LITMIR.BIZ

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      “You exaggerate fearfully,” she said in a faint, weary voice; “but I cannot enter into my defence — it is not worth doing. You are nothing to me in future, and the past side of the story may as well remain untold. I have lost all through you, but I have not complained. Your blunders and misfortunes may have been a sorrow to you, but they have been a wrong to me. All persons of refinement have been scared away from me since I sank into the mire of marriage. Is this your cherishing — to put me into a hut like this, and keep me like the wife of a hind? You deceived me — not by words, but by appearances, which are less seen through than words. But the place will serve as well as any other — as somewhere to pass from — into my grave.” Her words were smothered in her throat, and her head drooped down.

      “I don’t know what you mean by that. Am I the cause of your sin?” (Eustacia made a trembling motion towards him.) “What, you can begin to shed tears and offer me your hand? Good God! can you? No, not I. I’ll not commit the fault of taking that.” (The hand she had offered dropped nervelessly, but the tears continued flowing.) “Well, yes, I’ll take it, if only for the sake of my own foolish kisses that were wasted there before I knew what I cherished. How bewitched I was! How could there be any good in a woman that everybody spoke ill of?”

      “O, O, O!” she cried, breaking down at last; and, shaking with sobs which choked her, she sank upon her knees. “O, will you have done! O, you are too relentless — there’s a limit to the cruelty of savages! I have held out long — but you crush me down. I beg for mercy — I cannot bear this any longer — it is inhuman to go further with this! If I had — killed your — mother with my own hand — I should not deserve such a scourging to the bone as this. O, O! God have mercy upon a miserable woman! . . . You have beaten me in this game — I beg you to stay your hand in pity! . . . I confess that I— wilfully did not undo the door the first time she knocked — but — I should have unfastened it the second — if I had not thought you had gone to do it yourself. When I found you had not I opened it, but she was gone. That’s the extent of my crime — towards HER. Best natures commit bad faults sometimes, don’t they? — I think they do. Now I will leave you — for ever and ever!”

      “Tell all, and I WILL pity you. Was the man in the house with you Wildeve?”

      “I cannot tell,” she said desperately through her sobbing. “Don’t insist further — I cannot tell. I am going from this house. We cannot both stay here.”

      “You need not go — I will go. You can stay here.”

      “No, I will dress, and then I will go.”

      “Where?”

      “Where I came from, or ELSEWHERE.”

      She hastily dressed herself, Yeobright moodily walking up and down the room the whole of the time. At last all her things were on. Her little hands quivered so violently as she held them to her chin to fasten her bonnet that she could not tie the strings, and after a few moments she relinquished the attempt. Seeing this he moved forward and said, “Let me tie them.”

      She assented in silence, and lifted her chin. For once at least in her life she was totally oblivious of the charm of her attitude. But he was not, and he turned his eyes aside, that he might not be tempted to softness.

      The strings were tied; she turned from him. “Do you still prefer going away yourself to my leaving you?” he inquired again.

      “I do.”

      “Very well — let it be. And when you will confess to the man I may pity you.”

      She flung her shawl about her and went downstairs, leaving him standing in the room.

      Eustacia had not long been gone when there came a knock at the door of the bedroom; and Yeobright said, “Well?”

      It was the servant; and she replied, “Somebody from Mrs. Wildeve’s have called to tell ‘ee that the mis’ess and the baby are getting on wonderful well, and the baby’s name is to be Eustacia Clementine.” And the girl retired.

      “What a mockery!” said Clym. “This unhappy marriage of mine to be perpetuated in that child’s name!”

      Chapter 4

      The Ministrations of a Half-forgotten One

       Table of Contents

      Eustacia’s journey was at first as vague in direction as that of thistledown on the wind. She did not know what to do. She wished it had been night instead of morning, that she might at least have borne her misery without the possibility of being seen. Tracing mile after mile along between the dying ferns and the wet white spiders’ webs, she at length turned her steps towards her grandfather’s house. She found the front door closed and locked. Mechanically she went round to the end where the stable was, and on looking in at the stable door she saw Charley standing within.

      “Captain Vye is not at home?” she said.

      “No, ma’am,” said the lad in a flutter of feeling; “he’s gone to Weatherbury, and won’t be home till night. And the servant is gone home for a holiday. So the house is locked up.”

      Eustacia’s face was not visible to Charley as she stood at the doorway, her back being to the sky, and the stable but indifferently lighted; but the wildness of her manner arrested his attention. She turned and walked away across the enclosure to the gate, and was hidden by the bank.

      When she had disappeared Charley, with misgiving in his eyes, slowly came from the stable door, and going to another point in the bank he looked over. Eustacia was leaning against it on the outside, her face covered with her hands, and her head pressing the dewy heather which bearded the bank’s outer side. She appeared to be utterly indifferent to the circumstance that her bonnet, hair, and garments were becoming wet and disarranged by the moisture of her cold, harsh pillow. Clearly something was wrong.

      Charley had always regarded Eustacia as Eustacia had regarded Clym when she first beheld him — as a romantic and sweet vision, scarcely incarnate. He had been so shut off from her by the dignity of her look and the pride of her speech, except at that one blissful interval when he was allowed to hold her hand, that he had hardly deemed her a woman, wingless and earthly, subject to household conditions and domestic jars. The inner details of her life he had only conjectured. She had been a lovely wonder, predestined to an orbit in which the whole of his own was but a point; and this sight of her leaning like a helpless, despairing creature against a wild wet bank filled him with an amazed horror. He could no longer remain where he was. Leaping over, he came up, touched her with his finger, and said tenderly, “You are poorly, ma’am. What can I do?”

      Eustacia started up, and said, “Ah, Charley — you have followed me. You did not think when I left home in the summer that I should come back like this!”

      “I did not, dear ma’am. Can I help you now?”

      “I am afraid not. I wish I could get into the house. I feel giddy — that’s all.”

      “Lean on my arm, ma’am, till we get to the porch, and I will try to open the door.”

      He supported her to the porch, and there depositing her on a seat hastened to the back, climbed to a window by the help of a ladder, and descending inside opened the door. Next he assisted her into the room, where there was an old-fashioned horsehair settee as large as a donkey wagon. She lay down here, and Charley covered her with a cloak he found in the hall.

      “Shall I get you something to eat and drink?” he said.

      “If you please, Charley. But I suppose there is no fire?”

      “I can light it, ma’am.”

      He vanished, and she heard a splitting of wood and a blowing of bellows; and presently he returned, saying, “I have lighted a fire in the kitchen, and now I’ll light one here.”

      He lit the fire, Eustacia dreamily observing him from her couch.

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