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