Return of the Native
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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 at 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.
CHAPTER 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 lay 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?”
CHAPTER 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
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, meadowland 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 whirlpools 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.”