The Return of the Native | Page 9

kindled there had shone down
upon the lowlands as these were shining now. Festival fires to Thor and
Woden had followed on the same ground and duly had their day.
Indeed, it is pretty well known that such blazes as this the heathmen
were now enjoying are rather the lineal descendants from jumbled
Druidical rites and Saxon ceremonies than the invention of popular
feeling about Gunpowder Plot.
Moreover to light a fire is the instinctive and resistant act of man when,
at the winter ingress, the curfew is sounded throughout Nature. It
indicates a spontaneous, Promethean rebelliousness against that fiat
that this recurrent season shall bring foul times, cold darkness, misery
and death. Black chaos comes, and the fettered gods of the earth say,

Let there be light.
The brilliant lights and sooty shades which struggled upon the skin and
clothes of the persons standing round caused their lineaments and
general contours to be drawn with Dureresque vigour and dash. Yet the
permanent moral expression of each face it was impossible to discover,
for as the nimble flames towered, nodded, and swooped through the
surrounding air, the blots of shade and flakes of light upon the
countenances of the group changed shape and position endlessly. All
was unstable; quivering as leaves, evanescent as lightning. Shadowy
eye-sockets, deep as those of a death's head, suddenly turned into pits
of lustre: a lantern-jaw was cavernous, then it was shining; wrinkles
were emphasized to ravines, or obliterated entirely by a changed ray.
Nostrils were dark wells; sinews in old necks were gilt mouldings;
things with no particular polish on them were glazed; bright objects,
such as the tip of a furze-hook one of the men carried, were as glass;
eyeballs glowed like little lanterns. Those whom Nature had depicted
as merely quaint became grotesque, the grotesque became preternatural;
for all was in extremity.
Hence it may be that the face of an old man, who had like others been
called to the heights by the rising flames, was not really the mere nose
and chin that it appeared to be, but an appreciable quantity of human
countenance. He stood complacently sunning himself in the heat. With
a speaker, or stake, he tossed the outlying scraps of fuel into the
conflagration, looking at the midst of the pile, occasionally lifting his
eyes to measure the height of the flame, or to follow the great sparks
which rose with it and sailed away into darkness. The beaming sight,
and the penetrating warmth, seemed to breed in him a cumulative
cheerfulness, which soon amounted to delight. With his stick in his
hand he began to jig a private minuet, a bunch of copper seals shining
and swinging like a pendulum from under his waistcoat: he also began
to sing, in the voice of a bee up a flue--
"The king' call'd down' his no-bles all', By one', by two', by three'; Earl
Mar'-shal, I'll' go shrive'-the queen', And thou' shalt wend' with me'.
"A boon', a boon', quoth Earl' Mar-shal', And fell' on his bend'-ded

knee', That what'-so-e'er' the queen' shall say', No harm' there-of' may
be'."
Want of breath prevented a continuance of the song; and the breakdown
attracted the attention of a firm- standing man of middle age, who kept
each corner of his crescent-shaped mouth rigorously drawn back into
his cheek, as if to do away with any suspicion of mirthfulness which
might erroneously have attached to him.
"A fair stave, Grandfer Cantle; but I am afeard 'tis too much for the
mouldy weasand of such a old man as you," he said to the wrinkled
reveller. "Dostn't wish th' wast three sixes again, Grandfer, as you was
when you first learnt to sing it?"
"Hey?" said Grandfer Cantle, stopping in his dance.
"Dostn't wish wast young again, I say? There's a hole in thy poor
bellows nowadays seemingly."
"But there's good art in me? If I couldn't make a little wind go a long
ways I should seem no younger than the most aged man, should I,
Timothy?"
"And how about the new-married folks down there at the Quiet Woman
Inn?" the other inquired, pointing towards a dim light in the direction of
the distant highway, but considerably apart from where the reddleman
was at that moment resting. "What's the rights of the matter about 'em?
You ought to know, being an understanding man."
"But a little rakish, hey? I own to it. Master Cantle is that, or he's
nothing. Yet 'tis a gay fault, neigbbour Fairway, that age will cure."
"I heard that they were coming home tonight. By this time they must
have come. What besides?"
"The next thing is for us to go and wish 'em joy, I suppose?"
"Well, no."

"No? Now, I thought we must. I must, or 'twould be