The Return of the Native quotes

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 brooding 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.

The qualifications which frequently invest the façade of a prison with far more dignity than is found in the façade 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.

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.

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;

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This obscure, obsolete, superseded country figures in Domesday.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;

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.

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.

… 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 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.

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.

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?”

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.

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.

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 storey 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;

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.

“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.

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.

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.

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 footsteps no longer required undivided attention.

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.

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.”

“

Yes, real life is never at all like that.

”

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.

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.

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.

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.

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 biased 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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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:

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.

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.

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.

“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!”

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.

“

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

”

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.

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.

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?

She saw the white paling about half a mile off; but he did not appear. It was almost with heartsickness 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.

“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.

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.

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.

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.

… 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 enclosed, 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 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;

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.

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.

The truth seems to be that a long line of disillusive centuries has permanently displaced the Hellenic idea of life, or whatever it may be called.

What the Greeks only suspected we know well; what their Aeschylus imagined our nursery children feel.

That old-fashioned revelling in the general situation grows less and less possible as we uncover the defects of natural laws, and see the quandary that man is in by their operation.

He had been a lad of whom something was expected. Beyond this all had been chaos.

That he would be successful in an original way, or that he would go to the dogs in an original way, seemed equally probable.

The only absolute certainty about him was that he would not stand still in the circumstances amid which he was born.

it is felt that he will not be found to be, like most of us, doing nothing in particular. There is an indefinite sense that he must be invading some region of singularity, good or bad.

The devout hope is that he is doing well. The secret faith is that he is making a mess of it.

Half a dozen comfortable market-men, who were habitual callers at the Quiet Woman as they passed by in their carts, were partial to the topic.

In consequence of this relatively advanced position, Yeobright might have been called unfortunate. The rural world was not ripe for him.

A man should be only partially before his time: to be completely to the vanward in aspirations is fatal to fame.

Had Philip’s warlike son been intellectually so far ahead as to have attempted civilization without bloodshed, he would have been twice the godlike hero that he seemed, but nobody would have heard of an Alexander.

Also, on the other hand, that it will never cause him to be applauded as a prophet, revered as a priest, or exalted as a king.

Its usual blessings are happiness and mediocrity.

It produces the poetry of Rogers, the paintings of West, the statecraft of North, the spiritual guidance of Tomline;

his toys had been the flint knives and arrowheads which he found there, wondering why stones should “grow” to such odd shapes; his flowers, the purple bells and yellow furze; his animal kingdom, the snakes and croppers; his society, its human haunters.

Take all the varying hates felt by Eustacia Vye towards the heath, and translate them into loves, and you have the heart of Clym.

He gazed upon the wide prospect as he walked, and was glad.

But she had asked no question with her lips, even when the arrival of his trunk suggested that he was not going to leave her soon.

Her silence besought an explanation of him more loudly than words.

“I am not going back to Paris again, mother,” he said. “At least, in my old capacity. I have given up the business.”

She shook her head.

“I am managing to exist in a wilderness, but I cannot drink from a pond,” she said.

Clym looked towards the well, which was now deserted, the men having gone home. “It is a long way to send for spring-water,” he said, after a silence. “But since you don’t like this in the pond, I’ll try to get you some myself.”

“Still I think that if you were to hear my scheme you might take an interest in it.

There is no use in hating people⁠—if you hate anything, you should hate what produced them.

”

The month of March arrived, and the heath showed its first signs of awakening from winter trance.

The awakening was almost feline in its stealthiness.

The pool outside the bank by Eustacia’s dwelling, which seemed as dead and desolate as ever to an observer who moved and made noises in his observation, would gradually disclose a state of great animation when silently watched awhile.

Such a situation had less than three months brought forth.

They remained long without a single utterance, for no language could reach the level of their condition: words were as the rusty implements of a bygone barbarous epoch, and only to be occasionally tolerated.

“I began to wonder why you did not come,” said Yeobright, when she had withdrawn a little from his embrace.

“And not long? That’s because you occupy yourself, and so blind yourself to my absence.

To me, who can do nothing, it has been like living under stagnant water.

”

“No. Yet I know that we shall not love like this always.

Nothing can ensure the continuance of love. It will evaporate like a spirit, and so I feel full of fears.

”

“It is your only chance.

Many a man’s love has been a curse to him.

”

“Never mind what it is. Believe this, I cannot let myself lose you. I must have you always with me. This very evening I do not like to let you go. There is only one cure for this anxiety, dearest—you must be my wife.”

She started: then endeavoured to say calmly, “Cynics say that cures the anxiety by curing the love.”

“But you must answer me. Shall I claim you some day—I don’t mean at once?”

“

I see your face in every scene of my dreams, and hear your voice in every sound.

I wish I did not. It is too much what I feel. They say such love never lasts. But it must!

“I wish I had known that you would be here alone,” she said seriously, “and that we were going to have such an idle, pleasant time as this.

Pleasure not known beforehand is half wasted; to anticipate it is to double it.

I have not thought once today of having you all to myself this afternoon, and the actual moment of a thing is so soon gone.”

“There is hope yet. There are forty years of work in me yet, and why should you despair? I am only at an awkward turning.

I wish people wouldn’t be so ready to think that there is no progress without uniformity.

”

In her movements, in her gaze, she reminded the beholder of the feathered creatures who lived around her home. All similes and allegories concerning her began and ended with birds. There was as much variety in her motions as in their flight.

When she was musing she was a kestrel, which hangs in the air by an invisible motion of its wings.

When she was in a high wind her light body was blown against trees and banks like a heron’s. When she was frightened she darted noiselessly like a kingfisher.

“Very well; we will let it be so. There is little use in unravelling that now. Sons must be blind if they will.

Why is it that a woman can see from a distance what a man cannot see close?

Clym must do as he will—he is nothing more to me. And this is maternity—to give one’s best years and best love to ensure the fate of being despised!”

“

The more noble, the less wise.

”

When Thomasin entered the room he did not tell her of what he had heard. The old longing for Eustacia had reappeared in his soul: and it was mainly because he had discovered that it was another man’s intention to possess her.

To be yearning for the difficult, to be weary of that offered; to care for the remote, to dislike the near; it was Wildeve’s nature always.

This is the true mark of the man of sentiment. Though Wildeve’s fevered feeling had not been elaborated to real poetical compass, it was of the standard sort. His might have been called the Rousseau of Egdon.

“Then it is over,” she murmured. “Well, well! and life too will be over soon. And why should I go on scalding my face like this?

Cry about one thing in life, cry about all; one thread runs through the whole piece.

And yet we say, ‘a time to laugh!’ ”

… emptied the contents of one little bag into the right boot, and of the other into the left, spreading them as flatly as possible over the bottom of each, which was really a spacious coffer by no means limited to the size of the foot.

Pulling them on again and lacing them to the very top, he proceeded on his way, more easy in his head than under his soles.

His path converged towards that of the noisy company, and on coming nearer he found to his relief that they were several Egdon people whom he knew very well, while with them walked Fairway, of Blooms-End.

“You ought to win some money, now that you’ve got them. Any woman would marry you then. Now is your time, Christian, and I would recommend you not to let it slip.

Some men are born to luck, some are not.

I belong to the latter class.”

The game fluctuated, now in favour of one, now in favour of the other, without any great advantage on the side of either. Nearly twenty minutes were passed thus.

The light of the candle had by this time attracted heath-flies, moths, and other winged creatures of night, which floated round the lantern, flew into the flame, or beat about the faces of the two players.

But neither of the men paid much attention to these things, their eyes being concentrated upon the little flat stone, which to them was an arena vast and important as a battlefield. By this time a change had come over the game;

Both men looked blankly round without rising. As their eyes grew accustomed to the darkness they perceived faint greenish points of light among the grass and fern.

These lights dotted the hillside like stars of a low magnitude.

“Ah—glowworms,” said Wildeve. “Wait a minute. We can continue the game.”

The incongruity between the men’s deeds and their environment was great.

Amid the soft juicy vegetation of the hollow in which they sat, the motionless and the uninhabited solitude, intruded the chink of guineas, the rattle of dice, the exclamations of the reckless players.

Wildeve had lifted the box as soon as the lights were obtained, and the solitary die proclaimed that the game was still against him.

When it rained they were charmed, because they could remain indoors together all day with such a show of reason; when it was fine they were charmed, because they could sit together on the hills.

They were like those double stars which revolve round and round each other, and from a distance appear to be one.

The absolute solitude in which they lived intensified their reciprocal thoughts; yet some might have said that it had the disadvantage of consuming their mutual affections at a fearfully prodigal rate. Yeobright did not fear for his own part;

“No. I was simply for Clym,” replied Mrs. Yeobright, with too much emphasis in her earnestness.

“It is the instinct of everyone to look after their own.”

“How can you imply that he required guarding against me?” cried Eustacia, passionate tears in her eyes. “I have not injured him by marrying him! What sin have I done that you should think so ill of me?

There was a little more reticence now than formerly in Thomasin’s manner towards her cousin.

It is the effect of marriage to engender in several directions some of the reserve it annihilates in one.

“Your mother told me,” she said quietly. “She came back to my house after seeing Eustacia.”

This man from Paris was now so disguised by his leather accoutrements, and by the goggles he was obliged to wear over his eyes, that his closest friend might have passed by without recognizing him.

He was a brown spot in the midst of an expanse of olive-green gorse, and nothing more.

Though frequently depressed in spirit when not actually at work, owing to thoughts of Eustacia’s position and his mother’s estrangement, when in the full swing of labour he was cheerfully disposed and calm.

Bees hummed around his ears with an intimate air, and tugged at the heath and furze-flowers at his side in such numbers as to weigh them down to the sod.

The strange amber-coloured butterflies which Egdon produced, and which were never seen elsewhere, quivered in the breath of his lips, alighted upon his bowed back, and sported with the glittering point of his hook as he flourished it up and down.

Tribes of emerald-green grasshoppers leaped over his feet, falling awkwardly on their backs, heads, or hips, like unskilful acrobats, as chance might rule; or engaged themselves in noisy flirtations under the fern-fronds with silent ones of homely hue.

A whole village-full of sensuous emotion, scattered abroad all the year long, surged here in a focus for an hour. The forty hearts of those waving couples were beating as they had not done since, twelve months before, they had come together in similar jollity.

For the time Paganism was revived in their hearts, the pride of life was all in all, and they adored none other than themselves.

How many of those impassioned but temporary embraces were destined to become perpetual was possibly the wonder of some of those who indulged in them, as well as of Eustacia who looked on.

Her beginning to dance had been like a change of atmosphere; outside, she had been steeped in arctic frigidity by comparison with the tropical sensations here.

She had entered the dance from the troubled hours of her late life as one might enter a brilliant chamber after a night walk in a wood.

Wildeve by himself would have been merely an agitation; Wildeve added to the dance, and the moonlight, and the secrecy, began to be a delight.

As for Wildeve, his feelings are easy to guess.

Obstacles were a ripening sun to his love, and he was at this moment in a delirium of exquisite misery.

To clasp as his for five minutes what was another man’s through all the rest of the year was a kind of thing he of all men could appreciate. He had long since begun to sigh again for Eustacia;

“O yes,” said Eustacia.

“What could hurt me on this heath, who have nothing?”

“By diverging a little I can make my way home the same as yours. I shall be glad to keep you company as far as Throope Corner.”

The moon had now waxed bright and silvery, but the heath was proof against such illumination, and there was to be observed the striking scene of a dark, rayless tract of country under an atmosphere charged from its zenith to its extremities with whitest light.

To an eye above them their two faces would have appeared amid the expanse like two pearls on a table of ebony.

On this account the irregularities of the path were not visible, and Wildeve occasionally stumbled;

The place was called the Devil’s Bellows, and it was only necessary to come there on a March or November night to discover the forcible reasons for that name.

On the present heated afternoon, when no perceptible wind was blowing, the trees kept up a perpetual moan which one could hardly believe to be caused by the air.

Here she sat for twenty minutes or more ere she could summon resolution to go down to the door, her courage being lowered to zero by her physical lassitude.

“I am glad to hear that he’s so grand in character as that.”

“Yes; but the worst of it is that though Paul was excellent as a man in the Bible he would hardly have done in real life.”

Their voices had instinctively dropped lower, though at first they had taken no particular care to avoid awakening Clym. “Well, if that means that your marriage is a misfortune to you, you know who is to blame,” said Wildeve.

She did not reply, and they stood looking musingly at Clym as he slept on in that profound sleep which is the result of physical labour carried on in circumstances that wake no nervous fear.

“God, how I envy him that sweet sleep!”

said Wildeve. “I have not slept like that since I was a boy—years and years ago.”

“Why do you, every time you take a step, go like this?” The child in speaking gave to his motion the jerk and limp of an invalid.

“Because I have a burden which is more than I can bear.”

The little boy remained silently pondering, and they tottered on side by side until more than a quarter of an hour had elapsed, when Mrs. Yeobright, whose weakness plainly increased, said to him, “I must sit down here to rest.”

Before quite leaving her he threw upon her face a wistful glance, as if he had misgivings on the generosity of forsaking her thus.

He gazed into her face in a vague, wondering manner, like that of one examining some strange old manuscript the key to whose characters is undiscoverable.

He was not so young as to be absolutely without a sense that sympathy was demanded, he was not old enough to be free from the terror felt in childhood at beholding misery in adult quarters hitherto deemed impregnable;

“D’ye think so, Timothy?” said Grandfer Cantle, coming forward to Fairway’s side with sudden depression in his face.

“Then a man may feel for years that he is good solid company, and be wrong about himself after all?”

“Never mind that question, Grandfer. Stir your stumps and get some more sticks. ’Tis very nonsense of an old man to prattle so when life and death’s in mangling.”

and these antecedent similarities fostered the illusion that she, who was there no longer, would come out to welcome him. The garden gate was locked and the shutters were closed, just as he himself had left them on the evening after the funeral.

He unlocked the gate, and found that a spider had already constructed a large web, tying the door to the lintel, on the supposition that it was never to be opened again.

When he had entered the house and flung back the shutters he set about his task of overhauling the cupboards and closets, burning papers, and considering how best to arrange the place for Eustacia’s reception, until such time as he might be in a position …

A visit to the boy suggested itself as a means of gleaning new particulars; though it might be quite unproductive.

To probe a child’s mind after the lapse of six weeks, not for facts which the child had seen and understood, but to get at those which were in their nature beyond him, did not promise much; yet when every obvious channel is blocked we grope towards the small and obscure.

There was nothing else left to do; after that he would allow the enigma to drop into the abyss of undiscoverable things.

When Yeobright reached the cottage of Susan Nunsuch, the mother of the boy he sought, he found that the inmates were not yet astir. But in upland hamlets the transition from abed to abroad is surprisingly swift and easy.

There no dense partition of yawns and toilets divides humanity by night from humanity by day.

Yeobright tapped at the upper windowsill, which he could reach with his walking stick; and in three or four minutes the woman came down.

Eustacia’s journey was at first as vague in direction as that of thistledown on the wind.

She did not know what to do. She wished it had been night instead of morning, that she might at least have borne her misery without the possibility of being seen.

“You might have wished it, because it makes me as sad as you,” he said with emotion and deference.

“As for revealing⁠—the word is impossible between us two.”

“I did not send for you—don’t forget it, Damon; I am in pain, but I did not send for you! As a wife, at least, I’ve been straight.”

He had spent the time in working about the premises, sweeping leaves from the garden paths, cutting dead stalks from the flowerbeds, and nailing up creepers which had been displaced by the autumn winds.

He took no particular pleasure in these deeds, but they formed a screen between himself and despair.

Moreover, it had become a religion with him to preserve in good condition all that had lapsed from his mother’s hands to his own.

That there should be no mistake about her knowing where to find him he had ordered a notice board to be affixed to the garden gate at Alderworth, signifying in white letters whither he had removed.

When a leaf floated to the earth he turned his head, thinking it might be her footfall.

A bird searching for worms in the mould of the flowerbeds sounded like her hand on the latch of the gate;

At the same time the severity with which he had treated her lulled the sharpness of his regret for his mother, and awoke some of his old solicitude for his mother’s supplanter.

Harsh feelings produce harsh usage, and this by reaction quenches the sentiments that gave it birth.

The more he reflected the more he softened.

On the evening of the fifth November his thoughts of Eustacia were intense.

Echoes from those past times when they had exchanged tender words all the day long came like the diffused murmur of a seashore left miles behind.

“Surely,” he said, “she might have brought herself to communicate with me before now, and confess honestly what Wildeve was to her.”

“

I like what I was born near to; I admire its grim old face.

”

But calmly considered it was not likely that such a severance as now existed would ever close up: she would have to live on as a painful object, isolated, and out of place.

She had used to think of the heath alone as an uncongenial spot to be in; she felt it now of the whole world.

Towards evening on the sixth her determination to go away again revived. About four o’clock she packed up anew the few small articles she had brought in her flight from Alderworth, and also some belonging to her which had been left here;

In these desultory ramblings she passed the cottage of Susan Nunsuch, a little lower down than her grandfather’s. The door was ajar, and a ribbon of bright firelight fell over the ground without.

As Eustacia crossed the firebeams she appeared for an instant as distinct as a figure in a phantasmagoria⁠—a creature of light surrounded by an area of darkness; the moment passed, and she was absorbed in night again.

A woman who was sitting inside the cottage had seen and recognized her in that momentary irradiation. This was Susan herself, occupied in preparing a posset for her little boy, who, often ailing, was now seriously unwell.

But having committed herself to this line of action there was no retreating for bad weather. Even the receipt of Clym’s letter would not have stopped her now.

The gloom of the night was funereal; all nature seemed clothed in crape.

The spiky points of the fir trees behind the house rose into the sky like the turrets and pinnacles of an abbey. Nothing below the horizon was visible save a light which was still burning in the cottage of Susan Nunsuch.

Could it be that she was to remain a captive still? Money: she had never felt its value before.

Even to efface herself from the country means were required.

To ask Wildeve for pecuniary aid without allowing him to accompany her was impossible to a woman with a shadow of pride left in her: to fly as his mistress—and she knew that he loved her—was of the nature of humiliation.

Eustacia at length reached Rainbarrow, and stood still there to think.

Never was harmony more perfect than that between the chaos of her mind and the chaos of the world without.

A sudden recollection had flashed on her this moment: she had not money enough for undertaking a long journey.

… And I have no money to go alone! And if I could, what comfort to me? I must drag on next year, as I have dragged on this year, and the year after that as before.

How I have tried and tried to be a splendid woman, and how destiny has been against me!

… I do not deserve my lot!” she cried in a frenzy of bitter revolt. “O, the cruelty of putting me into this ill-conceived world! I was capable of much; but I have been injured and blighted and crushed by things beyond my control!

How I have tried and tried to be a splendid woman, and how destiny has been against me! … I do not deserve my lot!” she cried in a frenzy of bitter revolt. “

O, the cruelty of putting me into this ill-conceived world!

I was capable of much; but I have been injured and blighted and crushed by things beyond my control! O, how hard it is of Heaven to devise such tortures for me, who have done no harm to Heaven at all!”

How I have tried and tried to be a splendid woman, and how destiny has been against me! … I do not deserve my lot!” she cried in a frenzy of bitter revolt. “O, the cruelty of putting me into this ill-conceived world!

I was capable of much; but I have been injured and blighted and crushed by things beyond my control!

O, how hard it is of Heaven to devise such tortures for me, who have done no harm to Heaven at all!”

… I do not deserve my lot!” she cried in a frenzy of bitter revolt. “O, the cruelty of putting me into this ill-conceived world! I was capable of much; but I have been injured and blighted and crushed by things beyond my control!

O, how hard it is of Heaven to devise such tortures for me, who have done no harm to Heaven at all!

”

He walked restlessly about the untenanted rooms, stopping strange noises in windows and doors by jamming splinters of wood into the casements and crevices, and pressing together the leadwork of the quarries where it had become loosened from the glass.

It was one of those nights when cracks in the walls of old churches widen, when ancient stains on the ceilings of decayed manor houses are renewed and enlarged from the size of a man’s hand to an area of many feet.

The little gate in the palings before his dwelling continually opened and clicked together again, but when he looked out eagerly nobody was there; it was as if invisible shapes of the dead were passing in on their way to visit him.

It was one of those nights when cracks in the walls of old churches widen, when ancient stains on the ceilings of decayed manor houses are renewed and enlarged from the size of a man’s hand to an area of many feet.

The little gate in the palings before his dwelling continually opened and clicked together again, but when he looked out eagerly nobody was there; it was as if invisible shapes of the dead were passing in on their way to visit him.

Between ten and eleven o’clock, finding that neither Fairway nor anybody else came to him, he retired to rest, and despite his anxieties soon fell asleep.

His sorrows had made some change in his outward appearance; and yet the alteration was chiefly within. It might have been said that he had a wrinkled mind.

He had no enemies, and he could get nobody to reproach him, which was why he so bitterly reproached himself.

He did sometimes think he had been ill-used by fortune, so far as to say that to be born is a palpable dilemma, and that instead of men aiming to advance in life with glory they should calculate how to retreat out of it without …

and yet the alteration was chiefly within. It might have been said that he had a wrinkled mind. He had no enemies, and he could get nobody to reproach him, which was why he so bitterly reproached himself.

He did sometimes think he had been ill-used by fortune, so far as to say that to be born is a palpable dilemma, and that instead of men aiming to advance in life with glory they should calculate how to retreat out of it without shame.

But that he and his had been sarcastically and pitilessly handled in having such irons thrust into their souls he did not maintain long. It is usually so, except with the sternest of men.

But that he and his had been sarcastically and pitilessly handled in having such irons thrust into their souls he did not maintain long. It is usually so, except with the sternest of men.

Human beings, in their generous endeavour to construct a hypothesis that shall not degrade a First Cause, have always hesitated to conceive a dominant power of lower moral quality than their own; and, even while they sit down and weep by the waters of Babylon, invent excuses for the oppression which prompts their tears.

Thus, though words of solace were vainly uttered in his presence, he found relief in a direction of his own choosing when left to himself.

For a man of his habits the house and the hundred and twenty pounds a year which he had inherited from his mother were enough to supply all worldly needs.

Resources do not depend upon gross amounts, but upon the proportion of spendings to takings.

He frequently walked the heath alone, when the past seized upon him with its shadowy hand, and held him there to listen to its tale. His imagination would then people the spot with its ancient inhabitants:

For a man of his habits the house and the hundred and twenty pounds a year which he had inherited from his mother were enough to supply all worldly needs. Resources do not depend upon gross amounts, but upon the proportion of spendings to takings.

He frequently walked the heath alone, when the past seized upon him with its shadowy hand, and held him there to listen to its tale.

His imagination would then people the spot with its ancient inhabitants:

The instincts of merry England lingered on here with exceptional vitality, and the symbolic customs which tradition has attached to each season of the year were yet a reality on Egdon.

Indeed, the impulses of all such outlandish hamlets are pagan still: in these spots homage to nature, self-adoration, frantic gaieties, fragments of Teutonic rites to divinities whose names are forgotten, seem in some way or other to have survived medieval doctrine.

Yeobright did not interrupt the preparations, and went home again. The next morning, when Thomasin withdrew the curtains of her bedroom window, there stood the Maypole in the middle of the green, its top cutting into the sky.

Venn soon after went away, and in the evening Yeobright strolled as far as Fairway’s cottage.

It was a lovely May sunset, and the birch trees which grew on this margin of the vast Egdon wilderness had put on their new leaves, delicate as butterflies’ wings, and diaphanous as amber.

Beside Fairway’s dwelling was an open space recessed from the road, and here were now collected all the young people from within a radius of a couple of miles.