“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.
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.
