The Return of the Native by Thomas Hardy (most read books TXT) 📖

had I gone there, she would never have died saying, ‘I am a broken-hearted woman, cast off by my son.’ My door has always been open to her—a welcome here has always awaited her. But that she never came to see.”

“You had better not talk any more now, Clym,” said Eustacia faintly from the other part of the room, for the scene was growing intolerable to her.

“Let me talk to you instead for the little time I shall be here,” Thomasin said soothingly. “Consider what a one-sided way you have of looking at the matter, Clym. When she said that to the little boy you had not found her and taken her into your arms; and it might have been uttered in a moment of bitterness. It was rather like Aunt to say things in haste. She sometimes used to speak so to me. Though she did not come I am convinced that she thought of coming to see you. Do you suppose a man’s mother could live two or three months without one forgiving thought? She forgave me; and why should she not have forgiven you?”

“You laboured to win her round; I did nothing. I, who was going to teach people the higher secrets of happiness, did not know how to keep out of that gross misery which the most untaught are wise enough to avoid.”

“How did you get here tonight, Thomasin?” said Eustacia.

“Damon set me down at the end of the lane. He has driven into East Egdon on business, and he will come and pick me up by-and-by.”

Accordingly they soon after heard the noise of wheels. Wildeve had come, and was waiting outside with his horse and gig.

“Send out and tell him I will be down in two minutes,” said Thomasin.

“I will run down myself,” said Eustacia.

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

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

“Then don’t do so till he is well—it will be fatal. You are ill yourself.”

“I am wretched….O Damon,” she said, bursting into tears, “I—I can’t tell you how unhappy I am! I can hardly bear this. I can tell nobody of my trouble—nobody knows of it but you.”

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

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

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

“Which part should I keep back?”

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

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

“If he were only to die—” Wildeve murmured.

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

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

 

2 - A Lurid Light Breaks in upon a Darkened Understanding

 

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

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

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

“Yes, Mister Clym.”

“Have you dug up the potatoes and other roots?”

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

“And she is getting on well, you say?”

“Yes, sir. Only Mr. Wildeve is twanky because ‘tisn’t a boy—that’s what they say in the kitchen, but I was not supposed to notice that.”

“Christian, now listen to me.”

“Yes, sure, Mr. Yeobright.”

“Did you see my mother the day before she died?”

“No, I did not.”

Yeobright’s face expressed disappointment.

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

Clym’s look lighted up. “That’s nearer still to my meaning,” he said.

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

“See whom?”

“See you. She was going to your house, you understand.”

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

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

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

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

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

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

“Yes, when was that?”

“Last summer, in my dream.”

“Pooh! Who’s the man?”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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