Chapter: <CHAPTER>
7--Queen of Night


Eustacia Vye was the raw material of a divinity. On Olympus she would
have done well with a little preparation. She had the passions and
instincts which make a model goddess, that is, those which make not
quite a model woman. Had it been possible for the earth and mankind to
be entirely in her grasp for a while, she had handled the distaff, the
spindle, and the shears at her own free will, few in the world would
have noticed the change of government. There would have been the same
inequality of lot, the same heaping up of favours here, of contumely
there, the same generosity before justice, the same perpetual dilemmas,
the same captious alteration of caresses and blows that we endure now.

She was in person full-limbed and somewhat heavy; without ruddiness, as
without pallor; and soft to the touch as a cloud. To see her hair was
to fancy that a whole winter did not contain darkness enough to form
its shadow--it closed over her forehead like nightfall extinguishing the
western glow.

Her nerves extended into those tresses, and her temper could always
be softened by stroking them down. When her hair was brushed she would
instantly sink into stillness and look like the Sphinx. If, in passing
under one of the Egdon banks, any of its thick skeins were caught,
as they sometimes were, by a prickly tuft of the large Ulex
Europoeus--which will act as a sort of hairbrush--she would go back a
few steps, and pass against it a second time.

She had pagan eyes, full of nocturnal mysteries, and their light, as
it came and went, and came again, was partially hampered by their
oppressive lids and lashes; and of these the under lid was much fuller
than it usually is with English women. This enabled her to indulge in
reverie without seeming to do so--she might have been believed capable
of sleeping without closing them up. Assuming that the souls of men and
women were visible essences, you could fancy the colour of Eustacia's
soul to be flamelike. The sparks from it that rose into her dark pupils
gave the same impression.

The mouth seemed formed less to speak than to quiver, less to quiver
than to kiss. Some might have added, less to kiss than to curl. Viewed
sideways, the closing-line of her lips formed, with almost geometric
precision, the curve so well known in the arts of design as the
cima-recta, or ogee. The sight of such a flexible bend as that on grim
Egdon was quite an apparition. It was felt at once that the mouth did
not come over from Sleswig with a band of Saxon pirates whose lips met
like the two halves of a muffin. One had fancied that such lip-curves
were mostly lurking underground in the South as fragments of forgotten
marbles. So fine were the lines of her lips that, though full, each
corner of her mouth was as clearly cut as the point of a spear. This
keenness of corner was only blunted when she was given over to sudden
fits of gloom, one of the phases of the night-side of sentiment which
she knew too well for her years.

Her presence brought memories of such things as Bourbon roses, rubies,
and tropical midnight; her moods recalled lotus-eaters and the march in
Athalie; her motions, the ebb and flow of the sea; her voice, the viola.
In a dim light, and with a slight rearrangement of her hair, her general
figure might have stood for that of either of the higher female deities.
The new moon behind her head, an old helmet upon it, a diadem of
accidental dewdrops round her brow, would have been adjuncts sufficient
to strike the note of Artemis, Athena, or Hera respectively, with as
close an approximation to the antique as that which passes muster on
many respected canvases.

But celestial imperiousness, love, wrath, and fervour had proved to be
somewhat thrown away on netherward Egdon. Her power was limited, and the
consciousness of this limitation had biassed her development. Egdon was
her Hades, and since coming there she had imbibed much of what was dark
in its tone, though inwardly and eternally unreconciled thereto. Her
appearance accorded well with this smouldering rebelliousness, and
the shady splendour of her beauty was the real surface of the sad and
stifled warmth within her. A true Tartarean dignity sat upon her brow,
and not factitiously or with marks of constraint, for it had grown in
her with years.

Across the upper part of her head she wore a thin fillet of black
velvet, restraining the luxuriance of her shady hair, in a way which
added much to this class of majesty by irregularly clouding her
forehead. "Nothing can embellish a beautiful face more than a narrow
band drawn over the brow," says Richter. Some of the neighbouring
girls wore coloured ribbon for the same purpose, and sported metallic
ornaments elsewhere; but if anyone suggested coloured ribbon and
metallic ornaments to Eustacia Vye she laughed and went on.

Why did a woman of this sort live on Egdon Heath? Budmouth was her
native place, a fashionable seaside resort at that date. She was the
daughter of the bandmaster of a regiment which had been quartered
there--a Corfiote by birth, and a fine musician--who met his future
wife during her trip thither with her father the captain, a man of good
family. The marriage was scarcely in accord with the old man's wishes,
for the bandmaster's pockets were as light as his occupation. But the
musician did his best; adopted his wife's name, made England permanently
his home, took great trouble with his child's education, the expenses
of which were defrayed by the grandfather, and throve as the chief local
musician till her mother's death, when he left off thriving, drank, and
died also. The girl was left to the care of her grandfather, who, since
three of his ribs became broken in a shipwreck, had lived in this airy
perch on Egdon, a spot which had taken his fancy because the house was
to be had for next to nothing, and because a remote blue tinge on
the horizon between the hills, visible from the cottage door, was
traditionally believed to be the English Channel. She hated the change;
she felt like one banished; but here she was forced to abide.

Thus it happened that in Eustacia's brain were juxtaposed the strangest
assortment of ideas, from old time and from new. 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.

Eustacia had got beyond the vision of some marriage of inexpressible
glory; yet, though her emotions were in full vigour, she cared for no
meaner union. Thus we see her in a strange state of isolation. To have
lost the godlike conceit that we may do what we will, and not to have
acquired a homely zest for doing what we can, shows a grandeur of temper
which cannot be objected to in the abstract, for it denotes a mind
that, though disappointed, forswears compromise. But, if congenial to
philosophy, it is apt to be dangerous to the commonwealth. In a world
where doing means marrying, and the commonwealth is one of hearts and
hands, the same peril attends the condition.

And so we see our Eustacia--for at times she was not altogether
unlovable--arriving at that stage of enlightenment which feels that
nothing is worth while, and filling up the spare hours of her existence
by idealizing Wildeve for want of a better object. This was the sole
reason of his ascendency: she knew it herself. At moments her pride
rebelled against her passion for him, and she even had longed to be
free. But there was only one circumstance which could dislodge him, and
that was the advent of a greater man.

For the rest, she suffered much from depression of spirits, and took
slow walks to recover them, in which she carried her grandfather's
telescope and her grandmother's hourglass--the latter because of a
peculiar pleasure she derived from watching a material representation of
time's gradual glide away. She seldom schemed, but when she did scheme,
her plans showed rather the comprehensive strategy of a general than the
small arts called womanish, though she could utter oracles of Delphian
ambiguity when she did not choose to be direct. In heaven she will
probably sit between the Heloises and the Cleopatras.

</CHAPTER>

 This chapter opens with a doozy of a sentence: "Eustacia Vye was the raw material of a divinity" . Top that, Thomasin. Eustacia is likened to a Greek goddess, the night, winter, a Sphinx, and a Pagan. She's paralleled to Egdon Heath after dark as well. We learn that Eustacia is the daughter of a Greek musician and Captain Vye's daughter. Her dad took her mom's last name in order to sound more English. But now her parents are dead and she lives alone with her grandfather. Eustacia used to live in the bustling harbor town of Budmouth, and feels that Egdon is lame. Eustacia is prone to moodiness, wandering around the heath , and daydreaming . She has a raging ego, too: "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" . The profile of Eustacia continues. She's going through a rough adjustment period in her new home and she's basically latched onto Wildeve for want of anyone better in Egdon.

