"Thank you," said Wildeve, with dry resentment, his face as gloomy as a thunderstorm.
At the Grandfer"s heels now came the rest of the group, which included Fairway, Christian, Sam the turf-cutter, Humphrey, and a dozen others. All smiled upon Wildeve, and upon his tables and chairs likewise, from a general sense of friendliness towards the articles as well as towards their owner.
"We be not here afore Mrs. Yeobright after all," said Fairway, recognizing the matron"s bonnet through the gla.s.s part.i.tion which divided the public apartment they had entered from the room where the women sat. "We struck down across, d"ye see, Mr. Wildeve, and she went round by the path."
"And I see the young bride"s little head!" said Grandfer, peeping in the same direction, and discerning Thomasin, who was waiting beside her aunt in a miserable and awkward way. "Not quite settled in yet-well, well, there"s plenty of time."
Wildeve made no reply; and probably feeling that the sooner he treated them the sooner they would go, he produced a stone jar, which threw a warm halo over matters at once.
"That"s a drop of the right sort, I can see," said Grandfer Cantle, with the air of a man too well-mannered to show any hurry to taste it.
"Yes," said Wildeve, ""tis some old mead. I hope you will like it."
"O ay!" replied the guests, in the hearty tones natural when the words demanded by politeness coincide with those of deepest feeling. "There isn"t a prettier drink under the sun."
"I"ll take my oath there isn"t," added Grandfer Cantle. "All that can be said against mead is that "tis rather heady, and apt to lie about a man a good while. But tomorrow"s Sunday, thank G.o.d."
"I feel"d for all the world like some bold soldier after I had had some once," said Christian.
"You shall feel so again," said Wildeve, with condescension, "Cups or gla.s.ses, gentlemen?"
"Well, if you don"t mind, we"ll have the beaker, and pa.s.s "en round; "tis better than heling it out in dribbles."
"Jown the slippery gla.s.ses," said Grandfer Cantle. "What"s the good of a thing that you can"t put down in the ashes to warm, hey, neighbours; that"s what I ask?"
"Right, Grandfer," said Sam; and the mead then circulated.
"Well," said Timothy Fairway, feeling demands upon his praise in some form or other, ""tis a worthy thing to be married, Mr. Wildeve; and the woman you"ve got is a dimant, so says I. Yes," he continued, to Grandfer Cantle, raising his voice so as to be heard through the part.i.tion, "her father (inclining his head towards the inner room) was as good a feller as ever lived. He always had his great indignation ready against anything underhand."
"Is that very dangerous?" said Christian.
"And there were few in these parts that were upsides with him," said Sam. "Whenever a club walked he"d play the clarinet in the band that marched before "em as if he"d never touched anything but a clarinet all his life. And then, when they got to church door he"d throw down the clarinet, mount the gallery, s.n.a.t.c.h up the ba.s.s viol, and rozum away as if he"d never played anything but a ba.s.s viol. Folk would say-folk that knowed what a true stave was-"Surely, surely that"s never the same man that I saw handling the clarinet so masterly by now!"
"I can mind it," said the furze-cutter. ""Twas a wonderful thing that one body could hold it all and never mix the fingering."
"There was Kingsbere church likewise," Fairway recommenced, as one opening a new vein of the same mine of interest.
Wildeve breathed the breath of one intolerably bored, and glanced through the part.i.tion at the prisoners.
"He used to walk over there of a Sunday afternoon to visit his old acquaintance Andrew Brown, the first clarinet there; a good man enough, but rather screechy in his music, if you can mind?"
""A was."
"And neighbour Yeobright would take Andrey"s place for some part of the service, to let Andrey have a bit of a nap, as any friend would naturally do."
"As any friend would," said Grandfer Cantle, the other listeners expressing the same accord by the shorter way of nodding their heads.
"No sooner was Andrey asleep and the first whiff of neighbour Yeobright"s wind had got inside Andrey"s clarinet than everyone in church feeled in a moment there was a great soul among "em. All heads would turn, and they"d say, "Ah, I thought "twas he!" One Sunday I can well mind-a ba.s.s viol day that time, and Yeobright had brought his own. "Twas the Hundred-and-thirty-third to "Lydia"; and when they"d come to "Ran down his beard and o"er his robes its costly moisture shed," neighbour Yeobright, who had just warmed to his work, drove his bow into them strings that glorious grand that he e"en a"most sawed the ba.s.s viol into two pieces. Every winder in church rattled as if "twere a thunderstorm. Old Pa"son Williams lifted his hands in his great holy surplice as natural as if he"d been in common clothes, and seemed to say hisself, "O for such a man in our parish!" But not a soul in Kingsbere could hold a candle to Yeobright."
"Was it quite safe when the winder shook?" Christian inquired.
He received no answer, all for the moment sitting rapt in admiration of the performance described. As with Farinelli"s singing before the princesses, Sheridan"s renowned Begum Speech, and other such examples, the fortunate condition of its being for ever lost to the world invested the deceased Mr. Yeobright"s tour de force on that memorable afternoon with a c.u.mulative glory which comparative criticism, had that been possible, might considerably have shorn down.
"He was the last you"d have expected to drop off in the prime of life," said Humphrey.
"Ah, well; he was looking for the earth some months afore he went. At that time women used to run for smocks and gown-pieces at Greenhill Fair, and my wife that is now, being a long-legged slittering maid, hardly husband-high, went with the rest of the maidens, for "a was a good, runner afore she got so heavy. When she came home I said-we were then just beginning to walk together-"What have ye got, my honey?" "I"ve won-well, I"ve won-a gown-piece," says she, her colours coming up in a moment. "Tis a smock for a crown, I thought; and so it turned out. Ay, when I think what she"ll say to me now without a mossel of red in her face, it do seem strange that "a wouldn"t say such a little thing then....However, then she went on, and that"s what made me bring up the story. Well, whatever clothes I"ve won, white or figured, for eyes to see or for eyes not to see" ("a could do a pretty stroke of modesty in those days), "I"d sooner have lost it than have seen what I have. Poor Mr. Yeobright was took bad directly he reached the fair ground, and was forced to go home again." That was the last time he ever went out of the parish."
""A faltered on from one day to another, and then we heard he was gone."
"D"ye think he had great pain when "a died?" said Christian.
"O no-quite different. Nor any pain of mind. He was lucky enough to be G.o.d A"mighty"s own man."
"And other folk-d"ye think "twill be much pain to "em, Mister Fairway?"
"That depends on whether they be afeard."
"I bain"t afeard at all, I thank G.o.d!" said Christian strenuously. "I"m glad I bain"t, for then "twon"t pain me....I don"t think I be afeard-or if I be I can"t help it, and I don"t deserve to suffer. I wish I was not afeard at all!"
There was a solemn silence, and looking from the window, which was unshuttered and unblinded, Timothy said, "Well, what a fess little bonfire that one is, out by Cap"n Vye"s! "Tis burning just the same now as ever, upon my life."
All glances went through the window, and n.o.body noticed that Wildeve disguised a brief, telltale look. Far away up the sombre valley of heath, and to the right of Rainbarrow, could indeed be seen the light, small, but steady and persistent as before.
"It was lighted before ours was," Fairway continued; "and yet every one in the country round is out afore "n."
"Perhaps there"s meaning in it!" murmured Christian.
"How meaning?" said Wildeve sharply.
Christian was too scattered to reply, and Timothy helped him.
"He means, sir, that the lonesome dark-eyed creature up there that some say is a witch-ever I should call a fine young woman such a name-is always up to some odd conceit or other; and so perhaps "tis she."
"I"d be very glad to ask her in wedlock, if she"d hae me and take the risk of her wild dark eyes ill-wishing me," said Grandfer Cantle staunchly.
"Don"t ye say it, Father!" implored Christian.
"Well, be dazed if he who do marry the maid won"t hae an uncommon picture for his best parlour," said Fairway in a liquid tone, placing down the cup of mead at the end of a good pull.
"And a partner as deep as the North Star," said Sam, taking up the cup and finishing the little that remained. "Well, really, now I think we must be moving," said Humphrey, observing the emptiness of the vessel.
"But we"ll gie "em another song?" said Grandfer Cantle. "I"m as full of notes as a bird!"
"Thank you, Grandfer," said Wildeve. "But we will not trouble you now. Some other day must do for that-when I have a party."
"Be jown"d if I don"t learn ten new songs for"t, or I won"t learn a line!" said Grandfer Cantle. "And you may be sure I won"t disappoint ye by biding away, Mr. Wildeve."
"I quite believe you," said that gentleman.
All then took their leave, wishing their entertainer long life and happiness as a married man, with recapitulations which occupied some time. Wildeve attended them to the door, beyond which the deep-dyed upward stretch of heath stood awaiting them, an amplitude of darkness reigning from their feet almost to the zenith, where a definite form first became visible in the lowering forehead of Rainbarrow. Diving into the dense obscurity in a line headed by Sam the turf-cutter, they pursued their trackless way home.
When the scratching of the furze against their leggings had fainted upon the ear, Wildeve returned to the room where he had left Thomasin and her aunt. The women were gone.
They could only have left the house in one way, by the back window; and this was open.
Wildeve laughed to himself, remained a moment thinking, and idly returned to the front room. Here his glance fell upon a bottle of wine which stood on the mantelpiece. "Ah-old Dowden!" he murmured; and going to the kitchen door shouted, "Is anybody here who can take something to old Dowden?"
There was no reply. The room was empty, the lad who acted as his factotum having gone to bed. Wildeve came back put on his hat, took the bottle, and left the house, turning the key in the door, for there was no guest at the inn tonight. As soon as he was on the road the little bonfire on Mistover Knap again met his eye.
"Still waiting, are you, my lady?" he murmured.
However, he did not proceed that way just then; but leaving the hill to the left of him, he stumbled over a rutted road that brought him to a cottage which, like all other habitations on the heath at this hour, was only saved from being visible by a faint shine from its bedroom window. This house was the home of Olly Dowden, the besom-maker, and he entered.
The lower room was in darkness; but by feeling his way he found a table, whereon he placed the bottle, and a minute later emerged again upon the heath. He stood and looked northeast at the undying little fire-high up above him, though not so high as Rainbarrow.
We have been told what happens when a woman deliberates; and the epigram is not always terminable with woman, provided that one be in the case, and that a fair one. Wildeve stood, and stood longer, and breathed perplexedly, and then said to himself with resignation, "Yes-by Heaven, I must go to her, I suppose!"
Instead of turning in the direction of home he pressed on rapidly by a path under Rainbarrow towards what was evidently a signal light.
6-The Figure against the Sky
When the whole Egdon concourse had left the site of the bonfire to its accustomed loneliness, a closely wrapped female figure approached the barrow from that quarter of the heath in which the little fire lay. Had the reddleman been watching he might have recognized her as the woman who had first stood there so singularly, and vanished at the approach of strangers. She ascended to her old position at the top, where the red coals of the perishing fire greeted her like living eyes in the corpse of day. There she stood still around her stretching the vast night atmosphere, whose incomplete darkness in comparison with the total darkness of the heath below it might have represented a venial beside a mortal sin.
That she was tall and straight in build, that she was lady-like in her movements, was all that could be learnt of her just now, her form being wrapped in a shawl folded in the old cornerwise fashion, and her head in a large kerchief, a protection not superfluous at this hour and place. Her back was towards the wind, which blew from the northwest; but whether she had avoided that aspect because of the chilly gusts which played about her exceptional position, or because her interest lay in the southeast, did not at first appear.
Her reason for standing so dead still as the pivot of this circle of heath-country was just as obscure. Her extraordinary fixity, her conspicuous loneliness, her heedlessness of night, betokened among other things an utter absence of fear. A tract of country unaltered from that sinister condition which made Caesar anxious every year to get clear of its glooms before the autumnal equinox, a kind of landscape and weather which leads travellers from the South to describe our island as Homer"s Cimmerian land, was not, on the face of it, friendly to women.
It might reasonably have been supposed that she was listening to the wind, which rose somewhat as the night advanced, and laid hold of the attention. The wind, indeed, seemed made for the scene, as the scene seemed made for the hour. Part of its tone was quite special; what was heard there could be heard nowhere else. Gusts in innumerable series followed each other from the northwest, and when each one of them raced past the sound of its progress resolved into three. Treble, tenor, and ba.s.s notes were to be found therein. The general ricochet of the whole over pits and prominences had the gravest pitch of the chime. Next there could be heard the baritone buzz of a holly tree. Below these in force, above them in pitch, a dwindled voice strove hard at a husky tune, which was the peculiar local sound alluded to. Thinner and less immediately traceable than the other two, it was far more impressive than either. In it lay what may be called the linguistic peculiarity of the heath; and being audible nowhere on earth off a heath, it afforded a shadow of reason for the woman"s tenseness, which continued as unbroken as ever.
Throughout the blowing of these plaintive November winds that note bore a great resemblance to the ruins of human song which remain to the throat of fourscore and ten. It was a worn whisper, dry and papery, and it brushed so distinctly across the ear that, by the accustomed, the material minutiae in which it originated could be realized as by touch. It was the united products of infinitesimal vegetable causes, and these were neither stems, leaves, fruit, blades, p.r.i.c.kles, lichen, nor moss.
They were the mummied heathbells of the past summer, originally tender and purple, now washed colourless by Michaelmas rains, and dried to dead skins by October suns. So low was an individual sound from these that a combination of hundreds only just emerged from silence, and the myriads of the whole declivity reached the woman"s ear but as a shrivelled and intermittent recitative. Yet scarcely a single accent among the many afloat tonight could have such power to impress a listener with thoughts of its origin. One inwardly saw the infinity of those combined mult.i.tudes; and perceived that each of the tiny trumpets was seized on entered, scoured and emerged from by the wind as thoroughly as if it were as vast as a crater.
"The spirit moved them." A meaning of the phrase forced itself upon the attention; and an emotional listener"s fetichistic mood might have ended in one of more advanced quality. It was not, after all, that the left-hand expanse of old blooms spoke, or the right-hand, or those of the slope in front; but it was the single person of something else speaking through each at once.
Suddenly, on the barrow, there mingled with all this wild rhetoric of night a sound which modulated so naturally into the rest that its beginning and ending were hardly to be distinguished. The bluffs, and the bushes, and the heather-bells had broken silence; at last, so did the woman; and her articulation was but as another phrase of the same discourse as theirs. Thrown out on the winds it became twined in with them, and with them it flew away.
What she uttered was a lengthened sighing, apparently at something in her mind which had led to her presence here. There was a spasmodic abandonment about it as if, in allowing herself to utter the sound the woman"s brain had authorized what it could not regulate. One point was evident in this; that she had been existing in a suppressed state, and not in one of languor, or stagnation.
Far away down the valley the faint shine from the window of the inn still lasted on; and a few additional moments proved that the window, or what was within it, had more to do with the woman"s sigh than had either her own actions or the scene immediately around. She lifted her left hand, which held a closed telescope. This she rapidly extended, as if she were well accustomed to the operation, and raising it to her eye directed it towards the light beaming from the inn.
The handkerchief which had hooded her head was now a little thrown back, her face being somewhat elevated. A profile was visible against the dull monochrome of cloud around her; and it was as though side shadows from the features of Sappho and Mrs. Siddons had converged upwards from the tomb to form an image like neither but suggesting both. This, however, was mere superficiality. In respect of character a face may make certain admissions by its outline; but it fully confesses only in its changes. So much is this the case that what is called the play of the features often helps more in understanding a man or woman than the earnest labours of all the other members together. Thus the night revealed little of her whose form it was embracing, for the mobile parts of her countenance could not be seen.
At last she gave up her spying att.i.tude, closed the telescope, and turned to the decaying embers. From these no appreciable beams now radiated, except when a more than usually smart gust brushed over their faces and raised a fitful glow which came and went like the blush of a girl. She stooped over the silent circle, and selecting from the brands a piece of stick which bore the largest live coal at its end, brought it to where she had been standing before.
She held the brand to the ground, blowing the red coal with her mouth at the same time; till it faintly illuminated the sod, and revealed a small object, which turned out to be an hourgla.s.s, though she wore a watch. She blew long enough to show that the sand had all slipped through.
"Ah!" she said, as if surprised.
The light raised by her breath had been very fitful, and a momentary irradiation of flesh was all that it had disclosed of her face. That consisted of two matchless lips and a cheek only, her head being still enveloped. She threw away the stick, took the gla.s.s in her hand, the telescope under her arm, and moved on.
Along the ridge ran a faint foot-track, which the lady followed. Those who knew it well called it a path; and, while a mere visitor would have pa.s.sed it unnoticed even by day, the regular haunters of the heath were at no loss for it at midnight. The whole secret of following these incipient paths, when there was not light enough in the atmosphere to show a turnpike road, lay in the development of the sense of touch in the feet, which comes with years of night-rambling in little-trodden spots. To a walker practised in such places a difference between impact on maiden herbage, and on the crippled stalks of a slight footway, is perceptible through the thickest boot or shoe.
The solitary figure who walked this beat took no notice of the windy tune still played on the dead heathbells. She did not turn her head to look at a group of dark creatures further on, who fled from her presence as she skirted a ravine where they fed. They were about a score of the small wild ponies known as heath-croppers. They roamed at large on the undulations of Egdon, but in numbers too few to detract much from the solitude.
The pedestrian noticed nothing just now, and a clue to her abstraction was afforded by a trivial incident. A bramble caught hold of her skirt, and checked her progress. Instead of putting it off and hastening along, she yielded herself up to the pull, and stood pa.s.sively still. When she began to extricate herself it was by turning round and round, and so unwinding the p.r.i.c.kly switch. She was in a desponding reverie.
Her course was in the direction of the small undying fire which had drawn the attention of the men on Rainbarrow and of Wildeve in the valley below. A faint illumination from its rays began to glow upon her face, and the fire soon revealed itself to be lit, not on the level ground, but on a salient corner or redan of earth, at the junction of two converging bank fences. Outside was a ditch, dry except immediately under the fire, where there was a large pool, bearded all round by heather and rushes. In the smooth water of the pool the fire appeared upside down.
The banks meeting behind were bare of a hedge, save such as was formed by disconnected tufts of furze, standing upon stems along the top, like impaled heads above a city wall. A white mast, fitted up with spars and other nautical tackle, could be seen rising against the dark clouds whenever the flames played brightly enough to reach it. Altogether the scene had much the appearance of a fortification upon which had been kindled a beacon fire.
n.o.body was visible; but ever and anon a whitish something moved above the bank from behind, and vanished again. This was a small human hand, in the act of lifting pieces of fuel into the fire, but for all that could be seen the hand, like that which troubled Belshazzar, was there alone. Occasionally an ember rolled off the bank, and dropped with a hiss into the pool.
At one side of the pool rough steps built of clods enabled everyone who wished to do so to mount the bank; which the woman did. Within was a paddock in an uncultivated state, though bearing evidence of having once been tilled; but the heath and fern had insidiously crept in, and were rea.s.serting their old supremacy. Further ahead were dimly visible an irregular dwelling-house, garden, and outbuildings, backed by a clump of firs.
The young lady-for youth had revealed its presence in her buoyant bound up the bank-walked along the top instead of descending inside, and came to the corner where the fire was burning. One reason for the permanence of the blaze was now manifest: the fuel consisted of hard pieces of wood, cleft and sawn-the knotty boles of old thorn trees which grew in twos and threes about the hillsides. A yet unconsumed pile of these lay in the inner angle of the bank; and from this corner the upturned face of a little boy greeted her eyes. He was dilatorily throwing up a piece of wood into the fire every now and then, a business which seemed to have engaged him a considerable part of the evening, for his face was somewhat weary.
"I am glad you have come, Miss Eustacia," he said, with a sigh of relief. "I don"t like biding by myself."
"Nonsense. I have only been a little way for a walk. I have been gone only twenty minutes."
"It seemed long," murmured the sad boy. "And you have been so many times."
"Why, I thought you would be pleased to have a bonfire. Are you not much obliged to me for making you one?"
"Yes; but there"s n.o.body here to play wi" me."
"I suppose n.o.body has come while I"ve been away?"
"n.o.body except your grandfather-he looked out of doors once for "ee. I told him you were walking round upon the hill to look at the other bonfires."
"A good boy."
"I think I hear him coming again, miss."
An old man came into the remoter light of the fire from the direction of the homestead. He was the same who had overtaken the reddleman on the road that afternoon. He looked wistfully to the top of the bank at the woman who stood there, and his teeth, which were quite unimpaired, showed like parian from his parted lips.
"When are you coming indoors, Eustacia?" he asked. ""Tis almost bedtime. I"ve been home these two hours, and am tired out. Surely "tis somewhat childish of you to stay out playing at bonfires so long, and wasting such fuel. My precious thorn roots, the rarest of all firing, that I laid by on purpose for Christmas-you have burnt "em nearly all!"