That five minutes of overhearing furnished Eustacia
with visions enough to fill the whole blank afternoon.
Such sudden alternations from mental vacuity do sometimes
occur thus quietly. She could never have believed
in the morning that her colourless inner world would
before night become as animated as water under a microscope,
and that without the arrival of a single visitor.
The words of Sam and Humphrey on the harmony between
the unknown and herself had on her mind the effect
of the invading Bard’s prelude in the “Castle
of Indolence,” at which myriads of imprisoned
shapes arose where had previously appeared the stillness
of a void.
Involved in these imaginings she knew nothing of time.
When she became conscious of externals it was dusk.
The furze-rick was finished; the men had gone home.
Eustacia went upstairs, thinking that she would take
a walk at this her usual time; and she determined that
her walk should be in the direction of Blooms-End,
the birthplace of young Yeobright and the present
home of his mother. She had no reason for walking
elsewhere, and why should she not go that way?
The scene of a day-dream is sufficient for a pilgrimage
at nineteen. To look at the palings before the
Yeobrights’ house had the dignity of a necessary
performance. Strange that such a piece of idling
should have seemed an important errand.
She put on her bonnet, and, leaving the house, descended
the hill on the side towards Blooms-End, where she
walked slowly along the valley for a distance of a
mile and a half. This brought her to a spot in
which the green bottom of the dale began to widen,
the furze bushes to recede yet further from the path
on each side, till they were diminished to an isolated
one here and there by the increasing fertility of
the soil. Beyond the irregular carpet of grass
was a row of white palings, which marked the verge
of the heath in this latitude. They showed upon
the dusky scene that they bordered as distinctly as
white lace on velvet. Behind the white palings
was a little garden; behind the garden an old, irregular,
thatched house, facing the heath, and commanding a
full view of the valley. This was the obscure,
removed spot to which was about to return a man whose
latter life had been passed in the French capital—the
centre and vortex of the fashionable world.
II
The People at Blooms-End Make Ready
All that afternoon the expected arrival of the subject
of Eustacia’s ruminations created a bustle of
preparation at Blooms-End. Thomasin had been
persuaded by her aunt, and by an instinctive impulse
of loyalty towards her cousin Clym, to bestir herself
on his account with an alacrity unusual in her during
these most sorrowful days of her life. At the
time that Eustacia was listening to the rickmakers’
conversation on Clym’s return, Thomasin was climbing
into a loft over her aunt’s fuel-house, where
the store-apples were kept, to search out the best
and largest of them for the coming holiday-time.
