ld 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,
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