The Return of the Native | Page 4

officer of some sort or other.
Before him stretched the long, laborious road, dry, empty, and white. It
was quite open to the heath on each side, and bisected that vast dark
surface like the parting-line on a head of black hair, diminishing and
bending away on the furthest horizon.
The old man frequently stretched his eyes ahead to gaze over the tract
that he had yet to traverse. At length he discerned, a long distance in
front of him, a moving spot, which appeared to be a vehicle, and it
proved to be going the same way as that in which he himself was
journeying. It was the single atom of life that the scene contained, and
it only served to render the general loneliness more evident. Its rate of
advance was slow, and the old man gained upon it sensibly.
When he drew nearer he perceived it to be a spring van, ordinary in
shape, but singular in colour, this being a lurid red. The driver walked
beside it; and, like his van, he was completely red. One dye of that
tincture covered his clothes, the cap upon his head, his boots, his face,
and his hands. He was not temporarily overlaid with the colour; it
permeated him.
The old man knew the meaning of this. The traveller with the cart was a
reddleman--a person whose vocation it was to supply farmers with
redding for their sheep. He was one of a class rapidly becoming extinct
in Wessex, filling at present in the rural world the place which, during
the last century, the dodo occupied in the world of animals. He is a
curious, interesting, and nearly perished link between obsolete forms of
life and those which generally prevail.
The decayed officer, by degrees, came up alongside his
fellow-wayfarer, and wished him good evening. The reddleman turned
his head, and replied in sad and occupied tones. He was young, and his

face, if not exactly handsome, approached so near to handsome that
nobody would have contradicted an assertion that it really was so in its
natural colour. His eye, which glared so strangely through his stain,
was in itself attractive--keen as that of a bird of prey, and blue as
autumn mist. He had neither whisker nor moustache, which allowed the
soft curves of the lower part of his face to be apparent. His lips were
thin, and though, as it seemed, compressed by thought, there was a
pleasant twitch at their corners now and then. He was clothed
throughout in a tight-fitting suit of corduroy, excellent in quality, not
much worn, and well-chosen for its purpose, but deprived of its original
colour by his trade. It showed to advantage the good shape of his figure.
A certain well-to-do air about the man suggested that he was not poor
for his degree. The natural query of an observer would have been, Why
should such a promising being as this have hidden his prepossessing
exterior by adopting that singular occupation?
After replying to the old man's greeting he showed no inclination to
continue in talk, although they still walked side by side, for the elder
traveller seemed to desire company. There were no sounds but that of
the booming wind upon the stretch of tawny herbage around them, the
crackling wheels, the tread of the men, and the footsteps of the two
shaggy ponies which drew the van. They were small, hardy animals, of
a breed between Galloway and Exmoor, and were known as
"heath-croppers" here.
Now, as they thus pursued their way, the reddleman occasionally left
his companion's side, and, stepping behind the van, looked into its
interior through a small window. The look was always anxious. He
would then return to the old man, who made another remark about the
state of the country and so on, to which the reddleman again
abstractedly replied, and then again they would lapse into silence. The
silence conveyed to neither any sense of awkwardness; in these lonely
places wayfarers, after a first greeting, frequently plod on for miles
without speech; contiguity amounts to a tacit conversation where,
otherwise than in cities, such contiguity can be put an end to on the
merest inclination, and where not to put an end to it is intercourse in
itself.

Possibly these two might not have spoken again till their parting, had it
not been for the reddleman's visits to his van. When he returned from
his fifth time of looking in the old man said, "You have something
inside there besides your load?"
"Yes."
"Somebody who wants looking after?"
"Yes."
Not long after this a faint cry sounded from the interior. The reddleman
hastened to the back, looked in, and came away again.
"You have a child there, my man?"
"No, sir, I have a