The Return of the Native

7--Queen of Night

Eustacia Vye was the raw material of a divinity. On Olympus she wouldhave done well with a little preparation. She had the passions andinstincts which make a model goddess, that is, those which make notquite a model woman. Had it been possible for the earth and mankind tobe entirely in her grasp for a while, she had handled the distaff, thespindle, and the shears at her own free will, few in the world wouldhave noticed the change of government. There would have been the sameinequality of lot, the same heaping up of favours here, of contumelythere, the same generosity before justice, the same perpetual dilemmas,the same captious alteration of caresses and blows that we endure now.

She was in person full-limbed and somewhat heavy; without ruddiness, aswithout pallor; and soft to the touch as a cloud. To see her hair wasto fancy that a whole winter did not contain darkness enough to formits shadow--it closed over her forehead like nightfall extinguishing thewestern glow.

Her nerves extended into those tresses, and her temper could alwaysbe softened by stroking them down. When her hair was brushed she wouldinstantly sink into stillness and look like the Sphinx. If, in passingunder one of the Egdon banks, any of its thick skeins were caught,as they sometimes were, by a prickly tuft of the large UlexEuropoeus--which will act as a sort of hairbrush--she would go back afew steps, and pass against it a second time.

She had pagan eyes, full of nocturnal mysteries, and their light, asit came and went, and came again, was partially hampered by theiroppressive lids and lashes; and of these the under lid was much fullerthan it usually is with English women. This enabled her to indulge inreverie without seeming to do so--she might have been believed capableof sleeping without closing them up. Assuming that the souls of men andwomen were visible essences, you could fancy the colour of Eustacia'ssoul to be flamelike. The sparks from it that rose into her dark pupilsgave the same impression.

The mouth seemed formed less to speak than to quiver, less to quiverthan to kiss. Some might have added, less to kiss than to curl. Viewedsideways, the closing-line of her lips formed, with almost geometricprecision, the curve so well known in the arts of design as thecima-recta, or ogee. The sight of such a flexible bend as that on grimEgdon was quite an apparition. It was felt at once that the mouth didnot come over from Sleswig with a band of Saxon pirates whose lips metlike the two halves of a muffin. One had fancied that such lip-curveswere mostly lurking underground in the South as fragments of forgottenmarbles. So fine were the lines of her lips that, though full, eachcorner of her mouth was as clearly cut as the point of a spear. Thiskeenness of corner was only blunted when she was given over to suddenfits of gloom, one of the phases of the night-side of sentiment whichshe knew too well for her years.

Her presence brought memories of such things as Bourbon roses, rubies,and tropical midnight; her moods recalled lotus-eaters and the march inAthalie; her motions, the ebb and flow of the sea; her voice, the viola.In a dim light, and with a slight rearrangement of her hair, her generalfigure might have stood for that of either of the higher female deities.The new moon behind her head, an old helmet upon it, a diadem ofaccidental dewdrops round her brow, would have been adjuncts sufficientto strike the note of Artemis, Athena, or Hera respectively, with asclose an approximation to the antique as that which passes muster onmany respected canvases.

But celestial imperiousness, love, wrath, and fervour had proved to besomewhat thrown away on netherward Egdon. Her power was limited, and theconsciousness of this limitation had biassed her development. Egdon washer Hades, and since coming there she had imbibed much of what was darkin its tone, though inwardly and eternally unreconciled thereto. Herappearance accorded well with this smouldering rebelliousness, andthe shady splendour of her beauty was the real surface of the sad andstifled warmth within her. A true Tartarean dignity sat upon her brow,and not factitiously or with marks of constraint, for it had grown inher with years.

Across the upper part of her head she wore a thin fillet of blackvelvet, restraining the luxuriance of her shady hair, in a way whichadded much to this class of majesty by irregularly clouding herforehead. ”Nothing can embellish a beautiful face more than a narrowband drawn over the brow,” says Richter. Some of the neighbouringgirls wore coloured ribbon for the same purpose, and sported metallicornaments elsewhere; but if anyone suggested coloured ribbon andmetallic ornaments to Eustacia Vye she laughed and went on.

Why did a woman of this sort live on Egdon Heath? Budmouth was hernative place, a fashionable seaside resort at that date. She was thedaughter of the bandmaster of a regiment which had been quarteredthere--a Corfiote by birth, and a fine musician--who met his futurewife during her trip thither with her father the captain, a man of goodfamily. The marriage was scarcely in accord with the old man's wishes,for the bandmaster's pockets were as light as his occupation. But themusician did his best; adopted his wife's name, made England permanentlyhis home, took great trouble with his child's education, the expensesof which were defrayed by the grandfather, and throve as the chief localmusician till her mother's death, when he left off thriving, drank, anddied also. The girl was left to the care of her grandfather, who, sincethree of his ribs became broken in a shipwreck, had lived in this airyperch on Egdon, a spot which had taken his fancy because the house wasto be had for next to nothing, and because a remote blue tinge onthe horizon between the hills, visible from the cottage door, wastraditionally believed to be the English Channel. She hated the change;she felt like one banished; but here she was forced to abide.

Thus it happened that in Eustacia's brain were juxtaposed the strangestassortment of ideas, from old time and from new. There was no middledistance in her perspective--romantic recollections of sunny afternoonson an esplanade, with military bands, officers, and gallants around,stood like gilded letters upon the dark tablet of surrounding Egdon.Every bizarre effect that could result from the random intertwining ofwatering-place glitter with the grand solemnity of a heath, was to befound in her. Seeing nothing of human life now, she imagined all themore of what she had seen.

Where did her dignity come from? By a latent vein from Alcinous' line,her father hailing from Phaeacia's isle?--or from Fitzalan and De Vere,her maternal grandfather having had a cousin in the peerage? Perhaps itwas the gift of Heaven--a happy convergence of natural laws. Among otherthings opportunity had of late years been denied her of learning tobe undignified, for she lived lonely. Isolation on a heath rendersvulgarity well-nigh impossible. It would have been as easy for theheath-ponies, bats, and snakes to be vulgar as for her. A narrow life inBudmouth might have completely demeaned her.

The only way to look queenly without realms or hearts to queen it overis to look as if you had lost them; and Eustacia did that to a triumph.In the captain's cottage she could suggest mansions she had never seen.Perhaps that was because she frequented a vaster mansion than any ofthem, the open hills. Like the summer condition of the place around her,she was an embodiment of the phrase ”a populous solitude”--apparently solistless, void, and quiet, she was really busy and full.

To be loved to madness--such was her great desire. Love was to her theone cordial which could drive away the eating loneliness of her days.And she seemed to long for the abstraction called passionate love morethan for any particular lover.

She could show a most reproachful look at times, but it was directedless against human beings than against certain creatures of her mind,the chief of these being Destiny, through whose interference she dimlyfancied it arose that love alighted only on gliding youth--that any loveshe might win would sink simultaneously with the sand in the glass.She thought of it with an ever-growing consciousness of cruelty, whichtended to breed actions of reckless unconventionality, framed to snatcha year's, a week's, even an hour's passion from anywhere while it couldbe won. Through want of it she had sung without being merry, possessedwithout enjoying, outshone without triumphing. Her loneliness deepenedher desire. On Egdon, coldest and meanest kisses were at famine prices,and where was a mouth matching hers to be found?

Fidelity in love for fidelity's sake had less attraction for her thanfor most women; fidelity because of love's grip had much. A blaze oflove, and extinction, was better than a lantern glimmer of the samewhich should last long years. On this head she knew by prevision whatmost women learn only by experience--she had mentally walked round love,told the towers thereof, considered its palaces, and concluded that lovewas but a doleful joy. Yet she desired it, as one in a desert would bethankful for brackish water.

She often repeated her prayers; not at particular times, but, like theunaffectedly devout, when she desired to pray. Her prayer was alwaysspontaneous, and often ran thus, ”O deliver my heart from this fearfulgloom and loneliness; send me great love from somewhere, else I shalldie.”

Her high gods were William the Conqueror, Strafford, and NapoleonBuonaparte, as they had appeared in the Lady's History used at theestablishment in which she was educated. Had she been a mother she wouldhave christened her boys such names as Saul or Sisera in preference toJacob or David, neither of whom she admired. At school she had usedto side with the Philistines in several battles, and had wondered ifPontius Pilate were as handsome as he was frank and fair.

Thus she was a girl of some forwardness of mind, indeed, weighed inrelation to her situation among the very rearward of thinkers, veryoriginal. Her instincts towards social non-comformity were at the rootof this. In the matter of holidays, her mood was that of horses who,when turned out to grass, enjoy looking upon their kind at work on thehighway. She only valued rest to herself when it came in the midst ofother people's labour. Hence she hated Sundays when all was at rest, andoften said they would be the death of her. To see the heathmen in theirSunday condition, that is, with their hands in their pockets, theirboots newly oiled, and not laced up (a particularly Sunday sign),walking leisurely among the turves and furze-faggots they had cut duringthe week, and kicking them critically as if their use were unknown, wasa fearful heaviness to her. To relieve the tedium of this untimely dayshe would overhaul the cupboards containing her grandfather's old chartsand other rubbish, humming Saturday-night ballads of the country peoplethe while. But on Saturday nights she would frequently sing a psalm, andit was always on a weekday that she read the Bible, that she might beunoppressed with a sense of doing her duty.

Such views of life were to some extent the natural begettings of hersituation upon her nature. To dwell on a heath without studying itsmeanings was like wedding a foreigner without learning his tongue. Thesubtle beauties of the heath were lost to Eustacia; she only caught itsvapours. An environment which would have made a contented woman a poet,a suffering woman a devotee, a pious woman a psalmist, even a giddywoman thoughtful, made a rebellious woman saturnine.

Eustacia had got beyond the vision of some marriage of inexpressibleglory; yet, though her emotions were in full vigour, she cared for nomeaner union. Thus we see her in a strange state of isolation. To havelost the godlike conceit that we may do what we will, and not to haveacquired a homely zest for doing what we can, shows a grandeur of temperwhich cannot be objected to in the abstract, for it denotes a mindthat, though disappointed, forswears compromise. But, if congenial tophilosophy, it is apt to be dangerous to the commonwealth. In a worldwhere doing means marrying, and the commonwealth is one of hearts andhands, the same peril attends the condition.

And so we see our Eustacia--for at times she was not altogetherunlovable--arriving at that stage of enlightenment which feels thatnothing is worth while, and filling up the spare hours of her existenceby idealizing Wildeve for want of a better object. This was the solereason of his ascendency: she knew it herself. At moments her priderebelled against her passion for him, and she even had longed to befree. But there was only one circumstance which could dislodge him, andthat was the advent of a greater man.

For the rest, she suffered much from depression of spirits, and tookslow walks to recover them, in which she carried her grandfather'stelescope and her grandmother's hourglass--the latter because of apeculiar pleasure she derived from watching a material representation oftime's gradual glide away. She seldom schemed, but when she did scheme,her plans showed rather the comprehensive strategy of a general than thesmall arts called womanish, though she could utter oracles of Delphianambiguity when she did not choose to be direct. In heaven she willprobably sit between the Heloises and the Cleopatras.