Part 32

Clym was curious enough to advance a little further and look in at the window. To his astonishment there stood within the room Diggory Venn, no longer a reddleman, but exhibiting the strangely altered hues of an ordinary Christian countenance, white shirt-front, light flowered waistcoat, blue-spotted neckerchief, and bottle-green coat. Nothing in this appearance was at all singular but the fact of its great difference from what he had formerly been. Red, and all approach to red, was carefully excluded from every article of clothes upon him; for what is there that persons just out of harness dread so much as reminders of the trade which has enriched them?

Yeobright went round to the door and entered.

“I was so alarmed!” said Thomasin, smiling from one to the other. “I couldn’t believe that he had got white of his own accord! It seemed supernatural.”

“I gave up dealing in reddle last Christmas,” said Venn. “It was a profitable trade, and I found that by that time I had made enough to take the dairy of fifty cows that my father had in his lifetime. I always thought of getting to that place again if I changed at all, and now I am there.”

“How did you manage to become white, Diggory?” Thomasin asked.

“I turned so by degrees, ma’am.”

“You look much better than ever you did before.”

Venn appeared confused; and Thomasin, seeing how inadvertently she had spoken to a man who might possibly have tender feelings for her still, blushed a little. Clym saw nothing of this, and added good-humouredly—

“What shall we have to frighten Thomasin’s baby with, now you have become a human being again?”

“Sit down, Diggory,” said Thomasin, “and stay to tea.”

Venn moved as if he would retire to the kitchen, when Thomasin said with pleasant pertness as she went on with some sewing, “Of course you must sit down here. And where does your fifty-cow dairy lie, Mr. Venn?”

“At Stickleford—about two miles to the right of Alderworth, ma’am, where the meads begin. I have thought that if Mr. Yeobright would like to pay me a visit sometimes he shouldn’t stay away for want of asking. I’ll not bide to tea this afternoon, thank’ee, for I’ve got something on hand that must be settled. ’Tis Maypole-day tomorrow, and the Shadwater folk have clubbed with a few of your neighbours here to have a pole just outside your palings in the heath, as it is a nice green place.” Venn waved his elbow towards the patch in front of the house. “I have been talking to Fairway about it,” he continued, “and I said to him that before we put up the pole it would be as well to ask Mrs. Wildeve.”

“I can say nothing against it,” she answered. “Our property does not reach an inch further than the white palings.”

“But you might not like to see a lot of folk going crazy round a stick, under your very nose?”

“I shall have no objection at all.”

Venn soon after went away, and in the evening Yeobright strolled as far as Fairway’s cottage. It was a lovely May sunset, and the birch trees which grew on this margin of the vast Egdon wilderness had put on their new leaves, delicate as butterflies’ wings, and diaphanous as amber. Beside Fairway’s dwelling was an open space recessed from the road, and here were now collected all the young people from within a radius of a couple of miles. The pole lay with one end supported on a trestle, and women were engaged in wreathing it from the top downwards with wild-flowers. The instincts of merry England lingered on here with exceptional vitality, and the symbolic customs which tradition has attached to each season of the year were yet a reality on Egdon. Indeed, the impulses of all such outlandish hamlets are pagan still—in these spots homage to nature, self-adoration, frantic gaieties, fragments of Teutonic rites to divinities whose names are forgotten, seem in some way or other to have survived mediæval doctrine.

Yeobright did not interrupt the preparations, and went home again. The next morning, when Thomasin withdrew the curtains of her bedroom window, there stood the Maypole in the middle of the green, its top cutting into the sky. It had sprung up in the night, or rather early morning, like Jack’s bean-stalk. She opened the casement to get a better view of the garlands and posies that adorned it. The sweet perfume of the flowers had already spread into the surrounding air, which, being free from every taint, conducted to her lips a full measure of the fragrance received from the spire of blossom in its midst. At the top of the pole were crossed hoops decked with small flowers; beneath these came a milk-white zone of Maybloom; then a zone of bluebells, then of cowslips, then of lilacs, then of ragged-robins, daffodils, and so on, till the lowest stage was reached. Thomasin noticed all these, and was delighted that the May revel was to be so near.

When afternoon came people began to gather on the green, and Yeobright was interested enough to look out upon them from the open window of his room. Soon after this Thomasin walked out from the door immediately below and turned her eyes up to her cousin’s face. She was dressed more gaily than Yeobright had ever seen her dressed since the time of Wildeve’s death, eighteen months before; since the day of her marriage even she had not exhibited herself to such advantage.

“How pretty you look today, Thomasin!” he said. “Is it because of the Maypole?”

“Not altogether.” And then she blushed and dropped her eyes, which he did not specially observe, though her manner seemed to him to be rather peculiar, considering that she was only addressing himself. Could it be possible that she had put on her summer clothes to please him?

He recalled her conduct towards him throughout the last few weeks, when they had often been working together in the garden, just as they had formerly done when they were boy and girl under his mother’s eye. What if her interest in him were not so entirely that of a relative as it had formerly been? To Yeobright any possibility of this sort was a serious matter; and he almost felt troubled at the thought of it. Every pulse of loverlike feeling which had not been stilled during Eustacia’s lifetime had gone into the grave with her. His passion for her had occurred too far on in his manhood to leave fuel enough on hand for another fire of that sort, as may happen with more boyish loves. Even supposing him capable of loving again, that love would be a plant of slow and laboured growth, and in the end only small and sickly, like an autumn-hatched bird.

He was so distressed by this new complexity that when the enthusiastic brass band arrived and struck up, which it did about five o’clock, with apparently wind enough among its members to blow down his house, he withdrew from his rooms by the back door, went down the garden, through the gate in the hedge, and away out of sight. He could not bear to remain in the presence of enjoyment today, though he had tried hard.

Nothing was seen of him for four hours. When he came back by the same path it was dusk, and the dews were coating every green thing. The boisterous music had ceased; but, entering the premises as he did from behind, he could not see if the May party had all gone till he had passed through Thomasin’s division of the house to the front door. Thomasin was standing within the porch alone.

She looked at him reproachfully. “You went away just when it began, Clym,” she said.

“Yes. I felt I could not join in. You went out with them, of course?”

“No, I did not.”

“You appeared to be dressed on purpose.”

“Yes, but I could not go out alone; so many people were there. One is there now.”

Yeobright strained his eyes across the dark-green patch beyond the paling, and near the black form of the Maypole he discerned a shadowy figure, sauntering idly up and down. “Who is it?” he said.

“Mr. Venn,” said Thomasin.

“You might have asked him to come in, I think, Tamsie. He has been very kind to you first and last.”

“I will now,” she said; and, acting on the impulse, went through the wicket to where Venn stood under the Maypole.

“It is Mr. Venn, I think?” she inquired.

Venn started as if he had not seen her—artful man that he was—and said, “Yes.”

“Will you come in?”

“I am afraid that I—”

“I have seen you dancing this evening, and you had the very best of the girls for your partners. Is it that you won’t come in because you wish to stand here, and think over the past hours of enjoyment?”

“Well, that’s partly it,” said Mr. Venn, with ostentatious sentiment. “But the main reason why I am biding here like this is that I want to wait till the moon rises.”

“To see how pretty the Maypole looks in the moonlight?”

“No. To look for a glove that was dropped by one of the maidens.”

Thomasin was speechless with surprise. That a man who had to walk some four or five miles to his home should wait here for such a reason pointed to only one conclusion—the man must be amazingly interested in that glove’s owner.

“Were you dancing with her, Diggory?” she asked, in a voice which revealed that he had made himself considerably more interesting to her by this disclosure.

“No,” he sighed.

“And you will not come in, then?”

“Not tonight, thank you, ma’am.”

“Shall I lend you a lantern to look for the young person’s glove, Mr. Venn?”

“O no; it is not necessary, Mrs. Wildeve, thank you. The moon will rise in a few minutes.”

Thomasin went back to the porch. “Is he coming in?” said Clym, who had been waiting where she had left him.

“He would rather not tonight,” she said, and then passed by him into the house; whereupon Clym too retired to his own rooms.

When Clym was gone Thomasin crept upstairs in the dark, and, just listening by the cot, to assure herself that the child was asleep, she went to the window, gently lifted the corner of the white curtain, and looked out. Venn was still there. She watched the growth of the faint radiance appearing in the sky by the eastern hill, till presently the edge of the moon burst upwards and flooded the valley with light. Diggory’s form was now distinct on the green; he was moving about in a bowed attitude, evidently scanning the grass for the precious missing article, walking in zigzags right and left till he should have passed over every foot of the ground.

“How very ridiculous!” Thomasin murmured to herself, in a tone which was intended to be satirical. “To think that a man should be so silly as to go mooning about like that for a girl’s glove! A respectable dairyman, too, and a man of money as he is now. What a pity!”

At last Venn appeared to find it; whereupon he stood up and raised it to his lips. Then placing it in his breastpocket—the nearest receptacle to a man’s heart permitted by modern raiment—he ascended the valley in a mathematically direct line towards his distant home in the meadows.

II. Thomasin Walks in a Green Place by the Roman Road

Clym saw little of Thomasin for several days after this; and when they met she was more silent than usual. At length he asked her what she was thinking of so intently.

“I am thoroughly perplexed,” she said candidly. “I cannot for my life think who it is that Diggory Venn is so much in love with. None of the girls at the Maypole were good enough for him, and yet she must have been there.”

Clym tried to imagine Venn’s choice for a moment; but ceasing to be interested in the question he went on again with his gardening.

No clearing up of the mystery was granted her for some time. But one afternoon Thomasin was upstairs getting ready for a walk, when she had occasion to come to the landing and call “Rachel.” Rachel was a girl about thirteen, who carried the baby out for airings; and she came upstairs at the call.

“Have you seen one of my last new gloves about the house, Rachel?” inquired Thomasin. “It is the fellow to this one.”

Rachel did not reply.

“Why don’t you answer?” said her mistress.

“I think it is lost, ma’am.”

“Lost? Who lost it? I have never worn them but once.”

Rachel appeared as one dreadfully troubled, and at last began to cry. “Please, ma’am, on the day of the Maypole I had none to wear, and I seed yours on the table, and I thought I would borrow ’em. I did not mean to hurt ’em at all, but one of them got lost. Somebody gave me some money to buy another pair for you, but I have not been able to go anywhere to get ’em.”

“Who’s somebody?”

“Mr. Venn.”

“Did he know it was my glove?”

“Yes. I told him.”

Thomasin was so surprised by the explanation that she quite forgot to lecture the girl, who glided silently away. Thomasin did not move further than to turn her eyes upon the grass-plat where the Maypole had stood. She remained thinking, then said to herself that she would not go out that afternoon, but would work hard at the baby’s unfinished lovely plaid frock, cut on the cross in the newest fashion. How she managed to work hard, and yet do no more than she had done at the end of two hours, would have been a mystery to anyone not aware that the recent incident was of a kind likely to divert her industry from a manual to a mental channel.

Next day she went her ways as usual, and continued her custom of walking in the heath with no other companion than little Eustacia, now of the age when it is a matter of doubt with such characters whether they are intended to walk through the world on their hands or on their feet; so that they get into painful complications by trying both. It was very pleasant to Thomasin, when she had carried the child to some lonely place, to give her a little private practice on the green turf and shepherd’s-thyme, which formed a soft mat to fall headlong upon them when equilibrium was lost.

Once, when engaged in this system of training, and stooping to remove bits of stick, fern-stalks, and other such fragments from the child’s path, that the journey might not be brought to an untimely end by some insuperable barrier a quarter of an inch high, she was alarmed by discovering that a man on horseback was almost close beside her, the soft natural carpet having muffled the horse’s tread. The rider, who was Venn, waved his hat in the air and bowed gallantly.

“Diggory, give me my glove,” said Thomasin, whose manner it was under any circumstances to plunge into the midst of a subject which engrossed her.

Venn immediately dismounted, put his hand in his breastpocket, and handed the glove.

“Thank you. It was very good of you to take care of it.”

“It is very good of you to say so.”

“O no. I was quite glad to find you had it. Everybody gets so indifferent that I was surprised to know you thought of me.”

“If you had remembered what I was once you wouldn’t have been surprised.”

“Ah, no,” she said quickly. “But men of your character are mostly so independent.”

“What is my character?” he asked.

“I don’t exactly know,” said Thomasin simply, “except it is to cover up your feelings under a practical manner, and only to show them when you are alone.”

“Ah, how do you know that?” said Venn strategically.

“Because,” said she, stopping to put the little girl, who had managed to get herself upside down, right end up again, “because I do.”

“You mustn’t judge by folks in general,” said Venn. “Still I don’t know much what feelings are nowadays. I have got so mixed up with business of one sort and t’other that my soft sentiments are gone off in vapour like. Yes, I am given up body and soul to the making of money. Money is all my dream.”

“O Diggory, how wicked!” said Thomasin reproachfully, and looking at him in exact balance between taking his words seriously and judging them as said to tease her.

“Yes, ’tis rather a rum course,” said Venn, in the bland tone of one comfortably resigned to sins he could no longer overcome.

“You, who used to be so nice!”

“Well, that’s an argument I rather like, because what a man has once been he may be again.” Thomasin blushed. “Except that it is rather harder now,” Venn continued.

“Why?” she asked.

“Because you be richer than you were at that time.”

“O no—not much. I have made it nearly all over to the baby, as it was my duty to do, except just enough to live on.”

“I am rather glad of that,” said Venn softly, and regarding her from the corner of his eye, “for it makes it easier for us to be friendly.”

Thomasin blushed again, and, when a few more words had been said of a not unpleasing kind, Venn mounted his horse and rode on.

This conversation had passed in a hollow of the heath near the old Roman road, a place much frequented by Thomasin. And it might have been observed that she did not in future walk that way less often from having met Venn there now. Whether or not Venn abstained from riding thither because he had met Thomasin in the same place might easily have been guessed from her proceedings about two months later in the same year.

III. The Serious Discourse of Clym with His Cousin

Throughout this period Yeobright had more or less pondered on his duty to his cousin Thomasin. He could not help feeling that it would be a pitiful waste of sweet material if the tender-natured thing should be doomed from this early stage of her life onwards to dribble away her winsome qualities on lonely gorse and fern. But he felt this as an economist merely, and not as a lover. His passion for Eustacia had been a sort of conserve of his whole life, and he had nothing more of that supreme quality left to bestow. So far the obvious thing was not to entertain any idea of marriage with Thomasin, even to oblige her.

But this was not all. Years ago there had been in his mother’s mind a great fancy about Thomasin and himself. It had not positively amounted to a desire, but it had always been a favourite dream. That they should be man and wife in good time, if the happiness of neither were endangered thereby, was the fancy in question. So that what course save one was there now left for any son who reverenced his mother’s memory as Yeobright did? It is an unfortunate fact that any particular whim of parents, which might have been dispersed by half an hour’s conversation during their lives, becomes sublimated by their deaths into a fiat the most absolute, with such results to conscientious children as those parents, had they lived, would have been the first to decry.

Had only Yeobright’s own future been involved he would have proposed to Thomasin with a ready heart. He had nothing to lose by carrying out a dead mother’s hope. But he dreaded to contemplate Thomasin wedded to the mere corpse of a lover that he now felt himself to be. He had but three activities alive in him. One was his almost daily walk to the little graveyard wherein his mother lay; another, his just as frequent visits by night to the more distant enclosure which numbered his Eustacia among its dead; the third was self-preparation for a vocation which alone seemed likely to satisfy his cravings—that of an itinerant preacher of the eleventh commandment. It was difficult to believe that Thomasin would be cheered by a husband with such tendencies as these.

Yet he resolved to ask her, and let her decide for herself. It was even with a pleasant sense of doing his duty that he went downstairs to her one evening for this purpose, when the sun was printing on the valley the same long shadow of the housetop that he had seen lying there times out of number while his mother lived.

Thomasin was not in her room, and he found her in the front garden. “I have long been wanting, Thomasin,” he began, “to say something about a matter that concerns both our futures.”

“And you are going to say it now?” she remarked quickly, colouring as she met his gaze. “Do stop a minute, Clym, and let me speak first, for oddly enough, I have been wanting to say something to you.”

“By all means say on, Tamsie.”

“I suppose nobody can overhear us?” she went on, casting her eyes around and lowering her voice. “Well, first you will promise me this—that you won’t be angry and call me anything harsh if you disagree with what I propose?”

Yeobright promised, and she continued: “What I want is your advice, for you are my relation—I mean, a sort of guardian to me—aren’t you, Clym?”

“Well, yes, I suppose I am; a sort of guardian. In fact, I am, of course,” he said, altogether perplexed as to her drift.

“I am thinking of marrying,” she then observed blandly. “But I shall not marry unless you assure me that you approve of such a step. Why don’t you speak?”

“I was taken rather by surprise. But, nevertheless, I am very glad to hear such news. I shall approve, of course, dear Tamsie. Who can it be? I am quite at a loss to guess. No I am not—’tis the old doctor!—not that I mean to call him old, for he is not very old after all. Ah—I noticed when he attended you last time!”

“No, no,” she said hastily. “’Tis Mr. Venn.”

Clym’s face suddenly became grave.

“There, now, you don’t like him, and I wish I hadn’t mentioned him!” she exclaimed almost petulantly. “And I shouldn’t have done it, either, only he keeps on bothering me so till I don’t know what to do!”

Clym looked at the heath. “I like Venn well enough,” he answered at last. “He is a very honest and at the same time astute man. He is clever too, as is proved by his having got you to favour him. But really, Thomasin, he is not quite—”

“Gentleman enough for me? That is just what I feel. I am sorry now that I asked you, and I won’t think any more of him. At the same time I must marry him if I marry anybody—that I _will_ say!”

“I don’t see that,” said Clym, carefully concealing every clue to his own interrupted intention, which she plainly had not guessed. “You might marry a professional man, or somebody of that sort, by going into the town to live and forming acquaintances there.”

“I am not fit for town life—so very rural and silly as I always have been. Do not you yourself notice my countrified ways?”

“Well, when I came home from Paris I did, a little; but I don’t now.”

“That’s because you have got countrified too. O, I couldn’t live in a street for the world! Egdon is a ridiculous old place; but I have got used to it, and I couldn’t be happy anywhere else at all.”

“Neither could I,” said Clym.

“Then how could you say that I should marry some town man? I am sure, say what you will, that I must marry Diggory, if I marry at all. He has been kinder to me than anybody else, and has helped me in many ways that I don’t know of!” Thomasin almost pouted now.

“Yes, he has,” said Clym in a neutral tone. “Well, I wish with all my heart that I could say, marry him. But I cannot forget what my mother thought on that matter, and it goes rather against me not to respect her opinion. There is too much reason why we should do the little we can to respect it now.”

“Very well, then,” sighed Thomasin. “I will say no more.”

“But you are not bound to obey my wishes. I merely say what I think.”

“O no—I don’t want to be rebellious in that way,” she said sadly. “I had no business to think of him—I ought to have thought of my family. What dreadfully bad impulses there are in me!” Her lips trembled, and she turned away to hide a tear.

Clym, though vexed at what seemed her unaccountable taste, was in a measure relieved to find that at any rate the marriage question in relation to himself was shelved. Through several succeeding days he saw her at different times from the window of his room moping disconsolately about the garden. He was half angry with her for choosing Venn; then he was grieved at having put himself in the way of Venn’s happiness, who was, after all, as honest and persevering a young fellow as any on Egdon, since he had turned over a new leaf. In short, Clym did not know what to do.

When next they met she said abruptly, “He is much more respectable now than he was then!”

“Who? O yes—Diggory Venn.”

“Aunt only objected because he was a reddleman.”

“Well, Thomasin, perhaps I don’t know all the particulars of my mother’s wish. So you had better use your own discretion.”

“You will always feel that I slighted your mother’s memory.”