Thomas Hardy - The Return of the Native.pdf - Bookstacks

“And when she saw the young lady look out of the window the old lady knocked again; and when nobody
came she took up the furze-hook and looked at it, and put it down again, and then she looked at the faggot-bonds;
and then she went away, and walked across to me, and blowed her breath very hard, like this.
We walked on together, she and I, and I talked to her and she talked to me a bit, but not much, because she
couldn’t blow her breath.”
“O!” murmured Clym, in a low tone, and bowed his head. “Let’s have more,” he said.
“She couldn’t talk much, and she couldn’t walk; and her face was, O so queer!”
“How was her face?”
“Like yours is now.”
The woman looked at Yeobright, and beheld him colourless, in a cold sweat. “Isn’t there meaning in
it?” she said stealthily. “What do you think of her now?”
“Silence!” said Clym fiercely. And, turning to the boy, “And then you left her to die?”
“No,” said the woman, quickly and angrily. “He did not leave her to die! She sent him away. Whoever
says he forsook her says what’s not true.”
“Trouble no more about that,” answered Clym, with a quivering mouth. “What he did is a trifle in comparison
with what he saw. Door kept shut, did you say? Kept shut, she looking out of window? Good heart
of God!—what does it mean?”
The child shrank away from the gaze of his questioner.
“He said so,” answered the mother, “and Johnny’s a God-fearing boy and tells no lies.”
“‘Cast off by my son!’ No, by my best life, dear mother, it is not so! But by your son’s, your son’s—May
all murderesses get the torment they deserve!”
With these words Yeobright went forth from the little dwelling. The pupils of his eyes, fixed steadfastly
on blankness, were vaguely lit with an icy shine; his mouth had passed into the phase more or less imaginatively
rendered in studies of Oedipus. The strangest deeds were possible to his mood. But they were not
possible to his situation. Instead of there being before him the pale face of Eustacia, and a masculine shape
unknown, there was only the imperturbable countenance of the heath, which, having defied the cataclysmal
onsets of centuries, reduced to insignificance by its seamed and antique features the wildest turmoil of a
single man.
III
Eustacia Dresses Herself
on a Black Morning
A consciousness of a vast impassivity in all which lay around him took possession even of Yeobright in
his wild walk towards Alderworth. He had once before felt in his own person this overpowering of the fervid
by the inanimate; but then it had tended to enervate a passion far sweeter than that which at present pervaded
him. It was once when he stood parting from Eustacia in the moist still levels beyond the hills.
But dismissing all this he went onward home, and came to the front of his house. The blinds of Eustacia’s
bedroom were still closely drawn, for she was no early riser. All the life visible was in the shape of a solitary
thrush cracking a small snail upon the door-stone for his breakfast, and his tapping seemed a loud noise
in the general silence which prevailed; but on going to the door Clym found it unfastened, the young girl
who attended upon Eustacia being astir in the back part of the premises. Yeobright entered and went
straight to his wife’s room.
The noise of his arrival must have aroused her, for when he opened the door she was standing before
the looking-glass in her night-dress, the ends of her hair gathered into one hand, with which she was coiling
the whole mass round her head, previous to beginning toilette operations. She was not a woman given to