRIVAL

1 - Tidings of the Comer

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.

2 - The People at Blooms-End Make Ready

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 over her aunt's fuelhouse, where the store-apples
were kept, to search out the best and largest of them
for the coming holiday-time.

The loft was lighted by a semicircular hole,
through which the pigeons crept to their lodgings in the
same high quarters of the premises; and from this hole
the sun shone in a bright yellow patch upon the figure
of the maiden as she knelt and plunged her naked arms
into the soft brown fern, which, from its abundance,
was used on Egdon in packing away stores of all kinds.
The pigeons were flying about her head with the
greatest unconcern, and the face of her aunt was just
visible above the floor of the loft, lit by a few stray
motes of light, as she stood halfway up the ladder,
looking at a spot into which she was not climber enough to venture.

"Now a few russets, Tamsin. He used to like them almost
as well as ribstones."

Thomasin turned and rolled aside the fern from another nook,
where more mellow fruit greeted her with its ripe smell.
Before picking them out she stopped a moment.

"Dear Clym, I wonder how your face looks now?" she said,
gazing abstractedly at the pigeon-hole. which admitted
the sunlight so directly upon her brown hair and transparent
tissues that it almost seemed to shine through her.

"If he could have been dear to you in another way,"
said Mrs. Yeobright from the ladder, "this might have been
a happy meeting."

"Is there any use in saying what can do no good, Aunt?"

"Yes," said her aunt, with some warmth. "To thoroughly
fill the air with the past misfortune, so that other girls
may take warning and keep clear of it."

Thomasin lowered her face to the apples again.
"I am a warning to others, just as thieves and drunkards
and gamblers are," she said in a low voice. "What a
class to belong to! Do I really belong to them? 'Tis
absurd! Yet why, Aunt, does everybody keep on making me
think that I do, by the way they behave towards me? Why
don't people judge me by my acts? Now, look at me as I
kneel here, picking up these apples--do I look like a
lost woman?...I wish all good women were as good as I!"
she added vehemently.

"Strangers don't see you as I do," said Mrs. Yeobright;
"they judge from false report. Well, it is a silly job,
and I am partly to blame."

"How quickly a rash thing can be done!" replied the girl.
Her lips were quivering, and tears so crowded themselves
into her eyes that she could hardly distinguish apples
from fern as she continued industriously searching to hide
her weakness.

"As soon as you have finished getting the apples,"
her aunt said, descending the ladder, "come down,
and we'll go for the holly. There is nobody on the heath
this afternoon, and you need not fear being stared at.
We must get some berries, or Clym will never believe in
our preparations."

Thomasin came down when the apples were collected,
and together they went through the white palings to
the heath beyond. The open hills were airy and clear,
and the remote atmosphere appeared, as it often appears
on a fine winter day, in distinct planes of illumination
independently toned, the rays which lit the nearer tracts
of landscape streaming visibly across those further off;
a stratum of ensaffroned light was imposed on a stratum
of deep blue, and behind these lay still remoter scenes
wrapped in frigid grey.

They reached the place where the hollies grew,
which was in a conical pit, so that the tops of the trees
were not much above the general level of the ground.
Thomasin stepped up into a fork of one of the bushes,
as she had done under happier circumstances on many
similar occasions, and with a small chopper that they
had brought she began to lop off the heavily berried boughs.

"Don't scratch your face," said her aunt, who stood at
the edge of the pit, regarding the girl as she held on amid
the glistening green and scarlet masses of the tree.
"Will you walk with me to meet him this evening?"

"I should like to. Else it would seem as if I had
forgotten him," said Thomasin, tossing out a bough.
"Not that that would matter much; I belong to one man;
nothing can alter that. And that man I must marry,
for my pride's sake."

"I am afraid--" began Mrs. Yeobright.

"Ah, you think, 'That weak girl--how is she going to get
a man to marry her when she chooses?' But let me tell you
one thing, Aunt: Mr. Wildeve is not a profligate man,
any more than I am an improper woman. He has an
unfortunate manner, and doesn't try to make people
like him if they don't wish to do it of their own accord."

"Thomasin," said Mrs. Yeobright quietly, fixing her eye
upon her niece, "do you think you deceive me in your
defence of Mr. Wildeve?"

"How do you mean?"

"I have long had a suspicion that your love for him has
changed its colour since you have found him not to be
the saint you thought him, and that you act a part to me."

"He wished to marry me, and I wish to marry him."

"Now, I put it to you: would you at this present moment
agree to be his wife if that had not happened to entangle
you with him?"

Thomasin looked into the tree and appeared much disturbed.
"Aunt," she said presently, "I have, I think, a right to
refuse to answer that question."

"Yes, you have."

"You may think what you choose. I have never implied
to you by word or deed that I have grown to think otherwise
of him, and I never will. And I shall marry him."

"Well, wait till he repeats his offer. I think he
may do it, now that he knows--something I told him.
I don't for a moment dispute that it is the most proper
thing for you to marry him. Much as I have objected to him
in bygone days, I agree with you now, you may be sure.
It is the only way out of a false position, and a very
galling one."

"What did you tell him?"

"That he was standing in the way of another lover of yours."

"Aunt," said Thomasin, with round eyes, "what DO you mean?"

"Don't be alarmed; it was my duty. I can say no more
about it now, but when it is over I will tell you exactly
what I said, and why I said it."

Thomasin was perforce content.

"And you will keep the secret of my would-be marriage
from Clym for the present?" she next asked.

"I have given my word to. But what is the use of it?
He must soon know what has happened. A mere look
at your face will show him that something is wrong."

Thomasin turned and regarded her aunt from the tree.
"Now, hearken to me," she said, her delicate voice expanding
into firmness by a force which was other than physical.
"Tell him nothing. If he finds out that I am not worthy
to be his cousin, let him. But, since he loved me once,
we will not pain him by telling him my trouble too soon.
The air is full of the story, I know; but gossips will
not dare to speak of it to him for the first few days.
His closeness to me is the very thing that will hinder the tale
from reaching him early. If I am not made safe from sneers
in a week or two I will tell him myself."

The earnestness with which Thomasin spoke prevented
further objections. Her aunt simply said, "Very well.
He should by rights have been told at the time that the
wedding was going to be. He will never forgive you
for your secrecy."

"Yes, he will, when he knows it was because I wished
to spare him, and that I did not expect him home so soon.
And you must not let me stand in the way of your
Christmas party. Putting it off would only make matters worse."

"Of course I shall not. I do not wish to show myself beaten
before all Egdon, and the sport of a man like Wildeve.
We have enough berries now, I think, and we had better
take them home. By the time we have decked the house
with this and hung up the mistletoe, we must think
of starting to meet him."

Thomasin came out of the tree, shook from her hair
and dress the loose berries which had fallen thereon,
and went down the hill with her aunt, each woman
bearing half the gathered boughs. It was now nearly
four o'clock, and the sunlight was leaving the vales.
When the west grew red the two relatives came again
from the house and plunged into the heath in a different
direction from the first, towards a point in the distant
highway along which the expected man was to return.

3 - How a Little Sound Produced a Great Dream

Eustacia stood just within the heath, straining her eyes
in the direction of Mrs. Yeobright's house and premises.
No light, sound, or movement was perceptible there.
The evening was chilly; the spot was dark and lonely.
She inferred that the guest had not yet come; and after
lingering ten or fifteen minutes she turned again
towards home.

She had not far retraced her steps when sounds in front
of her betokened the approach of persons in conversation
along the same path. Soon their heads became visible
against the sky. They were walking slowly; and though it
was too dark for much discovery of character from aspect,
the gait of them showed that they were not workers on
the heath. Eustacia stepped a little out of the foot-track
to let them pass. They were two women and a man;
and the voices of the women were those of Mrs. Yeobright
and Thomasin.

They went by her, and at the moment of passing appeared
to discern her dusky form. There came to her ears
in a masculine voice, "Good night!"

She murmured a reply, glided by them, and turned round.
She could not, for a moment, believe that chance,
unrequested, had brought into her presence the soul
of the house she had gone to inspect, the man without
whom her inspection would not have been thought of.

She strained her eyes to see them, but was unable.
Such was her intentness, however, that it seemed
as if her ears were performing the functions of seeing
as well as hearing. This extension of power can almost
be believed in at such moments. The deaf Dr. Kitto was
probably under the influence of a parallel fancy when he
described his body as having become, by long endeavour,
so sensitive to vibrations that he had gained the power
of perceiving by it as by ears.

She could follow every word that the ramblers uttered.
They were talking no secrets. They were merely indulging
in the ordinary vivacious chat of relatives who have long
been parted in person though not in soul. But it was not
to the words that Eustacia listened; she could not even
have recalled, a few minutes later, what the words were.
It was to the alternating voice that gave out about one-tenth
of them--the voice that had wished her good night.
Sometimes this throat uttered Yes, sometimes it uttered No;
sometimes it made inquiries about a time worn denizen
of the place. Once it surprised her notions by remarking
upon the friendliness and geniality written in the faces of
the hills around.

The three voices passed on, and decayed and died out upon her ear.
Thus much had been granted her; and all besides withheld.
No event could have been more exciting. During the greater
part of the afternoon she had been entrancing herself
by imagining the fascination which must attend a man come
direct from beautiful Paris--laden with its atmosphere,
familiar with its charms. And this man had greeted her.

With the departure of the figures the profuse articulations
of the women wasted away from her memory; but the accents
of the other stayed on. Was there anything in the voice
of Mrs. Yeobright's son--for Clym it was--startling as a
sound? No; it was simply comprehensive. All emotional
things were possible to the speaker of that "good night."
Eustacia's imagination supplied the rest--except the solution
to one riddle. What COULD the tastes of that man
be who saw friendliness and geniality in these shaggy hills?

On such occasions as this a thousand ideas pass through
a highly charged woman's head; and they indicate themselves
on her face; but the changes, though actual, are minute.
Eustacia's features went through a rhythmical succession
of them. She glowed; remembering the mendacity
of the imagination, she flagged; then she freshened;
then she fired; then she cooled again. It was a cycle
of aspects, produced by a cycle of visions.

Eustacia entered her own house; she was excited.
Her grandfather was enjoying himself over the fire,
raking about the ashes and exposing the red-hot surface
of the turves, so that their lurid glare irradiated the
chimney-corner with the hues of a furnace.

"Why is it that we are never friendly with the Yeobrights?"
she said, coming forward and stretching her soft hands
over the warmth. "I wish we were. They seem to be very
nice people."

"Be hanged if I know why," said the captain. "I liked
the old man well enough, though he was as rough as a hedge.
But you would never have cared to go there, even if you
might have, I am well sure."

"Why shouldn't I?"

"Your town tastes would find them far too countrified.
They sit in the kitchen, drink mead and elder-wine, and
sand the floor to keep it clean. A sensible way of life;
but how would you like it?"

"I thought Mrs. Yeobright was a ladylike woman?
A curate's daughter, was she not?"

"Yes; but she was obliged to live as her husband did;
and I suppose she has taken kindly to it by this time.
Ah, I recollect that I once accidentally offended her,
and I have never seen her since."

That night was an eventful one to Eustacia's brain,
and one which she hardly ever forgot. She dreamt a dream;
and few human beings, from Nebuchadnezzar to the
Swaffham tinker, ever dreamt a more remarkable one.
Such an elaborately developed, perplexing, exciting dream
was certainly never dreamed by a girl in Eustacia's
situation before. It had as many ramifications
as the Cretan labyrinth, as many fluctuations as the
northern lights, as much colour as a parterre in June,
and was as crowded with figures as a coronation.
To Queen Scheherazade the dream might have seemed not far
removed from commonplace; and to a girl just returned
from all the courts of Europe it might have seemed
not more than interesting. But amid the circumstances
of Eustacia's life it was as wonderful as a dream could be.

There was, however, gradually evolved from its transformation
scenes a less extravagant episode, in which the heath dimly
appeared behind the general brilliancy of the action.
She was dancing to wondrous music, and her partner was
the man in silver armour who had accompanied her through
the previous fantastic changes, the visor of his helmet
being closed. The mazes of the dance were ecstatic.
Soft whispering came into her ear from under the
radiant helmet, and she felt like a woman in Paradise.
Suddenly these two wheeled out from the mass of dancers,
dived into one of the pools of the heath, and came out
somewhere into an iridescent hollow, arched with rainbows.
"It must be here," said the voice by her side, and blushingly
looking up she saw him removing his casque to kiss her.
At that moment there was a cracking noise, and his figure
fell into fragments like a pack of cards.

She cried aloud. "O that I had seen his face!"

Eustacia awoke. The cracking had been that of the window
shutter downstairs, which the maid-servant was opening
to let in the day, now slowly increasing to Nature's
meagre allowance at this sickly time of the year.
"O that I had seen his face!" she said again. "'Twas meant
for Mr. Yeobright!"

When she became cooler she perceived that many of the
phases of the dream had naturally arisen out of the images
and fancies of the day before. But this detracted
little from its interest, which lay in the excellent
fuel it provided for newly kindled fervour. She was
at the modulating point between indifference and love,
at the stage called "having a fancy for."  It occurs once
in the history of the most gigantic passions, and it
is a period when they are in the hands of the weakest will.

The perfervid woman was by this time half in love
with a vision. The fantastic nature of her passion,
which lowered her as an intellect, raised her as a soul.
If she had had a little more self-control she would have
attenuated the emotion to nothing by sheer reasoning,
and so have killed it off. If she had had a little less
pride she might have gone and circumambulated the Yeobrights'
premises at Blooms-End at any maidenly sacrifice until she
had seen him. But Eustacia did neither of these things.
She acted as the most exemplary might have acted,
being so influenced; she took an airing twice or thrice a day
upon the Egdon hills, and kept her eyes employed.

The first occasion passed, and he did not come that way.

She promenaded a second time, and was again the sole
wanderer there.

The third time there was a dense fog; she looked around,
but without much hope. Even if he had been walking within
twenty yards of her she could not have seen him.

At the fourth attempt to encounter him it began to rain
in torrents, and she turned back.

The fifth sally was in the afternoon; it was fine,
and she remained out long, walking to the very top of
the valley in which Blooms-End lay. She saw the white
paling about half a mile off; but he did not appear.
It was almost with heart-sickness that she came home
and with a sense of shame at her weakness. She resolved
to look for the man from Paris no more.

But Providence is nothing if not coquettish; and no sooner
had Eustacia formed this resolve than the opportunity
came which, while sought, had been entirely withholden.

4 - Eustacia Is Led on to an Adventure

In the evening of this last day of expectation, which was
the twenty-third of December, Eustacia was at home alone.
She had passed the recent hour in lamenting over a rumour
newly come to her ears--that Yeobright's visit to his
mother was to be of short duration, and would end some
time the next week. "Naturally," she said to herself.
A man in the full swing of his activities in a gay city
could not afford to linger long on Egdon Heath. That she
would behold face to face the owner of the awakening voice
within the limits of such a holiday was most unlikely,
unless she were to haunt the environs of his mother's house
like a robin, to do which was difficult and unseemly.

The customary expedient of provincial girls and men
in such circumstances is churchgoing. In an ordinary
village or country town one can safely calculate that,
either on Christmas day or the Sunday contiguous,
any native home for the holidays, who has not through age
or ennui lost the appetite for seeing and being seen,
will turn up in some pew or other, shining with hope,
self-consciousness, and new clothes. Thus the congregation
on Christmas morning is mostly a Tussaud collection
of celebrities who have been born in the neighbourhood.
Hither the mistress, left neglected at home all the year,
can steal and observe the development of the returned
lover who has forgotten her, and think as she watches
him over her prayer book that he may throb with a
renewed fidelity when novelties have lost their charm.
And hither a comparatively recent settler like Eustacia
may betake herself to scrutinize the person of a native
son who left home before her advent upon the scene,
and consider if the friendship of his parents be worth
cultivating during his next absence in order to secure a
knowledge of him on his next return.

But these tender schemes were not feasible among the scattered
inhabitants of Egdon Heath. In name they were parishioners,
but virtually they belonged to no parish at all.
People who came to these few isolated houses to keep
Christmas with their friends remained in their friends'
chimney-corners drinking mead and other comforting liquors
till they left again for good and all. Rain, snow, ice,
mud everywhere around, they did not care to trudge two or three
miles to sit wet-footed and splashed to the nape of their
necks among those who, though in some measure neighbours,
lived close to the church, and entered it clean and dry.
Eustacia knew it was ten to one that Clym Yeobright would
go to no church at all during his few days of leave,
and that it would be a waste of labour for her to go driving
the pony and gig over a bad road in hope to see him there.

It was dusk, and she was sitting by the fire in the dining-room
or hall, which they occupied at this time of the year
in preference to the parlour, because of its large hearth,
constructed for turf-fires, a fuel the captain was partial
to in the winter season. The only visible articles
in the room were those on the window-sill, which showed
their shapes against the low sky, the middle article being
the old hourglass, and the other two a pair of ancient
British urns which had been dug from a barrow near,
and were used as flowerpots for two razor-leaved cactuses.
Somebody knocked at the door. The servant was out;
so was her grandfather. The person, after waiting a minute,
came in and tapped at the door of the room.

"Who's there?" said Eustacia.

"Please, Cap'n Vye, will you let us----"

Eustacia arose and went to the door. "I cannot allow
you to come in so boldly. You should have waited."

"The cap'n said I might come in without any fuss,"
was answered in a lad's pleasant voice.

"Oh, did he?" said Eustacia more gently. "What do
you want, Charley?"

"Please will your grandfather lend us his fuelhouse
to try over our parts in, tonight at seven o'clock?"

"What, are you one of the Egdon mummers for this year?"

"Yes, miss. The cap'n used to let the old mummers
practise here."

"I know it. Yes, you may use the fuelhouse if you like,"
said Eustacia languidly.

The choice of Captain Vye's fuelhouse as the scene
of rehearsal was dictated by the fact that his dwelling
was nearly in the centre of the heath. The fuelhouse
was as roomy as a barn, and was a most desirable place
for such a purpose. The lads who formed the company
of players lived at different scattered points around,
and by meeting in this spot the distances to be traversed
by all the comers would be about equally proportioned.

For mummers and mumming Eustacia had the greatest contempt.
The mummers themselves were not afflicted with any such
feeling for their art, though at the same time they
were not enthusiastic. A traditional pastime is to be
distinguished from a mere revival in no more striking
feature than in this, that while in the revival all is
excitement and fervour, the survival is carried on with
a stolidity and absence of stir which sets one wondering
why a thing that is done so perfunctorily should be kept
up at all. Like Balaam and other unwilling prophets,
the agents seem moved by an inner compulsion to say
and do their allotted parts whether they will or no.
This unweeting manner of performance is the true ring
by which, in this refurbishing age, a fossilized survival
may be known from a spurious reproduction.

The piece was the well-known play of Saint George, and
all who were behind the scenes assisted in the preparations,
including the women of each household. Without the
co-operation of sisters and sweethearts the dresses
were likely to be a failure; but on the other hand,
this class of assistance was not without its drawbacks.
The girls could never be brought to respect tradition
in designing and decorating the armour; they insisted on
attaching loops and bows of silk and velvet in any situation
pleasing to their taste. Gorget, gusset, basinet, cuirass,
gauntlet, sleeve, all alike in the view of these feminine
eyes were practicable spaces whereon to sew scraps of
fluttering colour.

It might be that Joe, who fought on the side of Christendom,
had a sweetheart, and that Jim, who fought on the side
of the Moslem, had one likewise. During the making
of the costumes it would come to the knowledge of Joe's
sweetheart that Jim's was putting brilliant silk scallops
at the bottom of her lover's surcoat, in addition to the
ribbons of the visor, the bars of which, being invariably
formed of coloured strips about half an inch wide
hanging before the face, were mostly of that material.
Joe's sweetheart straight-way placed brilliant silk on the
scallops of the hem in question, and, going a little further,
added ribbon tufts to the shoulder pieces. Jim's, not
to be outdone, would affix bows and rosettes everywhere.

The result was that in the end the Valiant Soldier,
of the Christian army, was distinguished by no peculiarity
of accoutrement from the Turkish Knight; and what was worse,
on a casual view Saint George himself might be mistaken
for his deadly enemy, the Saracen. The guisers themselves,
though inwardly regretting this confusion of persons,
could not afford to offend those by whose assistance they
so largely profited, and the innovations were allowed
to stand.

There was, it is true, a limit to this tendency to uniformity.
The Leech or Doctor preserved his character intact--his
darker habiliments, peculiar hat, and the bottle of
physic slung under his arm, could never be mistaken.
And the same might be said of the conventional figure
of Father Christmas, with his gigantic club, an older man,
who accompanied the band as general protector in long
night journeys from parish to parish, and was bearer
of the purse.

Seven o'clock, the hour of the rehearsal, came round, and in
a short time Eustacia could hear voices in the fuelhouse.
To dissipate in some trifling measure her abiding sense
of the murkiness of human life she went to the "linhay"
or lean-to shed, which formed the root-store of their
dwelling and abutted on the fuelhouse. Here was a small
rough hole in the mud wall, originally made for pigeons,
through which the interior of the next shed could be viewed.
A light came from it now; and Eustacia stepped upon a stool
to look in upon the scene.

On a ledge in the fuelhouse stood three tall rushlights
and by the light of them seven or eight lads were
marching about, haranguing, and confusing each other,
in endeavours to perfect themselves in the play.
Humphrey and Sam, the furze-and turf-cutters, were
there looking on, so also was Timothy Fairway, who leant
against the wall and prompted the boys from memory,
interspersing among the set words remarks and anecdotes
of the superior days when he and others were the Egdon
mummers-elect that these lads were now.

"Well, ye be as well up to it as ever ye will be," he said.
"Not that such mumming would have passed in our time.
Harry as the Saracen should strut a bit more, and John needn't
holler his inside out. Beyond that perhaps you'll do.
Have you got all your clothes ready?"

"We shall by Monday."

"Your first outing will be Monday night, I suppose?"

"Yes. At Mrs. Yeobright's."

"Oh, Mrs. Yeobright's. What makes her want to see ye? I
should think a middle-aged woman was tired of mumming."

"She's got up a bit of a party, because 'tis the first
Christmas that her son Clym has been home for a long time."

"To be sure, to be sure--her party! I am going myself.
I almost forgot it, upon my life."

Eustacia's face flagged. There was to be a party at
the Yeobrights'; she, naturally, had nothing to do with it.
She was a stranger to all such local gatherings, and had
always held them as scarcely appertaining to her sphere.
But had she been going, what an opportunity would have
been afforded her of seeing the man whose influence
was penetrating her like summer sun! To increase that
influence was coveted excitement; to cast it off might be
to regain serenity; to leave it as it stood was tantalizing.

The lads and men prepared to leave the premises, and Eustacia
returned to her fireside. She was immersed in thought,
but not for long. In a few minutes the lad Charley,
who had come to ask permission to use the place,
returned with the key to the kitchen. Eustacia heard him,
and opening the door into the passage said, "Charley, come here."

The lad was surprised. He entered the front room not
without blushing; for he, like many, had felt the power
of this girl's face and form.

She pointed to a seat by the fire, and entered
the other side of the chimney-corner herself.
It could be seen in her face that whatever motive
she might have had in asking the youth indoors would soon appear.

"Which part do you play, Charley--the Turkish Knight,
do you not?" inquired the beauty, looking across the smoke
of the fire to him on the other side.

"Yes, miss, the Turkish Knight," he replied diffidently.

"Is yours a long part?"

"Nine speeches, about."

"Can you repeat them to me? If so I should like to hear them."

The lad smiled into the glowing turf and began--

    "Here come I, a Turkish Knight,
     Who learnt in Turkish land to fight,"

continuing the discourse throughout the scenes to the
concluding catastrophe of his fall by the hand of Saint George.

Eustacia had occasionally heard the part recited before.
When the lad ended she began, precisely in the same words,
and ranted on without hitch or divergence till she too
reached the end. It was the same thing, yet how different.
Like in form, it had the added softness and finish
of a Raffaelle after Perugino, which, while faithfully
reproducing the original subject, entirely distances the
original art.

Charley's eyes rounded with surprise. "Well, you be
a clever lady!" he said, in admiration. "I've been
three weeks learning mine."

"I have heard it before," she quietly observed.
"Now, would you do anything to please me, Charley?"

"I'd do a good deal, miss."

"Would you let me play your part for one night?"

"Oh, miss! But your woman's gown--you couldn't."

"I can get boy's clothes--at least all that would be wanted
besides the mumming dress. What should I have to give
you to lend me your things, to let me take your place
for an hour or two on Monday night, and on no account
to say a word about who or what I am? You would, of course,
have to excuse yourself from playing that night, and to say
that somebody--a cousin of Miss Vye's--would act for you.
The other mummers have never spoken to me in their lives
so that it would be safe enough; and if it were not,
I should not mind. Now, what must I give you to agree
to this? Half a crown?"

The youth shook his head

"Five shillings?"

He shook his head again. "Money won't do it," he said,
brushing the iron head of the firedog with the hollow
of his hand.

"What will, then, Charley?" said Eustacia in a disappointed tone.

"You know what you forbade me at the Maypoling, miss,"
murmured the lad, without looking at her, and still
stroking the firedog's head.

"Yes," said Eustacia, with a little more hauteur.
"You wanted to join hands with me in the ring, if I recollect?"

"Half an hour of that, and I'll agree, miss."

Eustacia regarded the youth steadfastly. He was three years
younger than herself, but apparently not backward for his age.
"Half an hour of what?" she said, though she guessed what.

"Holding your hand in mine."

She was silent. "Make it a quarter of an hour," she said

"Yes, Miss Eustacia--I will, if I may kiss it too.
A quarter of an hour. And I'll swear to do the best I
can to let you take my place without anybody knowing.
Don't you think somebody might know your tongue, miss?"

"It is possible. But I will put a pebble in my mouth
to make is less likely. Very well; you shall be allowed
to have my hand as soon as you bring the dress and your
sword and staff. I don't want you any longer now."

Charley departed, and Eustacia felt more and more interest
in life. Here was something to do: here was some one
to see, and a charmingly adventurous way to see him.
"Ah," she said to herself, "want of an object to live
for--that's all is the matter with me!"

Eustacia's manner was as a rule of a slumberous sort,
her passions being of the massive rather than the vivacious kind.
But when aroused she would make a dash which, just for
the time, was not unlike the move of a naturally lively person.

On the question of recognition she was somewhat indifferent.
By the acting lads themselves she was not likely to be known.
With the guests who might be assembled she was hardly so secure.
Yet detection, after all, would be no such dreadful thing.
The fact only could be detected, her true motive never.
It would be instantly set down as the passing freak
of a girl whose ways were already considered singular.
That she was doing for an earnest reason what would most
naturally be done in jest was at any rate a safe secret.

The next evening Eustacia stood punctually at the fuelhouse
door, waiting for the dusk which was to bring Charley
with the trappings. Her grandfather was at home tonight,
and she would be unable to ask her confederate indoors.

He appeared on the dark ridge of heathland, like a fly
on a Negro, bearing the articles with him, and came up
breathless with his walk.

"Here are the things," he whispered, placing them upon
the threshold. "And now, Miss Eustacia--"

"The payment. It is quite ready. I am as good as my word."

She leant against the door-post, and gave him her hand.
Charley took it in both his own with a tenderness
beyond description, unless it was like that of a child
holding a captured sparrow.

"Why, there's a glove on it!" he said in a deprecating way.

"I have been walking," she observed.

"But, miss!"

"Well--it is hardly fair."  She pulled off the glove,
and gave him her bare hand.

They stood together minute after minute, without
further speech, each looking at the blackening scene,
and each thinking his and her own thoughts.

"I think I won't use it all up tonight," said Charley devotedly,
when six or eight minutes had been passed by him caressing
her hand. "May I have the other few minutes another time?"

"As you like," said she without the least emotion.
"But it must be over in a week. Now, there is only one
thing I want you to do--to wait while I put on the dress,
and then to see if I do my part properly. But let me look
first indoors."

She vanished for a minute or two, and went in.
Her grandfather was safely asleep in his chair. "Now, then,"
she said, on returning, "walk down the garden a little way,
and when I am ready I'll call you."

Charley walked and waited, and presently heard a soft whistle.
He returned to the fuelhouse door.

"Did you whistle, Miss Vye?"

"Yes; come in," reached him in Eustacia's voice from a
back quarter. "I must not strike a light till the door
is shut, or it may be seen shining. Push your hat into the
hole through to the wash-house, if you can feel your way across."

Charley did as commanded, and she struck the light revealing
herself to be changed in sex, brilliant in colours,
and armed from top to toe. Perhaps she quailed a little
under Charley's vigorous gaze, but whether any shyness
at her male attire appeared upon her countenance could
not be seen by reason of the strips of ribbon which used
to cover the face in mumming costumes, representing the
barred visor of the mediaeval helmet.

"It fits pretty well," she said, looking down at the
white overalls, "except that the tunic, or whatever
you call it, is long in the sleeve. The bottom
of the overalls I can turn up inside. Now pay attention."

Eustacia then proceeded in her delivery, striking the
sword against the staff or lance at the minatory phrases,
in the orthodox mumming manner, and strutting up and down.
Charley seasoned his admiration with criticism of the
gentlest kind, for the touch of Eustacia's hand yet
remained with him.

"And now for your excuse to the others," she said.
"Where do you meet before you go to Mrs. Yeobright's?"

"We thought of meeting here, miss, if you have nothing
to say against it. At eight o'clock, so as to get there
by nine."

"Yes. Well, you of course must not appear. I will march
in about five minutes late, ready-dressed, and tell them
that you can't come. I have decided that the best plan
will be for you to be sent somewhere by me, to make
a real thing of the excuse. Our two heath-croppers
are in the habit of straying into the meads, and tomorrow
evening you can go and see if they are gone there.
I'll manage the rest. Now you may leave me."

"Yes, miss. But I think I'll have one minute more
of what I am owed, if you don't mind."

Eustacia gave him her hand as before.

"One minute," she said, and counted on till she reached
seven or eight minutes. Hand and person she then
withdrew to a distance of several feet, and recovered
some of her old dignity. The contract completed,
she raised between them a barrier impenetrable as a wall.

"There, 'tis all gone; and I didn't mean quite all,"
he said, with a sigh.

"You had good measure," said she, turning away.

"Yes, miss. Well, 'tis over, and now I'll get home-along."

5 - Through the Moonlight

The next evening the mummers were assembled in the same spot,
awaiting the entrance of the Turkish Knight.

"Twenty minutes after eight by the Quiet Woman, and Charley
not come."

"Ten minutes past by Blooms-End."

"It wants ten minutes to, by Grandfer Cantle's watch."

"And 'tis five minutes past by the captain's clock."

On Egdon there was no absolute hour of the day. The time
at any moment was a number of varying doctrines professed
by the different hamlets, some of them having originally
grown up from a common root, and then become divided
by secession, some having been alien from the beginning.
West Egdon believed in Blooms-End time, East Egdon
in the time of the Quiet Woman Inn. Grandfer Cantle's
watch had numbered many followers in years gone by,
but since he had grown older faiths were shaken.
Thus, the mummers having gathered hither from scattered
points each came with his own tenets on early and late;
and they waited a little longer as a compromise.

Eustacia had watched the assemblage through the hole;
and seeing that now was the proper moment to enter,
she went from the "linhay" and boldly pulled the bobbin
of the fuelhouse door. Her grandfather was safe at the
Quiet Woman.

"Here's Charley at last! How late you be, Charley."

"'Tis not Charley," said the Turkish Knight from within
his visor. "'Tis a cousin of Miss Vye's, come to take
Charley's place from curiosity. He was obliged to go and
look for the heath-croppers that have got into the meads,
and I agreed to take his place, as he knew he couldn't come
back here again tonight. I know the part as well as he."

Her graceful gait, elegant figure, and dignified manner
in general won the mummers to the opinion that they
had gained by the exchange, if the newcomer were perfect
in his part.

"It don't matter--if you be not too young," said Saint George.
Eustacia's voice had sounded somewhat more juvenile
and fluty than Charley's.

"I know every word of it, I tell you," said Eustacia decisively.
Dash being all that was required to carry her triumphantly through,
she adopted as much as was necessary. "Go ahead, lads,
with the try-over. I'll challenge any of you to find a mistake in me."

The play was hastily rehearsed, whereupon the other mummers
were delighted with the new knight. They extinguished
the candles at half-past eight, and set out upon the heath
in the direction of Mrs. Yeobright's house at Bloom's-End.

There was a slight hoarfrost that night, and the moon,
though not more than half full, threw a spirited and enticing
brightness upon the fantastic figures of the mumming band,
whose plumes and ribbons rustled in their walk like
autumn leaves. Their path was not over Rainbarrow now,
but down a valley which left that ancient elevation
a little to the east. The bottom of the vale was green
to a width of ten yards or thereabouts, and the shining
facets of frost upon the blades of grass seemed to move
on with the shadows of those they surrounded. The masses
of furze and heath to the right and left were dark as ever;
a mere half-moon was powerless to silver such sable
features as theirs.

Half-an-hour of walking and talking brought them to the spot
in the valley where the grass riband widened and led down to
the front of the house. At sight of the place Eustacia who had
felt a few passing doubts during her walk with the youths,
again was glad that the adventure had been undertaken.
She had come out to see a man who might possibly have the
power to deliver her soul from a most deadly oppression.
What was Wildeve? Interesting, but inadequate.
Perhaps she would see a sufficient hero tonight.

As they drew nearer to the front of the house the mummers became
aware that music and dancing were briskly flourishing within.
Every now and then a long low note from the serpent,
which was the chief wind instrument played at these times,
advanced further into the heath than the thin treble part,
and reached their ears alone; and next a more than usual
loud tread from a dancer would come the same way.
With nearer approach these fragmentary sounds became
pieced together, and were found to be the salient points
of the tune called "Nancy's Fancy."

He was there, of course. Who was she that he danced with?
Perhaps some unknown woman, far beneath herself in culture,
was by the most subtle of lures sealing his fate this
very instant. To dance with a man is to concentrate
a twelvemonth's regulation fire upon him in the fragment
of an hour. To pass to courtship without acquaintance,
to pass to marriage without courtship, is a skipping of
terms reserved for those alone who tread this royal road.
She would see how his heart lay by keen observation of
them all.

The enterprising lady followed the mumming company through
the gate in the white paling, and stood before the open porch.
The house was encrusted with heavy thatchings, which dropped
between the upper windows; the front, upon which the
moonbeams directly played, had originally been white;
but a huge pyracanth now darkened the greater portion.

It became at once evident that the dance was proceeding immediately
within the surface of the door, no apartment intervening.
The brushing of skirts and elbows, sometimes the bumping
of shoulders, could be heard against the very panels.
Eustacia, though living within two miles of the place,
had never seen the interior of this quaint old habitation.
Between Captain Vye and the Yeobrights there had never
existed much acquaintance, the former having come as a
stranger and purchased the long-empty house at Mistover
Knap not long before the death of Mrs. Yeobright's husband;
and with that event and the departure of her son
such friendship as had grown up became quite broken off.

"Is there no passage inside the door, then?" asked Eustacia
as they stood within the porch.

"No," said the lad who played the Saracen. "The door
opens right upon the front sitting-room, where the spree's
going on."

"So that we cannot open the door without stopping the dance."

"That's it. Here we must bide till they have done,
for they always bolt the back door after dark."

"They won't be much longer," said Father Christmas.

This assertion, however, was hardly borne out by the event.
Again the instruments ended the tune; again they
recommenced with as much fire and pathos as if it were
the first strain. The air was now that one without
any particular beginning, middle, or end, which perhaps,
among all the dances which throng an inspired fiddler's fancy,
best conveys the idea of the interminable--the celebrated
"Devil's Dream."  The fury of personal movement that was
kindled by the fury of the notes could be approximately
imagined by these outsiders under the moon, from the
occasional kicks of toes and heels against the door,
whenever the whirl round had been of more than customary velocity.

The first five minutes of listening was interesting enough
to the mummers. The five minutes extended to ten minutes,
and these to a quarter of an hour; but no signs of ceasing were
audible in the lively "Dream."  The bumping against the door,
the laughter, the stamping, were all as vigorous as ever,
and the pleasure in being outside lessened considerably.

"Why does Mrs. Yeobright give parties of this sort?"
Eustacia asked, a little surprised to hear merriment
so pronounced.

"It is not one of her bettermost parlour-parties. She's
asked the plain neighbours and workpeople without drawing
any lines, just to give 'em a good supper and such like.
Her son and she wait upon the folks."

"I see," said Eustacia.

"'Tis the last strain, I think," said Saint George,
with his ear to the panel. "A young man and woman have
just swung into this corner, and he's saying to her,
'Ah, the pity; 'tis over for us this time, my own.'"

"Thank God," said the Turkish Knight, stamping, and taking
from the wall the conventional lance that each of the
mummers carried. Her boots being thinner than those of
the young men, the hoar had damped her feet and made them cold.

"Upon my song 'tis another ten minutes for us,"
said the Valiant Soldier, looking through the keyhole
as the tune modulated into another without stopping.
"Grandfer Cantle is standing in this corner, waiting his turn."

"'Twon't be long; 'tis a six-handed reel," said the Doctor.

"Why not go in, dancing or no? They sent for us,"
said the Saracen.

"Certainly not," said Eustacia authoritatively, as she paced
smartly up and down from door to gate to warm herself.
"We should burst into the middle of them and stop the dance,
and that would be unmannerly."

"He thinks himself somebody because he has had a bit
more schooling than we," said the Doctor.

"You may go to the deuce!" said Eustacia.

There was a whispered conversation between three or four
of them, and one turned to her.

"Will you tell us one thing?" he said, not without gentleness.
"Be you Miss Vye? We think you must be."

"You may think what you like," said Eustacia slowly.
"But honourable lads will not tell tales upon a lady."

"We'll say nothing, miss. That's upon our honour."

"Thank you," she replied.

At this moment the fiddles finished off with a screech,
and the serpent emitted a last note that nearly lifted
the roof. When, from the comparative quiet within,
the mummers judged that the dancers had taken their seats,
Father Christmas advanced, lifted the latch, and put his head
inside the door.

"Ah, the mummers, the mummers!" cried several guests at once.
"Clear a space for the mummers."

Humpbacked Father Christmas then made a complete entry,
swinging his huge club, and in a general way clearing the
stage for the actors proper, while he informed the company
in smart verse that he was come, welcome or welcome not;
concluding his speech with

     "Make room, make room, my gallant boys,
        And give us space to rhyme;
      We've come to show Saint George's play,
        Upon this Christmas time."

The guests were now arranging themselves at one end of the room,
the fiddler was mending a string, the serpent-player
was emptying his mouthpiece, and the play began.
First of those outside the Valiant Soldier entered,
in the interest of Saint George--

     "Here come I, the Valiant Soldier;
        Slasher is my name";

and so on. This speech concluded with a challenge
to the infidel, at the end of which it was Eustacia's
duty to enter as the Turkish Knight. She, with the
rest who were not yet on, had hitherto remained
in the moonlight which streamed under the porch.
With no apparent effort or backwardness she came in, beginning--

     "Here come I, a Turkish Knight,
      Who learnt in Turkish land to fight;
      I'll fight this man with courage bold:
      If his blood's hot I'll make it cold!"

During her declamation Eustacia held her head erect,
and spoke as roughly as she could, feeling pretty secure
from observation. But the concentration upon her part
necessary to prevent discovery, the newness of the scene,
the shine of the candles, and the confusing effect upon
her vision of the ribboned visor which hid her features,
left her absolutely unable to perceive who were present
as spectators. On the further side of a table bearing
candles she could faintly discern faces, and that was all.

Meanwhile Jim Starks as the Valiant Soldier had
come forward, and, with a glare upon the Turk, replied--

     "If, then, thou art that Turkish Knight,
      Draw out thy sword, and let us fight!"

And fight they did; the issue of the combat being that the
Valiant Soldier was slain by a preternaturally inadequate
thrust from Eustacia, Jim, in his ardour for genuine
histrionic art, coming down like a log upon the stone
floor with force enough to dislocate his shoulder.
Then, after more words from the Turkish Knight,
rather too faintly delivered, and statements that he'd
fight Saint George and all his crew, Saint George
himself magnificently entered with the well-known flourish--

     "Here come I, Saint George, the valiant man,
      With naked sword and spear in hand,
Who fought the dragon and brought him to the slaughter,
And by this won fair Sabra, the King of Egypt's
daughter;
     What mortal man would dare to stand
     Before me with my sword in hand?"

This was the lad who had first recognized Eustacia;
and when she now, as the Turk, replied with suitable defiance,
and at once began the combat, the young fellow took especial
care to use his sword as gently as possible. Being wounded,
the Knight fell upon one knee, according to the direction.
The Doctor now entered, restored the Knight by giving him
a draught from the bottle which he carried, and the fight
was again resumed, the Turk sinking by degrees until
quite overcome--dying as hard in this venerable drama
as he is said to do at the present day.

This gradual sinking to the earth was, in fact,
one reason why Eustacia had thought that the part of
the Turkish Knight, though not the shortest, would suit
her best. A direct fall from upright to horizontal,
which was the end of the other fighting characters,
was not an elegant or decorous part for a girl.
But it was easy to die like a Turk, by a dogged decline.

Eustacia was now among the number of the slain, though not
on the floor, for she had managed to sink into a sloping
position against the clock-case, so that her head was
well elevated. The play proceeded between Saint George,
the Saracen, the Doctor, and Father Christmas; and Eustacia,
having no more to do, for the first time found leisure
to observe the scene round, and to search for the form
that had drawn her hither.

6 - The Two Stand Face to Face

The room had been arranged with a view to the dancing,
the large oak table having been moved back till it stood
as a breastwork to the fireplace. At each end, behind,
and in the chimney-corner were grouped the guests,
many of them being warm-faced and panting, among whom
Eustacia cursorily recognized some well-to-do persons
from beyond the heath. Thomasin, as she had expected,
was not visible, and Eustacia recollected that a
light had shone from an upper window when they were
outside--the window, probably, of Thomasin's room.
A nose, chin, hands, knees, and toes projected from the seat
within the chimney opening, which members she found to unite
in the person of Grandfer Cantle, Mrs. Yeobright's occasional
assistant in the garden, and therefore one of the invited.
The smoke went up from an Etna of peat in front of him,
played round the notches of the chimney-crook, struck
against the salt-box, and got lost among the flitches.

Another part of the room soon riveted her gaze.
At the other side of the chimney stood the settle,
which is the necessary supplement to a fire so open
that nothing less than a strong breeze will carry up
the smoke. It is, to the hearths of old-fashioned
cavernous fireplaces, what the east belt of trees is to the
exposed country estate, or the north wall to the garden.
Outside the settle candles gutter, locks of hair wave,
young women shiver, and old men sneeze. Inside is Paradise.
Not a symptom of a draught disturbs the air; the sitters'
backs are as warm as their faces, and songs and old tales
are drawn from the occupants by the comfortable heat,
like fruit from melon plants in a frame.

It was, however, not with those who sat in the settle that
Eustacia was concerned. A face showed itself with marked
distinctness against the dark-tanned wood of the upper part.
The owner, who was leaning against the settle's outer end,
was Clement Yeobright, or Clym, as he was called here;
she knew it could be nobody else. The spectacle constituted
an area of two feet in Rembrandt's intensest manner.
A strange power in the lounger's appearance lay in
the fact that, though his whole figure was visible,
the observer's eye was only aware of his face.

To one of middle age the countenance was that of a young man,
though a youth might hardly have seen any necessity
for the term of immaturity. But it was really one of
those faces which convey less the idea of so many years
as its age than of so much experience as its store.
The number of their years may have adequately summed
up Jared, Mahalaleel, and the rest of the antediluvians,
but the age of a modern man is to be measured by the
intensity of his history.

The face was well shaped, even excellently. But the mind
within was beginning to use it as a mere waste tablet whereon
to trace its idiosyncrasies as they developed themselves.
The beauty here visible would in no long time be ruthlessly
over-run by its parasite, thought, which might just as
well have fed upon a plainer exterior where there was
nothing it could harm. Had Heaven preserved Yeobright
from a wearing habit of meditation, people would have said,
"A handsome man."  Had his brain unfolded under sharper
contours they would have said, "A thoughtful man."  But an
inner strenuousness was preying upon an outer symmetry,
and they rated his look as singular.

Hence people who began by beholding him ended by perusing him.
His countenance was overlaid with legible meanings.
Without being thought-worn he yet had certain marks
derived from a perception of his surroundings, such as
are not unfrequently found on men at the end of the four
or five years of endeavour which follow the close
of placid pupilage. He already showed that thought
is a disease of flesh, and indirectly bore evidence
that ideal physical beauty is incompatible with emotional
development and a full recognition of the coil of things.
Mental luminousness must be fed with the oil of life,
even though there is already a physical need for it;
and the pitiful sight of two demands on one supply was
just showing itself here.

When standing before certain men the philosopher regrets
that thinkers are but perishable tissue, the artist
that perishable tissue has to think. Thus to deplore,
each from his point of view, the mutually destructive
interdependence of spirit and flesh would have been
instinctive with these in critically observing Yeobright.

As for his look, it was a natural cheerfulness striving
against depression from without, and not quite succeeding.
The look suggested isolation, but it revealed something more.
As is usual with bright natures, the deity that lies
ignominiously chained within an ephemeral human carcase
shone out of him like a ray.

The effect upon Eustacia was palpable. The extraordinary
pitch of excitement that she had reached beforehand would,
indeed, have caused her to be influenced by the most
commonplace man. She was troubled at Yeobright's presence.

The remainder of the play ended--the Saracen's head
was cut off, and Saint George stood as victor.
Nobody commented, any more than they would have commented
on the fact of mushrooms coming in autumn or snowdrops
in spring. They took the piece as phlegmatically as did
the actors themselves. It was a phase of cheerfulness
which was, as a matter of course, to be passed through
every Christmas; and there was no more to be said.

They sang the plaintive chant which follows the play,
during which all the dead men rise to their feet in a silent
and awful manner, like the ghosts of Napoleon's soldiers
in the Midnight Review. Afterwards the door opened,
and Fairway appeared on the threshold, accompanied by
Christian and another. They had been waiting outside
for the conclusion of the play, as the players had waited
for the conclusion of the dance.

"Come in, come in," said Mrs. Yeobright; and Clym went
forward to welcome them. "How is it you are so late?
Grandfer Cantle has been here ever so long, and we thought
you'd have come with him, as you live so near one another."

"Well, I should have come earlier," Mr. Fairway said
and paused to look along the beam of the ceiling for a
nail to hang his hat on; but, finding his accustomed
one to be occupied by the mistletoe, and all the nails
in the walls to be burdened with bunches of holly, he at
last relieved himself of the hat by ticklishly balancing
it between the candle-box and the head of the clock-case.
"I should have come earlier, ma'am," he resumed, with a
more composed air, "but I know what parties be, and how
there's none too much room in folks' houses at such times,
so I thought I wouldn't come till you'd got settled a bit."

"And I thought so too, Mrs. Yeobright," said Christian
earnestly, "but Father there was so eager that he had no
manners at all, and left home almost afore 'twas dark.
I told him 'twas barely decent in a' old man to come
so oversoon; but words be wind."

"Klk! I wasn't going to bide waiting about, till half
the game was over! I'm as light as a kite when anything's
going on!" crowed Grandfer Cantle from the chimneyseat.

Fairway had meanwhile concluded a critical gaze at Yeobright.
"Now, you may not believe it," he said to the rest of the room,
"but I should never have knowed this gentleman if I had
met him anywhere off his own he'th--he's altered so much."

"You too have altered, and for the better, I think Timothy,"
said Yeobright, surveying the firm figure of Fairway.

"Master Yeobright, look me over too. I have altered
for the better, haven't I, hey?" said Grandfer Cantle,
rising and placing himself something above half a foot
from Clym's eye, to induce the most searching criticism.

"To be sure we will," said Fairway, taking the candle and
moving it over the surface of the Grandfer's countenance,
the subject of his scrutiny irradiating himself with light
and pleasant smiles, and giving himself jerks of juvenility.

"You haven't changed much," said Yeobright.

"If there's any difference, Grandfer is younger,"
appended Fairway decisively.

"And yet not my own doing, and I feel no pride in it,"
said the pleased ancient. "But I can't be cured of my vagaries;
them I plead guilty to. Yes, Master Cantle always was that,
as we know. But I am nothing by the side of you,
Mister Clym."

"Nor any o' us," said Humphrey, in a low rich tone
of admiration, not intended to reach anybody's ears.

"Really, there would have been nobody here who could
have stood as decent second to him, or even third,
if I hadn't been a soldier in the Bang-up Locals (as we
was called for our smartness)," said Grandfer Cantle.
"And even as 'tis we all look a little scammish beside him.
But in the year four 'twas said there wasn't a finer figure
in the whole South Wessex than I, as I looked when dashing
past the shop-winders with the rest of our company on
the day we ran out o' Budmouth because it was thoughted
that Boney had landed round the point. There was I,
straight as a young poplar, wi' my firelock, and my bagnet,
and my spatterdashes, and my stock sawing my jaws off,
and my accoutrements sheening like the seven stars! Yes,
neighbours, I was a pretty sight in my soldiering days.
You ought to have seen me in four!"

"'Tis his mother's side where Master Clym's figure comes from,
bless ye," said Timothy. "I know'd her brothers well.
Longer coffins were never made in the whole country
of South Wessex, and 'tis said that poor George's knees
were crumpled up a little e'en as 'twas."

"Coffins, where?" inquired Christian, drawing nearer.
"Have the ghost of one appeared to anybody, Master Fairway?"

"No, no. Don't let your mind so mislead your ears,
Christian; and be a man," said Timothy reproachfully.

"I will."  said Christian. "But now I think o't my
shadder last night seemed just the shape of a coffin.
What is it a sign of when your shade's like a coffin,
neighbours? It can't be nothing to be afeared of,
I suppose?"

"Afeared, no!" said the Grandfer. "Faith, I was never
afeard of nothing except Boney, or I shouldn't ha'
been the soldier I was. Yes, 'tis a thousand pities you
didn't see me in four!"

By this time the mummers were preparing to leave;
but Mrs. Yeobright stopped them by asking them to sit
down and have a little supper. To this invitation
Father Christmas, in the name of them all, readily agreed.

Eustacia was happy in the opportunity of staying a little longer.
The cold and frosty night without was doubly frigid to her.
But the lingering was not without its difficulties.
Mrs. Yeobright, for want of room in the larger apartment,
placed a bench for the mummers halfway through the pantry door,
which opened from the sitting-room. Here they seated
themselves in a row, the door being left open--thus they
were still virtually in the same apartment. Mrs. Yeobright
now murmured a few words to her son, who crossed the room
to the pantry door, striking his head against the mistletoe
as he passed, and brought the mummers beef and bread,
cake pastry, mead, and elder-wine, the waiting being
done by him and his mother, that the little maid-servant
might sit as guest. The mummers doffed their helmets,
and began to eat and drink.

"But you will surely have some?" said Clym to the Turkish
Knight, as he stood before that warrior, tray in hand.
She had refused, and still sat covered, only the sparkle
of her eyes being visible between the ribbons which covered her face.

"None, thank you," replied Eustacia.

"He's quite a youngster," said the Saracen apologetically,
"and you must excuse him. He's not one of the old set,
but have jined us because t'other couldn't come."

"But he will take something?" persisted Yeobright.
"Try a glass of mead or elder-wine."

"Yes, you had better try that," said the Saracen.
"It will keep the cold out going home-along."

Though Eustacia could not eat without uncovering her face
she could drink easily enough beneath her disguise.
The elder-wine was accordingly accepted, and the glass
vanished inside the ribbons.

At moments during this performance Eustacia was half
in doubt about the security of her position; yet it
had a fearful joy. A series of attentions paid to her,
and yet not to her but to some imaginary person,
by the first man she had ever been inclined to adore,
complicated her emotions indescribably. She had loved
him partly because he was exceptional in this scene,
partly because she had determined to love him, chiefly
because she was in desperate need of loving somebody
after wearying of Wildeve. Believing that she must love
him in spite of herself, she had been influenced after
the fashion of the second Lord Lyttleton and other persons,
who have dreamed that they were to die on a certain day,
and by stress of a morbid imagination have actually brought
about that event. Once let a maiden admit the possibility
of her being stricken with love for someone at a certain
hour and place, and the thing is as good as done.

Did anything at this moment suggest to Yeobright the sex
of the creature whom that fantastic guise inclosed,
how extended was her scope both in feeling and in making
others feel, and how far her compass transcended that
of her companions in the band? When the disguised Queen
of Love appeared before Aeneas a preternatural perfume
accompanied her presence and betrayed her quality.
If such a mysterious emanation ever was projected by the
emotions of an earthly woman upon their object, it must
have signified Eustacia's presence to Yeobright now.
He looked at her wistfully, then seemed to fall into
a reverie, as if he were forgetting what he observed.
The momentary situation ended, he passed on, and Eustacia
sipped her wine without knowing what she drank.
The man for whom she had pre-determined to nourish
a passion went into the small room, and across it to the
further extremity.

The mummers, as has been stated, were seated on a bench,
one end of which extended into the small apartment,
or pantry, for want of space in the outer room.
Eustacia, partly from shyness, had chosen the midmost seat,
which thus commanded a view of the interior of the pantry
as well as the room containing the guests. When Clym
passed down the pantry her eyes followed him in the gloom
which prevailed there. At the remote end was a door which,
just as he was about to open it for himself, was opened
by somebody within; and light streamed forth.

The person was Thomasin, with a candle, looking anxious,
pale, and interesting. Yeobright appeared glad to see her,
and pressed her hand. "That's right, Tamsie," he said
heartily, as though recalled to himself by the sight
of her, "you have decided to come down. I am glad of it."

"Hush--no, no," she said quickly. "I only came to speak
to you."

"But why not join us?"

"I cannot. At least I would rather not. I am not
well enough, and we shall have plenty of time together
now you are going to be home a good long holiday."

"It isn't nearly so pleasant without you. Are you
really ill?"

"Just a little, my old cousin--here," she said,
playfully sweeping her hand across her heart.

"Ah, Mother should have asked somebody else to be
present tonight, perhaps?"

"O no, indeed. I merely stepped down, Clym, to ask you--"
Here he followed her through the doorway into the private
room beyond, and, the door closing, Eustacia and the
mummer who sat next to her, the only other witness
of the performance, saw and heard no more.

The heat flew to Eustacia's head and cheeks. She instantly
guessed that Clym, having been home only these two or
three days, had not as yet been made acquainted with
Thomasin's painful situation with regard to Wildeve;
and seeing her living there just as she had been living
before he left home, he naturally suspected nothing.
Eustacia felt a wild jealousy of Thomasin on the instant.
Though Thomasin might possibly have tender sentiments
towards another man as yet, how long could they be expected
to last when she was shut up here with this interesting and
travelled cousin of hers? There was no knowing what affection
might not soon break out between the two, so constantly
in each other's society, and not a distracting object near.
Clym's boyish love for her might have languished,
but it might easily be revived again.

Eustacia was nettled by her own contrivances. What a
sheer waste of herself to be dressed thus while another
was shining to advantage! Had she known the full effect
of the encounter she would have moved heaven and earth
to get here in a natural manner. The power of her face
all lost, the charm of her emotions all disguised,
the fascinations of her coquetry denied existence,
nothing but a voice left to her; she had a sense of the
doom of Echo. "Nobody here respects me," she said.
She had overlooked the fact that, in coming as a boy among
other boys, she would be treated as a boy. The slight,
though of her own causing, and self-explanatory, she
was unable to dismiss as unwittingly shown, so sensitive
had the situation made her.

Women have done much for themselves in histrionic dress.
To look far below those who, like a certain fair
personator of Polly Peachum early in the last century,
and another of Lydia Languish early in this, [1] have
won not only love but ducal coronets into the bargain,
whole shoals of them have reached to the initial
satisfaction of getting love almost whence they would.
But the Turkish Knight was denied even the chance of
achieving this by the fluttering ribbons which she dared
not brush aside.

[1] Written in 1877.

Yeobright returned to the room without his cousin.
When within two or three feet of Eustacia he stopped,
as if again arrested by a thought. He was gazing at her.
She looked another way, disconcerted, and wondered how long
this purgatory was to last. After lingering a few seconds he
passed on again.

To court their own discomfiture by love is a common instinct
with certain perfervid women. Conflicting sensations
of love, fear, and shame reduced Eustacia to a state
of the utmost uneasiness. To escape was her great and
immediate desire. The other mummers appeared to be in no
hurry to leave; and murmuring to the lad who sat next to
her that she preferred waiting for them outside the house,
she moved to the door as imperceptibly as possible,
opened it, and slipped out.

The calm, lone scene reassured her. She went forward
to the palings and leant over them, looking at the moon.
She had stood thus but a little time when the door again opened.
Expecting to see the remainder of the band Eustacia turned;
but no--Clym Yeobright came out as softly as she had done,
and closed the door behind him.

He advanced and stood beside her. "I have an odd opinion,"
he said, "and should like to ask you a question. Are you
a woman--or am I wrong?"

"I am a woman."

His eyes lingered on her with great interest. "Do girls
often play as mummers now? They never used to."

"They don't now."

"Why did you?"

"To get excitement and shake off depression," she said
in low tones.

"What depressed you?"

"Life."

"That's a cause of depression a good many have to put
up with."

"Yes."

A long silence. "And do you find excitement?" asked Clym
at last.

"At this moment, perhaps."

"Then you are vexed at being discovered?"

"Yes; though I thought I might be."

"I would gladly have asked you to our party had I known
you wished to come. Have I ever been acquainted with you
in my youth?"

"Never."

"Won't you come in again, and stay as long as you like?"

"No. I wish not to be further recognized."

"Well, you are safe with me."  After remaining in thought a
minute he added gently, "I will not intrude upon you longer.
It is a strange way of meeting, and I will not ask why
I find a cultivated woman playing such a part as this."
She did not volunteer the reason which he seemed to hope for,
and he wished her good night, going thence round to the
back of the house, where he walked up and down by himself
for some time before re-entering.

Eustacia, warmed with an inner fire, could not wait for
her companions after this. She flung back the ribbons
from her face, opened the gate, and at once struck into
the heath. She did not hasten along. Her grandfather
was in bed at this hour, for she so frequently walked
upon the hills on moonlight nights that he took no notice
of her comings and goings, and, enjoying himself in his
own way, left her to do likewise. A more important
subject than that of getting indoors now engrossed her.
Yeobright, if he had the least curiosity, would infallibly
discover her name. What then? She first felt a sort of
exultation at the way in which the adventure had terminated,
even though at moments between her exultations she was
abashed and blushful. Then this consideration recurred
to chill her: What was the use of her exploit? She was
at present a total stranger to the Yeobright family.
The unreasonable nimbus of romance with which she had
encircled that man might be her misery. How could she
allow herself to become so infatuated with a stranger? And
to fill the cup of her sorrow there would be Thomasin,
living day after day in inflammable proximity to him;
for she had just learnt that, contrary to her first belief,
he was going to stay at home some considerable time.

She reached the wicket at Mistover Knap, but before
opening it she turned and faced the heath once more.
The form of Rainbarrow stood above the hills, and the moon
stood above Rainbarrow. The air was charged with silence
and frost. The scene reminded Eustacia of a circumstance
which till that moment she had totally forgotten.
She had promised to meet Wildeve by the Barrow this very
night at eight, to give a final answer to his pleading
for an elopement.

She herself had fixed the evening and the hour.
He had probably come to the spot, waited there in the cold,
and been greatly disappointed.

"Well, so much the better--it did not hurt him,"
she said serenely. Wildeve had at present the rayless
outline of the sun through smoked glass, and she could
say such things as that with the greatest facility.

She remained deeply pondering; and Thomasin's winning
manner towards her cousin arose again upon Eustacia's mind.

"O that she had been married to Damon before this!"
she said. "And she would if it hadn't been for me! If I
had only known--if I had only known!"

Eustacia once more lifted her deep stormy eyes to
the moonlight, and, sighing that tragic sigh of hers
which was so much like a shudder, entered the shadow
of the roof. She threw off her trappings in the outhouse,
rolled them up, and went indoors to her chamber.

7 - A Coalition between Beauty and Oddness

The old captain's prevailing indifference to his
granddaughter's movements left her free as a bird to follow
her own courses; but it so happened that he did take upon
himself the next morning to ask her why she had walked out so late.

"Only in search of events, Grandfather," she said,
looking out of the window with that drowsy latency of
manner which discovered so much force behind it whenever
the trigger was pressed.

"Search of events--one would think you were one of the
bucks I knew at one-and-twenty."

"It is lonely here."

"So much the better. If I were living in a town my
whole time would be taken up in looking after you.
I fully expected you would have been home when I returned
from the Woman."

"I won't conceal what I did. I wanted an adventure,
and I went with the mummers. I played the part of the
Turkish Knight."

"No, never? Ha, ha! Good gad! I didn't expect it
of you, Eustacia."

"It was my first performance, and it certainly will be
my last. Now I have told you--and remember it is a secret."

"Of course. But, Eustacia, you never did--ha! ha! Dammy,
how 'twould have pleased me forty years ago! But remember,
no more of it, my girl. You may walk on the heath night
or day, as you choose, so that you don't bother me;
but no figuring in breeches again."

"You need have no fear for me, Grandpapa."

Here the conversation ceased, Eustacia's moral training
never exceeding in severity a dialogue of this sort,
which, if it ever became profitable to good works,
would be a result not dear at the price. But her thoughts
soon strayed far from her own personality; and, full of a
passionate and indescribable solicitude for one to whom
she was not even a name, she went forth into the amplitude
of tanned wild around her, restless as Ahasuerus the Jew.
She was about half a mile from her residence when she
beheld a sinister redness arising from a ravine a little
way in advance--dull and lurid like a flame in sunlight
and she guessed it to signify Diggory Venn.

When the farmers who had wished to buy in a new stock
of reddle during the last month had inquired where Venn
was to be found, people replied, "On Egdon Heath."
Day after day the answer was the same. Now, since Egdon
was populated with heath-croppers and furze-cutters rather
than with sheep and shepherds, and the downs where most
of the latter were to be found lay some to the north,
some to the west of Egdon, his reason for camping
about there like Israel in Zin was not apparent.
The position was central and occasionally desirable.
But the sale of reddle was not Diggory's primary object
in remaining on the heath, particularly at so late a period
of the year, when most travellers of his class had gone
into winter quarters.

Eustacia looked at the lonely man. Wildeve had told her
at their last meeting that Venn had been thrust forward
by Mrs. Yeobright as one ready and anxious to take his
place as Thomasin's betrothed. His figure was perfect,
his face young and well outlined, his eye bright,
his intelligence keen, and his position one which he could
readily better if he chose. But in spite of possibilities it
was not likely that Thomasin would accept this Ishmaelitish
creature while she had a cousin like Yeobright at her elbow,
and Wildeve at the same time not absolutely indifferent.
Eustacia was not long in guessing that poor Mrs. Yeobright,
in her anxiety for her niece's future, had mentioned
this lover to stimulate the zeal of the other.
Eustacia was on the side of the Yeobrights now,
and entered into the spirit of the aunt's desire.

"Good morning, miss," said the reddleman, taking off
his cap of hareskin, and apparently bearing her no ill-
will from recollection of their last meeting.

"Good morning, reddleman," she said, hardly troubling
to lift her heavily shaded eyes to his. "I did not know
you were so near. Is your van here too?"

Venn moved his elbow towards a hollow in which a dense
brake of purple-stemmed brambles had grown to such vast
dimensions as almost to form a dell. Brambles, though
churlish when handled, are kindly shelter in early winter,
being the latest of the deciduous bushes to lose their leaves.

The roof and chimney of Venn's caravan showed behind
the tracery and tangles of the brake.

"You remain near this part?" she asked with more interest.

"Yes, I have business here."

"Not altogether the selling of reddle?"

"It has nothing to do with that."

"It has to do with Miss Yeobright?"

Her face seemed to ask for an armed peace, and he therefore
said frankly, "Yes, miss; it is on account of her."

"On account of your approaching marriage with her?"

Venn flushed through his stain. "Don't make sport of me,
Miss Vye," he said.

"It isn't true?"

"Certainly not."

She was thus convinced that the reddleman was a mere
pis aller in Mrs. Yeobright's mind; one, moreover,
who had not even been informed of his promotion to
that lowly standing. "It was a mere notion of mine,"
she said quietly; and was about to pass by without
further speech, when, looking round to the right, she saw
a painfully well-known figure serpentining upwards by one
of the little paths which led to the top where she stood.
Owing to the necessary windings of his course his back
was at present towards them. She glanced quickly round;
to escape that man there was only one way. Turning to Venn,
she said, "Would you allow me to rest a few minutes
in your van? The banks are damp for sitting on."

"Certainly, miss; I'll make a place for you."

She followed him behind the dell of brambles to his wheeled
dwelling into which Venn mounted, placing the three-legged
stool just within the door.

"That is the best I can do for you," he said, stepping down
and retiring to the path, where he resumed the smoking
of his pipe as he walked up and down.

Eustacia bounded into the vehicle and sat on the stool,
ensconced from view on the side towards the trackway.
Soon she heard the brushing of other feet than the
reddleman's, a not very friendly "Good day" uttered by
two men in passing each other, and then the dwindling
of the foot-fall of one of them in a direction onwards.
Eustacia stretched her neck forward till she caught
a glimpse of a receding back and shoulders; and she
felt a wretched twinge of misery, she knew not why.
It was the sickening feeling which, if the changed
heart has any generosity at all in its composition,
accompanies the sudden sight of a once-loved one who is
beloved no more.

When Eustacia descended to proceed on her way
the reddleman came near. "That was Mr. Wildeve
who passed, miss," he said slowly, and expressed by
his face that he expected her to feel vexed at having
been sitting unseen.

"Yes, I saw him coming up the hill," replied Eustacia.
"Why should you tell me that?" It was a bold question,
considering the reddleman's knowledge of her past love;
but her undemonstrative manner had power to repress the
opinions of those she treated as remote from her.

"I am glad to hear that you can ask it," said the
reddleman bluntly. "And, now I think of it, it agrees
with what I saw last night."

"Ah--what was that?" Eustacia wished to leave him,
but wished to know.

"Mr. Wildeve stayed at Rainbarrow a long time waiting
for a lady who didn't come."

"You waited too, it seems?"

"Yes, I always do. I was glad to see him disappointed.
He will be there again tonight."

"To be again disappointed. The truth is, reddleman, that that lady,
so far from wishing to stand in the way of Thomasin's
marriage with Mr. Wildeve, would be very glad to promote it."

Venn felt much astonishment at this avowal, though he did
not show it clearly; that exhibition may greet remarks
which are one remove from expectation, but it is usually
withheld in complicated cases of two removes and upwards.
"Indeed, miss," he replied.

"How do you know that Mr. Wildeve will come to Rainbarrow
again tonight?" she asked.

"I heard him say to himself that he would. He's in
a regular temper."

Eustacia looked for a moment what she felt, and she murmured,
lifting her deep dark eyes anxiously to his, "I wish I
knew what to do. I don't want to be uncivil to him;
but I don't wish to see him again; and I have some few
little things to return to him."

"If you choose to send 'em by me, miss, and a note
to tell him that you wish to say no more to him,
I'll take it for you quite privately. That would
be the most straightforward way of letting him know your mind."

"Very well," said Eustacia. "Come towards my house,
and I will bring it out to you."

She went on, and as the path was an infinitely small
parting in the shaggy locks of the heath, the reddleman
followed exactly in her trail. She saw from a distance
that the captain was on the bank sweeping the horizon
with his telescope; and bidding Venn to wait where he
stood she entered the house alone.

In ten minutes she returned with a parcel and a note,
and said, in placing them in his hand, "Why are you so
ready to take these for me?"

"Can you ask that?"

"I suppose you think to serve Thomasin in some way by it.
Are you as anxious as ever to help on her marriage?"

Venn was a little moved. "I would sooner have married
her myself," he said in a low voice. "But what I feel
is that if she cannot be happy without him I will do
my duty in helping her to get him, as a man ought."

Eustacia looked curiously at the singular man who spoke thus.
What a strange sort of love, to be entirely free
from that quality of selfishness which is frequently
the chief constituent of the passion, and sometimes
its only one! The reddleman's disinterestedness was
so well deserving of respect that it overshot respect
by being barely comprehended; and she almost thought it absurd.

"Then we are both of one mind at last," she said.

"Yes," replied Venn gloomily. "But if you would
tell me, miss, why you take such an interest in her,
I should be easier. It is so sudden and strange."

Eustacia appeared at a loss. "I cannot tell you that,
reddleman," she said coldly.

Venn said no more. He pocketed the letter, and,
bowing to Eustacia, went away.

Rainbarrow had again become blended with night when
Wildeve ascended the long acclivity at its base.
On his reaching the top a shape grew up from the earth
immediately behind him. It was that of Eustacia's emissary.
He slapped Wildeve on the shoulder. The feverish young
inn-keeper and ex-engineer started like Satan at the touch
of Ithuriel's spear.

"The meeting is always at eight o'clock, at this place,"
said Venn, "and here we are--we three."

"We three?" said Wildeve, looking quickly round.

"Yes; you, and I, and she. This is she."  He held up
the letter and parcel.

Wildeve took them wonderingly. "I don't quite see
what this means," he said. "How do you come here?
There must be some mistake."

"It will be cleared from your mind when you have read
the letter. Lanterns for one."  The reddleman struck a light,
kindled an inch of tallow-candle which he had brought,
and sheltered it with his cap.

"Who are you?" said Wildeve, discerning by the candle-
light an obscure rubicundity of person in his companion.
"You are the reddleman I saw on the hill this morning--why,
you are the man who----"

"Please read the letter."

"If you had come from the other one I shouldn't have
been surprised," murmured Wildeve as he opened the letter
and read. His face grew serious.

TO MR. WILDEVE.

After some thought I have decided once and for all that we
must hold no further communication. The more I consider
the matter the more I am convinced that there must
be an end to our acquaintance. Had you been uniformly
faithful to me throughout these two years you might
now have some ground for accusing me of heartlessness;
but if you calmly consider what I bore during the period
of your desertion, and how I passively put up with your
courtship of another without once interfering, you will,
I think, own that I have a right to consult my own
feelings when you come back to me again. That these are
not what they were towards you may, perhaps, be a fault
in me, but it is one which you can scarcely reproach
me for when you remember how you left me for Thomasin.

The little articles you gave me in the early part of our
friendship are returned by the bearer of this letter.
They should rightly have been sent back when I first heard
of your engagement to her.

EUSTACIA.

By the time that Wildeve reached her name the blankness
with which he had read the first half of the letter
intensified to mortification. "I am made a great fool of,
one way and another," he said pettishly. "Do you know
what is in this letter?"

The reddleman hummed a tune.

"Can't you answer me?" asked Wildeve warmly.

"Ru-um-tum-tum," sang the reddleman.

Wildeve stood looking on the ground beside Venn's feet,
till he allowed his eyes to travel upwards over Diggory's form,
as illuminated by the candle, to his head and face.
"Ha-ha! Well, I suppose I deserve it, considering how I have
played with them both," he said at last, as much to himself
as to Venn. "But of all the odd things that ever I knew,
the oddest is that you should so run counter to your own
interests as to bring this to me."

"My interests?"

"Certainly. 'Twas your interest not to do anything
which would send me courting Thomasin again, now she
has accepted you--or something like it. Mrs. Yeobright
says you are to marry her. 'Tisn't true, then?"

"Good Lord! I heard of this before, but didn't believe it.
When did she say so?"

Wildeve began humming as the reddleman had done.

"I don't believe it now," cried Venn.

"Ru-um-tum-tum," sang Wildeve.

"O Lord--how we can imitate!" said Venn contemptuously.
"I'll have this out. I'll go straight to her."

Diggory withdrew with an emphatic step, Wildeve's eye
passing over his form in withering derision, as if he
were no more than a heath-cropper. When the reddleman's
figure could no longer be seen, Wildeve himself descended
and plunged into the rayless hollow of the vale.

To lose the two women--he who had been the well-beloved
of both--was too ironical an issue to be endured.
He could only decently save himself by Thomasin;
and once he became her husband, Eustacia's repentance,
he thought, would set in for a long and bitter term.
It was no wonder that Wildeve, ignorant of the new man
at the back of the scene, should have supposed Eustacia
to be playing a part. To believe that the letter was not
the result of some momentary pique, to infer that she really
gave him up to Thomasin, would have required previous
knowledge of her transfiguration by that man's influence.
Who was to know that she had grown generous in the greediness
of a new passion, that in coveting one cousin she was
dealing liberally with another, that in her eagerness to
appropriate she gave way?

Full of this resolve to marry in haste, and wring
the heart of the proud girl, Wildeve went his way.

Meanwhile Diggory Venn had returned to his van,
where he stood looking thoughtfully into the stove.
A new vista was opened up to him. But, however promising
Mrs. Yeobright's views of him might be as a candidate for her
niece's hand, one condition was indispensable to the favour
of Thomasin herself, and that was a renunciation of his
present wild mode of life. In this he saw little difficulty.

He could not afford to wait till the next day before seeing
Thomasin and detailing his plan. He speedily plunged
himself into toilet operations, pulled a suit of cloth
clothes from a box, and in about twenty minutes stood before
the van-lantern as a reddleman in nothing but his face,
the vermilion shades of which were not to be removed in
a day. Closing the door and fastening it with a padlock,
Venn set off towards Blooms-End.

He had reached the white palings and laid his hand
upon the gate when the door of the house opened,
and quickly closed again. A female form had glided in.
At the same time a man, who had seemingly been standing
with the woman in the porch, came forward from the house
till he was face to face with Venn. It was Wildeve again.

"Man alive, you've been quick at it," said Diggory sarcastically.

"And you slow, as you will find," said Wildeve.
"And," lowering his voice, "you may as well go
back again now. I've claimed her, and got her.
Good night, reddleman!" Thereupon Wildeve walked away.

Venn's heart sank within him, though it had not risen
unduly high. He stood leaning over the palings in
an indecisive mood for nearly a quarter of an hour.
Then he went up the garden path, knocked, and asked
for Mrs. Yeobright.

Instead of requesting him to enter she came to the porch.
A discourse was carried on between them in low measured
tones for the space of ten minutes or more. At the end
of the time Mrs. Yeobright went in, and Venn sadly retraced
his steps into the heath. When he had again regained
his van he lit the lantern, and with an apathetic face
at once began to pull off his best clothes, till in the
course of a few minutes he reappeared as the confirmed
and irretrievable reddleman that he had seemed before.

8 - Firmness Is Discovered in a Gentle Heart

On that evening the interior of Blooms-End, though cosy
and comfortable, had been rather silent. Clym Yeobright
was not at home. Since the Christmas party he had gone
on a few days' visit to a friend about ten miles off.

The shadowy form seen by Venn to part from Wildeve
in the porch, and quickly withdraw into the house,
was Thomasin's. On entering she threw down a cloak which
had been carelessly wrapped round her, and came forward
to the light, where Mrs. Yeobright sat at her work-table,
drawn up within the settle, so that part of it projected
into the chimney-corner.

"I don't like your going out after dark alone, Tamsin,"
said her aunt quietly, without looking up from her work.
"I have only been just outside the door."

"Well?" inquired Mrs. Yeobright, struck by a change
in the tone of Thomasin's voice, and observing her.
Thomasin's cheek was flushed to a pitch far beyond
that which it had reached before her troubles, and her
eyes glittered.

"It was HE who knocked," she said.

"I thought as much."

"He wishes the marriage to be at once."

"Indeed! What--is he anxious?" Mrs. Yeobright directed
a searching look upon her niece. "Why did not Mr. Wildeve
come in?"

"He did not wish to. You are not friends with him, he says.
He would like the wedding to be the day after tomorrow,
quite privately; at the church of his parish--not
at ours."

"Oh! And what did you say?"

"I agreed to it," Thomasin answered firmly. "I am a
practical woman now. I don't believe in hearts at all.
I would marry him under any circumstances since--since
Clym's letter."

A letter was lying on Mrs. Yeobright's work-basket, and
at Thomasin's words her aunt reopened it, and silently
read for the tenth time that day:--

What is the meaning of this silly story that people are
circulating about Thomasin and Mr. Wildeve? I should call
such a scandal humiliating if there was the least chance
of its being true. How could such a gross falsehood
have arisen? It is said that one should go abroad
to hear news of home, and I appear to have done it.
Of course I contradict the tale everywhere; but it is
very vexing, and I wonder how it could have originated.
It is too ridiculous that such a girl as Thomasin could
so mortify us as to get jilted on the wedding day.
What has she done?

"Yes," Mrs. Yeobright said sadly, putting down the letter.
"If you think you can marry him, do so. And since Mr. Wildeve
wishes it to be unceremonious, let it be that too.
I can do nothing. It is all in your own hands now.
My power over your welfare came to an end when you left
this house to go with him to Anglebury."  She continued,
half in bitterness, "I may almost ask, why do you consult
me in the matter at all? If you had gone and married
him without saying a word to me, I could hardly have
been angry--simply because, poor girl, you can't do a
better thing."

"Don't say that and dishearten me."

"You are right--I will not."

"I do not plead for him, Aunt. Human nature is weak,
and I am not a blind woman to insist that he is perfect.
I did think so, but I don't now. But I know my course,
and you know that I know it. I hope for the best."

"And so do I, and we will both continue to," said Mrs. Yeobright,
rising and kissing her. "Then the wedding, if it comes off,
will be on the morning of the very day Clym comes home?"

"Yes. I decided that it ought to be over before he came.
After that you can look him in the face, and so can I. Our
concealments will matter nothing."

Mrs. Yeobright moved her head in thoughtful assent,
and presently said, "Do you wish me to give you away?
I am willing to undertake that, you know, if you wish,
as I was last time. After once forbidding the banns I
think I can do no less."

"I don't think I will ask you to come," said Thomasin
reluctantly, but with decision. "It would be unpleasant,
I am almost sure. Better let there be only strangers present,
and none of my relations at all. I would rather have it so.
I do not wish to do anything which may touch your credit,
and I feel that I should be uncomfortable if you were there,
after what has passed. I am only your niece, and there
is no necessity why you should concern yourself more about me."

"Well, he has beaten us," her aunt said. "It really
seems as if he had been playing with you in this way
in revenge for my humbling him as I did by standing
up against him at first."

"O no, Aunt," murmured Thomasin.

They said no more on the subject then. Diggory Venn's knock
came soon after; and Mrs. Yeobright, on returning from
her interview with him in the porch, carelessly observed,
"Another lover has come to ask for you."

"No?"

"Yes, that queer young man Venn."

"Asks to pay his addresses to me?"

"Yes; and I told him he was too late."

Thomasin looked silently into the candle-flame. "Poor Diggory!"
she said, and then aroused herself to other things.

The next day was passed in mere mechanical deeds of preparation,
both the women being anxious to immerse themselves in
these to escape the emotional aspect of the situation.
Some wearing apparel and other articles were collected
anew for Thomasin, and remarks on domestic details were
frequently made, so as to obscure any inner misgivings
about her future as Wildeve's wife.

The appointed morning came. The arrangement with Wildeve
was that he should meet her at the church to guard against
any unpleasant curiosity which might have affected them
had they been seen walking off together in the usual
country way.

Aunt and niece stood together in the bedroom where the bride
was dressing. The sun, where it could catch it, made a
mirror of Thomasin's hair, which she always wore braided.
It was braided according to a calendar system--the more
important the day the more numerous the strands in the braid.
On ordinary working-days she braided it in threes;
on ordinary Sundays in fours; at Maypolings, gipsyings,
and the like, she braided it in fives. Years ago she had
said that when she married she would braid it in sevens.
She had braided it in sevens today.

"I have been thinking that I will wear my blue silk after all,"
she said. "It is my wedding day, even though there may
be something sad about the time. I mean," she added,
anxious to correct any wrong impression, "not sad in itself,
but in its having had great disappointment and trouble
before it."

Mrs. Yeobright breathed in a way which might have been called
a sigh. "I almost wish Clym had been at home," she said.
"Of course you chose the time because of his absence."

"Partly. I have felt that I acted unfairly to him in not
telling him all; but, as it was done not to grieve him,
I thought I would carry out the plan to its end, and tell
the whole story when the sky was clear."

"You are a practical little woman," said Mrs. Yeobright, smiling.
"I wish you and he--no, I don't wish anything. There, it is
nine o'clock," she interrupted, hearing a whizz and a dinging
downstairs.

"I told Damon I would leave at nine," said Thomasin,
hastening out of the room.

Her aunt followed. When Thomasin was going up the little
walk from the door to the wicket-gate, Mrs. Yeobright
looked reluctantly at her, and said, "It is a shame
to let you go alone."

"It is necessary," said Thomasin.

"At any rate," added her aunt with forced cheerfulness, "I shall
call upon you this afternoon, and bring the cake with me.
If Clym has returned by that time he will perhaps come too.
I wish to show Mr. Wildeve that I bear him no ill-will.
Let the past be forgotten. Well, God bless you! There,
I don't believe in old superstitions, but I'll do it."
She threw a slipper at the retreating figure of the girl,
who turned, smiled, and went on again.

A few steps further, and she looked back. "Did you
call me, Aunt?" she tremulously inquired. "Good-bye!"

Moved by an uncontrollable feeling as she looked upon
Mrs. Yeobright's worn, wet face, she ran back, when her
aunt came forward, and they met again. "O--Tamsie," said
the elder, weeping, "I don't like to let you go."

"I--I am--" Thomasin began, giving way likewise.
But, quelling her grief, she said "Good-bye!" again and went on.

Then Mrs. Yeobright saw a little figure wending its way
between the scratching furze-bushes, and diminishing far up
the valley--a pale-blue spot in a vast field of neutral brown,
solitary and undefended except by the power of her own hope.

But the worst feature in the case was one which did
not appear in the landscape; it was the man.

The hour chosen for the ceremony by Thomasin and Wildeve had
been so timed as to enable her to escape the awkwardness of
meeting her cousin Clym, who was returning the same morning.
To own to the partial truth of what he had heard would be
distressing as long as the humiliating position resulting
from the event was unimproved. It was only after a second
and successful journey to the altar that she could lift
up her head and prove the failure of the first attempt
a pure accident.

She had not been gone from Blooms-End more than half
an hour when Yeobright came by the meads from the other
direction and entered the house.

"I had an early breakfast," he said to his mother after
greeting her. "Now I could eat a little more."

They sat down to the repeated meal, and he went on in
a low, anxious voice, apparently imagining that Thomasin
had not yet come downstairs, "What's this I have heard
about Thomasin and Mr. Wildeve?"

"It is true in many points," said Mrs. Yeobright quietly;
"but it is all right now, I hope."  She looked at the clock.

"True?"

"Thomasin is gone to him today."

Clym pushed away his breakfast. "Then there is a scandal
of some sort, and that's what's the matter with Thomasin.
Was it this that made her ill?"

"Yes. Not a scandal--a misfortune. I will tell you all
about it, Clym. You must not be angry, but you must listen,
and you'll find that what we have done has been done
for the best."

She then told him the circumstances. All that he had known
of the affair before he returned from Paris was that there
had existed an attachment between Thomasin and Wildeve,
which his mother had at first discountenanced, but had since,
owing to the arguments of Thomasin, looked upon in a little
more favourable light. When she, therefore, proceeded
to explain all he was greatly surprised and troubled.

"And she determined that the wedding should be over
before you came back," said Mrs. Yeobright, "that there
might be no chance of her meeting you, and having a very
painful time of it. That's why she has gone to him;
they have arranged to be married this morning."

"But I can't understand it," said Yeobright, rising.
"'Tis so unlike her. I can see why you did not write
to me after her unfortunate return home. But why didn't
you let me know when the wedding was going to be--the
first time?"

"Well, I felt vexed with her just then. She seemed to me
to be obstinate; and when I found that you were nothing
in her mind I vowed that she should be nothing in yours.
I felt that she was only my niece after all; I told her she
might marry, but that I should take no interest in it,
and should not bother you about it either."

"It wouldn't have been bothering me. Mother, you did wrong."

"I thought it might disturb you in your business, and that
you might throw up your situation, or injure your prospects
in some way because of it, so I said nothing. Of course,
if they had married at that time in a proper manner,
I should have told you at once."

"Tamsin actually being married while we are sitting here!"

"Yes. Unless some accident happens again, as it did
the first time. It may, considering he's the same man."

"Yes, and I believe it will. Was it right to let her go?
Suppose Wildeve is really a bad fellow?"

"Then he won't come, and she'll come home again."

"You should have looked more into it."

"It is useless to say that," his mother answered with an
impatient look of sorrow. "You don't know how bad it has
been here with us all these weeks, Clym. You don't know
what a mortification anything of that sort is to a woman.
You don't know the sleepless nights we've had in this house,
and the almost bitter words that have passed between us
since that Fifth of November. I hope never to pass seven
such weeks again. Tamsin has not gone outside the door,
and I have been ashamed to look anybody in the face;
and now you blame me for letting her do the only thing that
can be done to set that trouble straight."

"No," he said slowly. "Upon the whole I don't blame you.
But just consider how sudden it seems to me. Here was I,
knowing nothing; and then I am told all at once that Tamsie
is gone to be married. Well, I suppose there was nothing
better to do. Do you know, Mother," he continued after
a moment or two, looking suddenly interested in his own
past history, "I once thought of Tamsin as a sweetheart? Yes,
I did. How odd boys are! And when I came home and saw
her this time she seemed so much more affectionate
than usual, that I was quite reminded of those days,
particularly on the night of the party, when she was unwell.
We had the party just the same--was not that rather cruel
to her?"

"It made no difference. I had arranged to give one, and it
was not worth while to make more gloom than necessary.
To begin by shutting ourselves up and telling you of Tamsin's
misfortunes would have been a poor sort of welcome."

Clym remained thinking. "I almost wish you had not had
that party," he said; "and for other reasons. But I will
tell you in a day or two. We must think of Tamsin now."

They lapsed into silence. "I'll tell you what,"
said Yeobright again, in a tone which showed some slumbering
feeling still. "I don't think it kind to Tamsin to let
her be married like this, and neither of us there to keep
up her spirits or care a bit about her. She hasn't
disgraced herself, or done anything to deserve that.
It is bad enough that the wedding should be so hurried
and unceremonious, without our keeping away from it
in addition. Upon my soul, 'tis almost a shame.
I'll go."

"It is over by this time," said his mother with a sigh;
"unless they were late, or he--"

"Then I shall be soon enough to see them come out.
I don't quite like your keeping me in ignorance, Mother,
after all. Really, I half hope he has failed to meet her!"

"And ruined her character?"

"Nonsense--that wouldn't ruin Thomasin."

He took up his hat and hastily left the house.
Mrs. Yeobright looked rather unhappy, and sat still,
deep in thought. But she was not long left alone.
A few minutes later Clym came back again, and in his company
came Diggory Venn.

"I find there isn't time for me to get there," said Clym.

"Is she married?" Mrs. Yeobright inquired, turning to the
reddleman a face in which a strange strife of wishes,
for and against, was apparent.

Venn bowed. "She is, ma'am."

"How strange it sounds," murmured Clym.

"And he didn't disappoint her this time?" said Mrs. Yeobright.

"He did not. And there is now no slight on her name.
I was hastening ath'art to tell you at once, as I saw you
were not there."

"How came you to be there? How did you know it?"
she asked.

"I have been in that neighbourhood for some time, and I
saw them go in," said the reddleman. "Wildeve came up
to the door, punctual as the clock. I didn't expect
it of him."  He did not add, as he might have added,
that how he came to be in that neighbourhood was not
by accident; that, since Wildeve's resumption of his right
to Thomasin, Venn, with the thoroughness which was part
of his character, had determined to see the end of the episode.

"Who was there?" said Mrs. Yeobright.

"Nobody hardly. I stood right out of the way, and she
did not see me."  The reddleman spoke huskily, and looked
into the garden.

"Who gave her away?"

"Miss Vye."

"How very remarkable! Miss Vye! It is to be considered
an honour, I suppose?"

"Who's Miss Vye?" said Clym.

"Captain Vye's granddaughter, of Mistover Knap."

"A proud girl from Budmouth," said Mrs. Yeobright.
"One not much to my liking. People say she's a witch,
but of course that's absurd."

The reddleman kept to himself his acquaintance with that
fair personage, and also that Eustacia was there because he
went to fetch her, in accordance with a promise he had given
as soon as he learnt that the marriage was to take place.
He merely said, in continuation of the story----

"I was sitting on the churchyard wall when they came up,
one from one way, the other from the other; and Miss Vye
was walking thereabouts, looking at the headstones.
As soon as they had gone in I went to the door, feeling I
should like to see it, as I knew her so well. I pulled
off my boots because they were so noisy, and went up into
the gallery. I saw then that the parson and clerk were
already there."