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Updated: May 4, 2025
He noticed that the flowers in the window had died for want of water, and he placed them out upon the ledge, that they might be taken away. While thus engaged he heard footsteps on the gravel without, and somebody knocked at the door. Yeobright opened it, and Venn was standing before him. "Good morning," said the reddleman. "Is Mrs. Yeobright at home?" Yeobright looked upon the ground.
He had been searching all day, and had heard nothing of the reddleman. "Inquire as much as you can tomorrow without neglecting your work," said Yeobright. "Don't come again till you have found him." The next day Yeobright set out for the old house at Blooms-End, which, with the garden, was now his own.
By the time that Wildeve reached her name the blankness with which he had read the first half of the letter intensified to mortification. "I am made a great fool of, one way and another," he said pettishly. "Do you know what is in this letter?" The reddleman hummed a tune. "Can't you answer me?" asked Wildeve warmly. "Ru-um-tum-tum," sang the reddleman.
He speedily plunged himself into toilet operations, pulled a suit of cloth clothes from a box, and in about twenty minutes stood before the van-lantern as a reddleman in nothing but his face, the vermilion shades of which were not to be removed in a day. Closing the door and fastening it with a padlock, Venn set off towards Blooms-End.
It was a clay pipe, and its colour was reddish. The men had been attracted to this object by a voice behind the pipe asking for a light. "Upon my life, it fairly startled me when the man spoke!" said Fairway, handing a candle. "Oh 'tis the reddleman! You've kept a quiet tongue, young man." "Yes, I had nothing to say," observed Venn. In a few minutes he arose and wished the company good night.
"The reddleman is coming for you!" had been the formulated threat of Wessex mothers for many generations. He was successfully supplanted for a while, at the beginning of the present century, by Buonaparte; but as process of time rendered the latter personage stale and ineffective the older phrase resumed its early prominence.
"I won't play any more you've been tampering with the dice," he shouted. "How when they were your own?" said the reddleman. "We'll change the game: the lowest point shall win the stake it may cut off my ill luck. Do you refuse?" "No go on," said Venn. "O, there they are again damn them!" cried Wildeve, looking up.
As soon as they reached the car and horse Venn guessed that something new was amiss, and hastened to follow in the course of the moving light. Venn walked faster than Thomasin, and came to the weir alone. The lamp placed against the post by Clym still shone across the water, and the reddleman observed something floating motionless. Being encumbered with the infant, he ran back to meet Thomasin.
The old man knew the meaning of this. The traveller with the cart was a reddleman a person whose vocation it was to supply farmers with redding for their sheep. He was one of a class rapidly becoming extinct in Wessex, filling at present in the rural world the place which, during the last century, the dodo occupied in the world of animals.
The reddleman had not been gone more than a few minutes when another person approached the partially revived bonfire. It proved to be a well-known and respected widow of the neighbourhood, of a standing which can only be expressed by the word genteel. Her face, encompassed by the blackness of the receding heath, showed whitely, and without half-lights, like a cameo.
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