The life of this sweet cousin, her baby, and her servants, came to Clym's senses only in the form of sounds through a wood partition as he sat over books of exceptionally large type; but his ear became at last so accustomed to these slight noises from the other part of the house that he almost could witness the scenes they signified.
A faint beat of half-seconds conjured up Thomasin rocking the cradle, a wavering hum meant that she was singing the baby to sleep, a crunching of sand as between millstones raised the picture of Humphrey's, Fairway's, or Sam's heavy feet crossing the stone floor of the kitchen;a light boyish step, and a gay tune in a high key, betokened a visit from Grandfer Cantle; a sudden break-off in the Grandfer's utterances implied the application to his lips of a mug of small beer, a bustling and slamming of doors meant starting to go to market; for Thomasin, in spite of her added scope of gentility, led a ludicrously narrow life, to the end that she might save every possible pound for her little daughter.
One summer day Clym was in the garden, immediately outside the parlour window, which was as usual open.He was looking at the pot-flowers on the sill; they had been revived and restored by Thomasin to the state in which his mother had left them.He heard a slight scream from Thomasin, who was sitting inside the room.
"O, how you frightened me!" she said to someone who had entered."I thought you were the ghost of yourself."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 mediaeval 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.