Had you been uniformly faithful to me throughout these two years you might now have some ground for accusing me of heartlessness; but if you calmly consider what I bore during the period of your desertion, and how I passively put up with your courtship of another without once interfering, you will, I think, own that I have a right to consult my own feelings when you come back to me again. That these are not what they were towards you may, perhaps, be a fault in me, but it is one which you can scarcely reproach me for when you remember how you left me for Thomasin.
The little articles you gave me in the early part of our friendship are returned by the bearer of this letter. They should rightly have been sent back when I first heard of your engagement to her.
EUSTACIA.
By the time that Wildeve reached her name the blankness with which he had read the first half of the letter intensified to mortification. “I am made a great fool of, one way and another,” he said pettishly. “Do you know what is in this letter?”
The reddleman hummed a tune.
“Can’t you answer me?” asked Wildeve warmly.
“Ru-um-tum-tum,” sang the reddleman.
Wildeve stood looking on the ground beside Venn’s feet, till he allowed his eyes to travel upwards over Diggory’s form, as illuminated by the candle, to his head and face. “Ha-ha! Well, I suppose I deserve it, considering how I have played with them both,” he said at last, as much to himself as to Venn. “But of all the odd things that ever I knew, the oddest is that you should so run counter to your own interests as to bring this to me.”
“My interests?”
“Certainly. ’Twas your interest not to do anything which would send me courting Thomasin again, now she has accepted you — or something like it. Mrs. Yeobright says you are to marry her. ‘Tisn’t true, then?”
“Good Lord! I heard of this before, but didn’t believe it. When did she say so?”
Wildeve began humming as the reddleman had done.
“I don’t believe it now,” cried Venn.
“Ru-um-tum-tum,” sang Wildeve.
“O Lord — how we can imitate!” said Venn contemptuously. “I’ll have this out. I’ll go straight to her.”
Diggory withdrew with an emphatic step, Wildeve’s eye passing over his form in withering derision, as if he were no more than a heath-cropper. When the reddleman’s figure could no longer be seen, Wildeve himself descended and plunged into the rayless hollow of the vale.
To lose the two women — he who had been the well-beloved of both — was too ironical an issue to be endured. He could only decently save himself by Thomasin; and once he became her husband, Eustacia’s repentance, he thought, would set in for a long and bitter term. It was no wonder that Wildeve, ignorant of the new man at the back of the scene, should have supposed Eustacia to be playing a part. To believe that the letter was not the result of some momentary pique, to infer that she really gave him up to Thomasin, would have required previous knowledge of her transfiguration by that man’s influence. Who was to know that she had grown generous in the greediness of a new passion, that in coveting one cousin she was dealing liberally with another, that in her eagerness to appropriate she gave way?
Full of this resolve to marry in haste, and wring the heart of the proud girl, Wildeve went his way.
Meanwhile Diggory Venn had returned to his van, where he stood looking thoughtfully into the stove. A new vista was opened up to him. But, however promising Mrs. Yeobright’s views of him might be as a candidate for her niece’s hand, one condition was indispensable to the favour of Thomasin herself, and that was a renunciation of his present wild mode of life. In this he saw little difficulty.
He could not afford to wait till the next day before seeing Thomasin and detailing his plan. He speedily plunged himself into toilet operations, pulled a suit of cloth clothes from a box, and in about twenty minutes stood before the van-lantern as a reddleman in nothing but his face, the vermilion shades of which were not to be removed in a day. Closing the door and fastening it with a padlock, Venn set off towards Blooms-End.
He had reached the white palings and laid his hand upon the gate when the door of the house opened, and quickly closed again. A female form had glided in. At the same time a man, who had seemingly been standing with the woman in the porch, came forward from the house till he was face to face with Venn. It was Wildeve again.
“Man alive, you’ve been quick at it,” said Diggory sarcastically.
“And you slow, as you will find,” said Wildeve. “And,” lowering his voice, “you may as well go back again now. I’ve claimed her, and got her. Good night, reddleman!” Thereupon Wildeve walked away.
Venn’s heart sank within him, though it had not risen unduly high. He stood leaning over the palings in an indecisive mood for nearly a quarter of an hour. Then he went up the garden path, knocked, and asked for Mrs. Yeobright.
Instead of requesting him to enter she came to the porch. A discourse was carried on between them in low measured tones for the space of ten minutes or more. At the end of the time Mrs. Yeobright went in, and Venn sadly retraced his steps into the heath. When he had again regained his van he lit the lantern, and with an apathetic face at once began to pull off his best clothes, till in the course of a few minutes he reappeared as the confirmed and irretrievable reddleman that he had seemed before.
Chapter 8
Firmness Is Discovered in a Gentle Heart
On that evening the interior of Blooms-End, though cosy and comfortable, had been rather silent. Clym Yeobright was not at home. Since the Christmas party he had gone on a few days’ visit to a friend about ten miles off.
The shadowy form seen by Venn to part from Wildeve in the porch, and quickly withdraw into the house, was Thomasin’s. On entering she threw down a cloak which had been carelessly wrapped round her, and came forward to the light, where Mrs. Yeobright sat at her work-table, drawn up within the settle, so that part of it projected into the chimney-corner.
“I don’t like your going out after dark alone, Tamsin,” said her aunt quietly, without looking up from her work. “I have only been just outside the door.”
“Well?” inquired Mrs. Yeobright, struck by a change in the tone of Thomasin’s voice, and observing her. Thomasin’s cheek was flushed to a pitch far beyond that which it had reached before her troubles, and her eyes glittered.
“It was HE who knocked,” she said.
“I thought as much.”
“He wishes the marriage to be at once.”
“Indeed! What — is he anxious?” Mrs. Yeobright directed a searching look upon her niece. “Why did not Mr. Wildeve come in?”
“He did not wish to. You are not friends with him, he says. He would like the wedding to be the day after tomorrow, quite privately; at the church of his parish — not at ours.”
“Oh! And what did you say?”
