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 north-east 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.
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 north-west; 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 south-east, 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.
