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

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 attitude, 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 hourglass, 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 glass 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 passed 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 heathcroppers.
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 passively still. When she began to extricate herself it was by
turning round and round, and so unwinding the prickly 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.
Nobody 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 any one 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 reasserting their old supremacy.
Further ahead were dimly visible an irregular dwelling-house, garden, and outbuildings, backed
by a clump of firs.