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

just as they had formerly done when they were boy and girl under his mother’s eye. What if her interest in him were not so entirely that of a relative as it had formerly been? To Yeobright any possibility of this sort was a serious matter; and he almost felt troubled at the thought of it. Every pulse of loverlike feeling which had not been stilled during Eustacia’s lifetime had gone into the grave with her. His passion for her had occurred too far on in his manhood to leave fuel enough on hand for another fire of that sort, as may happen with more boyish loves. Even supposing him capable of loving again, that love would be a plant of slow and laboured growth, and in the end only small and sickly, like an autumn-hatched bird.

He was so distressed by this new complexity that when the enthusiastic brass band arrived and struck up, which it did about five o’clock, with apparently wind enough among its members to blow down his house, he withdrew from his rooms by the back door, went down the garden, through the gate in the hedge, and away out of sight. He could not bear to remain in the presence of enjoyment today, though he had tried hard.

Nothing was seen of him for four hours. When he came back by the same path it was dusk, and the dews were coating every green thing. The boisterous music had ceased; but, entering the premises as he did from behind, he could not see if the May party had all gone till he had passed through Thomasin’s division of the house to the front door. Thomasin was standing within the porch alone.

She looked at him reproachfully. “You went away just when it began, Clym,” she said.

“Yes. I felt I could not join in. You went out with them, of course?”

“No, I did not.”

“You appeared to be dressed on purpose.”

“Yes, but I could not go out alone; so many people were there. One is there now.”

Yeobright strained his eyes across the dark-green patch beyond the paling, and near the black form of the Maypole he discerned a shadowy figure, sauntering idly up and down. “Who is it?” he said.

“Mr. Venn,” said Thomasin.

“You might have asked him to come in, I think, Tamsie. He has been very kind to you first and last.”

“I will now,” she said; and, acting on the impulse, went through the wicket to where Venn stood under the Maypole.

“It is Mr. Venn, I think?” she inquired.

Venn started as if he had not seen her—artful man that he was—and said, “Yes.”

“Will you come in?”

“I am afraid that I—”

“I have seen you dancing this evening, and you had the very best of the girls for your partners. Is it that you won’t come in because you wish to stand here, and think over the past hours of enjoyment?”

“Well, that’s partly it,” said Mr. Venn, with ostentatious sentiment. “But the main reason why I am biding here like this is that I want to wait till the moon rises.”

“To see how pretty the Maypole looks in the moonlight?”

“No. To look for a glove that was dropped by one of the maidens.”

Thomasin was speechless with surprise. That a man who had to walk some four or five miles to his home should wait here for such a reason pointed to only one conclusion—the man must be amazingly interested in that glove’s owner.

“Were you dancing with her, Diggory?” she asked, in a voice which revealed that he had made himself considerably more interesting to her by this disclosure.

“No,” he sighed.

“And you will not come in, then?”

“Not tonight, thank you, ma’am.”

“Shall I lend you a lantern to look for the young person’s glove, Mr. Venn?”

“O no; it is not necessary, Mrs. Wildeve, thank you. The moon will rise in a few minutes.”

Thomasin went back to the porch. “Is he coming in?” said Clym, who had been waiting where she had left him.

“He would rather not tonight,” she said, and then passed by him into the house; whereupon Clym too retired to his own rooms.

When Clym was gone Thomasin crept upstairs in the dark, and, just listening by the cot, to assure herself that the child was asleep, she went to the window, gently lifted the corner of the white curtain, and looked out. Venn was still there. She watched the growth of the faint radiance appearing in the sky by the eastern hill, till presently the edge of the moon burst upwards and flooded the valley with light. Diggory’s form was now distinct on the green; he was moving about in a bowed attitude, evidently scanning the grass for the precious missing article, walking in zigzags right and left till he should have passed over every foot of the ground.

“How very ridiculous!” Thomasin murmured to herself, in a tone which was intended to be satirical. “To think that a man should be so silly as to go mooning about like that for a girl’s glove! A respectable dairyman, too, and a man of money as he is now. What a pity!”

At last Venn appeared to find it; whereupon he stood up and raised it to his lips. Then placing it in his breastpocket—the nearest receptacle to a man’s heart permitted by modern raiment—he ascended the valley in a mathematically direct line towards his distant home in the meadows.

 

2 - Thomasin Walks in a Green Place by the Roman Road

 

Clym saw little of Thomasin for several days after this; and when they met she was more silent than usual. At length he asked her what she was thinking of so intently.

“I am thoroughly perplexed,” she said candidly. “I cannot for my life think who it is that Diggory Venn is so much in love with. None of the girls at the Maypole were good enough for him, and yet she must have been there.”

Clym tried to imagine Venn’s choice for a moment; but ceasing to be interested in the question he went on again with his gardening.

No clearing up of the mystery was granted her for some time. But one afternoon Thomasin was upstairs getting ready for a walk, when she had occasion to come to the landing and call “Rachel.” Rachel was a girl about thirteen, who carried the baby out for airings; and she came upstairs at the call.

“Have you seen one of my last new gloves about the house, Rachel?” inquired Thomasin. “It is the fellow to this one.”

Rachel did not reply.

“Why don’t you answer?” said her mistress.

“I think it is lost, ma’am.”

“Lost? Who lost it? I have never worn them but once.”

Rachel appeared as one dreadfully troubled, and at last began to cry. “Please, ma’am, on the day of the Maypole I had none to wear, and I seed yours on the table, and I thought I would borrow ‘em. I did not mean to hurt ‘em at all, but one of them got lost. Somebody gave me some money to buy another pair for you, but I have not been able to go anywhere to get ‘em.”

“Who’s somebody?”

“Mr. Venn.”

“Did he know it was my glove?”

“Yes. I told him.”

Thomasin was so surprised by the explanation that she quite forgot to lecture the girl, who glided silently away. Thomasin did not move further than to turn her eyes upon the grass-plat where the Maypole had stood. She remained thinking, then said to herself that she would not go out that afternoon, but would work hard at the baby’s unfinished lovely plaid frock, cut on the cross in the newest fashion. How she managed to work hard, and yet do no more than she had done at the end of two hours, would have been a mystery to anyone not aware that the recent incident was of a kind likely to divert her industry from a manual to a mental channel.

Next day she went her ways as usual, and continued her custom of walking in the heath with no other companion than little Eustacia, now of the age when it is a matter of doubt with such characters whether they are intended to walk through the world on their hands or on their feet; so that they get into painful complications by trying both. It was very pleasant to Thomasin, when she had carried the child to some lonely place, to give her a little private practice on the green turf and shepherd’s-thyme, which formed a soft mat to fall headlong upon them when equilibrium was lost.

Once, when engaged in this system of training, and stooping to remove bits of stick, fern-stalks, and other such fragments from the child’s path, that the journey might not be brought to an untimely end by some insuperable barrier a quarter of an inch high, she was alarmed by discovering that a man on horseback was almost close beside her, the soft natural carpet having muffled the horse’s tread. The rider, who was Venn, waved his hat in the air and bowed gallantly.

“Diggory, give me my glove,” said Thomasin, whose manner it was under any circumstances to plunge into the midst of a subject which engrossed her.

Venn immediately dismounted, put his hand in his breastpocket, and handed the glove.

“Thank you. It was very good of you to take care of it.”

“It is very good of you to say so.”

“O no. I was quite glad to find you had it. Everybody gets so indifferent that I was surprised to know you thought of me.”

“If you had remembered what I was once you wouldn’t have been surprised.”

“Ah, no,” she said quickly. “But men of your character are mostly so independent.”

“What is my character?” he asked.

“I don’t exactly know,” said Thomasin simply, “except it is to cover up your feelings under a practical manner, and only to show them when you are alone.”

“Ah, how do you know that?” said Venn strategically.

“Because,” said she, stopping to put the little girl, who had managed to get herself upside down, right end up again, “because I do.”

“You mustn’t judge by folks in general,” said Venn. “Still I don’t know much what feelings are nowadays. I have got so mixed up with business of one sort and t’other that my soft sentiments are gone off in vapour like. Yes, I am given up body and soul to the making of money. Money is all my dream.”

“O Diggory, how wicked!” said Thomasin reproachfully, and looking at him in exact balance between taking his words seriously and judging them as said to tease her.

“Yes, ‘tis rather a rum course,” said Venn, in the bland tone of one comfortably resigned to sins he could no longer overcome.

“You, who used to be so nice!”

“Well, that’s an argument I rather like, because what a man has once been he may be again.” Thomasin blushed. “Except that it is rather harder now,” Venn continued.

“Why?” she asked.

“Because you be richer than you were at that time.”

“O no—not much. I have made it nearly all over to the baby, as it was my duty to do, except just enough to live on.”

“I am rather glad of that,” said Venn softly, and regarding her from the corner of his eye, “for it makes it easier for us to be friendly.”

Thomasin blushed again, and, when a few more words had been said of a not unpleasing kind, Venn mounted his horse and rode on.

This conversation had passed in a hollow of the heath near the old Roman road, a place much frequented by Thomasin. And it might have been observed that she did not in future walk that