“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.
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 speaking first at a meeting, and she allowed Clym
to walk across in silence, without turning her head.
He came behind her, and she saw his face in the glass.
