Chapter: <CHAPTER>
BOOK SIX -- AFTERCOURSES
1--The Inevitable Movement Onward


The story of the deaths of Eustacia and Wildeve was told throughout
Egdon, and far beyond, for many weeks and months. All the known
incidents of their love were enlarged, distorted, touched up, and
modified, till the original reality bore but a slight resemblance to the
counterfeit presentation by surrounding tongues. Yet, upon the whole,
neither the man nor the woman lost dignity by sudden death. Misfortune
had struck them gracefully, cutting off their erratic histories with a
catastrophic dash, instead of, as with many, attenuating each life to an
uninteresting meagreness, through long years of wrinkles, neglect, and
decay.

On those most nearly concerned the effect was somewhat different.
Strangers who had heard of many such cases now merely heard of one more;
but immediately where a blow falls no previous imaginings amount to
appreciable preparation for it. The very suddenness of her bereavement
dulled, to some extent, Thomasin's feelings; yet irrationally enough, a
consciousness that the husband she had lost ought to have been a better
man did not lessen her mourning at all. On the contrary, this fact
seemed at first to set off the dead husband in his young wife's eyes,
and to be the necessary cloud to the rainbow.

But the horrors of the unknown had passed. Vague misgivings about her
future as a deserted wife were at an end. The worst had once been matter
of trembling conjecture; it was now matter of reason only, a limited
badness. Her chief interest, the little Eustacia, still remained. There
was humility in her grief, no defiance in her attitude; and when this is
the case a shaken spirit is apt to be stilled.

Could Thomasin's mournfulness now and Eustacia's serenity during life
have been reduced to common measure, they would have touched the same
mark nearly. But Thomasin's former brightness made shadow of that which
in a sombre atmosphere was light itself.

The spring came and calmed her; the summer came and soothed her; the
autumn arrived, and she began to be comforted, for her little girl
was strong and happy, growing in size and knowledge every day. Outward
events flattered Thomasin not a little. Wildeve had died intestate, and
she and the child were his only relatives. When administration had been
granted, all the debts paid, and the residue of her husband's uncle's
property had come into her hands, it was found that the sum waiting to
be invested for her own and the child's benefit was little less than ten
thousand pounds.

Where should she live? The obvious place was Blooms-End. The old rooms,
it is true, were not much higher than the between-decks of a frigate,
necessitating a sinking in the floor under the new clock-case she
brought from the inn, and the removal of the handsome brass knobs on its
head, before there was height for it to stand; but, such as the rooms
were, there were plenty of them, and the place was endeared to her by
every early recollection. Clym very gladly admitted her as a tenant,
confining his own existence to two rooms at the top of the back
staircase, where he lived on quietly, shut off from Thomasin and the
three servants she had thought fit to indulge in now that she was a
mistress of money, going his own ways, and thinking his own thoughts.

His sorrows had made some change in his outward appearance; and yet the
alteration was chiefly within. It might have been said that he had a
wrinkled mind. He had no enemies, and he could get nobody to reproach
him, which was why he so bitterly reproached himself.

He did sometimes think he had been ill-used by fortune, so far as to say
that to be born is a palpable dilemma, and that instead of men aiming to
advance in life with glory they should calculate how to retreat out
of it without shame. But that he and his had been sarcastically and
pitilessly handled in having such irons thrust into their souls he did
not maintain long. It is usually so, except with the sternest of men.
Human beings, in their generous endeavour to construct a hypothesis that
shall not degrade a First Cause, have always hesitated to conceive a
dominant power of lower moral quality than their own; and, even while
they sit down and weep by the waters of Babylon, invent excuses for the
oppression which prompts their tears.

Thus, though words of solace were vainly uttered in his presence, he
found relief in a direction of his own choosing when left to himself.
For a man of his habits the house and the hundred and twenty pounds a
year which he had inherited from his mother were enough to supply all
worldly needs. Resources do not depend upon gross amounts, but upon the
proportion of spendings to takings.

He frequently walked the heath alone, when the past seized upon him
with its shadowy hand, and held him there to listen to its tale.
His imagination would then people the spot with its ancient
inhabitants--forgotten Celtic tribes trod their tracks about him, and he
could almost live among them, look in their faces, and see them standing
beside the barrows which swelled around, untouched and perfect as at the
time of their erection. Those of the dyed barbarians who had chosen
the cultivable tracts were, in comparison with those who had left their
marks here, as writers on paper beside writers on parchment. Their
records had perished long ago by the plough, while the works of these
remained. Yet they all had lived and died unconscious of the different
fates awaiting their relics. It reminded him that unforeseen factors
operate in the evolution of immortality.

Winter again came round, with its winds, frosts, tame robins, and
sparkling starlight. The year previous Thomasin had hardly been
conscious of the season's advance; this year she laid her heart open to
external influences of every kind. 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. 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.

</CHAPTER>

 Damon and Eustacia are famous in their deaths and their love story is told and exaggerated far and wide. Damon had a bunch of debts so widowed Thomasin is now broke and has to move back in with Clym at Mrs. Yeobright's house. The two Yeobright cousins are seriously depressed, but Thomasin can at least take some comfort in her baby. Clym takes to wandering around the heath, visiting the graves of his wife and mother, and being depressed. Time passes and Diggory Venn shows back up - but he's no longer red. He gave up being a reddleman and is back to running his dairy farm. Thomasin is kind of impressed. A local festival happens and Thomasin attends, hoping to see Diggory. Clym starts to get worried that Thomasin is falling for the guy again and thinks he may need to marry her instead. Diggory spent the May Day party dancing with others. Crafty, Diggory, crafty. Thomasin sees him later that evening and invites him to visit Clym, but Diggory refuses. Diggory explains he was hanging around trying to find a girl's lost glove, which Thomasin thinks is just silly. She leaves and Diggory moons over the glove some more.

