"No. I have only just returned after a long stay away. I called here the day before I left."
"And you have heard nothing?"
"Nothing."
"My mother is--dead."
"Dead!" said Venn mechanically.
"Her home now is where I shouldn't mind having mine."
Venn regarded him, and then said, "If I didn't see your face I could never believe your words. Have you been ill?"
"I had an illness."
"Well, the change! When I parted from her a month ago everything seemed to say that she was going to begin a new life."
"And what seemed came true."
"You say right, no doubt. Trouble has taught you a deeper vein of talk than mine. All I meant was regarding her life here. She has died too soon."
"Perhaps through my living too long. I have had a bitter experience on that score this last month, Diggory. But come in; I have been wanting to see you."
He conducted the reddleman into the large room where the dancing had taken place the previous Christmas, and they sat down in the settle together. "There's the cold fireplace, you see," said Clym. "When that half-burnt log and those cinders were alight she was alive! Little has been changed here yet. I can do nothing. My life creeps like a snail."
"How came she to die?" said Venn.
Yeobright gave him some particulars of her illness and death, and continued: "After this no kind of pain will ever seem more than an indisposition to me. I began saying that I wanted to ask you something, but I stray from subjects like a drunken man. I am anxious to know what my mother said to you when she last saw you. You talked with her a long time, I think?"
"I talked with her more than half an hour."
"About me?"
"Yes. And it must have been on account of what we said that she was on the heath. Without question she was coming to see you."
"But why should she come to see me if she felt so bitterly against me? There's the mystery."
"Yet I know she quite forgave 'ee."
"But, Diggory--would a woman, who had quite forgiven her son, say, when she felt herself ill on the way to his house, that she was broken-hearted because of his ill-usage? Never!"
"What I know is that she didn't blame you at all. She blamed herself for what had happened, and only herself. I had it from her own lips."