"Well, well, as you will.Must I come to fetch you?""If you return soon enough from your work.But do not inconvenience yourself about it.I know the way home, and the heath has no terror for me.""And can you cling to gaiety so eagerly as to walk all the way to a village festival in search of it?""Now, you don't like my going alone! Clym, you are not jealous?""No.But I would come with you if it could give you any pleasure; though, as things stand, perhaps you have too much of me already.Still, I somehow wish that you did not want to go.Yes, perhaps I am jealous;and who could be jealous with more reason than I, a half-blind man, over such a woman as you?""Don't think like it.Let me go, and don't take all my spirits away!""I would rather lose all my own, my sweet wife.Go and do whatever you like.Who can forbid your indulgence in any whim? You have all my heart yet, I believe;and because you bear with me, who am in truth a drag upon you, I owe you thanks.Yes, go alone and shine.
As for me, I will stick to my doom.At that kind of meeting people would shun me.My hook and gloves are like the St.Lazarus rattle of the leper, warning the world to get out of the way of a sight that would sadden them."He kissed her, put on his leggings, and went out.
When he was gone she rested her head upon her hands and said to herself, "Two wasted lives--his and mine.
And I am come to this! Will it drive me out of my mind?"She cast about for any possible course which offered the least improvement on the existing state of things, and could find none.She imagined how all those Budmouth ones who should learn what had become of her would say, "Look at the girl for whom nobody was good enough!"To Eustacia the situation seemed such a mockery of her hopes that death appeared the only door of relief if the satire of Heaven should go much further.
Suddenly she aroused herself and exclaimed, "But I'll shake it off.Yes, I WILL shake it off! No one shall know my suffering.I'll be bitterly merry, and ironically gay, and I'll laugh in derision.And I'll begin by going to this dance on the green."She ascended to her bedroom and dressed herself with scrupulous care.To an onlooker her beauty would have made her feelings almost seem reasonable.The gloomy corner into which accident as much as indiscretion had brought this woman might have led even a moderate partisan to feel that she had cogent reasons for asking the Supreme Power by what right a being of such exquisite finish had been placed in circumstances calculated to make of her charms a curse rather than a blessing.
It was five in the afternoon when she came out from the house ready for her walk.There was material enough in the picture for twenty new conquests.The rebellious sadness that was rather too apparent when she sat indoors without a bonnet was cloaked and softened by her outdoor attire, which always had a sort of nebulousness about it, devoid of harsh edges anywhere; so that her face looked from its environment as from a cloud, with no noticeable lines of demarcation between flesh and clothes.The heat of the day had scarcely declined as yet, and she went along the sunny hills at a leisurely pace, there being ample time for her idle expedition.Tall ferns buried her in their leafage whenever her path lay through them, which now formed miniature forests, though not one stem of them would remain to bud the next year.
The site chosen for the village festivity was one of the lawnlike oases which were occasionally, yet not often, met with on the plateaux of the heath district.The brakes of furze and fern terminated abruptly round the margin, and the grass was unbroken.A green cattletrack skirted the spot, without, however, emerging from the screen of fern, and this path Eustacia followed, in order to reconnoitre the group before joining it.The lusty notes of the East Egdon band had directed her unerringly, and she now beheld the musicians themselves, sitting in a blue wagon with red wheels scrubbed as bright as new, and arched with sticks, to which boughs and flowers were tied.
In front of this was the grand central dance of fifteen or twenty couples, flanked by minor dances of inferior individuals whose gyrations were not always in strict keeping with the tune.
The young men wore blue and white rosettes, and with a flush on their faces footed it to the girls, who, with the excitement and the exercise, blushed deeper than the pink of their numerous ribbons.Fair ones with long curls, fair ones with short curls, fair ones with lovelocks, fair ones with braids, flew round and round; and a beholder might well have wondered how such a prepossessing set of young women of like size, age, and disposition, could have been collected together where there were only one or two villages to choose from.In the background was one happy man dancing by himself, with closed eyes, totally oblivious of all the rest.A fire was burning under a pollard thorn a few paces off, over which three kettles hung in a row.Hard by was a table where elderly dames prepared tea, but Eustacia looked among them in vain for the cattle-dealer's wife who had suggested that she should come, and had promised to obtain a courteous welcome for her.
This unexpected absence of the only local resident whom Eustacia knew considerably damaged her scheme for an afternoon of reckless gaiety.Joining in became a matter of difficulty, notwithstanding that, were she to advance, cheerful dames would come forward with cups of tea and make much of her as a stranger of superior grace and knowledge to themselves.Having watched the company through the figures of two dances, she decided to walk a little further, to a cottage where she might get some refreshment, and then return homeward in the shady time of evening.
This she did, and by the time that she retraced her steps towards the scene of the gipsying, which it was necessary to repass on her way to Alderworth, the sun was going down.
