by Thomas Hardy
The distant light which Eustacia had cursorily observed in leavingthe house came, as she had divined, from the cottage window of SusanNunsuch. What Eustacia did not divine was the occupation of the womanwithin at that moment. Susan's sight of her passing figure earlierin the evening, not five minutes after the sick boy's exclamation,"Mother, I do feel so bad!" persuaded the matron that an evilinfluence was certainly exercised by Eustacia's propinquity.
On this account Susan did not go to bed as soon as the evening's workwas over, as she would have done at ordinary times. To counteractthe malign spell which she imagined poor Eustacia to be working, theboy's mother busied herself with a ghastly invention of superstition,calculated to bring powerlessness, atrophy, and annihilation on anyhuman being against whom it was directed. It was a practice wellknown on Egdon at that date, and one that is not quite extinct at thepresent day.
She passed with her candle into an inner room, where, among otherutensils, were two large brown pans, containing together perhaps ahundredweight of liquid honey, the produce of the bees during theforegoing summer. On a shelf over the pans was a smooth and solidyellow mass of a hemispherical form, consisting of beeswax from thesame take of honey. Susan took down the lump, and cutting off severalthin slices, heaped them in an iron ladle, with which she returnedto the living-room, and placed the vessel in the hot ashes of thefireplace. As soon as the wax had softened to the plasticity of doughshe kneaded the pieces together. And now her face became more intent.She began moulding the wax; and it was evident from her manner ofmanipulation that she was endeavouring to give it some preconceivedform. The form was human.
By warming and kneading, cutting and twisting, dismembering andre-joining the incipient image she had in about a quarter of an hourproduced a shape which tolerably well resembled a woman, and wasabout six inches high. She laid it on the table to get cold and hard.Meanwhile she took the candle and went upstairs to where the littleboy was lying.
"Did you notice, my dear, what Mrs. Eustacia wore this afternoonbesides the dark dress?"
"A red ribbon round her neck."
"Anything else?"
"No--except sandal-shoes."
"A red ribbon and sandal-shoes," she said to herself.
Mrs. Nunsuch went and searched till she found a fragment of thenarrowest red ribbon, which she took downstairs and tied round theneck of the image. Then fetching ink and a quill from the ricketybureau by the window, she blackened the feet of the image to theextent presumably covered by shoes; and on the instep of each footmarked cross-lines in the shape taken by the sandal-strings of thosedays. Finally she tied a bit of black thread round the upper part ofthe head, in faint resemblance to a snood worn for confining the hair.
Susan held the object at arm's length and contemplated it with asatisfaction in which there was no smile. To anybody acquainted withthe inhabitants of Egdon Heath the image would have suggested EustaciaYeobright.
From her work-basket in the window-seat the woman took a paper ofpins, of the old long and yellow sort whose heads were disposedto come off at their first usage. These she began to thrust intothe image in all directions, with apparently excruciating energy.Probably as many as fifty were thus inserted, some into the head ofthe wax model, some into the shoulders, some into the trunk, someupwards through the soles of the feet, till the figure was completelypermeated with pins.
She turned to the fire. It had been of turf; and though the high heapof ashes which turf fires produce was somewhat dark and dead on theoutside, upon raking it abroad with the shovel the inside of the massshowed a glow of red heat. She took a few pieces of fresh turf fromthe chimney-corner and built them together over the glow, upon whichthe fire brightened. Seizing with the tongs the image that she hadmade of Eustacia, she held it in the heat, and watched it as it beganto waste slowly away. And while she stood thus engaged there camefrom between her lips a murmur of words.
It was a strange jargon--the Lord's Prayer repeated backwards--theincantation usual in proceedings for obtaining unhallowed assistanceagainst an enemy. Susan uttered the lugubrious discourse threetimes slowly, and when it was completed the image had considerablydiminished. As the wax dropped into the fire a long flame arose fromthe spot, and curling its tongue round the figure ate still furtherinto its substance. A pin occasionally dropped with the wax, and theembers heated it red as it lay.
