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, only herself.  I had it from her own lips.”

“You had it from her lips that I had not ill-treated her; and at the same time another had it from her lips that I had ill-treated her?  My mother was no impulsive woman who changed her opinion every hour without reason.  How can it be, Venn, that she should have told such different stories in close succession?”

“I cannot say.  It is certainly odd, when she had forgiven you, and had forgiven your wife, and was going to see ye on purpose to make friends.”

“If there was one thing wanting to bewilder me it was this incomprehensible thing!...  Diggory, if we, who remain alive, were only allowed to hold conversation with the dead—­just once, a bare minute, even through a screen of iron bars, as with persons in prison—­what we might learn!  How many who now ride smiling would hide their heads!  And this mystery—­I should then be at the bottom of it at once.  But the grave has for ever shut her in; and how shall it be found out now?”

No reply was returned by his companion, since none could be given; and when Venn left, a few minutes later, Clym had passed from the dullness of sorrow to the fluctuation of carking incertitude.

He continued in the same state all the afternoon.  A bed was made up for him in the same house by a neighbour, that he might not have to return again the next day; and when he retired to rest in the deserted place it was only to remain awake hour after hour thinking the same thoughts.  How to discover a solution to this riddle of death seemed a query of more importance than highest problems of the living.  There was housed in his memory a vivid picture of the face of a little boy as he entered the hovel where Clym’s mother lay.  The round eyes, eager gaze, the piping voice which enunciated the words, had operated like stilettos on his brain.