He entered the van, where there was a fire in a stove.  Without lighting his candle he sat down at once on the three-legged stool, and pondered on what he had seen and heard touching that still loved-one of his.  He uttered a sound which was neither sigh nor sob, but was even more indicative than either of a troubled mind.

“My Tamsie,” he whispered heavily.  “What can be done?  Yes, I will see that Eustacia Vye.”

X

A Desperate Attempt at Persuasion

The next morning, at the time when the height of the sun appeared very insignificant from any part of the heath as compared with the altitude of Rainbarrow, and when all the little hills in the lower levels were like an archipelago in a fog-formed Aegean, the reddleman came from the brambled nook which he had adopted as his quarters and ascended the slopes of Mistover Knap.

Though these shaggy hills were apparently so solitary, several keen round eyes were always ready on such a wintry morning as this to converge upon a passer-by.  Feathered species sojourned here in hiding which would have created wonder if found elsewhere.  A bustard haunted the spot, and not many years before this five and twenty might have been seen in Egdon at one time.  Marsh-harriers looked up from the valley by Wildeve’s.  A cream-coloured courser had used to visit this hill, a bird so rare that not more than a dozen have ever been seen in England; but a barbarian rested neither night nor day till he had shot the African truant, and after that event cream-coloured coursers thought fit to enter Egdon no more.

A traveller who should walk and observe any of these visitants as Venn observed them now could feel himself to be in direct communication with regions unknown to man.  Here in front of him was a wild mallard—­just arrived from the home of the north wind.  The creature brought within him an amplitude of Northern knowledge.  Glacial catastrophes, snowstorm episodes, glittering auroral effects, Polaris in the zenith, Franklin underfoot,—­the category of his commonplaces was wonderful.  But the bird, like many other philosophers, seemed as he looked at the reddleman to think that a present moment of comfortable reality was worth a decade of memories.

Venn passed on through these towards the house of the isolated beauty who lived up among them and despised them.  The day was Sunday; but as going to church, except to be married or buried, was exceptional at Egdon, this made little difference.  He had determined upon the bold stroke of asking for an interview with Miss Vye—­to attack her position as Thomasin’s rival either by art or by storm, showing therein, somewhat too conspicuously, the want of gallantry characteristic of a certain astute sort of men, from clowns to kings.  The great Frederick making war on the beautiful Archduchess, Napoleon refusing terms to the beautiful Queen of Prussia, were not more dead to difference of sex than the reddleman was, in his peculiar way, in planning the displacement of Eustacia.