She went indoors in that peculiar state of misery
which is not exactly grief, and which especially attends
the dawnings of reason in the latter days of an ill-judged,
transient love. To be conscious that the end
of the dream is approaching, and yet has not absolutely
come, is one of the most wearisome as well as the
most curious stages along the course between the beginning
of a passion and its end.
Her grandfather had returned, and was busily engaged
in pouring some gallons of newly arrived rum into
the square bottles of his square cellaret. Whenever
these home supplies were exhausted he would go to
the Quiet Woman, and, standing with his back to the
fire, grog in hand, tell remarkable stories of how
he had lived seven years under the water-line of his
ship, and other naval wonders, to the natives, who
hoped too earnestly for a treat of ale from the teller
to exhibit any doubts of his truth.
He had been there this evening. “I suppose
you have heard the Egdon news, Eustacia?” he
said, without looking up from the bottles. “The
men have been talking about it at the Woman as if it
were of national importance.”
“I have heard none,” she said.
“Young Clym Yeobright, as they call him, is
coming home next week to spend Christmas with his
mother. He is a fine fellow by this time, it
seems. I suppose you remember him?”
“I never saw him in my life.”
“Ah, true; he left before you came here.
I well remember him as a promising boy.”
“Where has he been living all these years?”
“In that rookery of pomp and vanity, Paris,
I believe.”
Tidings of the Comer
On fine days at this time of the year, and earlier,
certain ephemeral operations were apt to disturb,
in their trifling way, the majestic calm of Egdon
Heath. They were activities which, beside those
of a town, a village, or even a farm, would have appeared
as the ferment of stagnation merely, a creeping of
the flesh of somnolence. But here, away from
comparisons, shut in by the stable hills, among which
mere walking had the novelty of pageantry, and where
any man could imagine himself to be Adam without the
least difficulty, they attracted the attention of
every bird within eyeshot, every reptile not yet asleep,
and set the surrounding rabbits curiously watching
from hillocks at a safe distance.
The performance was that of bringing together and
building into a stack the furze-faggots which Humphrey
had been cutting for the captain’s use during
the foregoing fine days. The stack was at the
end of the dwelling, and the men engaged in building
it were Humphrey and Sam, the old man looking on.
It was a fine and quiet afternoon, about three o’clock;
but the winter solstice having stealthily come on,
the lowness of the sun caused the hour to seem later
than it actually was, there being little here to remind
an inhabitant that he must unlearn his summer experience
of the sky as a dial. In the course of many days
and weeks sunrise had advanced its quarters from north-east
to south-east, sunset had receded from north-west
to south-west; but Egdon had hardly heeded the change.
