There was no middle distance in her perspective--romantic recollections of sunny afternoons on 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 of watering-place glitter with the grand solemnity of a heath, was to be found in her.Seeing nothing of human life now, she imagined all the more 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 it was the gift of Heaven--a happy convergence of natural laws.
Among other things opportunity had of late years been denied her of learning to be undignified, for she lived lonely.
Isolation on a heath renders vulgarity well-nigh impossible.
It would have been as easy for the heath-ponies, bats, and snakes to be vulgar as for her.A narrow life in Budmouth might have completely demeaned her.
The only way to look queenly without realms or hearts to queen it over is 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 of them, the open hills.Like the summer condition of the place around her, she was an embodiment of the phrase "a populous solitude"--apparently so listless, void, and quiet, she was really busy and full.
To be loved to madness--such was her great desire.
Love was to her the one cordial which could drive away the eating loneliness of her days.And she seemed to long for the abstraction called passionate love more than for any particular lover.
She could show a most reproachful look at times, but it was directed less against human beings than against certain creatures of her mind, the chief of these being Destiny, through whose interference she dimly fancied it arose that love alighted only on gliding youth--that any love she might win would sink simultaneously with the sand in the glass.She thought of it with an ever-growing consciousness of cruelty, which tended to breed actions of reckless unconventionality, framed to snatch a year's, a week's, even an hour's passion from anywhere while it could be won.Through want of it she had sung without being merry, possessed without enjoying, outshone without triumphing.Her loneliness deepened her 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 than for most women; fidelity because of love's grip had much.A blaze of love, and extinction, was better than a lantern glimmer of the same which should last long years.
On this head she knew by prevision what most women learn only by experience--she had mentally walked round love, told the towers thereof, considered its palaces, and concluded that love was but a doleful joy.Yet she desired it, as one in a desert would be thankful for brackish water.
She often repeated her prayers; not at particular times, but, like the unaffectedly devout, when she desired to pray.
Her prayer was always spontaneous, and often ran thus, "O deliver my heart from this fearful gloom and loneliness;send me great love from somewhere, else I shall die."Her high gods were William the Conqueror, Strafford, and Napoleon Buonaparte, as they had appeared in the Lady's History used at the establishment in which she was educated.
Had she been a mother she would have christened her boys such names as Saul or Sisera in preference to Jacob or David, neither of whom she admired.At school she had used to side with the Philistines in several battles, and had wondered if Pontius Pilate were as handsome as he was frank and fair.
Thus she was a girl of some forwardness of mind, indeed, weighed in relation to her situation among the very rearward of thinkers, very original.Her instincts towards social non-comformity were at the root of 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 the highway.She only valued rest to herself when it came in the midst of other people's labour.
Hence she hated Sundays when all was at rest, and often said they would be the death of her.To see the heathmen in their Sunday condition, that is, with their hands in their pockets, their boots newly oiled, and not laced up (a particularly Sunday sign), walking leisurely among the turves and furze-faggots they had cut during the week, and kicking them critically as if their use were unknown, was a fearful heaviness to her.To relieve the tedium of this untimely day she would overhaul the cupboards containing her grandfather's old charts and other rubbish, humming Saturday-night ballads of the country people the while.
But on Saturday nights she would frequently sing a psalm, and it was always on a weekday that she read the Bible, that she might be unoppressed with a sense of doing her duty.
Such views of life were to some extent the natural begettings of her situation upon her nature.To dwell on a heath without studying its meanings was like wedding a foreigner without learning his tongue.The subtle beauties of the heath were lost to Eustacia; she only caught its vapours.An environment which would have made a contented woman a poet, a suffering woman a devotee, a pious woman a psalmist, even a giddy woman thoughtful, made a rebellious woman saturnine.
