“No,” said the woman, quickly and angrily.  “He did not leave her to die!  She sent him away.  Whoever says he forsook her says what’s not true.”

“Trouble no more about that,” answered Clym, with a quivering mouth.  “What he did is a trifle in comparison with what he saw.  Door kept shut, did you say?  Kept shut, she looking out of window?  Good heart of God!—­what does it mean?”

The child shrank away from the gaze of his questioner.

“He said so,” answered the mother, “and Johnny’s a God-fearing boy and tells no lies.”

“‘Cast off by my son!’ No, by my best life, dear mother, it is not so!  But by your son’s, your son’s—­May all murderesses get the torment they deserve!”

With these words Yeobright went forth from the little dwelling.  The pupils of his eyes, fixed steadfastly on blankness, were vaguely lit with an icy shine; his mouth had passed into the phase more or less imaginatively rendered in studies of Oedipus.  The strangest deeds were possible to his mood.  But they were not possible to his situation.  Instead of there being before him the pale face of Eustacia, and a masculine shape unknown, there was only the imperturbable countenance of the heath, which, having defied the cataclysmal onsets of centuries, reduced to insignificance by its seamed and antique features the wildest turmoil of a single man.

III

Eustacia Dresses Herself on a Black Morning

A consciousness of a vast impassivity in all which lay around him took possession even of Yeobright in his wild walk towards Alderworth.  He had once before felt in his own person this overpowering of the fervid by the inanimate; but then it had tended to enervate a passion far sweeter than that which at present pervaded him.  It was once when he stood parting from Eustacia in the moist still levels beyond the hills.

But dismissing all this he went onward home, and came to the front of his house.  The blinds of Eustacia’s bedroom were still closely drawn, for she was no early riser.  All the life visible was in the shape of a solitary thrush cracking a small snail upon the door-stone for his breakfast, and his tapping seemed a loud noise in the general silence which prevailed; but on going to the door Clym found it unfastened, the young girl who attended upon Eustacia being astir in the back part of the premises.  Yeobright entered and went straight to his wife’s room.

The noise of his arrival must have aroused her, for when he opened the door she was standing before the looking-glass in her night-dress, the ends of her hair gathered into one hand, with which she was coiling the whole mass round her head, previous to beginning toilette operations.  She was not a woman given to speaking first at a meeting, and she allowed Clym to walk across in silence, without turning her head.  He came behind her, and she saw his face in the glass.