Wessex Tales Series: 18 Novels & Stories (Complete Collection). Томас ХардиЧитать онлайн книгу.
I must do? To sit by him hour after hour, and hear him reproach himself as being the cause of her death, and to know that I am the sinner, if any human being is at all, drives me into cold despair. I don’t know what to do. Should I tell him or should I not tell him? I always am asking myself that. O, I want to tell him; and yet I am afraid. If he find it out he must surely kill me, for nothing else will be in proportion to his feelings now. ‘Beware the fury of a patient man’ sounds day by day in my ears as I watch him.”
“Well, wait till he is better, and trust to chance. And when you tell, you must only tell part — for his own sake.”
“Which part should I keep back?”
Wildeve paused. “That I was in the house at the time,” he said in a low tone.
“Yes; it must be concealed, seeing what has been whispered. How much easier are hasty actions than speeches that will excuse them!”
“If he were only to die —” Wildeve murmured.
“Do not think of it! I would not buy hope of immunity by so cowardly a desire even if I hated him. Now I am going up to him again. Thomasin bade me tell you she would be down in a few minutes. Good-bye.”
She returned, and Thomasin soon appeared. When she was seated in the gig with her husband, and the horse was turning to go off, Wildeve lifted his eyes to the bedroom windows. Looking from one of them he could discern a pale, tragic face watching him drive away. It was Eustacia’s.
Chapter 2
A Lurid Light Breaks in upon a Darkened Understanding
Clym’s grief became mitigated by wearing itself out. His strength returned, and a month after the visit of Thomasin he might have been seen walking about the garden. Endurance and despair, equanimity and gloom, the tints of health and the pallor of death, mingled weirdly in his face. He was now unnaturally silent upon all of the past that related to his mother; and though Eustacia knew that he was thinking of it none the less, she was only too glad to escape the topic ever to bring it up anew. When his mind had been weaker his heart had led him to speak out; but reason having now somewhat recovered itself he sank into taciturnity.
One evening when he was thus standing in the garden, abstractedly spudding up a weed with his stick, a bony figure turned the corner of the house and came up to him.
“Christian, isn’t it?” said Clym. “I am glad you have found me out. I shall soon want you to go to Blooms-End and assist me in putting the house in order. I suppose it is all locked up as I left it?”
“Yes, Mister Clym.”
“Have you dug up the potatoes and other roots?”
“Yes, without a drop o’ rain, thank God. But I was coming to tell ‘ee of something else which is quite different from what we have lately had in the family. I am sent by the rich gentleman at the Woman, that we used to call the landlord, to tell ‘ee that Mrs. Wildeve is doing well of a girl, which was born punctually at one o’clock at noon, or a few minutes more or less; and ’tis said that expecting of this increase is what have kept ’em there since they came into their money.”
“And she is getting on well, you say?”
“Yes, sir. Only Mr. Wildeve is twanky because ‘tisn’t a boy — that’s what they say in the kitchen, but I was not supposed to notice that.”
“Christian, now listen to me.”
“Yes, sure, Mr. Yeobright.”
“Did you see my mother the day before she died?”
“No, I did not.”
Yeobright’s face expressed disappointment.
“But I zeed her the morning of the same day she died.”
Clym’s look lighted up. “That’s nearer still to my meaning,” he said.
“Yes, I know ’twas the same day; for she said, ‘I be going to see him, Christian; so I shall not want any vegetables brought in for dinner.’”
“See whom?”
“See you. She was going to your house, you understand.”
Yeobright regarded Christian with intense surprise. “Why did you never mention this?” he said. “Are you sure it was my house she was coming to?”
“O yes. I didn’t mention it because I’ve never zeed you lately. And as she didn’t get there it was all nought, and nothing to tell.”
“And I have been wondering why she should have walked in the heath on that hot day! Well, did she say what she was coming for? It is a thing, Christian, I am very anxious to know.”
“Yes, Mister Clym. She didn’t say it to me, though I think she did to one here and there.”
“Do you know one person to whom she spoke of it?”
“There is one man, please, sir, but I hope you won’t mention my name to him, as I have seen him in strange places, particular in dreams. One night last summer he glared at me like Famine and Sword, and it made me feel so low that I didn’t comb out my few hairs for two days. He was standing, as it might be, Mister Yeobright, in the middle of the path to Mistover, and your mother came up, looking as pale —”
“Yes, when was that?”
“Last summer, in my dream.”
“Pooh! Who’s the man?”
“Diggory, the reddleman. He called upon her and sat with her the evening before she set out to see you. I hadn’t gone home from work when he came up to the gate.”
“I must see Venn — I wish I had known it before,” said Clym anxiously. “I wonder why he has not come to tell me?”
“He went out of Egdon Heath the next day, so would not be likely to know you wanted him.”
“Christian,” said Clym, “you must go and find Venn. I am otherwise engaged, or I would go myself. Find him at once, and tell him I want to speak to him.”
“I am a good hand at hunting up folk by day,” said Christian, looking dubiously round at the declining light; “but as to night-time, never is such a bad hand as I, Mister Yeobright.”
“Search the heath when you will, so that you bring him soon. Bring him tomorrow, if you can.”
Christian then departed. The morrow came, but no Venn. In the evening Christian arrived, looking very weary. He had been searching all day, and had heard nothing of the reddleman.
“Inquire as much as you can tomorrow without neglecting your work,” said Yeobright. “Don’t come again till you have found him.”
The next day Yeobright set out for the old house at Blooms-End, which, with the garden, was now his own. His severe illness had hindered all preparations for his removal thither; but it had become necessary that he should go and overlook its contents, as administrator to his mother’s little property; for which purpose he decided to pass the next night on the premises.
He journeyed onward, not quickly or decisively, but in the slow walk of one who has been awakened from a stupefying sleep. It was early afternoon when he reached the valley. The expression of the place, the tone of the hour, were precisely those of many such occasions in days gone by; and these antecedent similarities fostered the illusion that she, who was there no longer, would come out to welcome him. The garden gate was locked and the shutters were closed, just as he himself had left them on the evening after the funeral. He unlocked the gate, and found that a spider had already constructed a large web, tying the door to the lintel, on the supposition that it was never to be opened again. When he had entered the house and flung back the shutters he set about his task of overhauling the cupboards and closets, burning papers, and considering