
Phase the Fourth: The Consequence, XXV-XXXIV
XXV
Clare, restless, went out into the dusk when evening drew on, she who
had won him having retired to her chamber.
The night was as sultry as the day. There was no coolness
after dark unless on the grass. Roads, garden-paths, the
house-fronts, the barton-walls were warm as hearths, and
reflected the noontime temperature into the noctambulist's
face.
He sat on the east gate of the dairy-yard, and knew not
what to think of himself. Feeling had indeed smothered
judgement that day.
Since the sudden embrace, three hours before, the twain
had kept apart. She seemed stilled, almost alarmed, at what
had occurred, while the novelty, unpremeditation, mastery of
circumstance disquieted him—palpitating, contemplative being
that he was. He could hardly realize their true relations to
each other as yet, and what their mutual bearing should be
before third parties thenceforward.
Angel had come as pupil to this dairy in the idea that
his temporary existence here was to be the merest episode in
his life, soon passed through and early forgotten; he had
come as to a place from which as from a screened alcove he
could calmly view the absorbing world without, and,
apostrophizing it with Walt Whitman—
Crowds of men and women attired in the usual
costumes,
How curious you are to me!—
resolve upon a plan for plunging into that world anew. But
behold, the absorbing scene had been imported hither. What
had been the engrossing world had dissolved into an
uninteresting outer dumb-show; while here, in this
apparently dim and unimpassioned place, novelty had
volcanically started up, as it had never, for him, started
up elsewhere.
Every window of the house being open, Clare could hear
across the yard each trivial sound of the retiring
household. The dairy-house, so humble, so insignificant, so
purely to him a place of constrained sojourn that he had
never hitherto deemed it of sufficient importance to be
reconnoitred as an object of any quality whatever in the
landscape; what was it now? The aged and lichened brick
gables breathed forth "Stay!" The windows smiled, the door
coaxed and beckoned, the creeper blushed confederacy. A
personality within it was so far-reaching in her influence
as to spread into and make the bricks, mortar, and whole
overhanging sky throb with a burning sensibility. Whose was
this mighty personality? A milkmaid's.
It was amazing, indeed, to find how great a matter the
life of the obscure dairy had become to him. And though new
love was to be held partly responsible for this, it was not
solely so. Many besides Angel have learnt that the magnitude
of lives is not as to their external displacements, but as
to their subjective experiences. The impressionable peasant
leads a larger, fuller, more dramatic life than the
pachydermatous king. Looking at it thus, he found that life
was to be seen of the same magnitude here as elsewhere.
Despite his heterodoxy, faults, and weaknesses, Clare was
a man with a conscience. Tess was no insignificant creature
to toy with and dismiss; but a woman living her precious
life—a life which, to herself who endured or enjoyed it,
possessed as great a dimension as the life of the mightiest
to himself. Upon her sensations the whole world depended to
Tess; through her existence all her fellow-creatures
existed, to her. The universe itself only came into being
for Tess on the particular day in the particular year in
which she was born.
This consciousness upon which he had intruded was the
single opportunity of existence ever vouchsafed to Tess by
an unsympathetic First Cause—her all; her every and only
chance. How then should he look upon her as of less
consequence than himself; as a pretty trifle to caress and
grow weary of; and not deal in the greatest seriousness with
the affection which he knew that he had awakened in her—so
fervid and so impressionable as she was under her reserve—in
order that it might not agonize and wreck her?
To encounter her daily in the accustomed manner would be
to develop what had begun. Living in such close relations,
to meet meant to fall into endearment; flesh and blood could
not resist it; and, having arrived at no conclusion as to
the issue of such a tendency, he decided to hold aloof for
the present from occupations in which they would be mutually
engaged. As yet the harm done was small.
But it was not easy to carry out the resolution never to
approach her. He was driven towards her by every heave of
his pulse.
He thought he would go and see his friends. It might be
possible to sound them upon this. In less than five months
his term here would have ended, and after a few additional
months spent upon other farms he would be fully equipped in
agricultural knowledge and in a position to start on his own
account. Would not a farmer want a wife, and should a
farmer's wife be a drawing-room wax-figure, or a woman who
understood farming? Notwithstanding the pleasing answer
returned to him by the silence, he resolved to go his
journey.
One morning when they sat down to breakfast at Talbothays
Dairy some maid observed that she had not seen anything of
Mr Clare that day.
"O no," said Dairyman Crick. "Mr Clare has gone hwome to
Emminster to spend a few days wi' his kinsfolk."
For four impassioned ones around that table the sunshine
of the morning went out at a stroke, and the birds muffled
their song. But neither girl by word or gesture revealed her
blankness. "He's getting on towards the end of his time wi'
me," added the dairyman, with a phlegm which unconsciously
was brutal; "and so I suppose he is beginning to see about
his plans elsewhere."
"How much longer is he to bide here?" asked Izz Huett,
the only one of the gloom-stricken bevy who could trust her
voice with the question.
The others waited for the dairyman's answer as if their
lives hung upon it; Retty, with parted lips, gazing on the
tablecloth, Marian with heat added to her redness, Tess
throbbing and looking out at the meads.
"Well, I can't mind the exact day without looking at my
memorandum-book," replied Crick, with the same intolerable
unconcern. "And even that may be altered a bit. He'll bide
to get a little practice in the calving out at the
straw-yard, for certain. He'll hang on till the end of the
year I should say."
Four months or so of torturing ecstasy in his society—of
"pleasure girdled about with pain". After that the blackness
of unutterable night.
At this moment of the morning Angel Clare was riding
along a narrow lane ten miles distant from the breakfasters,
in the direction of his father's Vicarage at Emminster,
carrying, as well as he could, a little basket which
contained some black-puddings and a bottle of mead, sent by
Mrs Crick, with her kind respects, to his parents. The white
lane stretched before him, and his eyes were upon it; but
they were staring into next year, and not at the lane. He
loved her; ought he to marry her? Dared he to marry her?
What would his mother and his brothers say? What would he
himself say a couple of years after the event? That would
depend upon whether the germs of staunch comradeship
underlay the temporary emotion, or whether it were a
sensuous joy in her form only, with no substratum of
everlastingness.
His father's hill-surrounded little town, the Tudor
church-tower of red stone, the clump of trees near the
Vicarage, came at last into view beneath him, and he rode
down towards the well-known gate. Casting a glance in the
direction of the church before entering his home, he beheld
standing by the vestry-door a group of girls, of ages
between twelve and sixteen, apparently awaiting the arrival
of some other one, who in a moment became visible; a figure
somewhat older than the school-girls, wearing a
broad-brimmed hat and highly-starched cambric morning-gown,
with a couple of books in her hand.
Clare knew her well. He could not be sure that she
observed him; he hoped she did not, so as to render it
unnecessary that he should go and speak to her, blameless
creature that she was. An overpowering reluctance to greet
her made him decide that she had not seen him. The young
lady was Miss Mercy Chant, the only daughter of his father's
neighbour and friend, whom it was his parents' quiet hope
that he might wed some day. She was great at Antinomianism
and Bible-classes, and was plainly going to hold a class
now. Clare's mind flew to the impassioned, summer-steeped
heathens in the Var Vale, their rosy faces court-patched
with cow-droppings; and to one the most impassioned of them
all.
It was on the impulse of the moment that he had resolved
to trot over to Emminster, and hence had not written to
apprise his mother and father, aiming, however, to arrive
about the breakfast hour, before they should have gone out
to their parish duties. He was a little late, and they had
already sat down to the morning meal. The group at the table
jumped up to welcome him as soon as he entered. They were
his father and mother, his brother the Reverend Felix—curate
at a town in the adjoining county, home for the inside of a
fortnight—and his other brother, the Reverend Cuthbert, the
classical scholar, and Fellow and Dean of his College, down
from Cambridge for the long vacation. His mother appeared in
a cap and silver spectacles, and his father looked what in
fact he was—an earnest, God-fearing man, somewhat gaunt, in
years about sixty-five, his pale face lined with thought and
purpose. Over their heads hung the picture of Angel's
sister, the eldest of the family, sixteen years his senior,
who had married a missionary and gone out to Africa.
Old Mr Clare was a clergyman of a type which, within the
last twenty years, has well nigh dropped out of contemporary
life. A spiritual descendant in the direct line from
Wycliff, Huss, Luther, Calvin; an Evangelical of the
Evangelicals, a Conversionist, a man of Apostolic simplicity
in life and thought, he had in his raw youth made up his
mind once for all in the deeper questions of existence, and
admitted no further reasoning on them thenceforward. He was
regarded even by those of his own date and school of
thinking as extreme; while, on the other hand, those totally
opposed to him were unwillingly won to admiration for his
thoroughness, and for the remarkable power he showed in
dismissing all question as to principles in his energy for
applying them. He loved Paul of Tarsus, liked St John, hated
St James as much as he dared, and regarded with mixed
feelings Timothy, Titus, and Philemon. The New Testament was
less a Christiad then a Pauliad to his intelligence—less an
argument than an intoxication. His creed of determinism was
such that it almost amounted to a vice, and quite amounted,
on its negative side, to a renunciative philosophy which had
cousinship with that of Schopenhauer and Leopardi. He
despised the Canons and Rubric, swore by the Articles, and
deemed himself consistent through the whole category—which
in a way he might have been. One thing he certainly
was—sincere.
To the aesthetic, sensuous, pagan pleasure in natural
life and lush womanhood which his son Angel had lately been
experiencing in Var Vale, his temper would have been
antipathetic in a high degree, had he either by inquiry or
imagination been able to apprehend it. Once upon a time
Angel had been so unlucky as to say to his father, in a
moment of irritation, that it might have resulted far better
for mankind if Greece had been the source of the religion of
modern civilization, and not Palestine; and his father's
grief was of that blank description which could not realize
that there might lurk a thousandth part of a truth, much
less a half truth or a whole truth, in such a proposition.
He had simply preached austerely at Angel for some time
after. But the kindness of his heart was such that he never
resented anything for long, and welcomed his son to-day with
a smile which was as candidly sweet as a child's.
Angel sat down, and the place felt like home; yet he did
not so much as formerly feel himself one of the family
gathered there. Every time that he returned hither he was
conscious of this divergence, and since he had last shared
in the Vicarage life it had grown even more distinctly
foreign to his own than usual. Its transcendental
aspirations—still unconsciously based on the geocentric view
of things, a zenithal paradise, a nadiral hell—were as
foreign to his own as if they had been the dreams of people
on another planet. Latterly he had seen only Life, felt only
the great passionate pulse of existence, unwarped,
uncontorted, untrammelled by those creeds which futilely
attempt to check what wisdom would be content to regulate.
On their part they saw a great difference in him, a
growing divergence from the Angel Clare of former times. It
was chiefly a difference in his manner that they noticed
just now, particularly his brothers. He was getting to
behave like a farmer; he flung his legs about; the muscles
of his face had grown more expressive; his eyes looked as
much information as his tongue spoke, and more. The manner
of the scholar had nearly disappeared; still more the manner
of the drawing-room young man. A prig would have said that
he had lost culture, and a prude that he had become coarse.
Such was the contagion of domiciliary fellowship with the
Talbothays nymphs and swains.
After breakfast he walked with his two brothers,
non-evangelical, well-educated, hall-marked young men,
correct to their remotest fibre, such unimpeachable models
as are turned out yearly by the lathe of a systematic
tuition. They were both somewhat short-sighted, and when it
was the custom to wear a single eyeglass and string they
wore a single eyeglass and string; when it was the custom to
wear a double glass they wore a double glass; when it was
the custom to wear spectacles they wore spectacles
straightway, all without reference to the particular variety
of defect in their own vision. When Wordsworth was enthroned
they carried pocket copies; and when Shelley was belittled
they allowed him to grow dusty on their shelves. When
Correggio's Holy Families were admired, they admired
Correggio's Holy Families; when he was decried in favour of
Velasquez, they sedulously followed suit without any
personal objection.
If these two noticed Angel's growing social ineptness, he
noticed their growing mental limitations. Felix seemed to
him all Church; Cuthbert all College. His Diocesan Synod and
Visitations were the mainsprings of the world to the one;
Cambridge to the other. Each brother candidly recognized
that there were a few unimportant score of millions of
outsiders in civilized society, persons who were neither
University men nor churchmen; but they were to be tolerated
rather than reckoned with and respected.
They were both dutiful and attentive sons, and were
regular in their visits to their parents. Felix, though an
offshoot from a far more recent point in the devolution of
theology than his father, was less self-sacrificing and
disinterested. More tolerant than his father of a
contradictory opinion, in its aspect as a danger to its
holder, he was less ready than his father to pardon it as a
slight to his own teaching. Cuthbert was, upon the whole,
the more liberal-minded, though, with greater subtlety, he
had not so much heart.
As they walked along the hillside Angel's former feeling
revived in him—that whatever their advantages by comparison
with himself, neither saw or set forth life as it really was
lived. Perhaps, as with many men, their opportunities of
observation were not so good as their opportunities of
expression. Neither had an adequate conception of the
complicated forces at work outside the smooth and gentle
current in which they and their associates floated. Neither
saw the difference between local truth and universal truth;
that what the inner world said in their clerical and
academic hearing was quite a different thing from what the
outer world was thinking.
"I suppose it is farming or nothing for you now, my dear
fellow," Felix was saying, among other things, to his
youngest brother, as he looked through his spectacles at the
distant fields with sad austerity. "And, therefore, we must
make the best of it. But I do entreat you to endeavour to
keep as much as possible in touch with moral ideals.
Farming, of course, means roughing it externally; but high
thinking may go with plain living, nevertheless."
"Of course it may," said Angel. "Was it not proved
nineteen hundred years ago—if I may trespass upon your
domain a little? Why should you think, Felix, that I am
likely to drop my high thinking and my moral ideals?"
"Well, I fancied, from the tone of your letters and our
conversation—it may be fancy only—that you were somehow
losing intellectual grasp. Hasn't it struck you, Cuthbert?"
"Now, Felix," said Angel drily, "we are very good
friends, you know; each of us treading our allotted circles;
but if it comes to intellectual grasp, I think you, as a
contented dogmatist, had better leave mine alone, and
inquire what has become of yours."
They returned down the hill to dinner, which was fixed at
any time at which their father's and mother's morning work
in the parish usually concluded. Convenience as regarded
afternoon callers was the last thing to enter into the
consideration of unselfish Mr and Mrs Clare; though the
three sons were sufficiently in unison on this matter to
wish that their parents would conform a little to modern
notions.
The walk had made them hungry, Angel in particular, who
was now an outdoor man, accustomed to the profuse dapes
inemptae of the dairyman's somewhat coarsely-laden
table. But neither of the old people had arrived, and it was
not till the sons were almost tired of waiting that their
parents entered. The self-denying pair had been occupied in
coaxing the appetites of some of their sick parishioners,
whom they, somewhat inconsistently, tried to keep imprisoned
in the flesh, their own appetites being quite forgotten.
The family sat down to table, and a frugal meal of cold
viands was deposited before them. Angel looked round for Mrs
Crick's black-puddings, which he had directed to be nicely
grilled as they did them at the dairy, and of which he
wished his father and mother to appreciate the marvellous
herbal savours as highly as he did himself.
"Ah! you are looking for the black-puddings, my dear
boy," observed Clare's mother. "But I am sure you will not
mind doing without them as I am sure your father and I shall
not, when you know the reason. I suggested to him that we
should take Mrs Crick's kind present to the children of the
man who can earn nothing just now because of his attacks of
delirium tremens; and he agreed that it would be a great
pleasure to them; so we did."
"Of course," said Angel cheerfully, looking round for the
mead.
"I found the mead so extremely alcoholic," continued his
mother, "that it was quite unfit for use as a beverage, but
as valuable as rum or brandy in an emergency; so I have put
it in my medicine-closet."
"We never drink spirits at this table, on principle,"
added his father.
"But what shall I tell the dairyman's wife?" said Angel.
"The truth, of course," said his father.
"I rather wanted to say we enjoyed the mead and the
black-puddings very much. She is a kind, jolly sort of body,
and is sure to ask me directly I return."
"You cannot, if we did not," Mr Clare answered lucidly.
"Ah—no; though that mead was a drop of pretty tipple."
"A what?" said Cuthbert and Felix both.
"Oh—'tis an expression they use down at Talbothays,"
replied Angel, blushing. He felt that his parents were right
in their practice if wrong in their want of sentiment, and
said no more.
XXVI
It was not till the evening, after family prayers, that
Angel found opportunity of broaching to his father one or
two subjects near his heart. He had strung himself up to the
purpose while kneeling behind his brothers on the carpet,
studying the little nails in the heels of their walking
boots. When the service was over they went out of the room
with their mother, and Mr Clare and himself were left alone.
The young man first discussed with the elder his plans
for the attainment of his position as a farmer on an
extensive scale—either in England or in the Colonies. His
father then told him that, as he had not been put to the
expense of sending Angel up to Cambridge, he had felt it his
duty to set by a sum of money every year towards the
purchase or lease of land for him some day, that he might
not feel himself unduly slighted.
"As far as worldly wealth goes," continued his father,
"you will no doubt stand far superior to your brothers in a
few years."
This considerateness on old Mr Clare's part led Angel
onward to the other and dearer subject. He observed to his
father that he was then six-and-twenty, and that when he
should start in the farming business he would require eyes
in the back of his head to see to all matters—some one would
be necessary to superintend the domestic labours of his
establishment whilst he was afield. Would it not be well,
therefore, for him to marry?
His father seemed to think this idea not unreasonable;
and then Angel put the question—
"What kind of wife do you think would be best for me as a
thrifty hard-working farmer?"
"A truly Christian woman, who will be a help and a
comfort to you in your goings-out and your comings-in.
Beyond that, it really matters little. Such an one can be
found; indeed, my earnest-minded friend and neighbour, Dr
Chant—"
"But ought she not primarily to be able to milk cows,
churn good butter, make immense cheeses; know how to sit
hens and turkeys and rear chickens, to direct a field of
labourers in an emergency, and estimate the value of sheep
and calves?"
"Yes; a farmer's wife; yes, certainly. It would be
desirable." Mr Clare, the elder, had plainly never thought
of these points before. "I was going to add," he said, "that
for a pure and saintly woman you will not find one more to
your true advantage, and certainly not more to your mother's
mind and my own, than your friend Mercy, whom you used to
show a certain interest in. It is true that my neighbour
Chant's daughter had lately caught up the fashion of the
younger clergy round about us for decorating the
Communion-table—alter, as I was shocked to hear her call it
one day—with flowers and other stuff on festival occasions.
But her father, who is quite as opposed to such flummery as
I, says that can be cured. It is a mere girlish outbreak
which, I am sure, will not be permanent."
"Yes, yes; Mercy is good and devout, I know. But, father,
don't you think that a young woman equally pure and virtuous
as Miss Chant, but one who, in place of that lady's
ecclesiastical accomplishments, understands the duties of
farm life as well as a farmer himself, would suit me
infinitely better?"
His father persisted in his conviction that a knowledge
of a farmer's wife's duties came second to a Pauline view of
humanity; and the impulsive Angel, wishing to honour his
father's feelings and to advance the cause of his heart at
the same time, grew specious. He said that fate or
Providence had thrown in his way a woman who possessed every
qualification to be the helpmate of an agriculturist, and
was decidedly of a serious turn of mind. He would not say
whether or not she had attached herself to the sound Low
Church School of his father; but she would probably be open
to conviction on that point; she was a regular church-goer
of simple faith; honest-hearted, receptive, intelligent,
graceful to a degree, chaste as a vestal, and, in personal
appearance, exceptionally beautiful.
"Is she of a family such as you would care to marry
into—a lady, in short?" asked his startled mother, who had
come softly into the study during the conversation.
"She is not what in common parlance is called a lady,"
said Angel, unflinchingly, "for she is a cottager's
daughter, as I am proud to say. But she is a lady,
nevertheless—in feeling and nature."
"Mercy Chant is of a very good family."
"Pooh!—what's the advantage of that, mother?" said Angel
quickly. "How is family to avail the wife of a man who has
to rough it as I have, and shall have to do?"
"Mercy is accomplished. And accomplishments have their
charm," returned his mother, looking at him through her
silver spectacles.
"As to external accomplishments, what will be the use of
them in the life I am going to lead?—while as to her
reading, I can take that in hand. She'll be apt pupil
enough, as you would say if you knew her. She's brim full of
poetry—actualized poetry, if I may use the expression. She
lives what paper-poets only write… And she is an
unimpeachable Christian, I am sure; perhaps of the very
tribe, genus, and species you desire to propagate."
"O Angel, you are mocking!"
"Mother, I beg pardon. But as she really does attend
Church almost every Sunday morning, and is a good Christian
girl, I am sure you will tolerate any social shortcomings
for the sake of that quality, and feel that I may do worse
than choose her." Angel waxed quite earnest on that rather
automatic orthodoxy in his beloved Tess which (never
dreaming that it might stand him in such good stead) he had
been prone to slight when observing it practised by her and
the other milkmaids, because of its obvious unreality amid
beliefs essentially naturalistic.
In their sad doubts as to whether their son had himself
any right whatever to the title he claimed for the unknown
young woman, Mr and Mrs Clare began to feel it as an
advantage not to be overlooked that she at least was sound
in her views; especially as the conjunction of the pair must
have arisen by an act of Providence; for Angel never would
have made orthodoxy a condition of his choice. They said
finally that it was better not to act in a hurry, but that
they would not object to see her.
Angel therefore refrained from declaring more particulars
now. He felt that, single-minded and self-sacrificing as his
parents were, there yet existed certain latent prejudices of
theirs, as middle-class people, which it would require some
tact to overcome. For though legally at liberty to do as he
chose, and though their daughter-in-law's qualifications
could make no practical difference to their lives, in the
probability of her living far away from them, he wished for
affection's sake not to wound their sentiment in the most
important decision of his life.
He observed his own inconsistencies in dwelling upon
accidents in Tess's life as if they were vital features. It
was for herself that he loved Tess; her soul, her heart, her
substance—not for her skill in the dairy, her aptness as his
scholar, and certainly not for her simple formal
faith-professions. Her unsophisticated open-air existence
required no varnish of conventionality to make it palatable
to him. He held that education had as yet but little
affected the beats of emotion and impulse on which domestic
happiness depends. It was probable that, in the lapse of
ages, improved systems of moral and intellectual training
would appreciably, perhaps considerably, elevate the
involuntary and even the unconscious instincts of human
nature; but up to the present day, culture, as far as he
could see, might be said to have affected only the mental
epiderm of those lives which had been brought under its
influence. This belief was confirmed by his experience of
women, which, having latterly been extended from the
cultivated middle-class into the rural community, had taught
him how much less was the intrinsic difference between the
good and wise woman of one social stratum and the good and
wise woman of another social stratum, than between the good
and bad, the wise and the foolish, of the same stratum or
class.
It was the morning of his departure. His brothers had
already left the Vicarage to proceed on a walking tour in
the north, whence one was to return to his college, and the
other to his curacy. Angel might have accompanied them, but
preferred to rejoin his sweetheart at Talbothays. He would
have been an awkward member of the party; for, though the
most appreciative humanist, the most ideal religionist, even
the best-versed Christologist of the three, there was
alienation in the standing consciousness that his squareness
would not fit the round hole that had been prepared for him.
To neither Felix nor Cuthbert had he ventured to mention
Tess.
His mother made him sandwiches, and his father
accompanied him, on his own mare, a little way along the
road. Having fairly well advanced his own affairs, Angel
listened in a willing silence, as they jogged on together
through the shady lanes, to his father's account of his
parish difficulties, and the coldness of brother clergymen
whom he loved, because of his strict interpretations of the
New Testament by the light of what they deemed a pernicious
Calvinistic doctrine.
"Pernicious!" said Mr Clare, with genial scorn; and he
proceeded to recount experiences which would show the
absurdity of that idea. He told of wondrous conversions of
evil livers of which he had been the instrument, not only
amongst the poor, but amongst the rich and well-to-do; and
he also candidly admitted many failures.
As an instance of the latter, he mentioned the case of a
young upstart squire named d'Urberville, living some forty
miles off, in the neighbourhood of Trantridge.
"Not one of the ancient d'Urbervilles of Kingsbere and
other places?" asked his son. "That curiously historic
worn-out family with its ghostly legend of the
coach-and-four?"
"O no. The original d'Urbervilles decayed and disappeared
sixty or eighty years ago—at least, I believe so. This seems
to be a new family which had taken the name; for the credit
of the former knightly line I hope they are spurious, I'm
sure. But it is odd to hear you express interest in old
families. I thought you set less store by them even than I."
"You misapprehend me, father; you often do," said Angel
with a little impatience. "Politically I am sceptical as to
the virtue of their being old. Some of the wise even among
themselves 'exclaim against their own succession,' as Hamlet
puts it; but lyrically, dramatically, and even historically,
I am tenderly attached to them."
This distinction, though by no means a subtle one, was
yet too subtle for Mr Clare the elder, and he went on with
the story he had been about to relate; which was that after
the death of the senior so-called d'Urberville, the young
man developed the most culpable passions, though he had a
blind mother, whose condition should have made him know
better. A knowledge of his career having come to the ears of
Mr Clare, when he was in that part of the country preaching
missionary sermons, he boldly took occasion to speak to the
delinquent on his spiritual state. Though he was a stranger,
occupying another's pulpit, he had felt this to be his duty,
and took for his text the words from St Luke: "Thou fool,
this night thy soul shall be required of thee!" The young
man much resented this directness of attack, and in the war
of words which followed when they met he did not scruple
publicly to insult Mr Clare, without respect for his gray
hairs.
Angel flushed with distress.
"Dear father," he said sadly, "I wish you would not
expose yourself to such gratuitous pain from scoundrels!"
"Pain?" said his father, his rugged face shining in the
ardour of self-abnegation. "The only pain to me was pain on
his account, poor, foolish young man. Do you suppose his
incensed words could give me any pain, or even his blows?
'Being reviled we bless; being persecuted we suffer it;
being defamed we entreat; we are made as the filth of the
world, and as the offscouring of all things unto this day.'
Those ancient and noble words to the Corinthians are
strictly true at this present hour."
"Not blows, father? He did not proceed to blows?"
"No, he did not. Though I have borne blows from men in a
mad state of intoxication."
"No!"
"A dozen times, my boy. What then? I have saved them from
the guilt of murdering their own flesh and blood thereby;
and they have lived to thank me, and praise God."
"May this young man do the same!" said Angel fervently.
"But I fear otherwise, from what you say."
"We'll hope, nevertheless," said Mr Clare. "And I
continue to pray for him, though on this side of the grave
we shall probably never meet again. But, after all, one of
those poor words of mine may spring up in his heart as a
good seed some day."
Now, as always, Clare's father was sanguine as a child;
and though the younger could not accept his parent's narrow
dogma, he revered his practice and recognized the hero under
the pietist. Perhaps he revered his father's practice even
more now than ever, seeing that, in the question of making
Tessy his wife, his father had not once thought of inquiring
whether she were well provided or penniless. The same
unworldliness was what had necessitated Angel's getting a
living as a farmer, and would probably keep his brothers in
the position of poor parsons for the term of their
activities; yet Angel admired it none the less. Indeed,
despite his own heterodoxy, Angel often felt that he was
nearer to his father on the human side than was either of
his brethren.
XXVII
An up-hill and down-hill ride of twenty-odd miles through
a garish mid-day atmosphere brought him in the afternoon to
a detached knoll a mile or two west of Talbothays, whence he
again looked into that green trough of sappiness and
humidity, the valley of the Var or Froom. Immediately he
began to descend from the upland to the fat alluvial soil
below, the atmosphere grew heavier; the languid perfume of
the summer fruits, the mists, the hay, the flowers, formed
therein a vast pool of odour which at this hour seemed to
make the animals, the very bees and butterflies drowsy.
Clare was now so familiar with the spot that he knew the
individual cows by their names when, a long distance off, he
saw them dotted about the meads. It was with a sense of
luxury that he recognized his power of viewing life here
from its inner side, in a way that had been quite foreign to
him in his student-days; and, much as he loved his parents,
he could not help being aware that to come here, as now,
after an experience of home-life, affected him like throwing
off splints and bandages; even the one customary curb on the
humours of English rural societies being absent in this
place, Talbothays having no resident landlord.
Not a human being was out of doors at the dairy. The
denizens were all enjoying the usual afternoon nap of an
hour or so which the exceedingly early hours kept in
summer-time rendered a necessity. At the door the
wood-hooped pails, sodden and bleached by infinite
scrubbings, hung like hats on a stand upon the forked and
peeled limb of an oak fixed there for that purpose; all of
them ready and dry for the evening milking. Angel entered,
and went through the silent passages of the house to the
back quarters, where he listened for a moment. Sustained
snores came from the cart-house, where some of the men were
lying down; the grunt and squeal of sweltering pigs arose
from the still further distance. The large-leaved rhubarb
and cabbage plants slept too, their broad limp surfaces
hanging in the sun like half-closed umbrellas.
He unbridled and fed his horse, and as he re-entered the
house the clock struck three. Three was the afternoon
skimming-hour; and, with the stroke, Clare heard the
creaking of the floor-boards above, and then the touch of a
descending foot on the stairs. It was Tess's, who in another
moment came down before his eyes.
She had not heard him enter, and hardly realized his
presence there. She was yawning, and he saw the red interior
of her mouth as if it had been a snake's. She had stretched
one arm so high above her coiled-up cable of hair that he
could see its satin delicacy above the sunburn; her face was
flushed with sleep, and her eyelids hung heavy over their
pupils. The brim-fulness of her nature breathed from her. It
was a moment when a woman's soul is more incarnate than at
any other time; when the most spiritual beauty bespeaks
itself flesh; and sex takes the outside place in the
presentation.
Then those eyes flashed brightly through their filmy
heaviness, before the remainder of her face was well awake.
With an oddly compounded look of gladness, shyness, and
surprise, she exclaimed—"O Mr Clare! How you frightened
me—I—"
There had not at first been time for her to think of the
changed relations which his declaration had introduced; but
the full sense of the matter rose up in her face when she
encountered Clare's tender look as he stepped forward to the
bottom stair.
"Dear, darling Tessy!" he whispered, putting his arm
round her, and his face to her flushed cheek. "Don't, for
Heaven's sake, Mister me any more. I have hastened back so
soon because of you!"
Tess's excitable heart beat against his by way of reply;
and there they stood upon the red-brick floor of the entry,
the sun slanting in by the window upon his back, as he held
her tightly to his breast; upon her inclining face, upon the
blue veins of her temple, upon her naked arm, and her neck,
and into the depths of her hair. Having been lying down in
her clothes she was warm as a sunned cat. At first she would
not look straight up at him, but her eyes soon lifted, and
his plumbed the deepness of the ever-varying pupils, with
their radiating fibrils of blue, and black, and gray, and
violet, while she regarded him as Eve at her second waking
might have regarded Adam.
"I've got to go a-skimming," she pleaded, "and I have
on'y old Deb to help me to-day. Mrs Crick is gone to market
with Mr Crick, and Retty is not well, and the others are
gone out somewhere, and won't be home till milking."
As they retreated to the milk-house Deborah Fyander
appeared on the stairs.
"I have come back, Deborah," said Mr Clare, upwards. "So
I can help Tess with the skimming; and, as you are very
tired, I am sure, you needn't come down till milking-time."
Possibly the Talbothays milk was not very thoroughly
skimmed that afternoon. Tess was in a dream wherein familiar
objects appeared as having light and shade and position, but
no particular outline. Every time she held the skimmer under
the pump to cool it for the work her hand trembled, the
ardour of his affection being so palpable that she seemed to
flinch under it like a plant in too burning a sun.
Then he pressed her again to his side, and when she had
done running her forefinger round the leads to cut off the
cream-edge, he cleaned it in nature's way; for the
unconstrained manners of Talbothays dairy came convenient
now.
"I may as well say it now as later, dearest," he resumed
gently. "I wish to ask you something of a very practical
nature, which I have been thinking of ever since that day
last week in the meads. I shall soon want to marry, and,
being a farmer, you see I shall require for my wife a woman
who knows all about the management of farms. Will you be
that woman, Tessy?"
He put it that way that she might not think he had
yielded to an impulse of which his head would disapprove.
She turned quite careworn. She had bowed to the
inevitable result of proximity, the necessity of loving him;
but she had not calculated upon this sudden corollary,
which, indeed, Clare had put before her without quite
meaning himself to do it so soon. With pain that was like
the bitterness of dissolution she murmured the words of her
indispensable and sworn answer as an honourable woman.
"O Mr Clare—I cannot be your wife—I cannot be!"
The sound of her own decision seemed to break Tess's very
heart, and she bowed her face in her grief.
"But, Tess!" he said, amazed at her reply, and holding
her still more greedily close. "Do you say no? Surely you
love me?"
"O yes, yes! And I would rather be yours than anybody's
in the world," returned the sweet and honest voice of the
distressed girl. "But I cannot marry you!"
"Tess," he said, holding her at arm's length, "you are
engaged to marry some one else!"
"No, no!"
"Then why do you refuse me?"
"I don't want to marry! I have not thought of doing it. I
cannot! I only want to love you."
"But why?"
Driven to subterfuge, she stammered—
"Your father is a parson, and your mother wouldn' like
you to marry such as me. She will want you to marry a lady."
"Nonsense—I have spoken to them both. That was partly why
I went home."
"I feel I cannot—never, never!" she echoed.
"Is it too sudden to be asked thus, my Pretty?"
"Yes—I did not expect it."
"If you will let it pass, please, Tessy, I will give you
time," he said. "It was very abrupt to come home and speak
to you all at once. I'll not allude to it again for a
while."
She again took up the shining skimmer, held it beneath
the pump, and began anew. But she could not, as at other
times, hit the exact under-surface of the cream with the
delicate dexterity required, try as she might; sometimes she
was cutting down into the milk, sometimes in the air. She
could hardly see, her eyes having filled with two blurring
tears drawn forth by a grief which, to this her best friend
and dear advocate, she could never explain.
"I can't skim—I can't!" she said, turning away from him.
Not to agitate and hinder her longer, the considerate
Clare began talking in a more general way: "You quite
misapprehend my parents. They are the most simple-mannered
people alive, and quite unambitious. They are two of the few
remaining Evangelical school. Tessy, are you an
Evangelical?"
"I don't know."
"You go to church very regularly, and our parson here is
not very High, they tell me."
Tess's ideas on the views of the parish clergyman, whom
she heard every week, seemed to be rather more vague than
Clare's, who had never heard him at all.
"I wish I could fix my mind on what I hear there more
firmly than I do," she remarked as a safe generality. "It is
often a great sorrow to me."
She spoke so unaffectedly that Angel was sure in his
heart that his father could not object to her on religious
grounds, even though she did not know whether her principles
were High, Low or Broad. He himself knew that, in reality,
the confused beliefs which she held, apparently imbibed in
childhood, were, if anything, Tractarian as to phraseology,
and Pantheistic as to essence. Confused or otherwise, to
disturb them was his last desire:
Leave thou thy sister, when she prays,
Her early Heaven, her happy views;
Nor thou with shadow'd hint confuse
A life that leads melodious days.
He had occasionally thought the counsel less honest than musical; but
he gladly conformed to it now.
He spoke further of the incidents of his visit, of his
father's mode of life, of his zeal for his principles; she
grew serener, and the undulations disappeared from her
skimming; as she finished one lead after another he followed
her, and drew the plugs for letting down the milk.
"I fancied you looked a little downcast when you came
in," she ventured to observe, anxious to keep away from the
subject of herself.
"Yes—well, my father had been talking a good deal to me
of his troubles and difficulties, and the subject always
tends to depress me. He is so zealous that he gets many
snubs and buffetings from people of a different way of
thinking from himself, and I don't like to hear of such
humiliations to a man of his age, the more particularly as I
don't think earnestness does any good when carried so far.
He has been telling me of a very unpleasant scene in which
he took part quite recently. He went as the deputy of some
missionary society to preach in the neighbourhood of
Trantridge, a place forty miles from here, and made it his
business to expostulate with a lax young cynic he met with
somewhere about there—son of some landowner up that way—and
who has a mother afflicted with blindness. My father
addressed himself to the gentleman point-blank, and there
was quite a disturbance. It was very foolish of my father, I
must say, to intrude his conversation upon a stranger when
the probabilities were so obvious that it would be useless.
But whatever he thinks to be his duty, that he'll do, in
season or out of season; and, of course, he makes many
enemies, not only among the absolutely vicious, but among
the easy-going, who hate being bothered. He says he glories
in what happened, and that good may be done indirectly; but
I wish he would not wear himself out now he is getting old,
and would leave such pigs to their wallowing."
Tess's look had grown hard and worn, and her ripe mouth
tragical; but she no longer showed any tremulousness.
Clare's revived thoughts of his father prevented his
noticing her particularly; and so they went on down the
white row of liquid rectangles till they had finished and
drained them off, when the other maids returned, and took
their pails, and Deb came to scald out the leads for the new
milk. As Tess withdrew to go afield to the cows he said to
her softly—
"And my question, Tessy?"
"O no—no!" replied she with grave hopelessness, as one
who had heard anew the turmoil of her own past in the
allusion to Alec d'Urberville. "It can't be!"
She went out towards the mead, joining the other
milkmaids with a bound, as if trying to make the open air
drive away her sad constraint. All the girls drew onward to
the spot where the cows were grazing in the farther mead,
the bevy advancing with the bold grace of wild animals—the
reckless, unchastened motion of women accustomed to
unlimited space—in which they abandoned themselves to the
air as a swimmer to the wave. It seemed natural enough to
him now that Tess was again in sight to choose a mate from
unconstrained Nature, and not from the abodes of Art.
XXVIII
Her refusal, though unexpected, did not permanently daunt
Clare. His experience of women was great enough for him to
be aware that the negative often meant nothing more than the
preface to the affirmative; and it was little enough for him
not to know that in the manner of the present negative there
lay a great exception to the dallyings of coyness. That she
had already permitted him to make love to her he read as an
additional assurance, not fully trowing that in the fields
and pastures to "sigh gratis" is by no means deemed waste;
love-making being here more often accepted inconsiderately
and for its own sweet sake than in the carking, anxious
homes of the ambitious, where a girl's craving for an
establishment paralyzes her healthy thought of a passion as
an end.
"Tess, why did you say 'no' in such a positive way?" he
asked her in the course of a few days.
She started.
"Don't ask me. I told you why—partly. I am not good
enough—not worthy enough."
"How? Not fine lady enough?"
"Yes—something like that," murmured she. "Your friends
would scorn me."
"Indeed, you mistake them—my father and mother. As for my
brothers, I don't care—" He clasped his fingers behind her
back to keep her from slipping away. "Now—you did not mean
it, sweet?—I am sure you did not! You have made me so
restless that I cannot read, or play, or do anything. I am
in no hurry, Tess, but I want to know—to hear from your own
warm lips—that you will some day be mine—any time you may
choose; but some day?"
She could only shake her head and look away from him.
Clare regarded her attentively, conned the characters of
her face as if they had been hieroglyphics. The denial
seemed real.
"Then I ought not to hold you in this way—ought I? I have
no right to you—no right to seek out where you are, or walk
with you! Honestly, Tess, do you love any other man?"
"How can you ask?" she said, with continued
self-suppression.
"I almost know that you do not. But then, why do you
repulse me?"
"I don't repulse you. I like you to—tell me you love me;
and you may always tell me so as you go about with me—and
never offend me."
"But you will not accept me as a husband?"
"Ah—that's different—it is for your good, indeed, my
dearest! O, believe me, it is only for your sake! I don't
like to give myself the great happiness o' promising to be
yours in that way—because—because I am sure I ought
not to do it."
"But you will make me happy!"
"Ah—you think so, but you don't know!"
At such times as this, apprehending the grounds of her
refusal to be her modest sense of incompetence in matters
social and polite, he would say that she was wonderfully
well-informed and versatile—which was certainly true, her
natural quickness and her admiration for him having led her
to pick up his vocabulary, his accent, and fragments of his
knowledge, to a surprising extent. After these tender
contests and her victory she would go away by herself under
the remotest cow, if at milking-time, or into the sedge or
into her room, if at a leisure interval, and mourn silently,
not a minute after an apparently phlegmatic negative.
The struggle was so fearful; her own heart was so
strongly on the side of his—two ardent hearts against one
poor little conscience—that she tried to fortify her
resolution by every means in her power. She had come to
Talbothays with a made-up mind. On no account could she
agree to a step which might afterwards cause bitter rueing
to her husband for his blindness in wedding her. And she
held that what her conscience had decided for her when her
mind was unbiassed ought not to be overruled now.
"Why don't somebody tell him all about me?" she said. "It
was only forty miles off—why hasn't it reached here?
Somebody must know!"
Yet nobody seemed to know; nobody told him.
For two or three days no more was said. She guessed from
the sad countenances of her chamber companions that they
regarded her not only as the favourite, but as the chosen;
but they could see for themselves that she did not put
herself in his way.
Tess had never before known a time in which the thread of
her life was so distinctly twisted of two strands, positive
pleasure and positive pain. At the next cheese-making the
pair were again left alone together. The dairyman himself
had been lending a hand; but Mr Crick, as well as his wife,
seemed latterly to have acquired a suspicion of mutual
interest between these two; though they walked so
circumspectly that suspicion was but of the faintest.
Anyhow, the dairyman left them to themselves.
They were breaking up the masses of curd before putting
them into the vats. The operation resembled the act of
crumbling bread on a large scale; and amid the immaculate
whiteness of the curds Tess Durbeyfield's hands showed
themselves of the pinkness of the rose. Angel, who was
filling the vats with his handful, suddenly ceased, and laid
his hands flat upon hers. Her sleeves were rolled far above
the elbow, and bending lower he kissed the inside vein of
her soft arm.
Although the early September weather was sultry, her arm,
from her dabbling in the curds, was as cold and damp to his
mouth as a new-gathered mushroom, and tasted of the whey.
But she was such a sheaf of susceptibilities that her pulse
was accelerated by the touch, her blood driven to her
finder-ends, and the cool arms flushed hot. Then, as though
her heart had said, "Is coyness longer necessary? Truth is
truth between man and woman, as between man and man," she
lifted her eyes and they beamed devotedly into his, as her
lip rose in a tender half-smile.
"Do you know why I did that, Tess?" he said.
"Because you love me very much!"
"Yes, and as a preliminary to a new entreaty."
"Not again!"
She looked a sudden fear that her resistance might break
down under her own desire.
"O, Tessy!" he went on, "I cannot think why you
are so tantalizing. Why do you disappoint me so? You seem
almost like a coquette, upon my life you do—a coquette of
the first urban water! They blow hot and blow cold, just as
you do, and it is the very last sort of thing to expect to
find in a retreat like Talbothays. … And yet, dearest," he
quickly added, observing now the remark had cut her, "I know
you to be the most honest, spotless creature that ever
lived. So how can I suppose you a flirt? Tess, why don't you
like the idea of being my wife, if you love me as you seem
to do?"
"I have never said I don't like the idea, and I never
could say it; because—it isn't true!"
The stress now getting beyond endurance, her lip
quivered, and she was obliged to go away. Clare was so
pained and perplexed that he ran after and caught her in the
passage.
"Tell me, tell me!" he said, passionately clasping her,
in forgetfulness of his curdy hands: "do tell me that you
won't belong to anybody but me!"
"I will, I will tell you!" she exclaimed. "And I will
give you a complete answer, if you will let me go now. I
will tell you my experiences—all about myself—all!"
"Your experiences, dear; yes, certainly; any number." He
expressed assent in loving satire, looking into her face.
"My Tess, no doubt, almost as many experiences as that wild
convolvulus out there on the garden hedge, that opened
itself this morning for the first time. Tell me anything,
but don't use that wretched expression any more about not
being worthy of me."
"I will try—not! And I'll give you my reasons
to-morrow—next week."
"Say on Sunday?"
"Yes, on Sunday."
At last she got away, and did not stop in her retreat
till she was in the thicket of pollard willows at the lower
side of the barton, where she could be quite unseen. Here
Tess flung herself down upon the rustling undergrowth of
spear-grass, as upon a bed, and remained crouching in
palpitating misery broken by momentary shoots of joy, which
her fears about the ending could not altogether suppress.
In reality, she was drifting into acquiescence. Every
see-saw of her breath, every wave of her blood, every pulse
singing in her ears, was a voice that joined with nature in
revolt against her scrupulousness. Reckless, inconsiderate
acceptance of him; to close with him at the altar, revealing
nothing, and chancing discovery; to snatch ripe pleasure
before the iron teeth of pain could have time to shut upon
her: that was what love counselled; and in almost a terror
of ecstasy Tess divined that, despite her many months of
lonely self-chastisement, wrestlings, communings, schemes to
lead a future of austere isolation, love's counsel would
prevail.
The afternoon advanced, and still she remained among the
willows. She heard the rattle of taking down the pails from
the forked stands; the "waow-waow!" which accompanied the
getting together of the cows. But she did not go to the
milking. They would see her agitation; and the dairyman,
thinking the cause to be love alone, would good-naturedly
tease her; and that harassment could not be borne.
Her lover must have guessed her overwrought state, and
invented some excuse for her non-appearance, for no
inquiries were made or calls given. At half-past six the sun
settled down upon the levels with the aspect of a great
forge in the heavens; and presently a monstrous pumpkin-like
moon arose on the other hand. The pollard willows, tortured
out of their natural shape by incessant choppings, became
spiny-haired monsters as they stood up against it. She went
in and upstairs without a light.
It was now Wednesday. Thursday came, and Angel looked
thoughtfully at her from a distance, but intruded in no way
upon her. The indoor milkmaids, Marian and the rest, seemed
to guess that something definite was afoot, for they did not
force any remarks upon her in the bedchamber. Friday passed;
Saturday. To-morrow was the day.
"I shall give way—I shall say yes—I shall let myself
marry him—I cannot help it!" she jealously panted, with her
hot face to the pillow that night, on hearing one of the
other girls sigh his name in her sleep. "I can't bear to let
anybody have him but me! Yet it is a wrong to him, and may
kill him when he knows! O my heart—O—O—O!"
XXIX
"Now, who mid ye think I've heard news o' this morning?"
said Dairyman Crick, as he sat down to breakfast next day,
with a riddling gaze round upon the munching men and maids.
"Now, just who mid ye think?"
One guessed, and another guessed. Mrs Crick did not
guess, because she knew already.
"Well," said the dairyman, "'tis that slack-twisted
'hore's-bird of a feller, Jack Dollop. He's lately got
married to a widow-woman."
"Not Jack Dollop? A villain—to think o' that!" said a
milker.
The name entered quickly into Tess Durbeyfield's
consciousness, for it was the name of the lover who had
wronged his sweetheart, and had afterwards been so roughly
used by the young woman's mother in the butter-churn.
"And had he married the valiant matron's daughter, as he
promised?" asked Angel Clare absently, as he turned over the
newspaper he was reading at the little table to which he was
always banished by Mrs Crick, in her sense of his gentility.
"Not he, sir. Never meant to," replied the dairyman. "As
I say, 'tis a widow-woman, and she had money, it seems—fifty
poun' a year or so; and that was all he was after. They were
married in a great hurry; and then she told him that by
marrying she had lost her fifty poun' a year. Just fancy the
state o' my gentleman's mind at that news! Never such a
cat-and-dog life as they've been leading ever since! Serves
him well beright. But onluckily the poor woman gets the
worst o't."
"Well, the silly body should have told en sooner that the
ghost of her first man would trouble him," said Mrs Crick.
"Ay, ay," responded the dairyman indecisively. "Still,
you can see exactly how 'twas. She wanted a home, and didn't
like to run the risk of losing him. Don't ye think that was
something like it, maidens?"
He glanced towards the row of girls.
"She ought to ha' told him just before they went to
church, when he could hardly have backed out," exclaimed
Marian.
"Yes, she ought," agreed Izz.
"She must have seen what he was after, and should ha'
refused him," cried Retty spasmodically.
"And what do you say, my dear?" asked the dairyman of
Tess.
"I think she ought—to have told him the true state of
things—or else refused him—I don't know," replied Tess, the
bread-and-butter choking her.
"Be cust if I'd have done either o't," said Beck Knibbs,
a married helper from one of the cottages. "All's fair in
love and war. I'd ha' married en just as she did, and if
he'd said two words to me about not telling him beforehand
anything whatsomdever about my first chap that I hadn't
chose to tell, I'd ha' knocked him down wi' the
rolling-pin—a scram little feller like he! Any woman could
do it."
The laughter which followed this sally was supplemented
only by a sorry smile, for form's sake, from Tess. What was
comedy to them was tragedy to her; and she could hardly bear
their mirth. She soon rose from table, and, with an
impression that Clare would soon follow her, went along a
little wriggling path, now stepping to one side of the
irrigating channels, and now to the other, till she stood by
the main stream of the Var. Men had been cutting the
water-weeds higher up the river, and masses of them were
floating past her—moving islands of green crow-foot, whereon
she might almost have ridden; long locks of which weed had
lodged against the piles driven to keep the cows from
crossing.
Yes, there was the pain of it. This question of a woman
telling her story—the heaviest of crosses to herself—seemed
but amusement to others. It was as if people should laugh at
martyrdom.
"Tessy!" came from behind her, and Clare sprang across
the gully, alighting beside her feet. "My wife—soon!"
"No, no; I cannot. For your sake, O Mr Clare; for your
sake, I say no!"
"Tess!"
"Still I say no!" she repeated.
Not expecting this, he had put his arm lightly round her
waist the moment after speaking, beneath her hanging tail of
hair. (The younger dairymaids, including Tess, breakfasted
with their hair loose on Sunday mornings before building it
up extra high for attending church, a style they could not
adopt when milking with their heads against the cows.) If
she had said "Yes" instead of "No" he would have kissed her;
it had evidently been his intention; but her determined
negative deterred his scrupulous heart. Their condition of
domiciliary comradeship put her, as the woman, to such
disadvantage by its enforced intercourse, that he felt it
unfair to her to exercise any pressure of blandishment which
he might have honestly employed had she been better able to
avoid him. He released her momentarily-imprisoned waist, and
withheld the kiss.
It all turned on that release. What had given her
strength to refuse him this time was solely the tale of the
widow told by the dairyman; and that would have been
overcome in another moment. But Angel said no more; his face
was perplexed; he went away.
Day after day they met—somewhat less constantly than
before; and thus two or three weeks went by. The end of
September drew near, and she could see in his eye that he
might ask her again.
His plan of procedure was different now—as though he had
made up his mind that her negatives were, after all, only
coyness and youth startled by the novelty of the proposal.
The fitful evasiveness of her manner when the subject was
under discussion countenanced the idea. So he played a more
coaxing game; and while never going beyond words, or
attempting the renewal of caresses, he did his utmost
orally.
In this way Clare persistently wooed her in undertones
like that of the purling milk—at the cow's side, at
skimmings, at butter-makings, at cheese-makings, among
broody poultry, and among farrowing pigs—as no milkmaid was
ever wooed before by such a man.
Tess knew that she must break down. Neither a religious
sense of a certain moral validity in the previous union nor
a conscientious wish for candour could hold out against it
much longer. She loved him so passionately, and he was so
godlike in her eyes; and being, though untrained,
instinctively refined, her nature cried for his tutelary
guidance. And thus, though Tess kept repeating to herself,
"I can never be his wife," the words were vain. A proof of
her weakness lay in the very utterance of what calm strength
would not have taken the trouble to formulate. Every sound
of his voice beginning on the old subject stirred her with a
terrifying bliss, and she coveted the recantation she
feared.
His manner was—what man's is not?—so much that of one who
would love and cherish and defend her under any conditions,
changes, charges, or revelations, that her gloom lessened as
she basked in it. The season meanwhile was drawing onward to
the equinox, and though it was still fine, the days were
much shorter. The dairy had again worked by morning
candlelight for a long time; and a fresh renewal of Clare's
pleading occurred one morning between three and four.
She had run up in her bedgown to his door to call him as
usual; then had gone back to dress and call the others; and
in ten minutes was walking to the head of the stairs with
the candle in her hand. At the same moment he came down his
steps from above in his shirt-sleeves and put his arm across
the stairway.
"Now, Miss Flirt, before you go down," he said
peremptorily. "It is a fortnight since I spoke, and this
won't do any longer. You must tell me what you mean,
or I shall have to leave this house. My door was ajar just
now, and I saw you. For your own safety I must go. You don't
know. Well? Is it to be yes at last?"
"I am only just up, Mr Clare, and it is too early to take
me to task!" she pouted. "You need not call me Flirt. 'Tis
cruel and untrue. Wait till by and by. Please wait till by
and by! I will really think seriously about it between now
and then. Let me go downstairs!"
She looked a little like what he said she was as, holding
the candle sideways, she tried to smile away the seriousness
of her words.
"Call me Angel, then, and not Mr Clare."
"Angel."
"Angel dearest—why not?"
"'Twould mean that I agree, wouldn't it?"
"It would only mean that you love me, even if you cannot
marry me; and you were so good as to own that long ago."
"Very well, then, 'Angel dearest', if I must," she
murmured, looking at her candle, a roguish curl coming upon
her mouth, notwithstanding her suspense.
Clare had resolved never to kiss her until he had
obtained her promise; but somehow, as Tess stood there in
her prettily tucked-up milking gown, her hair carelessly
heaped upon her head till there should be leisure to arrange
it when skimming and milking were done, he broke his
resolve, and brought his lips to her cheek for one moment.
She passed downstairs very quickly, never looking back at
him or saying another word. The other maids were already
down, and the subject was not pursued. Except Marian, they
all looked wistfully and suspiciously at the pair, in the
sad yellow rays which the morning candles emitted in
contrast with the first cold signals of the dawn without.
When skimming was done—which, as the milk diminished with
the approach of autumn, was a lessening process day by
day—Retty and the rest went out. The lovers followed them.
"Our tremulous lives are so different from theirs, are
they not?" he musingly observed to her, as he regarded the
three figures tripping before him through the frigid pallor
of opening day.
"Not so very different, I think," she said.
"Why do you think that?"
"There are very few women's lives that are
not—tremulous," Tess replied, pausing over the new word as
if it impressed her. "There's more in those three than you
think."
"What is in them?"
"Almost either of 'em," she began, "would make—perhaps
would make—a properer wife than I. And perhaps they love you
as well as I—almost."
"O, Tessy!"
There were signs that it was an exquisite relief to her
to hear the impatient exclamation, though she had resolved
so intrepidly to let generosity make one bid against
herself. That was now done, and she had not the power to
attempt self-immolation a second time then. They were joined
by a milker from one of the cottages, and no more was said
on that which concerned them so deeply. But Tess knew that
this day would decide it.
In the afternoon several of the dairyman's household and
assistants went down to the meads as usual, a long way from
the dairy, where many of the cows were milked without being
driven home. The supply was getting less as the animals
advanced in calf, and the supernumerary milkers of the lush
green season had been dismissed.
The work progressed leisurely. Each pailful was poured
into tall cans that stood in a large spring-waggon which had
been brought upon the scene; and when they were milked, the
cows trailed away. Dairyman Crick, who was there with the
rest, his wrapper gleaming miraculously white against a
leaden evening sky, suddenly looked at his heavy watch.
"Why, 'tis later than I thought," he said. "Begad! We
shan't be soon enough with this milk at the station, if we
don't mind. There's no time to-day to take it home and mix
it with the bulk afore sending off. It must go to station
straight from here. Who'll drive it across?"
Mr Clare volunteered to do so, though it was none of his
business, asking Tess to accompany him. The evening, though
sunless, had been warm and muggy for the season, and Tess
had come out with her milking-hood only, naked-armed and
jacketless; certainly not dressed for a drive. She therefore
replied by glancing over her scant habiliments; but Clare
gently urged her. She assented by relinquishing her pail and
stool to the dairyman to take home, and mounted the
spring-waggon beside Clare.
XXX
In the diminishing daylight they went along the level
roadway through the meads, which stretched away into gray
miles, and were backed in the extreme edge of distance by
the swarthy and abrupt slopes of Egdon Heath. On its summit
stood clumps and stretches of fir-trees, whose notched tips
appeared like battlemented towers crowning black-fronted
castles of enchantment.
They were so absorbed in the sense of being close to each
other that they did not begin talking for a long while, the
silence being broken only by the clucking of the milk in the
tall cans behind them. The lane they followed was so
solitary that the hazel nuts had remained on the boughs till
they slipped from their shells, and the blackberries hung in
heavy clusters. Every now and then Angel would fling the
lash of his whip round one of these, pluck it off, and give
it to his companion.
The dull sky soon began to tell its meaning by sending
down herald-drops of rain, and the stagnant air of the day
changed into a fitful breeze which played about their faces.
The quick-silvery glaze on the rivers and pools vanished;
from broad mirrors of light they changed to lustreless
sheets of lead, with a surface like a rasp. But that
spectacle did not affect her preoccupation. Her countenance,
a natural carnation slightly embrowned by the season, had
deepened its tinge with the beating of the rain-drops; and
her hair, which the pressure of the cows' flanks had, as
usual, caused to tumble down from its fastenings and stray
beyond the curtain of her calico bonnet, was made clammy by
the moisture till it hardly was better than seaweed.
"I ought not to have come, I suppose," she murmured,
looking at the sky.
"I am sorry for the rain," said he. "But how glad I am to
have you here!"
Remote Egdon disappeared by degree behind the liquid
gauze. The evening grew darker, and the roads being crossed
by gates, it was not safe to drive faster than at a walking
pace. The air was rather chill.
"I am so afraid you will get cold, with nothing upon your
arms and shoulders," he said. "Creep close to me, and
perhaps the drizzle won't hurt you much. I should be sorrier
still if I did not think that the rain might be helping me."
She imperceptibly crept closer, and he wrapped round them
both a large piece of sail-cloth, which was sometimes used
to keep the sun off the milk-cans. Tess held it from
slipping off him as well as herself, Clare's hands being
occupied.
"Now we are all right again. Ah—no we are not! It runs
down into my neck a little, and it must still more into
yours. That's better. Your arms are like wet marble, Tess.
Wipe them in the cloth. Now, if you stay quiet, you will not
get another drop. Well, dear—about that question of
mine—that long-standing question?"
The only reply that he could hear for a little while was
the smack of the horse's hoofs on the moistening road, and
the cluck of the milk in the cans behind them.
"Do you remember what you said?"
"I do," she replied.
"Before we get home, mind."
"I'll try."
He said no more then. As they drove on, the fragment of
an old manor house of Caroline date rose against the sky,
and was in due course passed and left behind.
"That," he observed, to entertain her, "is an interesting
old place—one of the several seats which belonged to an
ancient Norman family formerly of great influence in this
county, the d'Urbervilles. I never pass one of their
residences without thinking of them. There is something very
sad in the extinction of a family of renown, even if it was
fierce, domineering, feudal renown."
"Yes," said Tess.
They crept along towards a point in the expanse of shade
just at hand at which a feeble light was beginning to assert
its presence, a spot where, by day, a fitful white streak of
steam at intervals upon the dark green background denoted
intermittent moments of contact between their secluded world
and modern life. Modern life stretched out its steam feeler
to this point three or four times a day, touched the native
existences, and quickly withdrew its feeler again, as if
what it touched had been uncongenial.
They reached the feeble light, which came from the smoky
lamp of a little railway station; a poor enough terrestrial
star, yet in one sense of more importance to Talbothays
Dairy and mankind than the celestial ones to which it stood
in such humiliating contrast. The cans of new milk were
unladen in the rain, Tess getting a little shelter from a
neighbouring holly tree.
Then there was the hissing of a train, which drew up
almost silently upon the wet rails, and the milk was rapidly
swung can by can into the truck. The light of the engine
flashed for a second upon Tess Durbeyfield's figure,
motionless under the great holly tree. No object could have
looked more foreign to the gleaming cranks and wheels than
this unsophisticated girl, with the round bare arms, the
rainy face and hair, the suspended attitude of a friendly
leopard at pause, the print gown of no date or fashion, and
the cotton bonnet drooping on her brow.
She mounted again beside her lover, with a mute obedience
characteristic of impassioned natures at times, and when
they had wrapped themselves up over head and ears in the
sailcloth again, they plunged back into the now thick night.
Tess was so receptive that the few minutes of contact with
the whirl of material progress lingered in her thought.
"Londoners will drink it at their breakfasts to-morrow,
won't they?" she asked. "Strange people that we have never
seen."
"Yes—I suppose they will. Though not as we send it. When
its strength has been lowered, so that it may not get up
into their heads."
"Noble men and noble women, ambassadors and centurions,
ladies and tradeswomen, and babies who have never seen a
cow."
"Well, yes; perhaps; particularly centurions."
"Who don't know anything of us, and where it comes from;
or think how we two drove miles across the moor to-night in
the rain that it might reach 'em in time?"
"We did not drive entirely on account of these precious
Londoners; we drove a little on our own—on account of that
anxious matter which you will, I am sure, set at rest, dear
Tess. Now, permit me to put it in this way. You belong to me
already, you know; your heart, I mean. Does it not?"
"You know as well as I. O yes—yes!"
"Then, if your heart does, why not your hand?"
"My only reason was on account of you—on account of a
question. I have something to tell you—"
"But suppose it to be entirely for my happiness, and my
worldly convenience also?"
"O yes; if it is for your happiness and worldly
convenience. But my life before I came here—I want—"
"Well, it is for my convenience as well as my happiness.
If I have a very large farm, either English or colonial, you
will be invaluable as a wife to me; better than a woman out
of the largest mansion in the country. So please—please,
dear Tessy, disabuse your mind of the feeling that you will
stand in my way."
"But my history. I want you to know it—you must let me
tell you—you will not like me so well!"
"Tell it if you wish to, dearest. This precious history
then. Yes, I was born at so and so, Anno Domini—"
"I was born at Marlott," she said, catching at his words
as a help, lightly as they were spoken. "And I grew up
there. And I was in the Sixth Standard when I left school,
and they said I had great aptness, and should make a good
teacher, so it was settled that I should be one. But there
was trouble in my family; father was not very industrious,
and he drank a little."
"Yes, yes. Poor child! Nothing new." He pressed her more
closely to his side.
"And then—there is something very unusual about it—about
me. I—I was—"
Tess's breath quickened.
"Yes, dearest. Never mind."
"I—I—am not a Durbeyfield, but a d'Urberville—a
descendant of the same family as those that owned the old
house we passed. And—we are all gone to nothing!"
"A d'Urberville!—Indeed! And is that all the trouble,
dear Tess?"
"Yes," she answered faintly.
"Well—why should I love you less after knowing this?"
"I was told by the dairyman that you hated old families."
He laughed.
"Well, it is true, in one sense. I do hate the
aristocratic principle of blood before everything, and do
think that as reasoners the only pedigrees we ought to
respect are those spiritual ones of the wise and virtuous,
without regard to corporal paternity. But I am extremely
interested in this news—you can have no idea how interested
I am! Are you not interested yourself in being one of that
well-known line?"
"No. I have thought it sad—especially since coming here,
and knowing that many of the hills and fields I see once
belonged to my father's people. But other hills and field
belonged to Retty's people, and perhaps others to Marian's,
so that I don't value it particularly."
"Yes—it is surprising how many of the present tillers of
the soil were once owners of it, and I sometimes wonder that
a certain school of politicians don't make capital of the
circumstance; but they don't seem to know it… I wonder that
I did not see the resemblance of your name to d'Urberville,
and trace the manifest corruption. And this was the carking
secret!"
She had not told. At the last moment her courage had
failed her; she feared his blame for not telling him sooner;
and her instinct of self-preservation was stronger than her
candour.
"Of course," continued the unwitting Clare, "I should
have been glad to know you to be descended exclusively from
the long-suffering, dumb, unrecorded rank and file of the
English nation, and not from the self-seeking few who made
themselves powerful at the expense of the rest. But I am
corrupted away from that by my affection for you, Tess (he
laughed as he spoke), and made selfish likewise. For your
own sake I rejoice in your descent. Society is hopelessly
snobbish, and this fact of your extraction may make an
appreciable difference to its acceptance of you as my wife,
after I have made you the well-read woman that I mean to
make you. My mother too, poor soul, will think so much
better of you on account of it. Tess, you must spell your
name correctly—d'Urberville—from this very day."
"I like the other way rather best."
"But you must, dearest! Good heavens, why dozens
of mushroom millionaires would jump at such a possession! By
the bye, there's one of that kidney who has taken the
name—where have I heard of him?—Up in the neighbourhood of
The Chase, I think. Why, he is the very man who had that
rumpus with my father I told you of. What an odd
coincidence!"
"Angel, I think I would rather not take the name! It is
unlucky, perhaps!"
She was agitated.
"Now then, Mistress Teresa d'Urberville, I have you. Take
my name, and so you will escape yours! The secret is out, so
why should you any longer refuse me?"
"If it is sure to make you happy to have me as
your wife, and you feel that you do wish to marry me,
very, very much—"
"I do, dearest, of course!"
"I mean, that it is only your wanting me very much, and
being hardly able to keep alive without me, whatever my
offences, that would make me feel I ought to say I will."
"You will—you do say it, I know! You will be mine for
ever and ever."
He clasped her close and kissed her.
"Yes!"
She had no sooner said it than she burst into a dry hard
sobbing, so violent that it seemed to rend her. Tess was not
a hysterical girl by any means, and he was surprised.
"Why do you cry, dearest?"
"I can't tell—quite!—I am so glad to think—of being
yours, and making you happy!"
"But this does not seem very much like gladness, my
Tessy!"
"I mean—I cry because I have broken down in my vow! I
said I would die unmarried!"
"But, if you love me you would like me to be your
husband?"
"Yes, yes, yes! But O, I sometimes wish I had never been
born!"
"Now, my dear Tess, if I did not know that you are very
much excited, and very inexperienced, I should say that
remark was not very complimentary. How came you to wish that
if you care for me? Do you care for me? I wish you would
prove it in some way."
"How can I prove it more than I have done?" she cried, in
a distraction of tenderness. "Will this prove it more?"
She clasped his neck, and for the first time Clare learnt
what an impassioned woman's kisses were like upon the lips
of one whom she loved with all her heart and soul, as Tess
loved him.
"There—now do you believe?" she asked, flushed, and
wiping her eyes.
"Yes. I never really doubted—never, never!"
So they drove on through the gloom, forming one bundle
inside the sail-cloth, the horse going as he would, and the
rain driving against them. She had consented. She might as
well have agreed at first. The "appetite for joy" which
pervades all creation, that tremendous force which sways
humanity to its purpose, as the tide sways the helpless
weed, was not to be controlled by vague lucubrations over
the social rubric.
"I must write to my mother," she said. "You don't mind my
doing that?"
"Of course not, dear child. You are a child to me, Tess,
not to know how very proper it is to write to your mother at
such a time, and how wrong it would be in me to object.
Where does she live?"
"At the same place—Marlott. On the further side of
Blackmoor Vale."
"Ah, then I have seen you before this summer—"
"Yes; at that dance on the green; but you would not dance
with me. O, I hope that is of no ill-omen for us now!"
XXXI
Tess wrote a most touching and urgent letter to her
mother the very next day, and by the end of the week a
response to her communication arrived in Joan Durbeyfield's
wandering last-century hand.
Dear Tess,—
J write these few lines Hoping they will find you
well, as they leave me at Present, thank God for it.
Dear Tess, we are all glad to Hear that you are
going really to be married soon. But with respect to
your question, Tess, J say between ourselves, quite
private but very strong, that on no account do you
say a word of your Bygone Trouble to him. J did not
tell everything to your Father, he being so Proud on
account of his Respectability, which, perhaps, your
Intended is the same. Many a woman—some of the
Highest in the Land—have had a Trouble in their
time; and why should you Trumpet yours when others
don't Trumpet theirs? No girl would be such a Fool,
specially as it is so long ago, and not your Fault
at all. J shall answer the same if you ask me fifty
times. Besides, you must bear in mind that, knowing
it to be your Childish Nature to tell all that's in
your heart—so simple!—J made you promise me never to
let it out by Word or Deed, having your Welfare in
my Mind; and you most solemnly did promise it going
from this Door. J have not named either that
Question or your coming marriage to your Father, as
he would blab it everywhere, poor Simple Man.
Dear Tess, keep up your Spirits, and we mean to
send you a Hogshead of Cyder for you Wedding,
knowing there is not much in your parts, and thin
Sour Stuff what there is. So no more at present, and
with kind love to your Young Man.—From your
affectte. Mother,
J. Durbeyfield
"O mother, mother!" murmured Tess.
She was recognizing how light was the touch of events the
most oppressive upon Mrs Durbeyfield's elastic spirit. Her
mother did not see life as Tess saw it. That haunting
episode of bygone days was to her mother but a passing
accident. But perhaps her mother was right as to the course
to be followed, whatever she might be in her reasons.
Silence seemed, on the face of it, best for her adored one's
happiness: silence it should be.
Thus steadied by a command from the only person in the
world who had any shadow of right to control her action,
Tess grew calmer. The responsibility was shifted, and her
heart was lighter than it had been for weeks. The days of
declining autumn which followed her assent, beginning with
the month of October, formed a season through which she
lived in spiritual altitudes more nearly approaching ecstasy
than any other period of her life.
There was hardly a touch of earth in her love for Clare.
To her sublime trustfulness he was all that goodness could
be—knew all that a guide, philosopher, and friend should
know. She thought every line in the contour of his person
the perfection of masculine beauty, his soul the soul of a
saint, his intellect that of a seer. The wisdom of her love
for him, as love, sustained her dignity; she seemed to be
wearing a crown. The compassion of his love for her, as she
saw it, made her lift up her heart to him in devotion. He
would sometimes catch her large, worshipful eyes, that had
no bottom to them looking at him from their depths, as if
she saw something immortal before her.
She dismissed the past—trod upon it and put it out, as
one treads on a coal that is smouldering and dangerous.
She had not known that men could be so disinterested,
chivalrous, protective, in their love for women as he. Angel
Clare was far from all that she thought him in this respect;
absurdly far, indeed; but he was, in truth, more spiritual
than animal; he had himself well in hand, and was singularly
free from grossness. Though not cold-natured, he was rather
bright than hot—less Byronic than Shelleyan; could love
desperately, but with a love more especially inclined to the
imaginative and ethereal; it was a fastidious emotion which
could jealously guard the loved one against his very self.
This amazed and enraptured Tess, whose slight experiences
had been so infelicitous till now; and in her reaction from
indignation against the male sex she swerved to excess of
honour for Clare.
They unaffectedly sought each other's company; in her
honest faith she did not disguise her desire to be with him.
The sum of her instincts on this matter, if clearly stated,
would have been that the elusive quality of her sex which
attracts men in general might be distasteful to so perfect a
man after an avowal of love, since it must in its very
nature carry with it a suspicion of art.
The country custom of unreserved comradeship out of doors
during betrothal was the only custom she knew, and to her it
had no strangeness; though it seemed oddly anticipative to
Clare till he saw how normal a thing she, in common with all
the other dairy-folk, regarded it. Thus, during this October
month of wonderful afternoons they roved along the meads by
creeping paths which followed the brinks of trickling
tributary brooks, hopping across by little wooden bridges to
the other side, and back again. They were never out of the
sound of some purling weir, whose buzz accompanied their own
murmuring, while the beams of the sun, almost as horizontal
as the mead itself, formed a pollen of radiance over the
landscape. They saw tiny blue fogs in the shadows of trees
and hedges, all the time that there was bright sunshine
elsewhere. The sun was so near the ground, and the sward so
flat, that the shadows of Clare and Tess would stretch a
quarter of a mile ahead of them, like two long fingers
pointing afar to where the green alluvial reaches abutted
against the sloping sides of the vale.
Men were at work here and there—for it was the season for
"taking up" the meadows, or digging the little waterways
clear for the winter irrigation, and mending their banks
where trodden down by the cows. The shovelfuls of loam,
black as jet, brought there by the river when it was as wide
as the whole valley, were an essence of soils, pounded
champaigns of the past, steeped, refined, and subtilized to
extraordinary richness, out of which came all the fertility
of the mead, and of the cattle grazing there.
Clare hardily kept his arm round her waist in sight of
these watermen, with the air of a man who was accustomed to
public dalliance, though actually as shy as she who, with
lips parted and eyes askance on the labourers, wore the look
of a wary animal the while.
"You are not ashamed of owning me as yours before them!"
she said gladly.
"O no!"
"But if it should reach the ears of your friends at
Emminster that you are walking about like this with me, a
milkmaid—"
"The most bewitching milkmaid ever seen."
"They might feel it a hurt to their dignity."
"My dear girl—a d'Urberville hurt the dignity of a Clare!
It is a grand card to play—that of your belonging to such a
family, and I am reserving it for a grand effect when we are
married, and have the proofs of your descent from Parson
Tringham. Apart from that, my future is to be totally
foreign to my family—it will not affect even the surface of
their lives. We shall leave this part of England—perhaps
England itself—and what does it matter how people regard us
here? You will like going, will you not?"
She could answer no more than a bare affirmative, so
great was the emotion aroused in her at the thought of going
through the world with him as his own familiar friend. Her
feelings almost filled her ears like a babble of waves, and
surged up to her eyes. She put her hand in his, and thus
they went on, to a place where the reflected sun glared up
from the river, under a bridge, with a molten-metallic glow
that dazzled their eyes, though the sun itself was hidden by
the bridge. They stood still, whereupon little furred and
feathered heads popped up from the smooth surface of the
water; but, finding that the disturbing presences had
paused, and not passed by, they disappeared again. Upon this
river-brink they lingered till the fog began to close round
them—which was very early in the evening at this time of the
year—settling on the lashes of her eyes, where it rested
like crystals, and on his brows and hair.
They walked later on Sundays, when it was quite dark.
Some of the dairy-people, who were also out of doors on the
first Sunday evening after their engagement, heard her
impulsive speeches, ecstasized to fragments, though they
were too far off to hear the words discoursed; noted the
spasmodic catch in her remarks, broken into syllables by the
leapings of her heart, as she walked leaning on his arm; her
contented pauses, the occasional little laugh upon which her
soul seemed to ride—the laugh of a woman in company with the
man she loves and has won from all other women—unlike
anything else in nature. They marked the buoyancy of her
tread, like the skim of a bird which has not quite alighted.
Her affection for him was now the breath and life of
Tess's being; it enveloped her as a photosphere, irradiated
her into forgetfulness of her past sorrows, keeping back the
gloomy spectres that would persist in their attempts to
touch her—doubt, fear, moodiness, care, shame. She knew that
they were waiting like wolves just outside the
circumscribing light, but she had long spells of power to
keep them in hungry subjection there.
A spiritual forgetfulness co-existed with an intellectual
remembrance. She walked in brightness, but she knew that in
the background those shapes of darkness were always spread.
They might be receding, or they might be approaching, one or
the other, a little every day.
One evening Tess and Clare were obliged to sit indoors
keeping house, all the other occupants of the domicile being
away. As they talked she looked thoughtfully up at him, and
met his two appreciative eyes.
"I am not worthy of you—no, I am not!" she burst out,
jumping up from her low stool as though appalled at his
homage, and the fulness of her own joy thereat.
Clare, deeming the whole basis of her excitement to be
that which was only the smaller part of it, said—
"I won't have you speak like it, dear Tess! Distinction
does not consist in the facile use of a contemptible set of
conventions, but in being numbered among those who are true,
and honest, and just, and pure, and lovely, and of good
report—as you are, my Tess."
She struggled with the sob in her throat. How often had
that string of excellences made her young heart ache in
church of late years, and how strange that he should have
cited them now.
"Why didn't you stay and love me when I—was sixteen;
living with my little sisters and brothers, and you danced
on the green? O, why didn't you, why didn't you!" she said,
impetuously clasping her hands.
Angel began to comfort and reassure her, thinking to
himself, truly enough, what a creature of moods she was, and
how careful he would have to be of her when she depended for
her happiness entirely on him.
"Ah—why didn't I stay!" he said. "That is just what I
feel. If I had only known! But you must not be so bitter in
your regret—why should you be?"
With the woman's instinct to hide she diverged hastily—
"I should have had four years more of your heart than I
can ever have now. Then I should not have wasted my time as
I have done—I should have had so much longer happiness!"
It was no mature woman with a long dark vista of intrigue
behind her who was tormented thus, but a girl of simple
life, not yet one-and twenty, who had been caught during her
days of immaturity like a bird in a springe. To calm herself
the more completely, she rose from her little stool and left
the room, overturning the stool with her skirts as she went.
He sat on by the cheerful firelight thrown from a bundle
of green ash-sticks laid across the dogs; the sticks snapped
pleasantly, and hissed out bubbles of sap from their ends.
When she came back she was herself again.
"Do you not think you are just a wee bit capricious,
fitful, Tess?" he said, good-humouredly, as he spread a
cushion for her on the stool, and seated himself in the
settle beside her. "I wanted to ask you something, and just
then you ran away."
"Yes, perhaps I am capricious," she murmured. She
suddenly approached him, and put a hand upon each of his
arms. "No, Angel, I am not really so—by nature, I mean!" The
more particularly to assure him that she was not, she placed
herself close to him in the settle, and allowed her head to
find a resting-place against Clare's shoulder. "What did you
want to ask me—I am sure I will answer it," she continued
humbly.
"Well, you love me, and have agreed to marry me, and
hence there follows a thirdly, 'When shall the day be?'"
"I like living like this."
"But I must think of starting in business on my own hook
with the new year, or a little later. And before I get
involved in the multifarious details of my new position, I
should like to have secured my partner."
"But," she timidly answered, "to talk quite practically,
wouldn't it be best not to marry till after all that?—Though
I can't bear the thought o' your going away and leaving me
here!"
"Of course you cannot—and it is not best in this case. I
want you to help me in many ways in making my start. When
shall it be? Why not a fortnight from now?"
"No," she said, becoming grave: "I have so many things to
think of first."
"But—"
He drew her gently nearer to him.
The reality of marriage was startling when it loomed so
near. Before discussion of the question had proceeded
further there walked round the corner of the settle into the
full firelight of the apartment Mr Dairyman Crick, Mrs
Crick, and two of the milkmaids.
Tess sprang like an elastic ball from his side to her
feet, while her face flushed and her eyes shone in the
firelight.
"I knew how it would be if I sat so close to him!" she
cried, with vexation. "I said to myself, they are sure to
come and catch us! But I wasn't really sitting on his knee,
though it might ha' seemed as if I was almost!"
"Well—if so be you hadn't told us, I am sure we shouldn't
ha' noticed that ye had been sitting anywhere at all in this
light," replied the dairyman. He continued to his wife, with
the stolid mien of a man who understood nothing of the
emotions relating to matrimony—"Now, Christianer, that shows
that folks should never fancy other folks be supposing
things when they bain't. O no, I should never ha' thought a
word of where she was a sitting to, if she hadn't told me—
not I."
"We are going to be married soon," said Clare, with
improvised phlegm.
"Ah—and be ye! Well, I am truly glad to hear it, sir.
I've thought you mid do such a thing for some time. She's
too good for a dairymaid—I said so the very first day I zid
her—and a prize for any man; and what's more, a wonderful
woman for a gentleman-farmer's wife; he won't be at the
mercy of his baily wi' her at his side."
Somehow Tess disappeared. She had been even more struck
with the look of the girls who followed Crick than abashed
by Crick's blunt praise.
After supper, when she reached her bedroom, they were all
present. A light was burning, and each damsel was sitting up
whitely in her bed, awaiting Tess, the whole like a row of
avenging ghosts.
But she saw in a few moments that there was no malice in
their mood. They could scarcely feel as a loss what they had
never expected to have. Their condition was objective,
contemplative.
"He's going to marry her!" murmured Retty, never taking
eyes off Tess. "How her face do show it!"
"You be going to marry him?" asked Marian.
"Yes," said Tess.
"When?"
"Some day."
They thought that this was evasiveness only.
"Yes—going to marry him—a gentleman!"
repeated Izz Huett.
And by a sort of fascination the three girls, one after
another, crept out of their beds, and came and stood
barefooted round Tess. Retty put her hands upon Tess's
shoulders, as if to realize her friend's corporeality after
such a miracle, and the other two laid their arms round her
waist, all looking into her face.
"How it do seem! Almost more than I can think of!" said
Izz Huett.
Marian kissed Tess. "Yes," she murmured as she withdrew
her lips.
"Was that because of love for her, or because other lips
have touched there by now?" continued Izz drily to Marian.
"I wasn't thinking o' that," said Marian simply. "I was
on'y feeling all the strangeness o't—that she is to be his
wife, and nobody else. I don't say nay to it, nor either of
us, because we did not think of it—only loved him. Still,
nobody else is to marry'n in the world—no fine lady, nobody
in silks and satins; but she who do live like we."
"Are you sure you don't dislike me for it?" said Tess in
a low voice.
They hung about her in their white nightgowns before
replying, as if they considered their answer might lie in
her look.
"I don't know—I don't know," murmured Retty Priddle. "I
want to hate 'ee; but I cannot!"
"That's how I feel," echoed Izz and Marian. "I can't hate
her. Somehow she hinders me!"
"He ought to marry one of you," murmured Tess.
"Why?"
"You are all better than I."
"We better than you?" said the girls in a low, slow
whisper. "No, no, dear Tess!"
"You are!" she contradicted impetuously. And suddenly
tearing away from their clinging arms she burst into a
hysterical fit of tears, bowing herself on the chest of
drawers and repeating incessantly, "O yes, yes, yes!"
Having once given way she could not stop her weeping.
"He ought to have had one of you!" she cried. "I think I
ought to make him even now! You would be better for him
than—I don't know what I'm saying! O! O!"
They went up to her and clasped her round, but still her
sobs tore her.
"Get some water," said Marian, "She's upset by us, poor
thing, poor thing!"
They gently led her back to the side of her bed, where
they kissed her warmly.
"You are best for'n," said Marian. "More ladylike, and a
better scholar than we, especially since he had taught 'ee
so much. But even you ought to be proud. You be
proud, I'm sure!"
"Yes, I am," she said; "and I am ashamed at so breaking
down."
When they were all in bed, and the light was out, Marian
whispered across to her—
"You will think of us when you be his wife, Tess, and of
how we told 'ee that we loved him, and how we tried not to
hate you, and did not hate you, and could not hate you,
because you were his choice, and we never hoped to be chose
by him."
They were not aware that, at these words, salt, stinging
tears trickled down upon Tess's pillow anew, and how she
resolved, with a bursting heart, to tell all her history to
Angel Clare, despite her mother's command—to let him for
whom she lived and breathed despise her if he would, and her
mother regard her as a fool, rather then preserve a silence
which might be deemed a treachery to him, and which somehow
seemed a wrong to these.
XXXII
This penitential mood kept her from naming the
wedding-day. The beginning of November found its date still
in abeyance, though he asked her at the most tempting times.
But Tess's desire seemed to be for a perpetual betrothal in
which everything should remain as it was then.
The meads were changing now; but it was still warm enough
in early afternoons before milking to idle there awhile, and
the state of dairy-work at this time of year allowed a spare
hour for idling. Looking over the damp sod in the direction
of the sun, a glistening ripple of gossamer webs was visible
to their eyes under the luminary, like the track of
moonlight on the sea. Gnats, knowing nothing of their brief
glorification, wandered across the shimmer of this pathway,
irradiated as if they bore fire within them, then passed out
of its line, and were quite extinct. In the presence of
these things he would remind her that the date was still the
question.
Or he would ask her at night, when he accompanied her on
some mission invented by Mrs Crick to give him the
opportunity. This was mostly a journey to the farmhouse on
the slopes above the vale, to inquire how the advanced cows
were getting on in the straw-barton to which they were
relegated. For it was a time of the year that brought great
changes to the world of kine. Batches of the animals were
sent away daily to this lying-in hospital, where they lived
on straw till their calves were born, after which event, and
as soon as the calf could walk, mother and offspring were
driven back to the dairy. In the interval which elapsed
before the calves were sold there was, of course, little
milking to be done, but as soon as the calf had been taken
away the milkmaids would have to set to work as usual.
Returning from one of these dark walks they reached a
great gravel-cliff immediately over the levels, where they
stood still and listened. The water was now high in the
streams, squirting through the weirs, and tinkling under
culverts; the smallest gullies were all full; there was no
taking short cuts anywhere, and foot-passengers were
compelled to follow the permanent ways. From the whole
extent of the invisible vale came a multitudinous
intonation; it forced upon their fancy that a great city lay
below them, and that the murmur was the vociferation of its
populace.
"It seems like tens of thousands of them," said Tess;
"holding public-meetings in their market-places, arguing,
preaching, quarrelling, sobbing, groaning, praying, and
cursing."
Clare was not particularly heeding.
"Did Crick speak to you to-day, dear, about his not
wanting much assistance during the winter months?"
"No."
"The cows are going dry rapidly."
"Yes. Six or seven went to the straw-barton yesterday,
and three the day before, making nearly twenty in the straw
already. Ah—is it that the farmer don't want my help for the
calving? O, I am not wanted here any more! And I have tried
so hard to—"
"Crick didn't exactly say that he would no longer require
you. But, knowing what our relations were, he said in the
most good-natured and respectful manner possible that he
supposed on my leaving at Christmas I should take you with
me, and on my asking what he would do without you he merely
observed that, as a matter of fact, it was a time of year
when he could do with a very little female help. I am afraid
I was sinner enough to feel rather glad that he was in this
way forcing your hand."
"I don't think you ought to have felt glad, Angel.
Because 'tis always mournful not to be wanted, even if at
the same time 'tis convenient."
"Well, it is convenient—you have admitted that." He put
his finger upon her cheek. "Ah!" he said.
"What?"
"I feel the red rising up at her having been caught! But
why should I trifle so! We will not trifle—life is too
serious."
"It is. Perhaps I saw that before you did."
She was seeing it then. To decline to marry him after
all—in obedience to her emotion of last night—and leave the
dairy, meant to go to some strange place, not a dairy; for
milkmaids were not in request now calving-time was coming
on; to go to some arable farm where no divine being like
Angel Clare was. She hated the thought, and she hated more
the thought of going home.
"So that, seriously, dearest Tess," he continued, "since
you will probably have to leave at Christmas, it is in every
way desirable and convenient that I should carry you off
then as my property. Besides, if you were not the most
uncalculating girl in the world you would know that we could
not go on like this for ever."
"I wish we could. That it would always be summer and
autumn, and you always courting me, and always thinking as
much of me as you have done through the past summer-time!"
"I always shall."
"O, I know you will!" she cried, with a sudden fervour of
faith in him. "Angel, I will fix the day when I will become
yours for always!"
Thus at last it was arranged between them, during that
dark walk home, amid the myriads of liquid voices on the
right and left.
When they reached the dairy Mr and Mrs Crick were
promptly told—with injunctions of secrecy; for each of the
lovers was desirous that the marriage should be kept as
private as possible. The dairyman, though he had thought of
dismissing her soon, now made a great concern about losing
her. What should he do about his skimming? Who would make
the ornamental butter-pats for the Anglebury and Sandbourne
ladies? Mrs Crick congratulated Tess on the shilly-shallying
having at last come to an end, and said that directly she
set eyes on Tess she divined that she was to be the chosen
one of somebody who was no common outdoor man; Tess had
looked so superior as she walked across the barton on that
afternoon of her arrival; that she was of a good family she
could have sworn. In point of fact Mrs Crick did remember
thinking that Tess was graceful and good-looking as she
approached; but the superiority might have been a growth of
the imagination aided by subsequent knowledge.
Tess was now carried along upon the wings of the hours,
without the sense of a will. The word had been given; the
number of the day written down. Her naturally bright
intelligence had begun to admit the fatalistic convictions
common to field-folk and those who associate more
extensively with natural phenomena than with their
fellow-creatures; and she accordingly drifted into that
passive responsiveness to all things her lover suggested,
characteristic of the frame of mind.
But she wrote anew to her mother, ostensibly to notify
the wedding-day; really to again implore her advice. It was
a gentleman who had chosen her, which perhaps her mother had
not sufficiently considered. A post-nuptial explanation,
which might be accepted with a light heart by a rougher man,
might not be received with the same feeling by him. But this
communication brought no reply from Mrs Durbeyfield.
Despite Angel Clare's plausible representation to himself
and to Tess of the practical need for their immediate
marriage, there was in truth an element of precipitancy in
the step, as became apparent at a later date. He loved her
dearly, though perhaps rather ideally and fancifully than
with the impassioned thoroughness of her feeling for him. He
had entertained no notion, when doomed as he had thought to
an unintellectual bucolic life, that such charms as he
beheld in this idyllic creature would be found behind the
scenes. Unsophistication was a thing to talk of; but he had
not known how it really struck one until he came here. Yet
he was very far from seeing his future track clearly, and it
might be a year or two before he would be able to consider
himself fairly started in life. The secret lay in the tinge
of recklessness imparted to his career and character by the
sense that he had been made to miss his true destiny through
the prejudices of his family.
"Don't you think 'twould have been better for us to wait
till you were quite settled in your midland farm?" she once
asked timidly. (A midland farm was the idea just then.)
"To tell the truth, my Tess, I don't like you to be left
anywhere away from my protection and sympathy."
The reason was a good one, so far as it went. His
influence over her had been so marked that she had caught
his manner and habits, his speech and phrases, his likings
and his aversions. And to leave her in farmland would be to
let her slip back again out of accord with him. He wished to
have her under his charge for another reason. His parents
had naturally desired to see her once at least before he
carried her off to a distant settlement, English or
colonial; and as no opinion of theirs was to be allowed to
change his intention, he judged that a couple of months'
life with him in lodgings whilst seeking for an advantageous
opening would be of some social assistance to her at what
she might feel to be a trying ordeal—her presentation to his
mother at the Vicarage.
Next, he wished to see a little of the working of a
flour-mill, having an idea that he might combine the use of
one with corn-growing. The proprietor of a large old
water-mill at Wellbridge—once the mill of an Abbey—had
offered him the inspection of his time-honoured mode of
procedure, and a hand in the operations for a few days,
whenever he should choose to come. Clare paid a visit to the
place, some few miles distant, one day at this time, to
inquire particulars, and returned to Talbothays in the
evening. She found him determined to spend a short time at
the Wellbridge flour-mills. And what had determined him?
Less the opportunity of an insight into grinding and bolting
than the casual fact that lodgings were to be obtained in
that very farmhouse which, before its mutilation, had been
the mansion of a branch of the d'Urberville family. This was
always how Clare settled practical questions; by a sentiment
which had nothing to do with them. They decided to go
immediately after the wedding, and remain for a fortnight,
instead of journeying to towns and inns.
"Then we will start off to examine some farms on the
other side of London that I have heard of," he said, "and by
March or April we will pay a visit to my father and mother."
Questions of procedure such as these arose and passed,
and the day, the incredible day, on which she was to become
his, loomed large in the near future. The thirty-first of
December, New Year's Eve, was the date. His wife, she said
to herself. Could it ever be? Their two selves together,
nothing to divide them, every incident shared by them; why
not? And yet why?
One Sunday morning Izz Huett returned from church, and
spoke privately to Tess.
"You was not called home this morning."
"What?"
"It should ha' been the first time of asking to-day," she
answered, looking quietly at Tess. "You meant to be married
New Year's Eve, deary?"
The other returned a quick affirmative.
"And there must be three times of asking. And now there
be only two Sundays left between."
Tess felt her cheek paling; Izz was right; of course
there must be three. Perhaps he had forgotten! If so, there
must be a week's postponement, and that was unlucky. How
could she remind her lover? She who had been so backward was
suddenly fired with impatience and alarm lest she should
lose her dear prize.
A natural incident relieved her anxiety. Izz mentioned
the omission of the banns to Mrs Crick, and Mrs Crick
assumed a matron's privilege of speaking to Angel on the
point.
"Have ye forgot 'em, Mr Clare? The banns, I mean."
"No, I have not forgot 'em," says Clare.
As soon as he caught Tess alone he assured her:
"Don't let them tease you about the banns. A licence will
be quieter for us, and I have decided on a licence without
consulting you. So if you go to church on Sunday morning you
will not hear your own name, if you wished to."
"I didn't wish to hear it, dearest," she said proudly.
But to know that things were in train was an immense
relief to Tess notwithstanding, who had well-nigh feared
that somebody would stand up and forbid the banns on the
ground of her history. How events were favouring her!
"I don't quite feel easy," she said to herself. "All this
good fortune may be scourged out of me afterwards by a lot
of ill. That's how Heaven mostly does. I wish I could have
had common banns!"
But everything went smoothly. She wondered whether he
would like her to be married in her present best white
frock, or if she ought to buy a new one. The question was
set at rest by his forethought, disclosed by the arrival of
some large packages addressed to her. Inside them she found
a whole stock of clothing, from bonnet to shoes, including a
perfect morning costume, such as would well suit the simple
wedding they planned. He entered the house shortly after the
arrival of the packages, and heard her upstairs undoing
them.
A minute later she came down with a flush on her face and
tears in her eyes.
"How thoughtful you've been!" she murmured, her cheek
upon his shoulder. "Even to the gloves and handkerchief! My
own love—how good, how kind!"
"No, no, Tess; just an order to a tradeswoman in
London—nothing more."
And to divert her from thinking too highly of him, he
told her to go upstairs, and take her time, and see if it
all fitted; and, if not, to get the village sempstress to
make a few alterations.
She did return upstairs, and put on the gown. Alone, she
stood for a moment before the glass looking at the effect of
her silk attire; and then there came into her head her
mother's ballad of the mystic robe—
That never would become that wife
That had once done amiss,
which Mrs Durbeyfield had used to sing to her as a child, so
blithely and so archly, her foot on the cradle, which she
rocked to the tune.
Suppose this robe should betray her by
changing colour, as her robe had betrayed Queen Guinevere.
Since she had been at the dairy she had
not once thought of
the lines till now.
XXXIII
Angel felt that he would like to spend a day with her
before the wedding, somewhere away from the dairy, as a last
jaunt in her company while there were yet mere lover and
mistress; a romantic day, in circumstances that would never
be repeated; with that other and greater day beaming close
ahead of them. During the preceding week, therefore, he
suggested making a few purchases in the nearest town, and
they started together.
Clare's life at the dairy had been that of a recluse in
respect the world of his own class. For months he had never
gone near a town, and, requiring no vehicle, had never kept
one, hiring the dairyman's cob or gig if he rode or drove.
They went in the gig that day.
And then for the first time in their lives they shopped
as partners in one concern. It was Christmas Eve, with its
loads a holly and mistletoe, and the town was very full of
strangers who had come in from all parts of the country on
account of the day. Tess paid the penalty of walking about
with happiness superadded to beauty on her countenance by
being much stared at as she moved amid them on his arm.
In the evening they returned to the inn at which they had
put up, and Tess waited in the entry while Angel went to see
the horse and gig brought to the door. The general
sitting-room was full of guests, who were continually going
in and out. As the door opened and shut each time for the
passage of these, the light within the parlour fell full
upon Tess's face. Two men came out and passed by her among
the rest. One of them had stared her up and down in
surprise, and she fancied he was a Trantridge man, though
that village lay so many miles off that Trantridge folk were
rarities here.
"A comely maid that," said the other.
"True, comely enough. But unless I make a great mistake—"
And he negatived the remainder of the definition forthwith.
Clare had just returned from the stable-yard, and,
confronting the man on the threshold, heard the words, and
saw the shrinking of Tess. The insult to her stung him to
the quick, and before he had considered anything at all he
struck the man on the chin with the full force of his fist,
sending him staggering backwards into the passage.
The man recovered himself, and seemed inclined to come
on, and Clare, stepping outside the door, put himself in a
posture of defence. But his opponent began to think better
of the matter. He looked anew at Tess as he passed her, and
said to Clare—
"I beg pardon, sir; 'twas a complete mistake. I thought
she was another woman, forty miles from here."
Clare, feeling then that he had been too hasty, and that
he was, moreover, to blame for leaving her standing in an
inn-passage, did what he usually did in such cases, gave the
man five shillings to plaster the blow; and thus they
parted, bidding each other a pacific good night. As soon as
Clare had taken the reins from the ostler, and the young
couple had driven off, the two men went in the other
direction.
"And was it a mistake?" said the second one.
"Not a bit of it. But I didn't want to hurt the
gentleman's feelings—not I."
In the meantime the lovers were driving onward.
"Could we put off our wedding till a little later?" Tess
asked in a dry dull voice. "I mean if we wished?"
"No, my love. Calm yourself. Do you mean that the fellow
may have time to summon me for assault?" he asked
good-humouredly.
"No—I only meant—if it should have to be put off."
What she meant was not very clear, and he directed her to
dismiss such fancies from her mind, which she obediently did
as well as she could. But she was grave, very grave, all the
way home; till she thought, "We shall go away, a very long
distance, hundreds of miles from these parts, and such as
this can never happen again, and no ghost of the past reach
there."
They parted tenderly that night on the landing, and Clare
ascended to his attic. Tess sat up getting on with some
little requisites, lest the few remaining days should not
afford sufficient time. While she sat she heard a noise in
Angel's room overhead, a sound of thumping and struggling.
Everybody else in the house was asleep, and in her anxiety
lest Clare should be ill she ran up and knocked at his door,
and asked him what was the matter.
"Oh, nothing, dear," he said from within. "I am so sorry
I disturbed you! But the reason is rather an amusing one: I
fell asleep and dreamt that I was fighting that fellow again
who insulted you, and the noise you heard was my pummelling
away with my fists at my portmanteau, which I pulled out
to-day for packing. I am occasionally liable to these freaks
in my sleep. Go to bed and think of it no more."
This was the last drachm required to turn the scale of
her indecision. Declare the past to him by word of mouth she
could not; but there was another way. She sat down and wrote
on the four pages of a note-sheet a succinct narrative of
those events of three or four years ago, put it into an
envelope, and directed it to Clare. Then, lest the flesh
should again be weak, she crept upstairs without any shoes
and slipped the note under his door.
Her night was a broken one, as it well might be, and she
listened for the first faint noise overhead. It came, as
usual; he descended, as usual. She descended. He met her at
the bottom of the stairs and kissed her. Surely it was as
warmly as ever!
He looked a little disturbed and worn, she thought. But
he said not a word to her about her revelation, even when
they were alone. Could he have had it? Unless he began the
subject she felt that she could say nothing. So the day
passed, and it was evident that whatever he thought he meant
to keep to himself. Yet he was frank and affectionate as
before. Could it be that her doubts were childish? that he
forgave her; that he loved her for what she was, just as she
was, and smiled at her disquiet as at a foolish nightmare?
Had he really received her note? She glanced into his room,
and could see nothing of it. It might be that he forgave
her. But even if he had not received it she had a sudden
enthusiastic trust that he surely would forgive her.
Every morning and night he was the same, and thus New
Year's Eve broke—the wedding day.
The lovers did not rise at milking-time, having through
the whole of this last week of their sojourn at the dairy
been accorded something of the position of guests, Tess
being honoured with a room of her own. When they arrived
downstairs at breakfast-time they were surprised to see what
effects had been produced in the large kitchen for their
glory since they had last beheld it. At some unnatural hour
of the morning the dairyman had caused the yawning
chimney-corner to be whitened, and the brick hearth
reddened, and a blazing yellow damask blower to be hung
across the arch in place of the old grimy blue cotton one
with a black sprig pattern which had formerly done duty
there. This renovated aspect of what was the focus indeed of
the room on a full winter morning threw a smiling demeanour
over the whole apartment.
"I was determined to do summat in honour o't", said the
dairyman. "And as you wouldn't hear of my gieing a rattling
good randy wi' fiddles and bass-viols complete, as we should
ha' done in old times, this was all I could think o' as a
noiseless thing."
Tess's friends lived so far off that none could
conveniently have been present at the ceremony, even had any
been asked; but as a fact nobody was invited from Marlott.
As for Angel's family, he had written and duly informed them
of the time, and assured them that he would be glad to see
one at least of them there for the day if he would like to
come. His brothers had not replied at all, seeming to be
indignant with him; while his father and mother had written
a rather sad letter, deploring his precipitancy in rushing
into marriage, but making the best of the matter by saying
that, though a dairywoman was the last daughter-in-law they
could have expected, their son had arrived at an age which
he might be supposed to be the best judge.
This coolness in his relations distressed Clare less than
it would have done had he been without the grand card with
which he meant to surprise them ere long. To produce Tess,
fresh from the dairy, as a d'Urberville and a lady, he had
felt to be temerarious and risky; hence he had concealed her
lineage till such time as, familiarized with worldly ways by
a few months' travel and reading with him, he could take her
on a visit to his parents and impart the knowledge while
triumphantly producing her as worthy of such an ancient
line. It was a pretty lover's dream, if no more. Perhaps
Tess's lineage had more value for himself than for anybody
in the world beside.
Her perception that Angel's bearing towards her still
remained in no whit altered by her own communication
rendered Tess guiltily doubtful if he could have received
it. She rose from breakfast before he had finished, and
hastened upstairs. It had occurred to her to look once more
into the queer gaunt room which had been Clare's den, or
rather eyrie, for so long, and climbing the ladder she stood
at the open door of the apartment, regarding and pondering.
She stooped to the threshold of the doorway, where she had
pushed in the note two or three days earlier in such
excitement. The carpet reached close to the sill, and under
the edge of the carpet she discerned the faint white margin
of the envelope containing her letter to him, which he
obviously had never seen, owing to her having in her haste
thrust it beneath the carpet as well as beneath the door.
With a feeling of faintness she withdrew the letter.
There it was—sealed up, just as it had left her hands. The
mountain had not yet been removed. She could not let him
read it now, the house being in full bustle of preparation;
and descending to her own room she destroyed the letter
there.
She was so pale when he saw her again that he felt quite
anxious. The incident of the misplaced letter she had jumped
at as if it prevented a confession; but she knew in her
conscience that it need not; there was still time. Yet
everything was in a stir; there was coming and going; all
had to dress, the dairyman and Mrs Crick having been asked
to accompany them as witnesses; and reflection or deliberate
talk was well-nigh impossible. The only minute Tess could
get to be alone with Clare was when they met upon the
landing.
"I am so anxious to talk to you—I want to confess all my
faults and blunders!" she said with attempted lightness.
"No, no—we can't have faults talked of—you must be deemed
perfect to-day at least, my Sweet!" he cried. "We shall have
plenty of time, hereafter, I hope, to talk over our
failings. I will confess mine at the same time."
"But it would be better for me to do it now, I think, so
that you could not say—"
"Well, my quixotic one, you shall tell me anything—say,
as soon as we are settled in our lodging; not now. I, too,
will tell you my faults then. But do not let us spoil the
day with them; they will be excellent matter for a dull
time."
"Then you don't wish me to, dearest?"
"I do not, Tessy, really."
The hurry of dressing and starting left no time for more
than this. Those words of his seemed to reassure her on
further reflection. She was whirled onward through the next
couple of critical hours by the mastering tide of her
devotion to him, which closed up further meditation. Her one
desire, so long resisted, to make herself his, to call him
her lord, her own—then, if necessary, to die—had at last
lifted her up from her plodding reflective pathway. In
dressing, she moved about in a mental cloud of many-coloured
idealities, which eclipsed all sinister contingencies by its
brightness.
The church was a long way off, and they were obliged to
drive, particularly as it was winter. A closed carriage was
ordered from a roadside inn, a vehicle which had been kept
there ever since the old days of post-chaise travelling. It
had stout wheel-spokes and heavy felloes, a great curved
bed, immense straps and springs, and a pole like a
battering-ram. The postilion was a venerable "boy" of
sixty—a martyr to rheumatic gout, the result of excessive
exposure in youth, counter-acted by strong liquors—who had
stood at inn-doors doing nothing for the whole
five-and-twenty years that had elapsed since he had no
longer been required to ride professionally, as if expecting
the old times to come back again. He had a permanent running
wound on the outside of his right leg, originated by the
constant bruisings of aristocratic carriage-poles during the
many years that he had been in regular employ at the King's
Arms, Casterbridge.
Inside this cumbrous and creaking structure, and behind
this decayed conductor, the partie carrée took their
seats—the bride and bridegroom and Mr and Mrs Crick. Angel
would have liked one at least of his brothers to be present
as groomsman, but their silence after his gentle hint to
that effect by letter had signified that they did not care
to come. They disapproved of the marriage, and could not be
expected to countenance it. Perhaps it was as well that they
could not be present. They were not worldly young fellows,
but fraternizing with dairy-folk would have struck
unpleasantly upon their biased niceness, apart from their
views of the match.
Upheld by the momentum of the time, Tess knew nothing of
this, did not see anything, did not know the road they were
taking to the church. She knew that Angel was close to her;
all the rest was a luminous mist. She was a sort of
celestial person, who owed her being to poetry—one of those
classical divinities Clare was accustomed to talk to her
about when they took their walks together.
The marriage being by licence there were only a dozen or
so of people in the church; had there been a thousand they
would have produced no more effect upon her. They were at
stellar distances from her present world. In the ecstatic
solemnity with which she swore her faith to him the ordinary
sensibilities of sex seemed a flippancy. At a pause in the
service, while they were kneeling together, she
unconsciously inclined herself towards him, so that her
shoulder touched his arm; she had been frightened by a
passing thought, and the movement had been automatic, to
assure herself that he was really there, and to fortify her
belief that his fidelity would be proof against all things.
Clare knew that she loved him—every curve of her form
showed that—but he did not know at that time the full depth
of her devotion, its single-mindedness, its meekness; what
long-suffering it guaranteed, what honesty, what endurance,
what good faith.
As they came out of church the ringers swung the bells
off their rests, and a modest peal of three notes broke
forth—that limited amount of expression having been deemed
sufficient by the church builders for the joys of such a
small parish. Passing by the tower with her husband on the
path to the gate she could feel the vibrant air humming
round them from the louvred belfry in the circle of sound,
and it matched the highly-charged mental atmosphere in which
she was living.
This condition of mind, wherein she felt glorified by an
irradiation not her own, like the angel whom St John saw in
the sun, lasted till the sound of the church bells had died
away, and the emotions of the wedding-service had calmed
down. Her eyes could dwell upon details more clearly now,
and Mr and Mrs Crick having directed their own gig to be
sent for them, to leave the carriage to the young couple,
she observed the build and character of that conveyance for
the first time. Sitting in silence she regarded it long.
"I fancy you seem oppressed, Tessy," said Clare.
"Yes," she answered, putting her hand to her brow. "I
tremble at many things. It is all so serious, Angel. Among
other things I seem to have seen this carriage before, to be
very well acquainted with it. It is very odd—I must have
seen it in a dream."
"Oh—you have heard the legend of the d'Urberville
Coach—that well-known superstition of this county about your
family when they were very popular here; and this lumbering
old thing reminds you of it."
"I have never heard of it to my knowledge," said she.
"What is the legend—may I know it?"
"Well—I would rather not tell it in detail just now. A
certain d'Urberville of the sixteenth or seventeenth century
committed a dreadful crime in his family coach; and since
that time members of the family see or hear the old coach
whenever—But I'll tell you another day—it is rather gloomy.
Evidently some dim knowledge of it has been brought back to
your mind by the sight of this venerable caravan."
"I don't remember hearing it before," she murmured. "Is
it when we are going to die, Angel, that members of my
family see it, or is it when we have committed a crime?"
"Now, Tess!"
He silenced her by a kiss.
By the time they reached home she was contrite and
spiritless. She was Mrs Angel Clare, indeed, but had she any
moral right to the name? Was she not more truly Mrs
Alexander d'Urberville? Could intensity of love justify what
might be considered in upright souls as culpable reticence?
She knew not what was expected of women in such cases; and
she had no counsellor.
However, when she found herself alone in her room for a
few minutes—the last day this on which she was ever to enter
it—she knelt down and prayed. She tried to pray to God, but
it was her husband who really had her supplication. Her
idolatry of this man was such that she herself almost feared
it to be ill-omened. She was conscious of the notion
expressed by Friar Laurence: "These violent delights have
violent ends." It might be too desperate for human
conditions—too rank, to wild, too deadly.
"O my love, why do I love you so!" she whispered there
alone; "for she you love is not my real self, but one in my
image; the one I might have been!"
Afternoon came, and with it the hour for departure. They
had decided to fulfil the plan of going for a few days to
the lodgings in the old farmhouse near Wellbridge Mill, at
which he meant to reside during his investigation of flour
processes. At two o'clock there was nothing left to do but
to start. All the servantry of the dairy were standing in
the red-brick entry to see them go out, the dairyman and his
wife following to the door. Tess saw her three chamber-mates
in a row against the wall, pensively inclining their heads.
She had much questioned if they would appear at the parting
moment; but there they were, stoical and staunch to the
last. She knew why the delicate Retty looked so fragile, and
Izz so tragically sorrowful, and Marian so blank; and she
forgot her own dogging shadow for a moment in contemplating
theirs. She impulsively whispered to him—
"Will you kiss 'em all, once, poor things, for the first
and last time?"
Clare had not the least objection to such a farewell
formality—which was all that it was to him—and as he passed
them he kissed them in succession where they stood, saying
"Goodbye" to each as he did so. When they reached the door
Tess femininely glanced back to discern the effect of that
kiss of charity; there was no triumph in her glance, as
there might have been. If there had it would have
disappeared when she saw how moved the girls all were. The
kiss had obviously done harm by awakening feelings they were
trying to subdue.
Of all this Clare was unconscious. Passing on to the
wicket-gate he shook hands with the dairyman and his wife,
and expressed his last thanks to them for their attentions;
after which there was a moment of silence before they had
moved off. It was interrupted by the crowing of a cock. The
white one with the rose comb had come and settled on the
palings in front of the house, within a few yards of them,
and his notes thrilled their ears through, dwindling away
like echoes down a valley of rocks.
"Oh?" said Mrs Crick. "An afternoon crow!"
Two men were standing by the yard gate, holding it open.
"That's bad," one murmured to the other, not thinking
that the words could be heard by the group at the
door-wicket.
The cock crew again—straight towards Clare.
"Well!" said the dairyman.
"I don't like to hear him!" said Tess to her husband.
"Tell the man to drive on. Goodbye, goodbye!"
The cock crew again.
"Hoosh! Just you be off, sir, or I'll twist your neck!"
said the dairyman with some irritation, turning to the bird
and driving him away. And to his wife as they went indoors:
"Now, to think o' that just to-day! I've not heard his crow
of an afternoon all the year afore."
"It only means a change in the weather," said she; "not
what you think: 'tis impossible!"
XXXIV
They drove by the level road along the valley to a
distance of a few miles, and, reaching Wellbridge, turned
away from the village to the left, and over the great
Elizabethan bridge which gives the place half its name.
Immediately behind it stood the house wherein they had
engaged lodgings, whose exterior features are so well known
to all travellers through the Froom Valley; once portion of
a fine manorial residence, and the property and seat of a
d'Urberville, but since its partial demolition a farmhouse.
"Welcome to one of your ancestral mansions!" said Clare
as he handed her down. But he regretted the pleasantry; it
was too near a satire.
On entering they found that, though they had only engaged
a couple of rooms, the farmer had taken advantage of their
proposed presence during the coming days to pay a New Year's
visit to some friends, leaving a woman from a neighbouring
cottage to minister to their few wants. The absoluteness of
possession pleased them, and they realized it as the first
moment of their experience under their own exclusive
roof-tree.
But he found that the mouldy old habitation somewhat
depressed his bride. When the carriage was gone they
ascended the stairs to wash their hands, the charwoman
showing the way. On the landing Tess stopped and started.
"What's the matter?" said he.
"Those horrid women!" she answered with a smile. "How
they frightened me."
He looked up, and perceived two life-size portraits on
panels built into the masonry. As all visitors to the
mansion are aware, these paintings represent women of middle
age, of a date some two hundred years ago, whose lineaments
once seen can never be forgotten. The long pointed features,
narrow eye, and smirk of the one, so suggestive of merciless
treachery; the bill-hook nose, large teeth, and bold eye of
the other suggesting arrogance to the point of ferocity,
haunt the beholder afterwards in his dreams.
"Whose portraits are those?" asked Clare of the
charwoman.
"I have been told by old folk that they were ladies of
the d'Urberville family, the ancient lords of this manor,"
she said, "Owing to their being builded into the wall they
can't be moved away."
The unpleasantness of the matter was that, in addition to
their effect upon Tess, her fine features were
unquestionably traceable in these exaggerated forms. He said
nothing of this, however, and, regretting that he had gone
out of his way to choose the house for their bridal time,
went on into the adjoining room. The place having been
rather hastily prepared for them, they washed their hands in
one basin. Clare touched hers under the water.
"Which are my fingers and which are yours?" he said,
looking up. "They are very much mixed."
"They are all yours," said she, very prettily, and
endeavoured to be gayer than she was. He had not been
displeased with her thoughtfulness on such an occasion; it
was what every sensible woman would show: but Tess knew that
she had been thoughtful to excess, and struggled against it.
The sun was so low on that short last afternoon of the
year that it shone in through a small opening and formed a
golden staff which stretched across to her skirt, where it
made a spot like a paint-mark set upon her. They went into
the ancient parlour to tea, and here they shared their first
common meal alone. Such was their childishness, or rather
his, that he found it interesting to use the same
bread-and-butter plate as herself, and to brush crumbs from
her lips with his own. He wondered a little that she did not
enter into these frivolities with his own zest.
Looking at her silently for a long time; "She is a dear
dear Tess," he thought to himself, as one deciding on the
true construction of a difficult passage. "Do I realize
solemnly enough how utterly and irretrievably this little
womanly thing is the creature of my good or bad faith and
fortune? I think not. I think I could not, unless I were a
woman myself. What I am in worldly estate, she is. What I
become, she must become. What I cannot be, she cannot be.
And shall I ever neglect her, or hurt her, or even forget to
consider her? God forbid such a crime!"
They sat on over the tea-table waiting for their luggage,
which the dairyman had promised to send before it grew dark.
But evening began to close in, and the luggage did not
arrive, and they had brought nothing more than they stood
in. With the departure of the sun the calm mood of the
winter day changed. Out of doors there began noises as of
silk smartly rubbed; the restful dead leaves of the
preceding autumn were stirred to irritated resurrection, and
whirled about unwillingly, and tapped against the shutters.
It soon began to rain.
"That cock knew the weather was going to change," said
Clare.
The woman who had attended upon them had gone home for
the night, but she had placed candles upon the table, and
now they lit them. Each candle-flame drew towards the
fireplace.
"These old houses are so draughty," continued Angel,
looking at the flames, and at the grease guttering down the
sides. "I wonder where that luggage is. We haven't even a
brush and comb."
"I don't know," she answered, absent-minded.
"Tess, you are not a bit cheerful this evening—not at all
as you used to be. Those harridans on the panels upstairs
have unsettled you. I am sorry I brought you here. I wonder
if you really love me, after all?"
He knew that she did, and the words had no serious
intent; but she was surcharged with emotion, and winced like
a wounded animal. Though she tried not to shed tears, she
could not help showing one or two.
"I did not mean it!" said he, sorry. "You are worried at
not having your things, I know. I cannot think why old
Jonathan has not come with them. Why, it is seven o'clock?
Ah, there he is!"
A knock had come to the door, and, there being nobody
else to answer it, Clare went out. He returned to the room
with a small package in his hand.
"It is not Jonathan, after all," he said.
"How vexing!" said Tess.
The packet had been brought by a special messenger, who
had arrived at Talbothays from Emminster Vicarage
immediately after the departure of the married couple, and
had followed them hither, being under injunction to deliver
it into nobody's hands but theirs. Clare brought it to the
light. It was less than a foot long, sewed up in canvas,
sealed in red wax with his father's seal, and directed in
his father's hand to "Mrs Angel Clare."
"It is a little wedding-present for you, Tess," said he,
handing it to her. "How thoughtful they are!"
Tess looked a little flustered as she took it.
"I think I would rather have you open it, dearest," said
she, turning over the parcel. "I don't like to break those
great seals; they look so serious. Please open it for me!"
He undid the parcel. Inside was a case of morocco
leather, on the top of which lay a note and a key.
The note was for Clare, in the following words:
My dear son—
Possibly you have forgotten that on the death of your godmother, Mrs
Pitney, when you were a lad, she—vain, kind woman
that she was—left to me a portion of the contents of
her jewel-case in trust for your wife, if you should
ever have one, as a mark of her affection for you
and whomsoever you should choose. This trust I have
fulfilled, and the diamonds have been locked up at
my banker's ever since. Though I feel it to be a
somewhat incongruous act in the circumstances, I am,
as you will see, bound to hand over the articles to
the woman to whom the use of them for her lifetime
will now rightly belong, and they are therefore
promptly sent. They become, I believe, heirlooms,
strictly speaking, according to the terms of your
godmother's will. The precise words of the clause
that refers to this matter are enclosed.
"I do remember," said Clare; "but I had quite forgotten."
Unlocking the case, they found it to contain a necklace,
with pendant, bracelets, and ear-rings; and also some other
small ornaments.
Tess seemed afraid to touch them at first, but her eyes
sparkled for a moment as much as the stones when Clare
spread out the set.
"Are they mine?" she asked incredulously.
"They are, certainly," said he.
He looked into the fire. He remembered how, when he was a
lad of fifteen, his godmother, the Squire's wife—the only
rich person with whom he had ever come in contact—had pinned
her faith to his success; had prophesied a wondrous career
for him. There had seemed nothing at all out of keeping with
such a conjectured career in the storing up of these showy
ornaments for his wife and the wives of her descendants.
They gleamed somewhat ironically now. "Yet why?" he asked
himself. It was but a question of vanity throughout; and if
that were admitted into one side of the equation it should
be admitted into the other. His wife was a d'Urberville:
whom could they become better than her?
Suddenly he said with enthusiasm—
"Tess, put them on—put them on!" And he turned from the
fire to help her.
But as if by magic she had already donned them—necklace,
ear-rings, bracelets, and all.
"But the gown isn't right, Tess," said Clare. "It ought
to be a low one for a set of brilliants like that."
"Ought it?" said Tess.
"Yes," said he.
He suggested to her how to tuck in the upper edge of her
bodice, so as to make it roughly approximate to the cut for
evening wear; and when she had done this, and the pendant to
the necklace hung isolated amid the whiteness of her throat,
as it was designed to do, he stepped back to survey her.
"My heavens," said Clare, "how beautiful you are!"
As everybody knows, fine feathers make fine birds; a
peasant girl but very moderately prepossessing to the casual
observer in her simple condition and attire will bloom as an
amazing beauty if clothed as a woman of fashion with the
aids that Art can render; while the beauty of the midnight
crush would often cut but a sorry figure if placed inside
the field-woman's wrapper upon a monotonous acreage of
turnips on a dull day. He had never till now estimated the
artistic excellence of Tess's limbs and features.
"If you were only to appear in a ball-room!" he said.
"But no—no, dearest; I think I love you best in the
wing-bonnet and cotton-frock—yes, better than in this, well
as you support these dignities."
Tess's sense of her striking appearance had given her a
flush of excitement, which was yet not happiness.
"I'll take them off," she said, "in case Jonathan should
see me. They are not fit for me, are they? They must be
sold, I suppose?"
"Let them stay a few minutes longer. Sell them? Never. It
would be a breach of faith."
Influenced by a second thought she readily obeyed. She
had something to tell, and there might be help in these. She
sat down with the jewels upon her; and they again indulged
in conjectures as to where Jonathan could possibly be with
their baggage. The ale they had poured out for his
consumption when he came had gone flat with long standing.
Shortly after this they began supper, which was already
laid on a side-table. Ere they had finished there was a jerk
in the fire-smoke, the rising skein of which bulged out into
the room, as if some giant had laid his hand on the
chimney-top for a moment. It had been caused by the opening
of the outer door. A heavy step was now heard in the
passage, and Angel went out.
"I couldn' make nobody hear at all by knocking,"
apologized Jonathan Kail, for it was he at last; "and as't
was raining out I opened the door. I've brought the things,
sir."
"I am very glad to see them. But you are very late."
"Well, yes, sir."
There was something subdued in Jonathan Kail's tone which
had not been there in the day, and lines of concern were
ploughed upon his forehead in addition to the lines of
years. He continued—
"We've all been gallied at the dairy at what might ha'
been a most terrible affliction since you and your
Mis'ess—so to name her now—left us this a'ternoon. Perhaps
you ha'nt forgot the cock's afternoon crow?"
"Dear me;—what—"
"Well, some says it do mane one thing, and some another;
but what's happened is that poor little Retty Priddle hev
tried to drown herself."
"No! Really! Why, she bade us goodbye with the rest—"
"Yes. Well, sir, when you and your Mis'ess—so to name
what she lawful is—when you two drove away, as I say, Retty
and Marian put on their bonnets and went out; and as there
is not much doing now, being New Year's Eve, and folks mops
and brooms from what's inside 'em, nobody took much notice.
They went on to Lew-Everard, where they had summut to drink,
and then on they vamped to Dree-armed Cross, and there they
seemed to have parted, Retty striking across the water-meads
as if for home, and Marian going on to the next village,
where there's another public-house. Nothing more was zeed or
heard o' Retty till the waterman, on his way home, noticed
something by the Great Pool; 'twas her bonnet and shawl
packed up. In the water he found her. He and another man
brought her home, thinking a' was dead; but she fetched
round by degrees."
Angel, suddenly recollecting that Tess was overhearing
this gloomy tale, went to shut the door between the passage
and the ante-room to the inner parlour where she was; but
his wife, flinging a shawl round her, had come to the outer
room and was listening to the man's narrative, her eyes
resting absently on the luggage and the drops of rain
glistening upon it.
"And, more than this, there's Marian; she's been found
dead drunk by the withy-bed—a girl who hev never been known
to touch anything before except shilling ale; though, to be
sure, 'a was always a good trencher-woman, as her face
showed. It seems as if the maids had all gone out o' their
minds!"
"And Izz?" asked Tess.
"Izz is about house as usual; but 'a do say 'a can guess
how it happened; and she seems to be very low in mind about
it, poor maid, as well she mid be. And so you see, sir, as
all this happened just when we was packing your few traps
and your Mis'ess's night-rail and dressing things into the
cart, why, it belated me."
"Yes. Well, Jonathan, will you get the trunks upstairs,
and drink a cup of ale, and hasten back as soon as you can,
in case you should be wanted?"
Tess had gone back to the inner parlour, and sat down by
the fire, looking wistfully into it. She heard Jonathan
Kail's heavy footsteps up and down the stairs till he had
done placing the luggage, and heard him express his thanks
for the ale her husband took out to him, and for the
gratuity he received. Jonathan's footsteps then died from
the door, and his cart creaked away.
Angel slid forward the massive oak bar which secured the
door, and coming in to where she sat over the hearth,
pressed her cheeks between his hands from behind. He
expected her to jump up gaily and unpack the toilet-gear
that she had been so anxious about, but as she did not rise
he sat down with her in the firelight, the candles on the
supper-table being too thin and glimmering to interfere with
its glow.
"I am so sorry you should have heard this sad story about
the girls," he said. "Still, don't let it depress you. Retty
was naturally morbid, you know."
"Without the least cause," said Tess. "While they who
have cause to be, hide it, and pretend they are not."
This incident had turned the scale for her. They were
simple and innocent girls on whom the unhappiness of
unrequited love had fallen; they had deserved better at the
hands of Fate. She had deserved worse—yet she was the chosen
one. It was wicked of her to take all without paying. She
would pay to the uttermost farthing; she would tell, there
and then. This final determination she came to when she
looked into the fire, he holding her hand.
A steady glare from the now flameless embers painted the
sides and back of the fireplace with its colour, and the
well-polished andirons, and the old brass tongs that would
not meet. The underside of the mantel-shelf was flushed with
the high-coloured light, and the legs of the table nearest
the fire. Tess's face and neck reflected the same warmth,
which each gem turned into an Aldebaran or a Sirius—a
constellation of white, red, and green flashes, that
interchanged their hues with her every pulsation.
"Do you remember what we said to each other this morning
about telling our faults?" he asked abruptly, finding that
she still remained immovable. "We spoke lightly perhaps, and
you may well have done so. But for me it was no light
promise. I want to make a confession to you, Love."
This, from him, so unexpectedly apposite, had the effect
upon her of a Providential interposition.
"You have to confess something?" she said quickly, and
even with gladness and relief.
"You did not expect it? Ah—you thought too highly of me.
Now listen. Put your head there, because I want you to
forgive me, and not to be indignant with me for not telling
you before, as perhaps I ought to have done."
How strange it was! He seemed to be her double. She did
not speak, and Clare went on—
"I did not mention it because I was afraid of endangering
my chance of you, darling, the great prize of my life—my
Fellowship I call you. My brother's Fellowship was won at
his college, mine at Talbothays Dairy. Well, I would not
risk it. I was going to tell you a month ago—at the time you
agreed to be mine, but I could not; I thought it might
frighten you away from me. I put it off; then I thought I
would tell you yesterday, to give you a chance at least of
escaping me. But I did not. And I did not this morning, when
you proposed our confessing our faults on the landing—the
sinner that I was! But I must, now I see you sitting there
so solemnly. I wonder if you will forgive me?"
"O yes! I am sure that—"
"Well, I hope so. But wait a minute. You don't know. To
begin at the beginning. Though I imagine my poor father
fears that I am one of the eternally lost for my doctrines,
I am of course, a believer in good morals, Tess, as much as
you. I used to wish to be a teacher of men, and it was a
great disappointment to me when I found I could not enter
the Church. I admired spotlessness, even though I could lay
no claim to it, and hated impurity, as I hope I do now.
Whatever one may think of plenary inspiration, one must
heartily subscribe to these words of Paul: 'Be thou an
example— in word, in conversation, in charity, in spirit, in
faith, in purity.' It is the only safeguard for us poor
human beings. 'Integer vitae,' says a Roman poet, who
is strange company for St Paul—
"The man of upright life, from frailties free,
Stands not in need of Moorish spear or bow.
"Well, a certain place is paved with good intentions, and
having felt all that so strongly, you will see what a
terrible remorse it bred in me when, in the midst of my fine
aims for other people, I myself fell."
He then told her of that time of his life to which
allusion has been made when, tossed about by doubts and
difficulties in London, like a cork on the waves, he plunged
into eight-and-forty hours' dissipation with a stranger.
"Happily I awoke almost immediately to a sense of my
folly," he continued. "I would have no more to say to her,
and I came home. I have never repeated the offence. But I
felt I should like to treat you with perfect frankness and
honour, and I could not do so without telling this. Do you
forgive me?"
She pressed his hand tightly for an answer.
"Then we will dismiss it at once and for ever!—too
painful as it is for the occasion—and talk of something
lighter."
"O, Angel—I am almost glad—because now you can
forgive me! I have not made my confession. I have a
confession, too—remember, I said so."
"Ah, to be sure! Now then for it, wicked little one."
"Perhaps, although you smile, it is as serious as yours,
or more so."
"It can hardly be more serious, dearest."
"It cannot—O no, it cannot!" She jumped up joyfully at
the hope. "No, it cannot be more serious, certainly," she
cried, "because 'tis just the same! I will tell you now."
She sat down again.
Their hands were still joined. The ashes under the grate
were lit by the fire vertically, like a torrid waste.
Imagination might have beheld a Last Day luridness in this
red-coaled glow, which fell on his face and hand, and on
hers, peering into the loose hair about her brow, and firing
the delicate skin underneath. A large shadow of her shape
rose upon the wall and ceiling. She bent forward, at which
each diamond on her neck gave a sinister wink like a toad's;
and pressing her forehead against his temple she entered on
her story of her acquaintance with Alec d'Urberville and its
results, murmuring the words without flinching, and with her
eyelids drooping down.
End of Phase the Fourth

Phase the Fifth: The Woman Pays, XXXV-XLIV
XXXV
Her narrative ended; even its re-assertions and secondary explanations
were done. Tess's voice throughout had hardly risen higher
than its opening tone; there had been no exculpatory phrase
of any kind, and she had not wept.
But the complexion even of external things seemed to
suffer transmutation as her announcement progressed. The
fire in the grate looked impish—demoniacally funny, as if it
did not care in the least about her strait. The fender
grinned idly, as if it too did not care. The light from the
water-bottle was merely engaged in a chromatic problem. All
material objects around announced their irresponsibility
with terrible iteration. And yet nothing had changed since
the moments when he had been kissing her; or rather, nothing
in the substance of things. But the essence of things had
changed.
When she ceased, the auricular impressions from their
previous endearments seemed to hustle away into the corner
of their brains, repeating themselves as echoes from a time
of supremely purblind foolishness.
Clare performed the irrelevant act of stirring the fire;
the intelligence had not even yet got to the bottom of him.
After stirring the embers he rose to his feet; all the force
of her disclosure had imparted itself now. His face had
withered. In the strenuousness of his concentration he
treadled fitfully on the floor. He could not, by any
contrivance, think closely enough; that was the meaning of
his vague movement. When he spoke it was in the most
inadequate, commonplace voice of the many varied tones she
had heard from him.
"Tess!"
"Yes, dearest."
"Am I to believe this? From your manner I am to take it
as true. O you cannot be out of your mind! You ought to be!
Yet you are not… My wife, my Tess—nothing in you warrants
such a supposition as that?"
"I am not out of my mind," she said.
"And yet—" He looked vacantly at her, to resume with
dazed senses: "Why didn't you tell me before? Ah, yes, you
would have told me, in a way—but I hindered you, I
remember!"
These and other of his words were nothing but the
perfunctory babble of the surface while the depths remained
paralyzed. He turned away, and bent over a chair. Tess
followed him to the middle of the room, where he was, and
stood there staring at him with eyes that did not weep.
Presently she slid down upon her knees beside his foot, and
from this position she crouched in a heap.
"In the name of our love, forgive me!" she whispered with
a dry mouth. "I have forgiven you for the same!"
And, as he did not answer, she said again—
"Forgive me as you are forgiven! I forgive you,
Angel."
"You—yes, you do."
"But you do not forgive me?"
"O Tess, forgiveness does not apply to the case! You were
one person; now you are another. My God—how can forgiveness
meet such a grotesque—prestidigitation as that!"
He paused, contemplating this definition; then suddenly
broke into horrible laughter—as unnatural and ghastly as a
laugh in hell.
"Don't—don't! It kills me quite, that!" she shrieked. "O
have mercy upon me—have mercy!"
He did not answer; and, sickly white, she jumped up.
"Angel, Angel! what do you mean by that laugh?" she cried
out. "Do you know what this is to me?"
He shook his head.
"I have been hoping, longing, praying, to make you happy!
I have thought what joy it will be to do it, what an
unworthy wife I shall be if I do not! That's what I have
felt, Angel!"
"I know that."
"I thought, Angel, that you loved me—me, my very self! If
it is I you do love, O how can it be that you look and speak
so? It frightens me! Having begun to love you, I love you
for ever—in all changes, in all disgraces, because you are
yourself. I ask no more. Then how can you, O my own husband,
stop loving me?"
"I repeat, the woman I have been loving is not you."
"But who?"
"Another woman in your shape."
She perceived in his words the realization of her own
apprehensive foreboding in former times. He looked upon her
as a species of imposter; a guilty woman in the guise of an
innocent one. Terror was upon her white face as she saw it;
her cheek was flaccid, and her mouth had almost the aspect
of a round little hole. The horrible sense of his view of
her so deadened her that she staggered, and he stepped
forward, thinking she was going to fall.
"Sit down, sit down," he said gently. "You are ill; and
it is natural that you should be."
She did sit down, without knowing where she was, that
strained look still upon her face, and her eyes such as to
make his flesh creep.
"I don't belong to you any more, then; do I, Angel?" she
asked helplessly. "It is not me, but another woman like me
that he loved, he says."
The image raised caused her to take pity upon herself as
one who was ill-used. Her eyes filled as she regarded her
position further; she turned round and burst into a flood of
self-sympathetic tears.
Clare was relieved at this change, for the effect on her
of what had happened was beginning to be a trouble to him
only less than the woe of the disclosure itself. He waited
patiently, apathetically, till the violence of her grief had
worn itself out, and her rush of weeping had lessened to a
catching gasp at intervals.
"Angel," she said suddenly, in her natural tones, the
insane, dry voice of terror having left her now. "Angel, am
I too wicked for you and me to live together?"
"I have not been able to think what we can do."
"I shan't ask you to let me live with you, Angel, because
I have no right to! I shall not write to mother and sisters
to say we be married, as I said I would do; and I shan't
finish the good-hussif' I cut out and meant to make while we
were in lodgings."
"Shan't you?"
"No, I shan't do anything, unless you order me to; and if
you go away from me I shall not follow 'ee; and if you never
speak to me any more I shall not ask why, unless you tell me
I may."
"And if I order you to do anything?"
"I will obey you like your wretched slave, even if it is
to lie down and die."
"You are very good. But it strikes me that there is a
want of harmony between your present mood of self-sacrifice
and your past mood of self-preservation."
These were the first words of antagonism. To fling
elaborate sarcasms at Tess, however, was much like flinging
them at a dog or cat. The charms of their subtlety passed by
her unappreciated, and she only received them as inimical
sounds which meant that anger ruled. She remained mute, not
knowing that he was smothering his affection for her. She
hardly observed that a tear descended slowly upon his cheek,
a tear so large that it magnified the pores of the skin over
which it rolled, like the object lens of a microscope.
Meanwhile reillumination as to the terrible and total change
that her confession had wrought in his life, in his
universe, returned to him, and he tried desperately to
advance among the new conditions in which he stood. Some
consequent action was necessary; yet what?
"Tess," he said, as gently as he could speak, "I cannot
stay—in this room—just now. I will walk out a little way."
He quietly left the room, and the two glasses of wine
that he had poured out for their supper—one for her, one for
him—remained on the table untasted. This was what their
agape had come to. At tea, two or three hours earlier,
they had, in the freakishness of affection, drunk from one
cup.
The closing of the door behind him, gently as it had been
pulled to, roused Tess from her stupor. He was gone; she
could not stay. Hastily flinging her cloak around her she
opened the door and followed, putting out the candles as if
she were never coming back. The rain was over and the night
was now clear.
She was soon close at his heels, for Clare walked slowly
and without purpose. His form beside her light gray figure
looked black, sinister, and forbidding, and she felt as
sarcasm the touch of the jewels of which she had been
momentarily so proud. Clare turned at hearing her footsteps,
but his recognition of her presence seemed to make no
difference to him, and he went on over the five yawning
arches of the great bridge in front of the house.
The cow and horse tracks in the road were full of water,
the rain having been enough to charge them, but not enough
to wash them away. Across these minute pools the reflected
stars flitted in a quick transit as she passed; she would
not have known they were shining overhead if she had not
seen them there—the vastest things of the universe imaged in
objects so mean.
The place to which they had travelled to-day was in the
same valley as Talbothays, but some miles lower down the
river; and the surroundings being open, she kept easily in
sight of him. Away from the house the road wound through the
meads, and along these she followed Clare without any
attempt to come up with him or to attract him, but with dumb
and vacant fidelity.
At last, however, her listless walk brought her up
alongside him, and still he said nothing. The cruelty of
fooled honesty is often great after enlightenment, and it
was mighty in Clare now. The outdoor air had apparently
taken away from him all tendency to act on impulse; she knew
that he saw her without irradiation—in all her bareness;
that Time was chanting his satiric psalm at her then—
Behold, when thy face is made bare, he that loved thee
shall hate;
Thy face shall be no more fair at the fall of thy fate.
For thy life shall fall as a leaf and be shed as the
rain;
And the veil of thine head shall be grief, and the crown
shall be pain.
He was still intently thinking, and her companionship had now
insufficient power to break or divert the strain of thought.
What a weak thing her presence must have become to him! She
could not help addressing Clare.
"What have I done—what have I done! I have not
told of anything that interferes with or belies my love for
you. You don't think I planned it, do you? It is in your own
mind what you are angry at, Angel; it is not in me. O, it is
not in me, and I am not that deceitful woman you think me!"
"H'm—well. Not deceitful, my wife; but not the same. No,
not the same. But do not make me reproach you. I have sworn
that I will not; and I will do everything to avoid it."
But she went on pleading in her distraction; and perhaps
said things that would have been better left to silence.
"Angel!—Angel! I was a child—a child when it happened! I
knew nothing of men."
"You were more sinned against than sinning, that I
admit."
"Then will you not forgive me?"
"I do forgive you, but forgiveness is not all."
"And love me?"
To this question he did not answer.
"O Angel—my mother says that it sometimes happens so!—she
knows several cases where they were worse than I, and the
husband has not minded it much—has got over it at least. And
yet the woman had not loved him as I do you!"
"Don't, Tess; don't argue. Different societies, different
manners. You almost make me say you are an unapprehending
peasant woman, who have never been initiated into the
proportions of social things. You don't know what you say."
"I am only a peasant by position, not by nature!"
She spoke with an impulse to anger, but it went as it
came.
"So much the worse for you. I think that parson who
unearthed your pedigree would have done better if he had
held his tongue. I cannot help associating your decline as a
family with this other fact—of your want of firmness.
Decrepit families imply decrepit wills, decrepit conduct.
Heaven, why did you give me a handle for despising you more
by informing me of your descent! Here was I thinking you a
new-sprung child of nature; there were you, the belated
seedling of an effete aristocracy!"
"Lots of families are as bad as mine in that! Retty's
family were once large landowners, and so were Dairyman
Billett's. And the Debbyhouses, who now are carters, were
once the De Bayeux family. You find such as I everywhere;
'tis a feature of our county, and I can't help it."
"So much the worse for the county."
She took these reproaches in their bulk simply, not in
their particulars; he did not love her as he had loved her
hitherto, and to all else she was indifferent.
They wandered on again in silence. It was said afterwards
that a cottager of Wellbridge, who went out late that night
for a doctor, met two lovers in the pastures, walking very
slowly, without converse, one behind the other, as in a
funeral procession, and the glimpse that he obtained of
their faces seemed to denote that they were anxious and sad.
Returning later, he passed them again in the same field,
progressing just as slowly, and as regardless of the hour
and of the cheerless night as before. It was only on account
of his preoccupation with his own affairs, and the illness
in his house, that he did not bear in mind the curious
incident, which, however, he recalled a long while after.
During the interval of the cottager's going and coming,
she had said to her husband— "I don't see how I can help
being the cause of much misery to you all your life. The
river is down there. I can put an end to myself in it. I am
not afraid."
"I don't wish to add murder to my other follies," he
said.
"I will leave something to show that I did it myself—on
account of my shame. They will not blame you then."
"Don't speak so absurdly—I wish not to hear it. It is
nonsense to have such thoughts in this kind of case, which
is rather one for satirical laughter than for tragedy. You
don't in the least understand the quality of the mishap. It
would be viewed in the light of a joke by nine-tenths of the
world if it were known. Please oblige me by returning to the
house, and going to bed."
"I will," said she dutifully.
They had rambled round by a road which led to the
well-known ruins of the Cistercian abbey behind the mill,
the latter having, in centuries past, been attached to the
monastic establishment. The mill still worked on, food being
a perennial necessity; the abbey had perished, creeds being
transient. One continually sees the ministration of the
temporary outlasting the ministration of the eternal. Their
walk having been circuitous, they were still not far from
the house, and in obeying his direction she only had to
reach the large stone bridge across the main river and
follow the road for a few yards. When she got back,
everything remained as she had left it, the fire being still
burning. She did not stay downstairs for more than a minute,
but proceeded to her chamber, whither the luggage had been
taken. Here she sat down on the edge of the bed, looking
blankly around, and presently began to undress. In removing
the light towards the bedstead its rays fell upon the tester
of white dimity; something was hanging beneath it, and she
lifted the candle to see what it was. A bough of mistletoe.
Angel had put it there; she knew that in an instant. This
was the explanation of that mysterious parcel which it had
been so difficult to pack and bring; whose contents he would
not explain to her, saying that time would soon show her the
purpose thereof. In his zest and his gaiety he had hung it
there. How foolish and inopportune that mistletoe looked
now.
Having nothing more to fear, having scarce anything to
hope, for that he would relent there seemed no promise
whatever, she lay down dully. When sorrow ceases to be
speculative, sleep sees her opportunity. Among so many
happier moods which forbid repose this was a mood which
welcomed it, and in a few minutes the lonely Tess forgot
existence, surrounded by the aromatic stillness of the
chamber that had once, possibly, been the bride-chamber of
her own ancestry.
Later on that night Clare also retraced his steps to the
house. Entering softly to the sitting-room he obtained a
light, and with the manner of one who had considered his
course he spread his rugs upon the old horse-hair sofa which
stood there, and roughly shaped it to a sleeping-couch.
Before lying down he crept shoeless upstairs, and listened
at the door of her apartment. Her measured breathing told
that she was sleeping profoundly.
"Thank God!" murmured Clare; and yet he was conscious of
a pang of bitterness at the thought—approximately true,
though not wholly so—that having shifted the burden of her
life to his shoulders, she was now reposing without care.
He turned away to descend; then, irresolute, faced round
to her door again. In the act he caught sight of one of the
d'Urberville dames, whose portrait was immediately over the
entrance to Tess's bedchamber. In the candlelight the
painting was more than unpleasant. Sinister design lurked in
the woman's features, a concentrated purpose of revenge on
the other sex—so it seemed to him then. The Caroline bodice
of the portrait was low—precisely as Tess's had been when he
tucked it in to show the necklace; and again he experienced
the distressing sensation of a resemblance between them.
The check was sufficient. He resumed his retreat and
descended.
His air remained calm and cold, his small compressed
mouth indexing his powers of self-control; his face wearing
still that terrible sterile expression which had spread
thereon since her disclosure. It was the face of a man who
was no longer passion's slave, yet who found no advantage in
his enfranchisement. He was simply regarding the harrowing
contingencies of human experience, the unexpectedness of
things. Nothing so pure, so sweet, so virginal as Tess had
seemed possible all the long while that he had adored her,
up to an hour ago; but
The little less, and what worlds away!
He argued erroneously when he said to himself that her heart
was not indexed in the honest freshness of her face; but
Tess had no advocate to set him right. Could it be possible,
he continued, that eyes which as they gazed never expressed
any divergence from what the tongue was telling, were yet
ever seeing another world behind her ostensible one,
discordant and contrasting?
He reclined on his couch in the sitting-room, and
extinguished the light. The night came in, and took up its
place there, unconcerned and indifferent; the night which
had already swallowed up his happiness, and was now
digesting it listlessly; and was ready to swallow up the
happiness of a thousand other people with as little
disturbance or change of mien.
XXXVI
Clare arose in the light of a dawn that was ashy and
furtive, as though associated with crime. The fireplace
confronted him with its extinct embers; the spread
supper-table, whereon stood the two full glasses of untasted
wine, now flat and filmy; her vacated seat and his own; the
other articles of furniture, with their eternal look of not
being able to help it, their intolerable inquiry what was to
be done? From above there was no sound; but in a few minutes
there came a knock at the door. He remembered that it would
be the neighbouring cottager's wife, who was to minister to
their wants while they remained here.
The presence of a third person in the house would be
extremely awkward just now, and, being already dressed, he
opened the window and informed her that they could manage to
shift for themselves that morning. She had a milk-can in her
hand, which he told her to leave at the door. When the dame
had gone away he searched in the back quarters of the house
for fuel, and speedily lit a fire. There was plenty of eggs,
butter, bread, and so on in the larder, and Clare soon had
breakfast laid, his experiences at the dairy having rendered
him facile in domestic preparations. The smoke of the
kindled wood rose from the chimney without like a
lotus-headed column; local people who were passing by saw
it, and thought of the newly-married couple, and envied
their happiness.
Angel cast a final glance round, and then going to the
foot of the stairs, called in a conventional voice—
"Breakfast is ready!"
He opened the front door, and took a few steps in the
morning air. When, after a short space, he came back she was
already in the sitting-room mechanically readjusting the
breakfast things. As she was fully attired, and the interval
since his calling her had been but two or three minutes, she
must have been dressed or nearly so before he went to summon
her. Her hair was twisted up in a large round mass at the
back of her head, and she had put on one of the new frocks—a
pale blue woollen garment with neck-frillings of white. Her
hands and face appeared to be cold, and she had possibly
been sitting dressed in the bedroom a long time without any
fire. The marked civility of Clare's tone in calling her
seemed to have inspired her, for the moment, with a new
glimmer of hope. But it soon died when she looked at him.
The pair were, in truth, but the ashes of their former
fires. To the hot sorrow of the previous night had succeeded
heaviness; it seemed as if nothing could kindle either of
them to fervour of sensation any more.
He spoke gently to her, and she replied with a like
undemonstrativeness. At last she came up to him, looking in
his sharply-defined face as one who had no consciousness
that her own formed a visible object also.
"Angel!" she said, and paused, touching him with her
fingers lightly as a breeze, as though she could hardly
believe to be there in the flesh the man who was once her
lover. Her eyes were bright, her pale cheek still showed its
wonted roundness, though half-dried tears had left
glistening traces thereon; and the usually ripe red mouth
was almost as pale as her cheek. Throbbingly alive as she
was still, under the stress of her mental grief the life
beat so brokenly that a little further pull upon it would
cause real illness, dull her characteristic eyes, and make
her mouth thin.
She looked absolutely pure. Nature, in her fantastic
trickery, had set such a seal of maidenhood upon Tess's
countenance that he gazed at her with a stupefied air.
"Tess! Say it is not true! No, it is not true!"
"It is true."
"Every word?"
"Every word."
He looked at her imploringly, as if he would willingly
have taken a lie from her lips, knowing it to be one, and
have made of it, by some sort of sophistry, a valid denial.
However, she only repeated—
"It is true."
"Is he living?" Angel then asked.
"The baby died."
"But the man?"
"He is alive."
A last despair passed over Clare's face.
"Is he in England?"
"Yes."
He took a few vague steps.
"My position—is this," he said abruptly. "I thought—any
man would have thought—that by giving up all ambition to win
a wife with social standing, with fortune, with knowledge of
the world, I should secure rustic innocence as surely as I
should secure pink cheeks; but—However, I am no man to
reproach you, and I will not."
Tess felt his position so entirely that the remainder had
not been needed. Therein lay just the distress of it; she
saw that he had lost all round.
"Angel—I should not have let it go on to marriage with
you if I had not known that, after all, there was a last way
out of it for you; though I hoped you would never—"
Her voice grew husky.
"A last way?"
"I mean, to get rid of me. You can get rid of me."
"How?"
"By divorcing me."
"Good heavens—how can you be so simple! How can I divorce
you?"
"Can't you—now I have told you? I thought my confession
would give you grounds for that."
"O Tess—you are too, too—childish—unformed—crude, I
suppose! I don't know what you are. You don't understand the
law—you don't understand!"
"What—you cannot?"
"Indeed I cannot."
A quick shame mixed with the misery upon his listener's
face.
"I thought—I thought," she whispered. "O, now I see how
wicked I seem to you! Believe me—believe me, on my soul, I
never thought but that you could! I hoped you would not; yet
I believed, without a doubt, that you could cast me off if
you were determined, and didn't love me at—at—all!"
"You were mistaken," he said.
"O, then I ought to have done it, to have done it last
night! But I hadn't the courage. That's just like me!"
"The courage to do what?"
As she did not answer he took her by the hand.
"What were you thinking of doing?" he inquired.
"Of putting an end to myself."
"When?"
She writhed under this inquisitorial manner of his. "Last
night," she answered.
"Where?"
"Under your mistletoe."
"My good—! How?" he asked sternly.
"I'll tell you, if you won't be angry with me!" she said,
shrinking. "It was with the cord of my box. But I could
not—do the last thing! I was afraid that it might cause a
scandal to your name."
The unexpected quality of this confession, wrung from
her, and not volunteered, shook him perceptibly. But he
still held her, and, letting his glance fall from her face
downwards, he said, "Now, listen to this. You must not dare
to think of such a horrible thing! How could you! You will
promise me as your husband to attempt that no more."
"I am ready to promise. I saw how wicked it was."
"Wicked! The idea was unworthy of you beyond
description."
"But, Angel," she pleaded, enlarging her eyes in calm
unconcern upon him, "it was thought of entirely on your
account—to set you free without the scandal of the divorce
that I thought you would have to get. I should never have
dreamt of doing it on mine. However, to do it with my own
hand is too good for me, after all. It is you, my ruined
husband, who ought to strike the blow. I think I should love
you more, if that were possible, if you could bring yourself
to do it, since there's no other way of escape for 'ee. I
feel I am so utterly worthless! So very greatly in the way!"
"Ssh!"
"Well, since you say no, I won't. I have no wish opposed
to yours."
He knew this to be true enough. Since the desperation of
the night her activities had dropped to zero, and there was
no further rashness to be feared.
Tess tried to busy herself again over the breakfast-table
with more or less success, and they sat down both on the
same side, so that their glances did not meet. There was at
first something awkward in hearing each other eat and drink,
but this could not be escaped; moreover, the amount of
eating done was small on both sides. Breakfast over, he
rose, and telling her the hour at which he might be expected
to dinner, went off to the miller's in a mechanical
pursuance of the plan of studying that business, which had
been his only practical reason for coming here.
When he was gone Tess stood at the window, and presently
saw his form crossing the great stone bridge which conducted
to the mill premises. He sank behind it, crossed the railway
beyond, and disappeared. Then, without a sigh, she turned
her attention to the room, and began clearing the table and
setting it in order.
The charwoman soon came. Her presence was at first a
strain upon Tess, but afterwards an alleviation. At
half-past twelve she left her assistant alone in the
kitchen, and, returning to the sitting-room, waited for the
reappearance of Angel's form behind the bridge.
About one he showed himself. Her face flushed, although
he was a quarter of a mile off. She ran to the kitchen to
get the dinner served by the time he should enter. He went
first to the room where they had washed their hands together
the day before, and as he entered the sitting-room the
dish-covers rose from the dishes as if by his own motion.
"How punctual!" he said.
"Yes. I saw you coming over the bridge," said she.
The meal was passed in commonplace talk of what he had
been doing during the morning at the Abbey Mill, of the
methods of bolting and the old-fashioned machinery, which he
feared would not enlighten him greatly on modern improved
methods, some of it seeming to have been in use ever since
the days it ground for the monks in the adjoining conventual
buildings—now a heap of ruins. He left the house again in
the course of an hour, coming home at dusk, and occupying
himself through the evening with his papers. She feared she
was in the way and, when the old woman was gone, retired to
the kitchen, where she made herself busy as well as she
could for more than an hour.
Clare's shape appeared at the door. "You must not work
like this," he said. "You are not my servant; you are my
wife."
She raised her eyes, and brightened somewhat. "I may
think myself that—indeed?" she murmured, in piteous
raillery. "You mean in name! Well, I don't want to be
anything more."
"You may think so, Tess! You are. What do you
mean?"
"I don't know," she said hastily, with tears in her
accents. "I thought I—because I am not respectable, I mean.
I told you I thought I was not respectable enough long
ago—and on that account I didn't want to marry you,
only—only you urged me!"
She broke into sobs, and turned her back to him. It would
almost have won round any man but Angel Clare. Within the
remote depths of his constitution, so gentle and
affectionate as he was in general, there lay hidden a hard
logical deposit, like a vein of metal in a soft loam, which
turned the edge of everything that attempted to traverse it.
It had blocked his acceptance of the Church; it blocked his
acceptance of Tess. Moreover, his affection itself was less
fire than radiance, and, with regard to the other sex, when
he ceased to believe he ceased to follow: contrasting in
this with many impressionable natures, who remain sensuously
infatuated with what they intellectually despise. He waited
till her sobbing ceased.
"I wish half the women in England were as respectable as
you," he said, in an ebullition of bitterness against
womankind in general. "It isn't a question of
respectability, but one of principle!"
He spoke such things as these and more of a kindred sort
to her, being still swayed by the antipathetic wave which
warps direct souls with such persistence when once their
vision finds itself mocked by appearances. There was, it is
true, underneath, a back current of sympathy through which a
woman of the world might have conquered him. But Tess did
not think of this; she took everything as her deserts, and
hardly opened her mouth. The firmness of her devotion to him
was indeed almost pitiful; quick-tempered as she naturally
was, nothing that he could say made her unseemly; she sought
not her own; was not provoked; thought no evil of his
treatment of her. She might just now have been Apostolic
Charity herself returned to a self-seeking modern world.
This evening, night, and morning were passed precisely as
the preceding ones had been passed. On one, and only one,
occasion did she—the formerly free and independent
Tess—venture to make any advances. It was on the third
occasion of his starting after a meal to go out to the
flour-mill. As he was leaving the table he said "Goodbye,"
and she replied in the same words, at the same time
inclining her mouth in the way of his. He did not avail
himself of the invitation, saying, as he turned hastily
aside—
"I shall be home punctually."
Tess shrank into herself as if she had been struck. Often
enough had he tried to reach those lips against her
consent—often had he said gaily that her mouth and breath
tasted of the butter and eggs and milk and honey on which
she mainly lived, that he drew sustenance from them, and
other follies of that sort. But he did not care for them
now. He observed her sudden shrinking, and said gently—
"You know, I have to think of a course. It was imperative
that we should stay together a little while, to avoid the
scandal to you that would have resulted from our immediate
parting. But you must see it is only for form's sake."
"Yes," said Tess absently.
He went out, and on his way to the mill stood still, and
wished for a moment that he had responded yet more kindly,
and kissed her once at least.
Thus they lived through this despairing day or two; in
the same house, truly; but more widely apart than before
they were lovers. It was evident to her that he was, as he
had said, living with paralyzed activities in his endeavour
to think of a plan of procedure. She was awe-stricken to
discover such determination under such apparent flexibility.
His consistency was, indeed, too cruel. She no longer
expected forgiveness now. More than once she thought of
going away from him during his absence at the mill; but she
feared that this, instead of benefiting him, might be the
means of hampering and humiliating him yet more if it should
become known.
Meanwhile Clare was meditating, verily. His thought had
been unsuspended; he was becoming ill with thinking; eaten
out with thinking, withered by thinking; scourged out of all
his former pulsating, flexuous domesticity. He walked about
saying to himself, "What's to be done—what's to be done?"
and by chance she overheard him. It caused her to break the
reserve about their future which had hitherto prevailed.
"I suppose—you are not going to live with me—long, are
you, Angel?" she asked, the sunk corners of her mouth
betraying how purely mechanical were the means by which she
retained that expression of chastened calm upon her face.
"I cannot" he said, "without despising myself, and what
is worse, perhaps, despising you. I mean, of course, cannot
live with you in the ordinary sense. At present, whatever I
feel, I do not despise you. And, let me speak plainly, or
you may not see all my difficulties. How can we live
together while that man lives?—he being your husband in
nature, and not I. If he were dead it might be different…
Besides, that's not all the difficulty; it lies in another
consideration—one bearing upon the future of other people
than ourselves. Think of years to come, and children being
born to us, and this past matter getting known—for it must
get known. There is not an uttermost part of the earth but
somebody comes from it or goes to it from elsewhere. Well,
think of wretches of our flesh and blood growing up under a
taunt which they will gradually get to feel the full force
of with their expanding years. What an awakening for them!
What a prospect! Can you honestly say 'Remain' after
contemplating this contingency? Don't you think we had
better endure the ills we have than fly to others?"
Her eyelids, weighted with trouble, continued drooping as
before.
"I cannot say 'Remain,'" she answered, "I cannot; I had
not thought so far."
Tess's feminine hope—shall we confess it?—had been so
obstinately recuperative as to revive in her surreptitious
visions of a domiciliary intimacy continued long enough to
break down his coldness even against his judgement. Though
unsophisticated in the usual sense, she was not incomplete;
and it would have denoted deficiency of womanhood if she had
not instinctively known what an argument lies in
propinquity. Nothing else would serve her, she knew, if this
failed. It was wrong to hope in what was of the nature of
strategy, she said to herself: yet that sort of hope she
could not extinguish. His last representation had now been
made, and it was, as she said, a new view. She had truly
never thought so far as that, and his lucid picture of
possible offspring who would scorn her was one that brought
deadly convictions to an honest heart which was humanitarian
to its centre. Sheer experience had already taught her that
in some circumstances there was one thing better than to
lead a good life, and that was to be saved from leading any
life whatever. Like all who have been previsioned by
suffering, she could, in the words of M. Sully-Prudhomme,
hear a penal sentence in the fiat, "You shall be born,"
particularly if addressed to potential issue of hers.
Yet such is the vulpine slyness of Dame Nature, that,
till now, Tess had been hoodwinked by her love for Clare
into forgetting it might result in vitalizations that would
inflict upon others what she had bewailed as misfortune to
herself.
She therefore could not withstand his argument. But with
the self-combating proclivity of the supersensitive, an
answer thereto arose in Clare's own mind, and he almost
feared it. It was based on her exceptional physical nature;
and she might have used it promisingly. She might have added
besides: "On an Australian upland or Texan plain, who is to
know or care about my misfortunes, or to reproach me or
you?" Yet, like the majority of women, she accepted the
momentary presentment as if it were the inevitable. And she
may have been right. The intuitive heart of woman knoweth
not only its own bitterness, but its husband's, and even if
these assumed reproaches were not likely to be addressed to
him or to his by strangers, they might have reached his ears
from his own fastidious brain.
It was the third day of the estrangement. Some might risk
the odd paradox that with more animalism he would have been
the nobler man. We do not say it. Yet Clare's love was
doubtless ethereal to a fault, imaginative to
impracticability. With these natures, corporal presence is
something less appealing than corporal absence; the latter
creating an ideal presence that conveniently drops the
defects of the real. She found that her personality did not
plead her cause so forcibly as she had anticipated. The
figurative phrase was true: she was another woman than the
one who had excited his desire.
"I have thought over what you say," she remarked to him,
moving her forefinger over the tablecloth, her other hand,
which bore the ring that mocked them both, supporting her
forehead. "It is quite true, all of it; it must be. You must
go away from me."
"But what can you do?"
"I can go home."
Clare had not thought of that.
"Are you sure?" he inquired.
"Quite sure. We ought to part, and we may as well get it
past and done. You once said that I was apt to win men
against their better judgement; and if I am constantly
before your eyes I may cause you to change your plans in
opposition to your reason and wish; and afterwards your
repentance and my sorrow will be terrible."
"And you would like to go home?" he asked.
"I want to leave you, and go home."
"Then it shall be so."
Though she did not look up at him, she started. There was
a difference between the proposition and the covenant, which
she had felt only too quickly.
"I feared it would come to this," she murmured, her
countenance meekly fixed. "I don't complain, Angel, I—I
think it best. What you said has quite convinced me. Yes,
though nobody else should reproach me if we should stay
together, yet somewhen, years hence, you might get angry
with me for any ordinary matter, and knowing what you do of
my bygones, you yourself might be tempted to say words, and
they might be overheard, perhaps by my own children. O, what
only hurts me now would torture and kill me then! I will
go—to-morrow."
"And I shall not stay here. Though I didn't like to
initiate it, I have seen that it was advisable we should
part—at least for a while, till I can better see the shape
that things have taken, and can write to you."
Tess stole a glance at her husband. He was pale, even
tremulous; but, as before, she was appalled by the
determination revealed in the depths of this gentle being
she had married—the will to subdue the grosser to the
subtler emotion, the substance to the conception, the flesh
to the spirit. Propensities, tendencies, habits, were as
dead leaves upon the tyrannous wind of his imaginative
ascendency.
He may have observed her look, for he explained—
"I think of people more kindly when I am away from them";
adding cynically, "God knows; perhaps we will shake down
together some day, for weariness; thousands have done it!"
That day he began to pack up, and she went upstairs and
began to pack also. Both knew that it was in their two minds
that they might part the next morning for ever, despite the
gloss of assuaging conjectures thrown over their proceeding
because they were of the sort to whom any parting which has
an air of finality is a torture. He knew, and she knew,
that, though the fascination which each had exercised over
the other—on her part independently of accomplishments—would
probably in the first days of their separation be even more
potent than ever, time must attenuate that effect; the
practical arguments against accepting her as a housemate
might pronounce themselves more strongly in the boreal light
of a remoter view. Moreover, when two people are once
parted—have abandoned a common domicile and a common
environment—new growths insensibly bud upward to fill each
vacated place; unforeseen accidents hinder intentions, and
old plans are forgotten.
XXXVII
Midnight came and passed silently, for there was nothing
to announce it in the Valley of the Froom.
Not long after one o'clock there was a slight creak in
the darkened farmhouse once the mansion of the
d'Urbervilles. Tess, who used the upper chamber, heard it
and awoke. It had come from the corner step of the
staircase, which, as usual, was loosely nailed. She saw the
door of her bedroom open, and the figure of her husband
crossed the stream of moonlight with a curiously careful
tread. He was in his shirt and trousers only, and her first
flush of joy died when she perceived that his eyes were
fixed in an unnatural stare on vacancy. When he reached the
middle of the room he stood still and murmured in tones of
indescribable sadness—
"Dead! dead! dead!"
Under the influence of any strongly-disturbing force,
Clare would occasionally walk in his sleep, and even perform
strange feats, such as he had done on the night of their
return from market just before their marriage, when he
re-enacted in his bedroom his combat with the man who had
insulted her. Tess saw that continued mental distress had
wrought him into that somnambulistic state now.
Her loyal confidence in him lay so deep down in her
heart, that, awake or asleep, he inspired her with no sort
of personal fear. If he had entered with a pistol in his
hand he would scarcely have disturbed her trust in his
protectiveness.
Clare came close, and bent over her. "Dead, dead, dead!"
he murmured.
After fixedly regarding her for some moments with the
same gaze of unmeasurable woe, he bent lower, enclosed her
in his arms, and rolled her in the sheet as in a shroud.
Then lifting her from the bed with as much respect as one
would show to a dead body, he carried her across the room,
murmuring—
"My poor, poor Tess—my dearest, darling Tess! So sweet,
so good, so true!"
The words of endearment, withheld so severely in his
waking hours, were inexpressibly sweet to her forlorn and
hungry heart. If it had been to save her weary life she
would not, by moving or struggling, have put an end to the
position she found herself in. Thus she lay in absolute
stillness, scarcely venturing to breathe, and, wondering
what he was going to do with her, suffered herself to be
borne out upon the landing.
"My wife—dead, dead!" he said.
He paused in his labours for a moment to lean with her
against the banister. Was he going to throw her down?
Self-solicitude was near extinction in her, and in the
knowledge that he had planned to depart on the morrow,
possibly for always, she lay in his arms in this precarious
position with a sense rather of luxury than of terror. If
they could only fall together, and both be dashed to pieces,
how fit, how desirable.
However, he did not let her fall, but took advantage of
the support of the handrail to imprint a kiss upon her
lips—lips in the day-time scorned. Then he clasped her with
a renewed firmness of hold, and descended the staircase. The
creak of the loose stair did not awaken him, and they
reached the ground-floor safely. Freeing one of his hands
from his grasp of her for a moment, he slid back the
door-bar and passed out, slightly striking his stockinged
toe against the edge of the door. But this he seemed not to
mind, and, having room for extension in the open air, he
lifted her against his shoulder, so that he could carry her
with ease, the absence of clothes taking much from his
burden. Thus he bore her off the premises in the direction
of the river a few yards distant.
His ultimate intention, if he had any, she had not yet
divined; and she found herself conjecturing on the matter as
a third person might have done. So easefully had she
delivered her whole being up to him that it pleased her to
think he was regarding her as his absolute possession, to
dispose of as he should choose. It was consoling, under the
hovering terror of to-morrow's separation, to feel that he
really recognized her now as his wife Tess, and did not cast
her off, even if in that recognition he went so far as to
arrogate to himself the right of harming her.
Ah! now she knew what he was dreaming of—that Sunday
morning when he had borne her along through the water with
the other dairymaids, who had loved him nearly as much as
she, if that were possible, which Tess could hardly admit.
Clare did not cross the bridge with her, but proceeding
several paces on the same side towards the adjoining mill,
at length stood still on the brink of the river.
Its waters, in creeping down these miles of meadowland,
frequently divided, serpentining in purposeless curves,
looping themselves around little islands that had no name,
returning and re-embodying themselves as a broad main stream
further on. Opposite the spot to which he had brought her
was such a general confluence, and the river was
proportionately voluminous and deep. Across it was a narrow
foot-bridge; but now the autumn flood had washed the
handrail away, leaving the bare plank only, which, lying a
few inches above the speeding current, formed a giddy
pathway for even steady heads; and Tess had noticed from the
window of the house in the day-time young men walking across
upon it as a feat in balancing. Her husband had possibly
observed the same performance; anyhow, he now mounted the
plank, and, sliding one foot forward, advanced along it.
Was he going to drown her? Probably he was. The spot was
lonely, the river deep and wide enough to make such a
purpose easy of accomplishment. He might drown her if he
would; it would be better than parting to-morrow to lead
severed lives.
The swift stream raced and gyrated under them, tossing,
distorting, and splitting the moon's reflected face. Spots
of froth travelled past, and intercepted weeds waved behind
the piles. If they could both fall together into the current
now, their arms would be so tightly clasped together that
they could not be saved; they would go out of the world
almost painlessly, and there would be no more reproach to
her, or to him for marrying her. His last half-hour with her
would have been a loving one, while if they lived till he
awoke, his day-time aversion would return, and this hour
would remain to be contemplated only as a transient dream.
The impulse stirred in her, yet she dared not indulge it,
to make a movement that would have precipitated them both
into the gulf. How she valued her own life had been proved;
but his—she had no right to tamper with it. He reached the
other side with her in safety.
Here they were within a plantation which formed the Abbey
grounds, and taking a new hold of her he went onward a few
steps till they reached the ruined choir of the
Abbey-church. Against the north wall was the empty stone
coffin of an abbot, in which every tourist with a turn for
grim humour was accustomed to stretch himself. In this Clare
carefully laid Tess. Having kissed her lips a second time he
breathed deeply, as if a greatly desired end were attained.
Clare then lay down on the ground alongside, when he
immediately fell into the deep dead slumber of exhaustion,
and remained motionless as a log. The spurt of mental
excitement which had produced the effort was now over.
Tess sat up in the coffin. The night, though dry and mild
for the season, was more than sufficiently cold to make it
dangerous for him to remain here long, in his half-clothed
state. If he were left to himself he would in all
probability stay there till the morning, and be chilled to
certain death. She had heard of such deaths after
sleep-walking. But how could she dare to awaken him, and let
him know what he had been doing, when it would mortify him
to discover his folly in respect of her? Tess, however,
stepping out of her stone confine, shook him slightly, but
was unable to arouse him without being violent. It was
indispensable to do something, for she was beginning to
shiver, the sheet being but a poor protection. Her
excitement had in a measure kept her warm during the few
minutes' adventure; but that beatific interval was over.
It suddenly occurred to her to try persuasion; and
accordingly she whispered in his ear, with as much firmness
and decision as she could summon—
"Let us walk on, darling," at the same time taking him
suggestively by the arm. To her relief, he unresistingly
acquiesced; her words had apparently thrown him back into
his dream, which thenceforward seemed to enter on a new
phase, wherein he fancied she had risen as a spirit, and was
leading him to Heaven. Thus she conducted him by the arm to
the stone bridge in front of their residence, crossing which
they stood at the manor-house door. Tess's feet were quite
bare, and the stones hurt her, and chilled her to the bone;
but Clare was in his woollen stockings and appeared to feel
no discomfort.
There was no further difficulty. She induced him to lie
down on his own sofa bed, and covered him up warmly,
lighting a temporary fire of wood, to dry any dampness out
of him. The noise of these attentions she thought might
awaken him, and secretly wished that they might. But the
exhaustion of his mind and body was such that he remained
undisturbed.
As soon as they met the next morning Tess divined that
Angel knew little or nothing of how far she had been
concerned in the night's excursion, though, as regarded
himself, he may have been aware that he had not lain still.
In truth, he had awakened that morning from a sleep deep as
annihilation; and during those first few moments in which
the brain, like a Samson shaking himself, is trying its
strength, he had some dim notion of an unusual nocturnal
proceeding. But the realities of his situation soon
displaced conjecture on the other subject.
He waited in expectancy to discern some mental pointing;
he knew that if any intention of his, concluded over-night,
did not vanish in the light of morning, it stood on a basis
approximating to one of pure reason, even if initiated by
impulse of feeling; that it was so far, therefore, to be
trusted. He thus beheld in the pale morning light the
resolve to separate from her; not as a hot and indignant
instinct, but denuded of the passionateness which had made
it scorch and burn; standing in its bones; nothing but a
skeleton, but none the less there. Clare no longer
hesitated.
At breakfast, and while they were packing the few
remaining articles, he showed his weariness from the night's
effort so unmistakeably that Tess was on the point of
revealing all that had happened; but the reflection that it
would anger him, grieve him, stultify him, to know that he
had instinctively manifested a fondness for her of which his
common-sense did not approve, that his inclination had
compromised his dignity when reason slept, again deterred
her. It was too much like laughing at a man when sober for
his erratic deeds during intoxication.
It just crossed her mind, too, that he might have a faint
recollection of his tender vagary, and was disinclined to
allude to it from a conviction that she would take amatory
advantage of the opportunity it gave her of appealing to him
anew not to go.
He had ordered by letter a vehicle from the nearest town,
and soon after breakfast it arrived. She saw in it the
beginning of the end—the temporary end, at least, for the
revelation of his tenderness by the incident of the night
raised dreams of a possible future with him. The luggage was
put on the top, and the man drove them off, the miller and
the old waiting-woman expressing some surprise at their
precipitate departure, which Clare attributed to his
discovery that the mill-work was not of the modern kind
which he wished to investigate, a statement that was true so
far as it went. Beyond this there was nothing in the manner
of their leaving to suggest a fiasco, or that they were not
going together to visit friends.
Their route lay near the dairy from which they had
started with such solemn joy in each other a few days back,
and as Clare wished to wind up his business with Mr Crick,
Tess could hardly avoid paying Mrs Crick a call at the same
time, unless she would excite suspicion of their unhappy
state.
To make the call as unobtrusive as possible, they left
the carriage by the wicket leading down from the high road
to the dairy-house, and descended the track on foot, side by
side. The withy-bed had been cut, and they could see over
the stumps the spot to which Clare had followed her when he
pressed her to be his wife; to the left the enclosure in
which she had been fascinated by his harp; and far away
behind the cow-stalls the mead which had been the scene of
their first embrace. The gold of the summer picture was now
gray, the colours mean, the rich soil mud, and the river
cold.
Over the barton-gate the dairyman saw them, and came
forward, throwing into his face the kind of jocularity
deemed appropriate in Talbothays and its vicinity on the
re-appearance of the newly-married. Then Mrs Crick emerged
from the house, and several others of their old
acquaintance, though Marian and Retty did not seem to be
there.
Tess valiantly bore their sly attacks and friendly
humours, which affected her far otherwise than they
supposed. In the tacit agreement of husband and wife to keep
their estrangement a secret they behaved as would have been
ordinary. And then, although she would rather there had been
no word spoken on the subject, Tess had to hear in detail
the story of Marian and Retty. The later had gone home to
her father's, and Marian had left to look for employment
elsewhere. They feared she would come to no good.
To dissipate the sadness of this recital Tess went and
bade all her favourite cows goodbye, touching each of them
with her hand, and as she and Clare stood side by side at
leaving, as if united body and soul, there would have been
something peculiarly sorry in their aspect to one who should
have seen it truly; two limbs of one life, as they outwardly
were, his arm touching hers, her skirts touching him, facing
one way, as against all the dairy facing the other, speaking
in their adieux as "we", and yet sundered like the poles.
Perhaps something unusually stiff and embarrassed in their
attitude, some awkwardness in acting up to their profession
of unity, different from the natural shyness of young
couples, may have been apparent, for when they were gone Mrs
Crick said to her husband—
"How onnatural the brightness of her eyes did seem, and
how they stood like waxen images and talked as if they were
in a dream! Didn't it strike 'ee that 'twas so? Tess had
always sommat strange in her, and she's not now quite like
the proud young bride of a well-be-doing man."
They re-entered the vehicle, and were driven along the
roads towards Weatherbury and Stagfoot Lane, till they
reached the Lane inn, where Clare dismissed the fly and man.
They rested here a while, and entering the Vale were next
driven onward towards her home by a stranger who did not
know their relations. At a midway point, when Nuttlebury had
been passed, and where there were cross-roads, Clare stopped
the conveyance and said to Tess that if she meant to return
to her mother's house it was here that he would leave her.
As they could not talk with freedom in the driver's presence
he asked her to accompany him for a few steps on foot along
one of the branch roads; she assented, and directing the man
to wait a few minutes they strolled away.
"Now, let us understand each other," he said gently.
"There is no anger between us, though there is that which I
cannot endure at present. I will try to bring myself to
endure it. I will let you know where I go to as soon as I
know myself. And if I can bring myself to bear it—if it is
desirable, possible—I will come to you. But until I come to
you it will be better that you should not try to come to
me."
The severity of the decree seemed deadly to Tess; she saw
his view of her clearly enough; he could regard her in no
other light than that of one who had practised gross deceit
upon him. Yet could a woman who had done even what she had
done deserve all this? But she could contest the point with
him no further. She simply repeated after him his own words.
"Until you come to me I must not try to come to you?"
"Just so."
"May I write to you?"
"O yes—if you are ill, or want anything at all. I hope
that will not be the case; so that it may happen that I
write first to you."
"I agree to the conditions, Angel; because you know best
what my punishment ought to be; only—only—don't make it more
than I can bear!"
That was all she said on the matter. If Tess had been
artful, had she made a scene, fainted, wept hysterically, in
that lonely lane, notwithstanding the fury of fastidiousness
with which he was possessed, he would probably not have
withstood her. But her mood of long-suffering made his way
easy for him, and she herself was his best advocate. Pride,
too, entered into her submission—which perhaps was a symptom
of that reckless acquiescence in chance too apparent in the
whole d'Urberville family—and the many effective chords
which she could have stirred by an appeal were left
untouched.
The remainder of their discourse was on practical matters
only. He now handed her a packet containing a fairly good
sum of money, which he had obtained from his bankers for the
purpose. The brilliants, the interest in which seemed to be
Tess's for her life only (if he understood the wording of
the will), he advised her to let him send to a bank for
safety; and to this she readily agreed.
These things arranged, he walked with Tess back to the
carriage, and handed her in. The coachman was paid and told
where to drive her. Taking next his own bag and umbrella—the
sole articles he had brought with him hitherwards—he bade
her goodbye; and they parted there and then.
The fly moved creepingly up a hill, and Clare watched it
go with an unpremeditated hope that Tess would look out of
the window for one moment. But that she never thought of
doing, would not have ventured to do, lying in a half-dead
faint inside. Thus he beheld her recede, and in the anguish
of his heart quoted a line from a poet, with peculiar
emendations of his own—
God's not in his heaven:
All's wrong with the world!
When Tess had passed over the crest of the hill he turned to go his own
way, and hardly knew that he loved her still.
XXXVIII
As she drove on through Blackmoor Vale, and the landscape
of her youth began to open around her, Tess aroused herself
from her stupor. Her first thought was how would she be able
to face her parents?
She reached a turnpike-gate which stood upon the highway
to the village. It was thrown open by a stranger, not by the
old man who had kept it for many years, and to whom she had
been known; he had probably left on New Year's Day, the date
when such changes were made. Having received no intelligence
lately from her home, she asked the turnpike-keeper for
news.
"Oh—nothing, miss," he answered. "Marlott is Marlott
still. Folks have died and that. John Durbeyfield, too, hev
had a daughter married this week to a gentleman-farmer; not
from John's own house, you know; they was married elsewhere;
the gentleman being of that high standing that John's own
folk was not considered well-be-doing enough to have any
part in it, the bridegroom seeming not to know how't have
been discovered that John is a old and ancient nobleman
himself by blood, with family skillentons in their own
vaults to this day, but done out of his property in the time
o' the Romans. However, Sir John, as we call 'n now, kept up
the wedding-day as well as he could, and stood treat to
everybody in the parish; and John's wife sung songs at The
Pure Drop till past eleven o'clock."
Hearing this, Tess felt so sick at heart that she could
not decide to go home publicly in the fly with her luggage
and belongings. She asked the turnpike-keeper if she might
deposit her things at his house for a while, and, on his
offering no objection, she dismissed her carriage, and went
on to the village alone by a back lane.
At sight of her father's chimney she asked herself how
she could possibly enter the house? Inside that cottage her
relations were calmly supposing her far away on a
wedding-tour with a comparatively rich man, who was to
conduct her to bouncing prosperity; while here she was,
friendless, creeping up to the old door quite by herself,
with no better place to go to in the world.
She did not reach the house unobserved. Just by the
garden-hedge she was met by a girl who knew her—one of the
two or three with whom she had been intimate at school.
After making a few inquiries as to how Tess came there, her
friend, unheeding her tragic look, interrupted with—
"But where's thy gentleman, Tess?"
Tess hastily explained that he had been called away on
business, and, leaving her interlocutor, clambered over the
garden-hedge, and thus made her way to the house.
As she went up the garden-path she heard her mother
singing by the back door, coming in sight of which she
perceived Mrs Durbeyfield on the doorstep in the act of
wringing a sheet. Having performed this without observing
Tess, she went indoors, and her daughter followed her.
The washing-tub stood in the same old place on the same
old quarter-hogshead, and her mother, having thrown the
sheet aside, was about to plunge her arms in anew.
"Why—Tess!—my chil'—I thought you was married!—married
really and truly this time—we sent the cider—"
"Yes, mother; so I am."
"Going to be?"
"No—I am married."
"Married! Then where's thy husband?"
"Oh, he's gone away for a time."
"Gone away! When was you married, then? The day you
said?"
"Yes, Tuesday, mother."
"And now 'tis on'y Saturday, and he gone away?"
"Yes, he's gone."
"What's the meaning o' that? 'Nation seize such husbands
as you seem to get, say I!"
"Mother!" Tess went across to Joan Durbeyfield, laid her
face upon the matron's bosom, and burst into sobs. "I don't
know how to tell 'ee, mother! You said to me, and wrote to
me, that I was not to tell him. But I did tell him—I
couldn't help it—and he went away!"
"O you little fool—you little fool!" burst out Mrs
Durbeyfield, splashing Tess and herself in her agitation.
"My good God! that ever I should ha' lived to say it, but I
say it again, you little fool!"
Tess was convulsed with weeping, the tension of so many
days having relaxed at last.
"I know it—I know—I know!" she gasped through her sobs.
"But, O my mother, I could not help it! He was so good—and I
felt the wickedness of trying to blind him as to what had
happened! If—if—it were to be done again—I should do the
same. I could not—I dared not—so sin—against him!"
"But you sinned enough to marry him first!"
"Yes, yes; that's where my misery do lie! But I thought
he could get rid o' me by law if he were determined not to
overlook it. And O, if you knew—if you could only half know
how I loved him—how anxious I was to have him—and how wrung
I was between caring so much for him and my wish to be fair
to him!"
Tess was so shaken that she could get no further, and
sank, a helpless thing, into a chair.
"Well, well; what's done can't be undone! I'm sure I
don't know why children o' my bringing forth should all be
bigger simpletons than other people's—not to know better
than to blab such a thing as that, when he couldn't ha'
found it out till too late!" Here Mrs Durbeyfield began
shedding tears on her own account as a mother to be pitied.
"What your father will say I don't know," she continued;
"for he's been talking about the wedding up at Rolliver's
and The Pure Drop every day since, and about his family
getting back to their rightful position through you—poor
silly man!—and now you've made this mess of it! The
Lord-a-Lord!"
As if to bring matters to a focus, Tess's father was
heard approaching at that moment. He did not, however, enter
immediately, and Mrs Durbeyfield said that she would break
the bad news to him herself, Tess keeping out of sight for
the present. After her first burst of disappointment Joan
began to take the mishap as she had taken Tess's original
trouble, as she would have taken a wet holiday or failure in
the potato-crop; as a thing which had come upon them
irrespective of desert or folly; a chance external
impingement to be borne with; not a lesson.
Tess retreated upstairs and beheld casually that the beds
had been shifted, and new arrangements made. Her old bed had
been adapted for two younger children. There was no place
here for her now.
The room below being unceiled she could hear most of what
went on there. Presently her father entered, apparently
carrying in a live hen. He was a foot-haggler now, having
been obliged to sell his second horse, and he travelled with
his basket on his arm. The hen had been carried about this
morning as it was often carried, to show people that he was
in his work, though it had lain, with its legs tied, under
the table at Rolliver's for more than an hour.
"We've just had up a story about—" Durbeyfield began, and
thereupon related in detail to his wife a discussion which
had arisen at the inn about the clergy, originated by the
fact of his daughter having married into a clerical family.
"They was formerly styled 'sir', like my own ancestry," he
said, "though nowadays their true style, strictly speaking,
is 'clerk' only." As Tess had wished that no great publicity
should be given to the event, he had mentioned no
particulars. He hoped she would remove that prohibition
soon. He proposed that the couple should take Tess's own
name, d'Urberville, as uncorrupted. It was better than her
husbands's. He asked if any letter had come from her that
day.
Then Mrs Durbeyfield informed him that no letter had
come, but Tess unfortunately had come herself.
When at length the collapse was explained to him, a
sullen mortification, not usual with Durbeyfield,
overpowered the influence of the cheering glass. Yet the
intrinsic quality of the event moved his touchy
sensitiveness less than its conjectured effect upon the
minds of others.
"To think, now, that this was to be the end o't!" said
Sir John. "And I with a family vault under that there church
of Kingsbere as big as Squire Jollard's ale-cellar, and my
folk lying there in sixes and sevens, as genuine county
bones and marrow as any recorded in history. And now to be
sure what they fellers at Rolliver's and The Pure Drop will
say to me! How they'll squint and glane, and say, 'This is
yer mighty match is it; this is yer getting back to the true
level of yer forefathers in King Norman's time!' I feel this
is too much, Joan; I shall put an end to myself, title and
all—I can bear it no longer! … But she can make him keep her
if he's married her?"
"Why, yes. But she won't think o' doing that."
"D'ye think he really have married her?—or is it like the
first—"
Poor Tess, who had heard as far as this, could not bear
to hear more. The perception that her word could be doubted
even here, in her own parental house, set her mind against
the spot as nothing else could have done. How unexpected
were the attacks of destiny! And if her father doubted her a
little, would not neighbours and acquaintance doubt her
much? O, she could not live long at home!
A few days, accordingly, were all that she allowed
herself here, at the end of which time she received a short
note from Clare, informing her that he had gone to the North
of England to look at a farm. In her craving for the lustre
of her true position as his wife, and to hide from her
parents the vast extent of the division between them, she
made use of this letter as her reason for again departing,
leaving them under the impression that she was setting out
to join him. Still further to screen her husband from any
imputation of unkindness to her, she took twenty-five of the
fifty pounds Clare had given her, and handed the sum over to
her mother, as if the wife of a man like Angel Clare could
well afford it, saying that it was a slight return for the
trouble and humiliation she had brought upon them in years
past. With this assertion of her dignity she bade them
farewell; and after that there were lively doings in the
Durbeyfield household for some time on the strength of
Tess's bounty, her mother saying, and, indeed, believing,
that the rupture which had arisen between the young husband
and wife had adjusted itself under their strong feeling that
they could not live apart from each other.
XXXIX
It was three weeks after the marriage that Clare found
himself descending the hill which led to the well-known
parsonage of his father. With his downward course the tower
of the church rose into the evening sky in a manner of
inquiry as to why he had come; and no living person in the
twilighted town seemed to notice him, still less to expect
him. He was arriving like a ghost, and the sound of his own
footsteps was almost an encumbrance to be got rid of.
The picture of life had changed for him. Before this time
he had known it but speculatively; now he thought he knew it
as a practical man; though perhaps he did not, even yet.
Nevertheless humanity stood before him no longer in the
pensive sweetness of Italian art, but in the staring and
ghastly attitudes of a Wiertz Museum, and with the leer of a
study by Van Beers.
His conduct during these first weeks had been desultory
beyond description. After mechanically attempting to pursue
his agricultural plans as though nothing unusual had
happened, in the manner recommended by the great and wise
men of all ages, he concluded that very few of those great
and wise men had ever gone so far outside themselves as to
test the feasibility of their counsel. "This is the chief
thing: be not perturbed," said the Pagan moralist. That was
just Clare's own opinion. But he was perturbed. "Let not
your heart be troubled, neither let it be afraid," said the
Nazarene. Clare chimed in cordially; but his heart was
troubled all the same. How he would have liked to confront
those two great thinkers, and earnestly appeal to them as
fellow-man to fellow-men, and ask them to tell him their
method!
His mood transmuted itself into a dogged indifference
till at length he fancied he was looking on his own
existence with the passive interest of an outsider.
He was embittered by the conviction that all this
desolation had been brought about by the accident of her
being a d'Urberville. When he found that Tess came of that
exhausted ancient line, and was not of the new tribes from
below, as he had fondly dreamed, why had he not stoically
abandoned her in fidelity to his principles? This was what
he had got by apostasy, and his punishment was deserved.
Then he became weary and anxious, and his anxiety
increased. He wondered if he had treated her unfairly. He
ate without knowing that he ate, and drank without tasting.
As the hours dropped past, as the motive of each act in the
long series of bygone days presented itself to his view, he
perceived how intimately the notion of having Tess as a dear
possession was mixed up with all his schemes and words and
ways.
In going hither and thither he observed in the outskirts
of a small town a red-and-blue placard setting forth the
great advantages of the Empire of Brazil as a field for the
emigrating agriculturist. Land was offered there on
exceptionally advantageous terms. Brazil somewhat attracted
him as a new idea. Tess could eventually join him there, and
perhaps in that country of contrasting scenes and notions
and habits the conventions would not be so operative which
made life with her seem impracticable to him here. In brief
he was strongly inclined to try Brazil, especially as the
season for going thither was just at hand.
With this view he was returning to Emminster to disclose
his plan to his parents, and to make the best explanation he
could make of arriving without Tess, short of revealing what
had actually separated them. As he reached the door the new
moon shone upon his face, just as the old one had done in
the small hours of that morning when he had carried his wife
in his arms across the river to the graveyard of the monks;
but his face was thinner now.
Clare had given his parents no warning of his visit, and
his arrival stirred the atmosphere of the Vicarage as the
dive of the kingfisher stirs a quiet pool. His father and
mother were both in the drawing-room, but neither of his
brothers was now at home. Angel entered, and closed the door
quietly behind him.
"But—where's your wife, dear Angel?" cried his mother.
"How you surprise us!"
"She is at her mother's—temporarily. I have come home
rather in a hurry because I've decided to go to Brazil."
"Brazil! Why they are all Roman Catholics there surely!"
"Are they? I hadn't thought of that."
But even the novelty and painfulness of his going to a
Papistical land could not displace for long Mr and Mrs
Clare's natural interest in their son's marriage.
"We had your brief note three weeks ago announcing that
it had taken place," said Mrs Clare, "and your father sent
your godmother's gift to her, as you know. Of course it was
best that none of us should be present, especially as you
preferred to marry her from the dairy, and not at her home,
wherever that may be. It would have embarrassed you, and
given us no pleasure. Your bothers felt that very strongly.
Now it is done we do not complain, particularly if she suits
you for the business you have chosen to follow instead of
the ministry of the Gospel. … Yet I wish I could have seen
her first, Angel, or have known a little more about her. We
sent her no present of our own, not knowing what would best
give her pleasure, but you must suppose it only delayed.
Angel, there is no irritation in my mind or your father's
against you for this marriage; but we have thought it much
better to reserve our liking for your wife till we could see
her. And now you have not brought her. It seems strange.
What has happened?"
He replied that it had been thought best by them that she
should to go her parents' home for the present, whilst he
came there.
"I don't mind telling you, dear mother," he said, "that I
always meant to keep her away from this house till I should
feel she could some with credit to you. But this idea of
Brazil is quite a recent one. If I do go it will be
unadvisable for me to take her on this my first journey. She
will remain at her mother's till I come back."
"And I shall not see her before you start?"
He was afraid they would not. His original plan had been,
as he had said, to refrain from bringing her there for some
little while—not to wound their prejudices—feelings—in any
way; and for other reasons he had adhered to it. He would
have to visit home in the course of a year, if he went out
at once; and it would be possible for them to see her before
he started a second time—with her.
A hastily prepared supper was brought in, and Clare made
further exposition of his plans. His mother's disappointment
at not seeing the bride still remained with her. Clare's
late enthusiasm for Tess had infected her through her
maternal sympathies, till she had almost fancied that a good
thing could come out of Nazareth—a charming woman out of
Talbothays Dairy. She watched her son as he ate.
"Cannot you describe her? I am sure she is very pretty,
Angel."
"Of that there can be no question!" he said, with a zest
which covered its bitterness.
"And that she is pure and virtuous goes without
question?"
"Pure and virtuous, of course, she is."
"I can see her quite distinctly. You said the other day
that she was fine in figure; roundly built; had deep red
lips like Cupid's bow; dark eyelashes and brows, an immense
rope of hair like a ship's cable; and large eyes
violety-bluey-blackish."
"I did, mother."
"I quite see her. And living in such seclusion she
naturally had scarce ever seen any young man from the world
without till she saw you."
"Scarcely."
"You were her first love?"
"Of course."
"There are worse wives than these simple, rosy-mouthed,
robust girls of the farm. Certainly I could have
wished—well, since my son is to be an agriculturist, it is
perhaps but proper that his wife should have been accustomed
to an outdoor life."
His father was less inquisitive; but when the time came
for the chapter from the Bible which was always read before
evening prayers, the Vicar observed to Mrs Clare—
"I think, since Angel has come, that it will be more
appropriate to read the thirty-first of Proverbs than the
chapter which we should have had in the usual course of our
reading?"
"Yes, certainly," said Mrs Clare. "The words of King
Lemuel" (she could cite chapter and verse as well as her
husband). "My dear son, your father has decided to read us
the chapter in Proverbs in praise of a virtuous wife. We
shall not need to be reminded to apply the words to the
absent one. May Heaven shield her in all her ways!"
A lump rose in Clare's throat. The portable lectern was
taken out from the corner and set in the middle of the
fireplace, the two old servants came in, and Angel's father
began to read at the tenth verse of the aforesaid chapter—
"Who can find a virtuous woman? for her price is
far above rubies. She riseth while it is yet night,
and giveth meat to her household. She girdeth her
loins with strength and strengtheneth her arms. She
perceiveth that her merchandise is good; her candle
goeth not out by night. She looketh well to the ways
of her household, and eateth not the bread of
idleness. Her children arise up and call her
blessed; her husband also, and he praiseth her. Many
daughters have done virtuously, but thou excellest
them all."
When prayers were over, his mother said—
"I could not help thinking how very aptly that chapter
your dear father read applied, in some of its particulars,
to the woman you have chosen. The perfect woman, you see,
was a working woman; not an idler; not a fine lady; but one
who used her hands and her head and her heart for the good
of others. 'Her children arise up and call her blessed; her
husband also, and he praiseth her. Many daughters have done
virtuously, but she excelleth them all.' Well, I wish I
could have seen her, Angel. Since she is pure and chaste,
she would have been refined enough for me."
Clare could bear this no longer. His eyes were full of
tears, which seemed like drops of molten lead. He bade a
quick good night to these sincere and simple souls whom he
loved so well; who knew neither the world, the flesh, nor
the devil in their own hearts, only as something vague and
external to themselves. He went to his own chamber.
His mother followed him, and tapped at his door. Clare
opened it to discover her standing without, with anxious
eyes.
"Angel," she asked, "is there something wrong that you go
away so soon? I am quite sure you are not yourself."
"I am not, quite, mother," said he.
"About her? Now, my son, I know it is that—I know it is
about her! Have you quarrelled in these three weeks?"
"We have not exactly quarrelled," he said. "But we have
had a difference—"
"Angel—is she a young woman whose history will bear
investigation?"
With a mother's instinct Mrs Clare had put her finger on
the kind of trouble that would cause such a disquiet as
seemed to agitate her son.
"She is spotless!" he replied; and felt that if it had
sent him to eternal hell there and then he would have told
that lie.
"Then never mind the rest. After all, there are few purer
things in nature then an unsullied country maid. Any
crudeness of manner which may offend your more educated
sense at first, will, I am sure, disappear under the
influence or your companionship and tuition."
Such terrible sarcasm of blind magnanimity brought home
to Clare the secondary perception that he had utterly
wrecked his career by this marriage, which had not been
among his early thoughts after the disclosure. True, on his
own account he cared very little about his career; but he
had wished to make it at least a respectable one on account
of his parents and brothers. And now as he looked into the
candle its flame dumbly expressed to him that it was made to
shine on sensible people, and that it abhorred lighting the
face of a dupe and a failure.
When his agitation had cooled he would be at moments
incensed with his poor wife for causing a situation in which
he was obliged to practise deception on his parents. He
almost talked to her in his anger, as if she had been in the
room. And then her cooing voice, plaintive in expostulation,
disturbed the darkness, the velvet touch of her lips passed
over his brow, and he could distinguish in the air the
warmth of her breath.
This night the woman of his belittling deprecations was
thinking how great and good her husband was. But over them
both there hung a deeper shade than the shade which Angel
Clare perceived, namely, the shade of his own limitations.
With all his attempted independence of judgement this
advanced and well-meaning young man, a sample product of the
last five-and-twenty years, was yet the slave to custom and
conventionality when surprised back into his early
teachings. No prophet had told him, and he was not prophet
enough to tell himself, that essentially this young wife of
his was as deserving of the praise of King Lemuel as any
other woman endowed with the same dislike of evil, her moral
value having to be reckoned not by achievement but by
tendency. Moreover, the figure near at hand suffers on such
occasion, because it shows up its sorriness without shade;
while vague figures afar off are honoured, in that their
distance makes artistic virtues of their stains. In
considering what Tess was not, he overlooked what she was,
and forgot that the defective can be more than the entire.
XL
At breakfast Brazil was the topic, and all endeavoured to
take a hopeful view of Clare's proposed experiment with that
country's soil, notwithstanding the discouraging reports of
some farm-labourers who had emigrated thither and returned
home within the twelve months. After breakfast Clare went
into the little town to wind up such trifling matters as he
was concerned with there, and to get from the local bank all
the money he possessed. On his way back he encountered Miss
Mercy Chant by the church, from whose walls she seemed to be
a sort of emanation. She was carrying an armful of Bibles
for her class, and such was her view of life that events
which produced heartache in others wrought beatific smiles
upon her—an enviable result, although, in the opinion of
Angel, it was obtained by a curiously unnatural sacrifice of
humanity to mysticism.
She had learnt that he was about to leave England, and
observed what an excellent and promising scheme it seemed to
be.
"Yes; it is a likely scheme enough in a commercial sense,
no doubt," he replied. "But, my dear Mercy, it snaps the
continuity of existence. Perhaps a cloister would be
preferable."
"A cloister! O, Angel Clare!"
"Well?"
"Why, you wicked man, a cloister implies a monk, and a
monk Roman Catholicism."
"And Roman Catholicism sin, and sin damnation. Thou art
in a parlous state, Angel Clare."
"I glory in my Protestantism!" she said severely.
Then Clare, thrown by sheer misery into one of the
demoniacal moods in which a man does despite to his true
principles, called her close to him, and fiendishly
whispered in her ear the most heterodox ideas he could think
of. His momentary laughter at the horror which appeared on
her fair face ceased when it merged in pain and anxiety for
his welfare.
"Dear Mercy," he said, "you must forgive me. I think I am
going crazy!"
She thought that he was; and thus the interview ended,
and Clare re-entered the Vicarage. With the local banker he
deposited the jewels till happier days should arise. He also
paid into the bank thirty pounds—to be sent to Tess in a few
months, as she might require; and wrote to her at her
parents' home in Blackmoor Vale to inform her of what he had
done. This amount, with the sum he had already placed in her
hands—about fifty pounds—he hoped would be amply sufficient
for her wants just at present, particularly as in an
emergency she had been directed to apply to his father.
He deemed it best not to put his parents into
communication with her by informing them of her address;
and, being unaware of what had really happened to estrange
the two, neither his father nor his mother suggested that he
should do so. During the day he left the parsonage, for what
he had to complete he wished to get done quickly.
As the last duty before leaving this part of England it
was necessary for him to call at the Wellbridge farmhouse,
in which he had spent with Tess the first three days of
their marriage, the trifle of rent having to be paid, the
key given up of the rooms they had occupied, and two or
three small articles fetched away that they had left behind.
It was under this roof that the deepest shadow ever thrown
upon his life had stretched its gloom over him. Yet when he
had unlocked the door of the sitting-room and looked into
it, the memory which returned first upon him was that of
their happy arrival on a similar afternoon, the first fresh
sense of sharing a habitation conjointly, the first meal
together, the chatting by the fire with joined hands.
The farmer and his wife were in the field at the moment
of his visit, and Clare was in the rooms alone for some
time. Inwardly swollen with a renewal of sentiment that he
had not quite reckoned with, he went upstairs to her
chamber, which had never been his. The bed was smooth as she
had made it with her own hands on the morning of leaving.
The mistletoe hung under the tester just as he had placed
it. Having been there three or four weeks it was turning
colour, and the leaves and berries were wrinkled. Angel took
it down and crushed it into the grate. Standing there, he
for the first time doubted whether his course in this
conjecture had been a wise, much less a generous, one. But
had he not been cruelly blinded? In the incoherent multitude
of his emotions he knelt down at the bedside wet-eyed. "O
Tess! If you had only told me sooner, I would have forgiven
you!" he mourned.
Hearing a footstep below, he rose and went to the top of
the stairs. At the bottom of the flight he saw a woman
standing, and on her turning up her face recognized the
pale, dark-eyed Izz Huett.
"Mr Clare," she said, "I've called to see you and Mrs
Clare, and to inquire if ye be well. I thought you might be
back here again."
This was a girl whose secret he had guessed, but who had
not yet guessed his; an honest girl who loved him—one who
would have made as good, or nearly as good, a practical
farmer's wife as Tess.
"I am here alone," he said; "we are not living here now."
Explaining why he had come, he asked, "Which way are you
going home, Izz?"
"I have no home at Talbothays Dairy now, sir," she said.
"Why is that?"
Izz looked down.
"It was so dismal there that I left! I am staying out
this way." She pointed in a contrary direction, the
direction in which he was journeying.
"Well—are you going there now? I can take you if you wish
for a lift."
Her olive complexion grew richer in hue.
"Thank 'ee, Mr Clare," she said.
He soon found the farmer, and settled the account for his
rent and the few other items which had to be considered by
reason of the sudden abandonment of the lodgings. On Clare's
return to his horse and gig, Izz jumped up beside him.
"I am going to leave England, Izz," he said, as they
drove on. "Going to Brazil."
"And do Mrs Clare like the notion of such a journey?" she
asked.
"She is not going at present—say for a year or so. I am
going out to reconnoitre—to see what life there is like."
They sped along eastward for some considerable distance,
Izz making no observation.
"How are the others?" he inquired. "How is Retty?"
"She was in a sort of nervous state when I zid her last;
and so thin and hollow-cheeked that 'a do seem in a decline.
Nobody will ever fall in love wi' her any more," said Izz
absently.
"And Marian?"
Izz lowered her voice.
"Marian drinks."
"Indeed!"
"Yes. The dairyman has got rid of her."
"And you!"
"I don't drink, and I bain't in a decline. But—I am no
great things at singing afore breakfast now!"
"How is that? Do you remember how neatly you used to turn
''Twas down in Cupid's Gardens' and 'The Tailor's Breeches'
at morning milking?"
"Ah, yes! When you first came, sir, that was. Not when
you had been there a bit."
"Why was that falling-off?"
Her black eyes flashed up to his face for one moment by
way of answer.
"Izz!—how weak of you—for such as I!" he said, and fell
into reverie. "Then—suppose I had asked you to marry
me?"
"If you had I should have said 'Yes', and you would have
married a woman who loved 'ee!"
"Really!"
"Down to the ground!" she whispered vehemently. "O my
God! did you never guess it till now!"
By-and-by they reached a branch road to a village.
"I must get down. I live out there," said Izz abruptly,
never having spoken since her avowal.
Clare slowed the horse. He was incensed against his fate,
bitterly disposed towards social ordinances; for they had
cooped him up in a corner, out of which there was no
legitimate pathway. Why not be revenged on society by
shaping his future domesticities loosely, instead of kissing
the pedagogic rod of convention in this ensnaring manner?
"I am going to Brazil alone, Izz," said he. "I have
separated from my wife for personal, not voyaging, reasons.
I may never live with her again. I may not be able to love
you; but—will you go with me instead of her?"
"You truly wish me to go?"
"I do. I have been badly used enough to wish for relief.
And you at least love me disinterestedly."
"Yes—I will go," said Izz, after a pause.
"You will? You know what it means, Izz?"
"It means that I shall live with you for the time you are
over there—that's good enough for me."
"Remember, you are not to trust me in morals now. But I
ought to remind you that it will be wrong-doing in the eyes
of civilization—Western civilization, that is to say."
"I don't mind that; no woman do when it comes to
agony-point, and there's no other way!"
"Then don't get down, but sit where you are."
He drove past the cross-roads, one mile, two miles,
without showing any signs of affection.
"You love me very, very much, Izz?" he suddenly asked.
"I do—I have said I do! I loved you all the time we was
at the dairy together!"
"More than Tess?"
She shook her head.
"No," she murmured, "not more than she."
"How's that?"
"Because nobody could love 'ee more than Tess did! … She
would have laid down her life for 'ee. I could do no more."
Like the prophet on the top of Peor, Izz Huett would fain
have spoken perversely at such a moment, but the fascination
exercised over her rougher nature by Tess's character
compelled her to grace.
Clare was silent; his heart had risen at these
straightforward words from such an unexpected unimpeachable
quarter. In his throat was something as if a sob had
solidified there. His ears repeated, "She would have laid
down her life for 'ee. I could do no more!"
"Forget our idle talk, Izz," he said, turning the horse's
head suddenly. "I don't know what I've been saying! I will
now drive you back to where your lane branches off."
"So much for honesty towards 'ee! O—how can I bear it—how
can I—how can I!"
Izz Huett burst into wild tears, and beat her forehead as
she saw what she had done.
"Do you regret that poor little act of justice to an
absent one? O, Izz, don't spoil it by regret!"
She stilled herself by degrees.
"Very well, sir. Perhaps I didn't know what I was saying,
either, wh—when I agreed to go! I wish—what cannot be!"
"Because I have a loving wife already."
"Yes, yes! You have!"
They reached the corner of the lane which they had passed
half an hour earlier, and she hopped down.
"Izz—please, please forget my momentary levity!" he
cried. "It was so ill-considered, so ill-advised!"
"Forget it? Never, never! O, it was no levity to me!"
He felt how richly he deserved the reproach that the
wounded cry conveyed, and, in a sorrow that was
inexpressible, leapt down and took her hand.
"Well, but, Izz, we'll part friends, anyhow? You don't
know what I've had to bear!"
She was a really generous girl, and allowed no further
bitterness to mar their adieux.
"I forgive 'ee, sir!" she said.
"Now, Izz," he said, while she stood beside him there,
forcing himself to the mentor's part he was far from
feeling; "I want you to tell Marian when you see her that
she is to be a good woman, and not to give way to folly.
Promise that, and tell Retty that there are more worthy men
than I in the world, that for my sake she is to act wisely
and well—remember the words—wisely and well—for my sake. I
send this message to them as a dying man to the dying; for I
shall never see them again. And you, Izzy, you have saved me
by your honest words about my wife from an incredible
impulse towards folly and treachery. Women may be bad, but
they are not so bad as men in these things! On that one
account I can never forget you. Be always the good and
sincere girl you have hitherto been; and think of me as a
worthless lover, but a faithful friend. Promise."
She gave the promise.
"Heaven bless and keep you, sir. Goodbye!"
He drove on; but no sooner had Izz turned into the lane,
and Clare was out of sight, than she flung herself down on
the bank in a fit of racking anguish; and it was with a
strained unnatural face that she entered her mother's
cottage late that night. Nobody ever was told how Izz spent
the dark hours that intervened between Angel Clare's parting
from her and her arrival home.
Clare, too, after bidding the girl farewell, was wrought
to aching thoughts and quivering lips. But his sorrow was
not for Izz. That evening he was within a feather-weight's
turn of abandoning his road to the nearest station, and
driving across that elevated dorsal line of South Wessex
which divided him from his Tess's home. It was neither a
contempt for her nature, nor the probable state of her
heart, which deterred him.
No; it was a sense that, despite her love, as
corroborated by Izz's admission, the facts had not changed.
If he was right at first, he was right now. And the momentum
of the course on which he had embarked tended to keep him
going in it, unless diverted by a stronger, more sustained
force than had played upon him this afternoon. He could soon
come back to her. He took the train that night for London,
and five days after shook hands in farewell of his brothers
at the port of embarkation.
XLI
From the foregoing events of the winter-time let us press
on to an October day, more than eight months subsequent to
the parting of Clare and Tess. We discover the latter in
changed conditions; instead of a bride with boxes and trunks
which others bore, we see her a lonely woman with a basket
and a bundle in her own porterage, as at an earlier time
when she was no bride; instead of the ample means that were
projected by her husband for her comfort through this
probationary period, she can produce only a flattened purse.
After again leaving Marlott, her home, she had got
through the spring and summer without any great stress upon
her physical powers, the time being mainly spent in
rendering light irregular service at dairy-work near
Port-Bredy to the west of the Blackmoor Valley, equally
remote from her native place and from Talbothays. She
preferred this to living on his allowance. Mentally she
remained in utter stagnation, a condition which the
mechanical occupation rather fostered than checked. Her
consciousness was at that other dairy, at that other season,
in the presence of the tender lover who had confronted her
there—he who, the moment she had grasped him to keep for her
own, had disappeared like a shape in a vision.
The dairy-work lasted only till the milk began to lessen,
for she had not met with a second regular engagement as at
Talbothays, but had done duty as a supernumerary only.
However, as harvest was now beginning, she had simply to
remove from the pasture to the stubble to find plenty of
further occupation, and this continued till harvest was
done.
Of the five-and-twenty pounds which had remained to her
of Clare's allowance, after deducting the other half of the
fifty as a contribution to her parents for the trouble and
expense to which she had put them, she had as yet spent but
little. But there now followed an unfortunate interval of
wet weather, during which she was obliged to fall back upon
her sovereigns.
She could not bear to let them go. Angel had put them
into her hand, had obtained them bright and new from his
bank for her; his touch had consecrated them to souvenirs of
himself—they appeared to have had as yet no other history
than such as was created by his and her own experiences—and
to disperse them was like giving away relics. But she had to
do it, and one by one they left her hands.
She had been compelled to send her mother her address
from time to time, but she concealed her circumstances. When
her money had almost gone a letter from her mother reached
her. Joan stated that they were in dreadful difficulty; the
autumn rains had gone through the thatch of the house, which
required entire renewal; but this could not be done because
the previous thatching had never been paid for. New rafters
and a new ceiling upstairs also were required, which, with
the previous bill, would amount to a sum of twenty pounds.
As her husband was a man of means, and had doubtless
returned by this time, could she not send them the money?
Tess had thirty pounds coming to her almost immediately
from Angel's bankers, and, the case being so deplorable, as
soon as the sum was received she sent the twenty as
requested. Part of the remainder she was obliged to expend
in winter clothing, leaving only a nominal sum for the whole
inclement season at hand. When the last pound had gone, a
remark of Angel's that whenever she required further
resources she was to apply to his father, remained to be
considered.
But the more Tess thought of the step, the more reluctant
was she to take it. The same delicacy, pride, false shame,
whatever it may be called, on Clare's account, which had led
her to hide from her own parents the prolongation of the
estrangement, hindered her owning to his that she was in
want after the fair allowance he had left her. They probably
despised her already; how much more they would despise her
in the character of a mendicant! The consequence was that by
no effort could the parson's daughter-in-law bring herself
to let him know her state.
Her reluctance to communicate with her husband's parents
might, she thought, lessen with the lapse of time; but with
her own the reverse obtained. On her leaving their house
after the short visit subsequent to her marriage they were
under the impression that she was ultimately going to join
her husband; and from that time to the present she had done
nothing to disturb their belief that she was awaiting his
return in comfort, hoping against hope that his journey to
Brazil would result in a short stay only, after which he
would come to fetch her, or that he would write for her to
join him; in any case that they would soon present a united
front to their families and the world. This hope she still
fostered. To let her parents know that she was a deserted
wife, dependent, now that she had relieved their
necessities, on her own hands for a living, after the
éclat of a marriage which was to nullify the collapse of
the first attempt, would be too much indeed.
The set of brilliants returned to her mind. Where Clare
had deposited them she did not know, and it mattered little,
if it were true that she could only use and not sell them.
Even were they absolutely hers it would be passing mean to
enrich herself by a legal title to them which was not
essentially hers at all.
Meanwhile her husband's days had been by no means free
from trial. At this moment he was lying ill of fever in the
clay lands near Curitiba in Brazil, having been drenched
with thunder-storms and persecuted by other hardships, in
common with all the English farmers and farm-labourers who,
just at this time, were deluded into going thither by the
promises of the Brazilian Government, and by the baseless
assumption that those frames which, ploughing and sowing on
English uplands, had resisted all the weathers to whose
moods they had been born, could resist equally well all the
weathers by which they were surprised on Brazilian plains.
To return. Thus it happened that when the last of Tess's
sovereigns had been spent she was unprovided with others to
take their place, while on account of the season she found
it increasingly difficult to get employment. Not being aware
of the rarity of intelligence, energy, health, and
willingness in any sphere of life, she refrained from
seeking an indoor occupation; fearing towns, large houses,
people of means and social sophistication, and of manners
other than rural. From that direction of gentility Black
Care had come. Society might be better than she supposed
from her slight experience of it. But she had no proof of
this, and her instinct in the circumstances was to avoid its
purlieus.
The small dairies to the west, beyond Port-Bredy, in
which she had served as supernumerary milkmaid during the
spring and summer required no further aid. Room would
probably have been made for her at Talbothays, if only out
of sheer compassion; but comfortable as her life had been
there, she could not go back. The anti-climax would be too
intolerable; and her return might bring reproach upon her
idolized husband. She could not have borne their pity, and
their whispered remarks to one another upon her strange
situation; though she would almost have faced a knowledge of
her circumstances by every individual there, so long as her
story had remained isolated in the mind of each. It was the
interchange of ideas about her that made her sensitiveness
wince. Tess could not account for this distinction; she
simply knew that she felt it.
She was now on her way to an upland farm in the centre of
the county, to which she had been recommended by a wandering
letter which had reached her from Marian. Marian had somehow
heard that Tess was separated from her husband—probably
through Izz Huett—and the good-natured and now tippling
girl, deeming Tess in trouble, had hastened to notify to her
former friend that she herself had gone to this upland spot
after leaving the dairy, and would like to see her there,
where there was room for other hands, if it was really true
that she worked again as of old.
With the shortening of the days all hope of obtaining her
husband's forgiveness began to leave her; and there was
something of the habitude of the wild animal in the
unreflecting instinct with which she rambled
on—disconnecting herself by littles from her eventful past
at every step, obliterating her identity, giving no thought
to accidents or contingencies which might make a quick
discovery of her whereabouts by others of importance to her
own happiness, if not to theirs.
Among the difficulties of her lonely position not the
least was the attention she excited by her appearance, a
certain bearing of distinction, which she had caught from
Clare, being superadded to her natural attractiveness.
Whilst the clothes lasted which had been prepared for her
marriage, these casual glances of interest caused her no
inconvenience, but as soon as she was compelled to don the
wrapper of a fieldwoman, rude words were addressed to her
more than once; but nothing occurred to cause her bodily
fear till a particular November afternoon.
She had preferred the country west of the River Brit to
the upland farm for which she was now bound, because, for
one thing, it was nearer to the home of her husband's
father; and to hover about that region unrecognized, with
the notion that she might decide to call at the Vicarage
some day, gave her pleasure. But having once decided to try
the higher and drier levels, she pressed back eastward,
marching afoot towards the village of Chalk-Newton, where
she meant to pass the night.
The lane was long and unvaried, and, owing to the rapid
shortening of the days, dusk came upon her before she was
aware. She had reached the top of a hill down which the lane
stretched its serpentine length in glimpses, when she heard
footsteps behind her back, and in a few moments she was
overtaken by a man. He stepped up alongside Tess and said—
"Good night, my pretty maid": to which she civilly
replied.
The light still remaining in the sky lit up her face,
though the landscape was nearly dark. The man turned and
stared hard at her.
"Why, surely, it is the young wench who was at Trantridge
awhile—young Squire d'Urberville's friend? I was there at
that time, though I don't live there now."
She recognized in him the well-to-do boor whom Angel had
knocked down at the inn for addressing her coarsely. A spasm
of anguish shot through her, and she returned him no answer.
"Be honest enough to own it, and that what I said in the
town was true, though your fancy-man was so up about it—hey,
my sly one? You ought to beg my pardon for that blow of his,
considering."
Still no answer came from Tess. There seemed only one
escape for her hunted soul. She suddenly took to her heels
with the speed of the wind, and, without looking behind her,
ran along the road till she came to a gate which opened
directly into a plantation. Into this she plunged, and did
not pause till she was deep enough in its shade to be safe
against any possibility of discovery.
Under foot the leaves were dry, and the foliage of some
holly bushes which grew among the deciduous trees was dense
enough to keep off draughts. She scraped together the dead
leaves till she had formed them into a large heap, making a
sort of nest in the middle. Into this Tess crept.
Such sleep as she got was naturally fitful; she fancied
she heard strange noises, but persuaded herself that they
were caused by the breeze. She thought of her husband in
some vague warm clime on the other side of the globe, while
she was here in the cold. Was there another such a wretched
being as she in the world? Tess asked herself; and, thinking
of her wasted life, said, "All is vanity." She repeated the
words mechanically, till she reflected that this was a most
inadequate thought for modern days. Solomon had thought as
far as that more than two thousand years ago; she herself,
though not in the van of thinkers, had got much further. If
all were only vanity, who would mind it? All was, alas,
worse than vanity—injustice, punishment, exaction, death.
The wife of Angel Clare put her hand to her brow, and felt
its curve, and the edges of her eye-sockets perceptible
under the soft skin, and thought as she did so that a time
would come when that bone would be bare. "I wish it were
now," she said.
In the midst of these whimsical fancies she heard a new
strange sound among the leaves. It might be the wind; yet
there was scarcely any wind. Sometimes it was a palpitation,
sometimes a flutter; sometimes it was a sort of gasp or
gurgle. Soon she was certain that the noises came from wild
creatures of some kind, the more so when, originating in the
boughs overhead, they were followed by the fall of a heavy
body upon the ground. Had she been ensconced here under
other and more pleasant conditions she would have become
alarmed; but, outside humanity, she had at present no fear.
Day at length broke in the sky. When it had been day
aloft for some little while it became day in the wood.
Directly the assuring and prosaic light of the world's
active hours had grown strong, she crept from under her
hillock of leaves, and looked around boldly. Then she
perceived what had been going on to disturb her. The
plantation wherein she had taken shelter ran down at this
spot into a peak, which ended it hitherward, outside the
hedge being arable ground. Under the trees several pheasants
lay about, their rich plumage dabbled with blood; some were
dead, some feebly twitching a wing, some staring up at the
sky, some pulsating quickly, some contorted, some stretched
out—all of them writhing in agony, except the fortunate ones
whose tortures had ended during the night by the inability
of nature to bear more.
Tess guessed at once the meaning of this. The birds had
been driven down into this corner the day before by some
shooting-party; and while those that had dropped dead under
the shot, or had died before nightfall, had been searched
for and carried off, many badly wounded birds had escaped
and hidden themselves away, or risen among the thick boughs,
where they had maintained their position till they grew
weaker with loss of blood in the night-time, when they had
fallen one by one as she had heard them.
She had occasionally caught glimpses of these men in
girlhood, looking over hedges, or peeping through bushes,
and pointing their guns, strangely accoutred, a bloodthirsty
light in their eyes. She had been told that, rough and
brutal as they seemed just then, they were not like this all
the year round, but were, in fact, quite civil persons save
during certain weeks of autumn and winter, when, like the
inhabitants of the Malay Peninsula, they ran amuck, and made
it their purpose to destroy life—in this case harmless
feathered creatures, brought into being by artificial means
solely to gratify these propensities—at once so unmannerly
and so unchivalrous towards their weaker fellows in Nature's
teeming family.
With the impulse of a soul who could feel for kindred
sufferers as much as for herself, Tess's first thought was
to put the still living birds out of their torture, and to
this end with her own hands she broke the necks of as many
as she could find, leaving them to lie where she had found
them till the game-keepers should come—as they probably
would come—to look for them a second time.
"Poor darlings—to suppose myself the most miserable being
on earth in the sight o' such misery as yours!" she
exclaimed, her tears running down as she killed the birds
tenderly. "And not a twinge of bodily pain about me! I be
not mangled, and I be not bleeding, and I have two hands to
feed and clothe me." She was ashamed of herself for her
gloom of the night, based on nothing more tangible than a
sense of condemnation under an arbitrary law of society
which had no foundation in Nature.
XLII
It was now broad day, and she started again, emerging
cautiously upon the highway. But there was no need for
caution; not a soul was at hand, and Tess went onward with
fortitude, her recollection of the birds' silent endurance
of their night of agony impressing upon her the relativity
of sorrows and the tolerable nature of her own, if she could
once rise high enough to despise opinion. But that she could
not do so long as it was held by Clare.
She reached Chalk-Newton, and breakfasted at an inn,
where several young men were troublesomely complimentary to
her good looks. Somehow she felt hopeful, for was it not
possible that her husband also might say these same things
to her even yet? She was bound to take care of herself on
the chance of it, and keep off these casual lovers. To this
end Tess resolved to run no further risks from her
appearance. As soon as she got out of the village she
entered a thicket and took from her basket one of the oldest
field-gowns, which she had never put on even at the
dairy—never since she had worked among the stubble at
Marlott. She also, by a felicitous thought, took a
handkerchief from her bundle and tied it round her face
under her bonnet, covering her chin and half her cheeks and
temples, as if she were suffering from toothache. Then with
her little scissors, by the aid of a pocket looking-glass,
she mercilessly nipped her eyebrows off, and thus insured
against aggressive admiration, she went on her uneven way.
"What a mommet of a maid!" said the next man who met her
to a companion.
Tears came into her eyes for very pity of herself as she
heard him.
"But I don't care!" she said. "O no—I don't care! I'll
always be ugly now, because Angel is not here, and I have
nobody to take care of me. My husband that was is gone away,
and never will love me any more; but I love him just the
same, and hate all other men, and like to make 'em think
scornfully of me!"
Thus Tess walks on; a figure which is part of the
landscape; a fieldwoman pure and simple, in winter guise; a
gray serge cape, a red woollen cravat, a stuff skirt covered
by a whitey-brown rough wrapper, and buff-leather gloves.
Every thread of that old attire has become faded and thin
under the stroke of raindrops, the burn of sunbeams, and the
stress of winds. There is no sign of young passion in her
now—
The maiden's mouth is cold
…
Fold over simple fold
Binding her head.
Inside this exterior, over which the eye might have roved as over a
thing scarcely percipient, almost inorganic, there was the
record of a pulsing life which had learnt too well, for its
years, of the dust and ashes of things, of the cruelty of
lust and the fragility of love.
Next day the weather was bad, but she trudged on, the
honesty, directness, and impartiality of elemental enmity
disconcerting her but little. Her object being a winter's
occupation and a winter's home, there was no time to lose.
Her experience of short hirings had been such that she was
determined to accept no more.
Thus she went forward from farm to farm in the direction
of the place whence Marian had written to her, which she
determined to make use of as a last shift only, its rumoured
stringencies being the reverse of tempting. First she
inquired for the lighter kinds of employment, and, as
acceptance in any variety of these grew hopeless, applied
next for the less light, till, beginning with the dairy and
poultry tendance that she liked best, she ended with the
heavy and course pursuits which she liked least—work on
arable land: work of such roughness, indeed, as she would
never have deliberately voluteered for.
Towards the second evening she reached the irregular
chalk table-land or plateau, bosomed with semi-globular
tumuli—as if Cybele the Many-breasted were supinely extended
there—which stretched between the valley of her birth and
the valley of her love.
Here the air was dry and cold, and the long cart-roads
were blown white and dusty within a few hours after rain.
There were few trees, or none, those that would have grown
in the hedges being mercilessly plashed down with the
quickset by the tenant-farmers, the natural enemies of tree,
bush, and brake. In the middle distance ahead of her she
could see the summits of Bulbarrow and of Nettlecombe Tout,
and they seemed friendly. They had a low and unassuming
aspect from this upland, though as approached on the other
side from Blackmoor in her childhood they were as lofty
bastions against the sky. Southerly, at many miles'
distance, and over the hills and ridges coastward, she could
discern a surface like polished steel: it was the English
Channel at a point far out towards France.
Before her, in a slight depression, were the remains of a
village. She had, in fact, reached Flintcomb-Ash, the place
of Marian's sojourn. There seemed to be no help for it;
hither she was doomed to come. The stubborn soil around her
showed plainly enough that the kind of labour in demand here
was of the roughest kind; but it was time to rest from
searching, and she resolved to stay, particularly as it
began to rain. At the entrance to the village was a cottage
whose gable jutted into the road, and before applying for a
lodging she stood under its shelter, and watched the evening
close in.
"Who would think I was Mrs Angel Clare!" she said.
The wall felt warm to her back and shoulders, and she
found that immediately within the gable was the cottage
fireplace, the heat of which came through the bricks. She
warmed her hands upon them, and also put her cheek—red and
moist with the drizzle—against their comforting surface. The
wall seemed to be the only friend she had. She had so little
wish to leave it that she could have stayed there all night.
Tess could hear the occupants of the cottage—gathered
together after their day's labour—talking to each other
within, and the rattle of their supper-plates was also
audible. But in the village-street she had seen no soul as
yet. The solitude was at last broken by the approach of one
feminine figure, who, though the evening was cold, wore the
print gown and the tilt-bonnet of summer time. Tess
instinctively thought it might be Marian, and when she came
near enough to be distinguishable in the gloom, surely
enough it was she. Marian was even stouter and redder in the
face than formerly, and decidedly shabbier in attire. At any
previous period of her existence Tess would hardly have
cared to renew the acquaintance in such conditions; but her
loneliness was excessive, and she responded readily to
Marian's greeting.
Marian was quite respectful in her inquiries, but seemed
much moved by the fact that Tess should still continue in no
better condition than at first; though she had dimly heard
of the separation.
"Tess—Mrs Clare—the dear wife of dear he! And is it
really so bad as this, my child? Why is your cwomely face
tied up in such a way? Anybody been beating 'ee? Not he?"
"No, no, no! I merely did it not to be clipsed or colled,
Marian."
She pulled off in disgust a bandage which could suggest
such wild thoughts.
"And you've got no collar on" (Tess had been accustomed
to wear a little white collar at the dairy).
"I know it, Marian."
"You've lost it travelling."
"I've not lost it. The truth is, I don't care anything
about my looks; and so I didn't put it on."
"And you don't wear your wedding-ring?"
"Yes, I do; but not in public. I wear it round my neck on
a ribbon. I don't wish people to think who I am by marriage,
or that I am married at all; it would be so awkward while I
lead my present life."
Marian paused.
"But you be a gentleman's wife; and it seems
hardly fair that you should live like this!"
"O yes it is, quite fair; though I am very unhappy."
"Well, well. He married you—and you can be
unhappy!"
"Wives are unhappy sometimes; from no fault of their
husbands—from their own."
"You've no faults, deary; that I'm sure of. And he's
none. So it must be something outside ye both."
"Marian, dear Marian, will you do me a good turn without
asking questions? My husband has gone abroad, and somehow I
have overrun my allowance, so that I have to fall back upon
my old work for a time. Do not call me Mrs Clare, but Tess,
as before. Do they want a hand here?"
"O yes; they'll take one always, because few care to
come. 'Tis a starve-acre place. Corn and swedes are all they
grow. Though I be here myself, I feel 'tis a pity for such
as you to come."
"But you used to be as good a dairywoman as I."
"Yes; but I've got out o' that since I took to drink.
Lord, that's the only comfort I've got now! If you engage,
you'll be set swede-hacking. That's what I be doing; but you
won't like it."
"O—anything! Will you speak for me?"
"You will do better by speaking for yourself."
"Very well. Now, Marian, remember—nothing about him
if I get the place. I don't wish to bring his name down to
the dirt."
Marian, who was really a trustworthy girl though of
coarser grain than Tess, promised anything she asked.
"This is pay-night," she said, "and if you were to come
with me you would know at once. I be real sorry that you are
not happy; but 'tis because he's away, I know. You couldn't
be unhappy if he were here, even if he gie'd ye no
money—even if he used you like a drudge."
"That's true; I could not!"
They walked on together and soon reached the farmhouse,
which was almost sublime in its dreariness. There was not a
tree within sight; there was not, at this season, a green
pasture—nothing but fallow and turnips everywhere, in large
fields divided by hedges plashed to unrelieved levels.
Tess waited outside the door of the farmhouse till the
group of workfolk had received their wages, and then Marian
introduced her. The farmer himself, it appeared, was not at
home, but his wife, who represented him this evening, made
no objection to hiring Tess, on her agreeing to remain till
Old Lady-Day. Female field-labour was seldom offered now,
and its cheapness made it profitable for tasks which women
could perform as readily as men.
Having signed the agreement, there was nothing more for
Tess to do at present than to get a lodging, and she found
one in the house at whose gable-wall she had warmed herself.
It was a poor subsistence that she had ensured, but it would
afford a shelter for the winter at any rate.
That night she wrote to inform her parents of her new
address, in case a letter should arrive at Marlott from her
husband. But she did not tell them of the sorriness of her
situation: it might have brought reproach upon him.
XLIII
There was no exaggeration in Marian's definition of
Flintcomb-Ash farm as a starve-acre place. The single fat
thing on the soil was Marian herself; and she was an
importation. Of the three classes of village, the village
cared for by its lord, the village cared for by itself, and
the village uncared for either by itself or by its lord (in
other words, the village of a resident squires's tenantry,
the village of free- or copy-holders, and the
absentee-owner's village, farmed with the land) this place,
Flintcomb-Ash, was the third.
But Tess set to work. Patience, that blending of moral
courage with physical timidity, was now no longer a minor
feature in Mrs Angel Clare; and it sustained her.
The swede-field in which she and her companion were set
hacking was a stretch of a hundred odd acres in one patch,
on the highest ground of the farm, rising above stony
lanchets or lynchets—the outcrop of siliceous veins in the
chalk formation, composed of myriads of loose white flints
in bulbous, cusped, and phallic shapes. The upper half of
each turnip had been eaten off by the live-stock, and it was
the business of the two women to grub up the lower or earthy
half of the root with a hooked fork called a hacker, that it
might be eaten also. Every leaf of the vegetable having
already been consumed, the whole field was in colour a
desolate drab; it was a complexion without features, as if a
face, from chin to brow, should be only an expanse of skin.
The sky wore, in another colour, the same likeness; a white
vacuity of countenance with the lineaments gone. So these
two upper and nether visages confronted each other all day
long, the white face looking down on the brown face, and the
brown face looking up at the white face, without anything
standing between them but the two girls crawling over the
surface of the former like flies.
Nobody came near them, and their movements showed a
mechanical regularity; their forms standing enshrouded in
Hessian "wroppers"—sleeved brown pinafores, tied behind to
the bottom, to keep their gowns from blowing about—scant
skirts revealing boots that reached high up the ankles, and
yellow sheepskin gloves with gauntlets. The pensive
character which the curtained hood lent to their bent heads
would have reminded the observer of some early Italian
conception of the two Marys.
They worked on hour after hour, unconscious of the
forlorn aspect they bore in the landscape, not thinking of
the justice or injustice of their lot. Even in such a
position as theirs it was possible to exist in a dream. In
the afternoon the rain came on again, and Marian said that
they need not work any more. But if they did not work they
would not be paid; so they worked on. It was so high a
situation, this field, that the rain had no occasion to
fall, but raced along horizontally upon the yelling wind,
sticking into them like glass splinters till they were wet
through. Tess had not known till now what was really meant
by that. There are degrees of dampness, and a very little is
called being wet through in common talk. But to stand
working slowly in a field, and feel the creep of rain-water,
first in legs and shoulders, then on hips and head, then at
back, front, and sides, and yet to work on till the leaden
light diminishes and marks that the sun is down, demands a
distinct modicum of stoicism, even of valour.
Yet they did not feel the wetness so much as might be
supposed. They were both young, and they were talking of the
time when they lived and loved together at Talbothays Dairy,
that happy green tract of land where summer had been liberal
in her gifts; in substance to all, emotionally to these.
Tess would fain not have conversed with Marian of the man
who was legally, if not actually, her husband; but the
irresistible fascination of the subject betrayed her into
reciprocating Marian's remarks. And thus, as has been said,
though the damp curtains of their bonnets flapped smartly
into their faces, and their wrappers clung about them to
wearisomeness, they lived all this afternoon in memories of
green, sunny, romantic Talbothays.
"You can see a gleam of a hill within a few miles o'
Froom Valley from here when 'tis fine," said Marian.
"Ah! Can you?" said Tess, awake to the new value of this
locality.
So the two forces were at work here as everywhere, the
inherent will to enjoy, and the circumstantial will against
enjoyment. Marian's will had a method of assisting itself by
taking from her pocket as the afternoon wore on a pint
bottle corked with white rag, from which she invited Tess to
drink. Tess's unassisted power of dreaming, however, being
enough for her sublimation at present, she declined except
the merest sip, and then Marian took a pull from the
spirits.
"I've got used to it," she said, "and can't leave it off
now. 'Tis my only comfort—You see I lost him: you didn't;
and you can do without it perhaps."
Tess thought her loss as great as Marian's, but upheld by
the dignity of being Angel's wife, in the letter at least,
she accepted Marian's differentiation.
Amid this scene Tess slaved in the morning frosts and in
the afternoon rains. When it was not swede-grubbing it was
swede-trimming, in which process they sliced off the earth
and the fibres with a bill-hook before storing the roots for
future use. At this occupation they could shelter themselves
by a thatched hurdle if it rained; but if it was frosty even
their thick leather gloves could not prevent the frozen
masses they handled from biting their fingers. Still Tess
hoped. She had a conviction that sooner or later the
magnanimity which she persisted in reckoning as a chief
ingredient of Clare's character would lead him to rejoin
her.
Marian, primed to a humorous mood, would discover the
queer-shaped flints aforesaid, and shriek with laughter,
Tess remaining severely obtuse. They often looked across the
country to where the Var or Froom was know to stretch, even
though they might not be able to see it; and, fixing their
eyes on the cloaking gray mist, imagined the old times they
had spent out there.
"Ah," said Marian, "how I should like another or two of
our old set to come here! Then we could bring up Talbothays
every day here afield, and talk of he, and of what nice
times we had there, and o' the old things we used to know,
and make it all come back a'most, in seeming!" Marian's eyes
softened, and her voice grew vague as the visions returned.
"I'll write to Izz Huett," she said. "She's biding at home
doing nothing now, I know, and I'll tell her we be here, and
ask her to come; and perhaps Retty is well enough now."
Tess had nothing to say against the proposal, and the
next she heard of this plan for importing old Talbothays'
joys was two or three days later, when Marian informed her
that Izz had replied to her inquiry, and had promised to
come if she could.
There had not been such a winter for years. It came on in
stealthy and measured glides, like the moves of a
chess-player. One morning the few lonely trees and the
thorns of the hedgerows appeared as if they had put off a
vegetable for an animal integument. Every twig was covered
with a white nap as of fur grown from the rind during the
night, giving it four times its usual stoutness; the whole
bush or tree forming a staring sketch in white lines on the
mournful gray of the sky and horizon. Cobwebs revealed their
presence on sheds and walls where none had ever been
observed till brought out into visibility by the
crystallizing atmosphere, hanging like loops of white
worsted from salient points of the out-houses, posts, and
gates.
After this season of congealed dampness came a spell of
dry frost, when strange birds from behind the North Pole
began to arrive silently on the upland of Flintcomb-Ash;
gaunt spectral creatures with tragical eyes—eyes which had
witnessed scenes of cataclysmal horror in inaccessible polar
regions of a magnitude such as no human being had ever
conceived, in curdling temperatures that no man could
endure; which had beheld the crash of icebergs and the slide
of snow-hills by the shooting light of the Aurora; been half
blinded by the whirl of colossal storms and terraqueous
distortions; and retained the expression of feature that
such scenes had engendered. These nameless birds came quite
near to Tess and Marian, but of all they had seen which
humanity would never see, they brought no account. The
traveller's ambition to tell was not theirs, and, with dumb
impassivity, they dismissed experiences which they did not
value for the immediate incidents of this homely upland—the
trivial movements of the two girls in disturbing the clods
with their hackers so as to uncover something or other that
these visitants relished as food.
Then one day a peculiar quality invaded the air of this
open country. There came a moisture which was not of rain,
and a cold which was not of frost. It chilled the eyeballs
of the twain, made their brows ache, penetrated to their
skeletons, affecting the surface of the body less than its
core. They knew that it meant snow, and in the night the
snow came. Tess, who continued to live at the cottage with
the warm gable that cheered any lonely pedestrian who paused
beside it, awoke in the night, and heard above the thatch
noises which seemed to signify that the roof had turned
itself into a gymnasium of all the winds. When she lit her
lamp to get up in the morning she found that the snow had
blown through a chink in the casement, forming a white cone
of the finest powder against the inside, and had also come
down the chimney, so that it lay sole-deep upon the floor,
on which her shoes left tracks when she moved about.
Without, the storm drove so fast as to create a snow-mist in
the kitchen; but as yet it was too dark out-of-doors to see
anything.
Tess knew that it was impossible to go on with the
swedes; and by the time she had finished breakfast beside
the solitary little lamp, Marian arrived to tell her that
they were to join the rest of the women at reed-drawing in
the barn till the weather changed. As soon, therefore, as
the uniform cloak of darkness without began to turn to a
disordered medley of grays, they blew out the lamp, wrapped
themselves up in their thickest pinners, tied their woollen
cravats round their necks and across their chests, and
started for the barn. The snow had followed the birds from
the polar basin as a white pillar of a cloud, and individual
flakes could not be seen. The blast smelt of icebergs,
arctic seas, whales, and white bears, carrying the snow so
that it licked the land but did not deepen on it. They
trudged onwards with slanted bodies through the flossy
fields, keeping as well as they could in the shelter of
hedges, which, however, acted as strainers rather than
screens. The air, afflicted to pallor with the hoary
multitudes that infested it, twisted and spun them
eccentrically, suggesting an achromatic chaos of things. But
both the young women were fairly cheerful; such weather on a
dry upland is not in itself dispiriting.
"Ha-ha! the cunning northern birds knew this was coming,"
said Marian. "Depend upon't, they keep just in front o't all
the way from the North Star. Your husband, my dear, is, I
make no doubt, having scorching weather all this time. Lord,
if he could only see his pretty wife now! Not that this
weather hurts your beauty at all—in fact, it rather does it
good."
"You mustn't talk about him to me, Marian," said Tess
severely.
"Well, but—surely you care for'n! Do you?"
Instead of answering, Tess, with tears in her eyes,
impulsively faced in the direction in which she imagined
South America to lie, and, putting up her lips, blew out a
passionate kiss upon the snowy wind.
"Well, well, I know you do. But 'pon my body, it is a rum
life for a married couple! There—I won't say another word!
Well, as for the weather, it won't hurt us in the
wheat-barn; but reed-drawing is fearful hard work—worse than
swede-hacking. I can stand it because I'm stout; but you be
slimmer than I. I can't think why maister should have set
'ee at it."
They reached the wheat-barn and entered it. One end of
the long structure was full of corn; the middle was where
the reed-drawing was carried on, and there had already been
placed in the reed-press the evening before as many sheaves
of wheat as would be sufficient for the women to draw from
during the day.
"Why, here's Izz!" said Marian.
Izz it was, and she came forward. She had walked all the
way from her mother's home on the previous afternoon, and,
not deeming the distance so great, had been belated,
arriving, however, just before the snow began, and sleeping
at the alehouse. The farmer had agreed with her mother at
market to take her on if she came to-day, and she had been
afraid to disappoint him by delay.
In addition to Tess, Marian, and Izz, there were two
women from a neighbouring village; two Amazonian sisters,
whom Tess with a start remembered as Dark Car, the Queen of
Spades, and her junior, the Queen of Diamonds—those who had
tried to fight with her in the midnight quarrel at
Trantridge. They showed no recognition of her, and possibly
had none, for they had been under the influence of liquor on
that occasion, and were only temporary sojourners there as
here. They did all kinds of men's work by preference,
including well-sinking, hedging, ditching, and excavating,
without any sense of fatigue. Noted reed-drawers were they
too, and looked round upon the other three with some
superciliousness.
Putting on their gloves, all set to work in a row in
front of the press, an erection formed of two posts
connected by a cross-beam, under which the sheaves to be
drawn from were laid ears outward, the beam being pegged
down by pins in the uprights, and lowered as the sheaves
diminished.
The day hardened in colour, the light coming in at the
barndoors upwards from the snow instead of downwards from
the sky. The girls pulled handful after handful from the
press; but by reason of the presence of the strange women,
who were recounting scandals, Marian and Izz could not at
first talk of old times as they wished to do. Presently they
heard the muffled tread of a horse, and the farmer rode up
to the barndoor. When he had dismounted he came close to
Tess, and remained looking musingly at the side of her face.
She had not turned at first, but his fixed attitude led her
to look round, when she perceived that her employer was the
native of Trantridge from whom she had taken flight on the
high-road because of his allusion to her history.
He waited till she had carried the drawn bundles to the
pile outside, when he said, "So you be the young woman who
took my civility in such ill part? Be drowned if I didn't
think you might be as soon as I heard of your being hired!
Well, you thought you had got the better of me the first
time at the inn with your fancy-man, and the second time on
the road, when you bolted; but now I think I've got the
better you." He concluded with a hard laugh.
Tess, between the Amazons and the farmer, like a bird
caught in a clap-net, returned no answer, continuing to pull
the straw. She could read character sufficiently well to
know by this time that she had nothing to fear from her
employer's gallantry; it was rather the tyranny induced by
his mortification at Clare's treatment of him. Upon the
whole she preferred that sentiment in man and felt brave
enough to endure it.
"You thought I was in love with 'ee I suppose? Some women
are such fools, to take every look as serious earnest. But
there's nothing like a winter afield for taking that
nonsense out o' young wenches' heads; and you've signed and
agreed till Lady-Day. Now, are you going to beg my pardon?"
"I think you ought to beg mine."
"Very well—as you like. But we'll see which is master
here. Be they all the sheaves you've done to-day?"
"Yes, sir."
"'Tis a very poor show. Just see what they've done over
there" (pointing to the two stalwart women). "The rest, too,
have done better than you."
"They've all practised it before, and I have not. And I
thought it made no difference to you as it is task work, and
we are only paid for what we do."
"Oh, but it does. I want the barn cleared."
"I am going to work all the afternoon instead of leaving
at two as the others will do."
He looked sullenly at her and went away. Tess felt that
she could not have come to a much worse place; but anything
was better than gallantry. When two o'clock arrived the
professional reed-drawers tossed off the last half-pint in
their flagon, put down their hooks, tied their last sheaves,
and went away. Marian and Izz would have done likewise, but
on hearing that Tess meant to stay, to make up by longer
hours for her lack of skill, they would not leave her.
Looking out at the snow, which still fell, Marian exclaimed,
"Now, we've got it all to ourselves." And so at last the
conversation turned to their old experiences at the dairy;
and, of course, the incidents of their affection for Angel
Clare.
"Izz and Marian," said Mrs Angel Clare, with a dignity
which was extremely touching, seeing how very little of a
wife she was: "I can't join in talk with you now, as I used
to do, about Mr Clare; you will see that I cannot; because,
although he is gone away from me for the present, he is my
husband."
Izz was by nature the sauciest and most caustic of all
the four girls who had loved Clare. "He was a very splendid
lover, no doubt," she said; "but I don't think he is a too
fond husband to go away from you so soon."
"He had to go—he was obliged to go, to see about the land
over there!" pleaded Tess.
"He might have tided 'ee over the winter."
"Ah—that's owing to an accident—a misunderstanding; and
we won't argue it," Tess answered, with tearfulness in her
words. "Perhaps there's a good deal to be said for him! He
did not go away, like some husbands, without telling me; and
I can always find out where he is."
After this they continued for some long time in a
reverie, as they went on seizing the ears of corn, drawing
out the straw, gathering it under their arms, and cutting
off the ears with their bill-hooks, nothing sounding in the
barn but the swish of the straw and the crunch of the hook.
Then Tess suddenly flagged, and sank down upon the heap of
wheat-ears at her feet.
"I knew you wouldn't be able to stand it!" cried Marian.
"It wants harder flesh than yours for this work."
Just then the farmer entered. "Oh, that's how you get on
when I am away," he said to her.
"But it is my own loss," she pleaded. "Not yours."
"I want it finished," he said doggedly, as he crossed the
barn and went out at the other door.
"Don't 'ee mind him, there's a dear," said Marian. "I've
worked here before. Now you go and lie down there, and Izz
and I will make up your number."
"I don't like to let you do that. I'm taller than you,
too."
However, she was so overcome that she consented to lie
down awhile, and reclined on a heap of pull-tails—the refuse
after the straight straw had been drawn—thrown up at the
further side of the barn. Her succumbing had been as largely
owning to agitation at the re-opening the subject of her
separation from her husband as to the hard work. She lay in
a state of percipience without volition, and the rustle of
the straw and the cutting of the ears by the others had the
weight of bodily touches.
She could hear from her corner, in addition to these
noises, the murmur of their voices. She felt certain that
they were continuing the subject already broached, but their
voices were so low that she could not catch the words. At
last Tess grew more and more anxious to know what they were
saying, and, persuading herself that she felt better, she
got up and resumed work.
Then Izz Huett broke down. She had walked more than a
dozen miles the previous evening, had gone to bed at
midnight, and had risen again at five o'clock. Marian alone,
thanks to her bottle of liquor and her stoutness of build,
stood the strain upon back and arms without suffering. Tess
urged Izz to leave off, agreeing, as she felt better, to
finish the day without her, and make equal division of the
number of sheaves.
Izz accepted the offer gratefully, and disappeared
through the great door into the snowy track to her lodging.
Marian, as was the case every afternoon at this time on
account of the bottle, began to feel in a romantic vein.
"I should not have thought it of him—never!" she said in
a dreamy tone. "And I loved him so! I didn't mind his having
you. But this about Izz is too bad!"
Tess, in her start at the words, narrowly missed cutting
off a finger with the bill-hook.
"Is it about my husband?" she stammered.
"Well, yes. Izz said, 'Don't 'ee tell her'; but I am sure
I can't help it! It was what he wanted Izz to do. He wanted
her to go off to Brazil with him."
Tess's face faded as white as the scene without, and its
curves straightened. "And did Izz refuse to go?" she asked.
"I don't know. Anyhow he changed his mind."
"Pooh—then he didn't mean it! 'Twas just a man's jest!"
"Yes he did; for he drove her a good-ways towards the
station."
"He didn't take her!"
They pulled on in silence till Tess, without any
premonitory symptoms, burst out crying.
"There!" said Marian. "Now I wish I hadn't told 'ee!"
"No. It is a very good thing that you have done! I have
been living on in a thirtover, lackaday way, and have not
seen what it may lead to! I ought to have sent him a letter
oftener. He said I could not go to him, but he didn't say I
was not to write as often as I liked. I won't dally like
this any longer! I have been very wrong and neglectful in
leaving everything to be done by him!"
The dim light in the barn grew dimmer, and they could see
to work no longer. When Tess had reached home that evening,
and had entered into the privacy of her little white-washed
chamber, she began impetuously writing a letter to Clare.
But falling into doubt, she could not finish it. Afterwards
she took the ring from the ribbon on which she wore it next
her heart, and retained it on her finger all night, as if to
fortify herself in the sensation that she was really the
wife of this elusive lover of hers, who could propose that
Izz should go with him abroad, so shortly after he had left
her. Knowing that, how could she write entreaties to him, or
show that she cared for him any more?
XLIV
By the disclosure in the barn her thoughts were led anew
in the direction which they had taken more than once of
late—to the distant Emminster Vicarage. It was through her
husband's parents that she had been charged to send a letter
to Clare if she desired; and to write to them direct if in
difficulty. But that sense of her having morally no claim
upon him had always led Tess to suspend her impulse to send
these notes; and to the family at the Vicarage, therefore,
as to her own parents since her marriage, she was virtually
non-existent. This self-effacement in both directions had
been quite in consonance with her independent character of
desiring nothing by way of favour or pity to which she was
not entitled on a fair consideration of her deserts. She had
set herself to stand or fall by her qualities, and to waive
such merely technical claims upon a strange family as had
been established for her by the flimsy fact of a member of
that family, in a season of impulse, writing his name in a
church-book beside hers.
But now that she was stung to a fever by Izz's tale,
there was a limit to her powers of renunciation. Why had her
husband not written to her? He had distinctly implied that
he would at least let her know of the locality to which he
had journeyed; but he had not sent a line to notify his
address. Was he really indifferent? But was he ill? Was it
for her to make some advance? Surely she might summon the
courage of solicitude, call at the Vicarage for
intelligence, and express her grief at his silence. If
Angel's father were the good man she had heard him
represented to be, he would be able to enter into her
heart-starved situation. Her social hardships she could
conceal.
To leave the farm on a week-day was not in her power;
Sunday was the only possible opportunity. Flintcomb-Ash
being in the middle of the cretaceous tableland over which
no railway had climbed as yet, it would be necessary to
walk. And the distance being fifteen miles each way she
would have to allow herself a long day for the undertaking
by rising early.
A fortnight later, when the snow had gone, and had been
followed by a hard black frost, she took advantage of the
state of the roads to try the experiment. At four o'clock
that Sunday morning she came downstairs and stepped out into
the starlight. The weather was still favourable, the ground
ringing under her feet like an anvil.
Marian and Izz were much interested in her excursion,
knowing that the journey concerned her husband. Their
lodgings were in a cottage a little further along the lane,
but they came and assisted Tess in her departure, and argued
that she should dress up in her very prettiest guise to
captivate the hearts of her parents-in-law; though she,
knowing of the austere and Calvinistic tenets of old Mr
Clare, was indifferent, and even doubtful. A year had now
elapsed since her sad marriage, but she had preserved
sufficient draperies from the wreck of her then full
wardrobe to clothe her very charmingly as a simple country
girl with no pretensions to recent fashion; a soft gray
woollen gown, with white crape quilling against the pink
skin of her face and neck, and a black velvet jacket and
hat.
"'Tis a thousand pities your husband can't see 'ee
now—you do look a real beauty!" said Izz Huett, regarding
Tess as she stood on the threshold between the steely
starlight without and the yellow candlelight within. Izz
spoke with a magnanimous abandonment of herself to the
situation; she could not be—no woman with a heart bigger
than a hazel-nut could be—antagonistic to Tess in her
presence, the influence which she exercised over those of
her own sex being of a warmth and strength quite unusual,
curiously overpowering the less worthy feminine feelings of
spite and rivalry.
With a final tug and touch here, and a slight brush
there, they let her go; and she was absorbed into the pearly
air of the fore-dawn. They heard her footsteps tap along the
hard road as she stepped out to her full pace. Even Izz
hoped she would win, and, though without any particular
respect for her own virtue, felt glad that she had been
prevented wronging her friend when momentarily tempted by
Clare.
It was a year ago, all but a day, that Clare had married
Tess, and only a few days less than a year that he had been
absent from her. Still, to start on a brisk walk, and on
such an errand as hers, on a dry clear wintry morning,
through the rarefied air of these chalky hogs'-backs, was
not depressing; and there is no doubt that her dream at
starting was to win the heart of her mother-in-law, tell her
whole history to that lady, enlist her on her side, and so
gain back the truant.
In time she reached the edge of the vast escarpment below
which stretched the loamy Vale of Blackmoor, now lying misty
and still in the dawn. Instead of the colourless air of the
uplands, the atmosphere down there was a deep blue. Instead
of the great enclosures of a hundred acres in which she was
now accustomed to toil, there were little fields below her
of less than half-a-dozen acres, so numerous that they
looked from this height like the meshes of a net. Here the
landscape was whitey-brown; down there, as in Froom Valley,
it was always green. Yet it was in that vale that her sorrow
had taken shape, and she did not love it as formerly. Beauty
to her, as to all who have felt, lay not in the thing, but
in what the thing symbolized.
Keeping the Vale on her right, she steered steadily
westward; passing above the Hintocks, crossing at
right-angles the high-road from Sherton-Abbas to
Casterbridge, and skirting Dogbury Hill and High-Stoy, with
the dell between them called "The Devil's Kitchen". Still
following the elevated way she reached Cross-in-Hand, where
the stone pillar stands desolate and silent, to mark the
site of a miracle, or murder, or both. Three miles further
she cut across the straight and deserted Roman road called
Long-Ash Lane; leaving which as soon as she reached it she
dipped down a hill by a transverse lane into the small town
or village of Evershead, being now about halfway over the
distance. She made a halt here, and breakfasted a second
time, heartily enough—not at the Sow-and-Acorn, for she
avoided inns, but at a cottage by the church.
The second half of her journey was through a more gentle
country, by way of Benvill Lane. But as the mileage lessened
between her and the spot of her pilgrimage, so did Tess's
confidence decrease, and her enterprise loom out more
formidably. She saw her purpose in such staring lines, and
the landscape so faintly, that she was sometimes in danger
of losing her way. However, about noon she paused by a gate
on the edge of the basin in which Emminster and its Vicarage
lay.
The square tower, beneath which she knew that at that
moment the Vicar and his congregation were gathered, had a
severe look in her eyes. She wished that she had somehow
contrived to come on a week-day. Such a good man might be
prejudiced against a woman who had chosen Sunday, never
realizing the necessities of her case. But it was incumbent
upon her to go on now. She took off the thick boots in which
she had walked thus far, put on her pretty thin ones of
patent leather, and, stuffing the former into the hedge by
the gatepost where she might readily find them again,
descended the hill; the freshness of colour she had derived
from the keen air thinning away in spite of her as she drew
near the parsonage.
Tess hoped for some accident that might favour her, but
nothing favoured her. The shrubs on the Vicarage lawn
rustled uncomfortably in the frosty breeze; she could not
feel by any stretch of imagination, dressed to her highest
as she was, that the house was the residence of near
relations; and yet nothing essential, in nature or emotion,
divided her from them: in pains, pleasures, thoughts, birth,
death, and after-death, they were the same.
She nerved herself by an effort, entered the swing-gate,
and rang the door-bell. The thing was done; there could be
no retreat. No; the thing was not done. Nobody answered to
her ringing. The effort had to be risen to and made again.
She rang a second time, and the agitation of the act,
coupled with her weariness after the fifteen miles' walk,
led her support herself while she waited by resting her hand
on her hip, and her elbow against the wall of the porch. The
wind was so nipping that the ivy-leaves had become wizened
and gray, each tapping incessantly upon its neighbour with a
disquieting stir of her nerves. A piece of blood-stained
paper, caught up from some meat-buyer's dust-heap, beat up
and down the road without the gate; too flimsy to rest, too
heavy to fly away; and a few straws kept it company.
The second peal had been louder, and still nobody came.
Then she walked out of the porch, opened the gate, and
passed through. And though she looked dubiously at the
house-front as if inclined to return, it was with a breath
of relied that she closed the gate. A feeling haunted her
that she might have been recognized (though how she could
not tell), and orders been given not to admit her.
Tess went as far as the corner. She had done all she
could do; but determined not to escape present trepidation
at the expense of future distress, she walked back again
quite past the house, looking up at all the windows.
Ah—the explanation was that they were all at church,
every one. She remembered her husband saying that his father
always insisted upon the household, servants included, going
to morning-service, and, as a consequence, eating cold food
when they came home. It was, therefore, only necessary to
wait till the service was over. She would not make herself
conspicuous by waiting on the spot, and she started to get
past the church into the lane. But as she reached the
churchyard-gate the people began pouring out, and Tess found
herself in the midst of them.
The Emminster congregation looked at her as only a
congregation of small country-townsfolk walking home at its
leisure can look at a woman out of the common whom it
perceives to be a stranger. She quickened her pace, and
ascended the the road by which she had come, to find a
retreat between its hedges till the Vicar's family should
have lunched, and it might be convenient for them to receive
her. She soon distanced the churchgoers, except two youngish
men, who, linked arm-in-arm, were beating up behind her at a
quick step.
As they drew nearer she could hear their voices engaged
in earnest discourse, and, with the natural quickness of a
woman in her situation, did not fail to recognize in those
noises the quality of her husband's tones. The pedestrians
were his two brothers. Forgetting all her plans, Tess's one
dread was lest they should overtake her now, in her
disorganized condition, before she was prepared to confront
them; for though she felt that they could not identify her,
she instinctively dreaded their scrutiny. The more briskly
they walked, the more briskly walked she. They were plainly
bent upon taking a short quick stroll before going indoors
to lunch or dinner, to restore warmth to limbs chilled with
sitting through a long service.
Only one person had preceded Tess up the hill—a ladylike
young woman, somewhat interesting, though, perhaps, a trifle
guindée and prudish. Tess had nearly overtaken her
when the speed of her brothers-in-law brought them so nearly
behind her back that she could hear every word of their
conversation. They said nothing, however, which particularly
interested her till, observing the young lady still further
in front, one of them remarked, "There is Mercy Chant. Let
us overtake her."
Tess knew the name. It was the woman who had been
destined for Angel's life-companion by his and her parents,
and whom he probably would have married but for her
intrusive self. She would have known as much without
previous information if she had waited a moment, for one of
the brothers proceeded to say: "Ah! poor Angel, poor Angel!
I never see that nice girl without more and more regretting
his precipitancy in throwing himself away upon a dairymaid,
or whatever she may be. It is a queer business, apparently.
Whether she has joined him yet or not I don't know; but she
had not done so some months ago when I heard from him."
"I can't say. He never tells me anything nowadays. His
ill-considered marriage seems to have completed that
estrangement from me which was begun by his extraordinary
opinions."
Tess beat up the long hill still faster; but she could
not outwalk them without exciting notice. At last they
outsped her altogether, and passed her by. The young lady
still further ahead heard their footsteps and turned. Then
there was a greeting and a shaking of hands, and the three
went on together.
They soon reached the summit of the hill, and, evidently
intending this point to be the limit of their promenade,
slackened pace and turned all three aside to the gate
whereat Tess had paused an hour before that time to
reconnoitre the town before descending into it. During their
discourse one of the clerical brothers probed the hedge
carefully with his umbrella, and dragged something to light.
"Here's a pair of old boots," he said. "Thrown away, I
suppose, by some tramp or other."
"Some imposter who wished to come into the town barefoot,
perhaps, and so excite our sympathies," said Miss Chant.
"Yes, it must have been, for they are excellent
walking-boots—by no means worn out. What a wicked thing to
do! I'll carry them home for some poor person."
Cuthbert Clare, who had been the one to find them, picked
them up for her with the crook of his stick; and Tess's
boots were appropriated.
She, who had heard this, walked past under the screen of
her woollen veil till, presently looking back, she perceived
that the church party had left the gate with her boots and
retreated down the hill.
Thereupon our heroine resumed her walk. Tears, blinding
tears, were running down her face. She knew that it was all
sentiment, all baseless impressibility, which had caused her
to read the scene as her own condemnation; nevertheless she
could not get over it; she could not contravene in her own
defenceless person all those untoward omens. It was
impossible to think of returning to the Vicarage. Angel's
wife felt almost as if she had been hounded up that hill
like a scorned thing by those—to her—superfine clerics.
Innocently as the slight had been inflicted, it was somewhat
unfortunate that she had encountered the sons and not the
father, who, despite his narrowness, was far less starched
and ironed than they, and had to the full the gift of
charity. As she again thought of her dusty boots she almost
pitied those habiliments for the quizzing to which they had
been subjected, and felt how hopeless life was for their
owner.
"Ah!" she said, still sighing in pity of herself, "They
didn't know that I wore those over the roughest part of the
road to save these pretty ones he bought for
me—no—they did not know it! And they didn't think that he
chose the colour o' my pretty frock—no—how could they? If
they had known perhaps they would not have cared, for they
don't care much for him, poor thing!"
Then she grieved for the beloved man whose conventional
standard of judgement had caused her all these latter
sorrows; and she went her way without knowing that the
greatest misfortune of her life was this feminine loss of
courage at the last and critical moment through her
estimating her father-in-law by his sons. Her present
condition was precisely one which would have enlisted the
sympathies of old Mr and Mrs Clare. Their hearts went out of
them at a bound towards extreme cases, when the subtle
mental troubles of the less desperate among mankind failed
to win their interest or regard. In jumping at Publicans and
Sinners they would forget that a word might be said for the
worries of Scribes and Pharisees; and this defect or
limitation might have recommended their own daughter-in-law
to them at this moment as a fairly choice sort of lost
person for their love.
Thereupon she began to plod back along the road by which
she had come not altogether full of hope, but full of a
conviction that a crisis in her life was approaching. No
crisis, apparently, had supervened; and there was nothing
left for her to do but to continue upon that starve-acre
farm till she could again summon courage to face the
Vicarage. She did, indeed, take sufficient interest in
herself to throw up her veil on this return journey, as if
to let the world see that she could at least exhibit a face
such as Mercy Chant could not show. But it was done with a
sorry shake of the head. "It is nothing—it is nothing!" she
said. "Nobody loves it; nobody sees it. Who cares about the
looks of a castaway like me!"
Her journey back was rather a meander than a march. It
had no sprightliness, no purpose; only a tendency. Along the
tedious length of Benvill Lane she began to grow tired, and
she leant upon gates and paused by milestones.
She did not enter any house till, at the seventh or
eighth mile, she descended the steep long hill below which
lay the village or townlet of Evershead, where in the
morning she had breakfasted with such contrasting
expectations. The cottage by the church, in which she again
sat down, was almost the first at that end of the village,
and while the woman fetched her some milk from the pantry,
Tess, looking down the street, perceived that the place
seemed quite deserted.
"The people are gone to afternoon service, I suppose?"
she said.
"No, my dear," said the old woman. "'Tis too soon for
that; the bells hain't strook out yet. They be all gone to
hear the preaching in yonder barn. A ranter preaches there
between the services—an excellent, fiery, Christian man,
they say. But, Lord, I don't go to hear'n! What comes in the
regular way over the pulpit is hot enough for I."
Tess soon went onward into the village, her footsteps
echoing against the houses as though it were a place of the
dead. Nearing the central part, her echoes were intruded on
by other sounds; and seeing the barn not far off the road,
she guessed these to be the utterances of the preacher.
His voice became so distinct in the still clear air that
she could soon catch his sentences, though she was on the
closed side of the barn. The sermon, as might be expected,
was of the extremest antinomian type; on justification by
faith, as expounded in the theology of St Paul. This fixed
idea of the rhapsodist was delivered with animated
enthusiasm, in a manner entirely declamatory, for he had
plainly no skill as a dialectician. Although Tess had not
heard the beginning of the address, she learnt what the text
had been from its constant iteration—
"O foolish galatians, who hath bewitched you,
that ye should not obey the truth, before whose eyes
Jesus Christ hath been evidently set forth,
crucified among you?"
Tess was all the more interested, as she stood listening behind, in
finding that the preacher's doctrine was a vehement form of
the view of Angel's father, and her interest intensified
when the speaker began to detail his own spiritual
experiences of how he had come by those views. He had, he
said, been the greatest of sinners. He had scoffed; he had
wantonly associated with the reckless and the lewd. But a
day of awakening had come, and, in a human sense, it had
been brought about mainly by the influence of a certain
clergyman, whom he had at first grossly insulted; but whose
parting words had sunk into his heart, and had remained
there, till by the grace of Heaven they had worked this
change in him, and made him what they saw him.
But more startling to Tess than the doctrine had been the
voice, which, impossible as it seemed, was precisely that of
Alec d'Urberville. Her face fixed in painful suspense, she
came round to the front of the barn, and passed before it.
The low winter sun beamed directly upon the great
double-doored entrance on this side; one of the doors being
open, so that the rays stretched far in over the
threshing-floor to the preacher and his audience, all snugly
sheltered from the northern breeze. The listeners were
entirely villagers, among them being the man whom she had
seen carrying the red paint-pot on a former memorable
occasion. But her attention was given to the central figure,
who stood upon some sacks of corn, facing the people and the
door. The three o'clock sun shone full upon him, and the
strange enervating conviction that her seducer confronted
her, which had been gaining ground in Tess ever since she
had heard his words distinctly, was at last established as a
fact indeed.
End of Phase the Fifth

Phase the Sixth: The Convert, XLV-LII
XLV
Till this moment she had never seen or heard from d'Urberville since
her departure from Trantridge.
The rencounter came at a heavy moment, one of all moments
calculated to permit its impact with the least emotional
shock. But such was unreasoning memory that, though he stood
there openly and palpably a converted man, who was sorrowing
for his past irregularities, a fear overcame her, paralyzing
her movement so that she neither retreated nor advanced.
To think of what emanated from that countenance when she
saw it last, and to behold it now! … There was the same
handsome unpleasantness of mien, but now he wore neatly
trimmed, old-fashioned whiskers, the sable moustache having
disappeared; and his dress was half-clerical, a modification
which had changed his expression sufficiently to abstract
the dandyism from his features, and to hinder for a second
her belief in his identity.
To Tess's sense there was, just at first, a ghastly
bizarrerie, a grim incongruity, in the march of these
solemn words of Scripture out of such a mouth. This too
familiar intonation, less than four years earlier, had
brought to her ears expressions of such divergent purpose
that her heart became quite sick at the irony of the
contrast.
It was less a reform than a transfiguration. The former
curves of sensuousness were now modulated to lines of
devotional passion. The lip-shapes that had meant
seductiveness were now made to express supplication; the
glow on the cheek that yesterday could be translated as
riotousness was evangelized to-day into the splendour of
pious rhetoric; animalism had become fanaticism; Paganism,
Paulinism; the bold rolling eye that had flashed upon her
form in the old time with such mastery now beamed with the
rude energy of a theolatry that was almost ferocious. Those
black angularities which his face had used to put on when
his wishes were thwarted now did duty in picturing the
incorrigible backslider who would insist upon turning again
to his wallowing in the mire.
The lineaments, as such, seemed to complain. They had
been diverted from their hereditary connotation to signify
impressions for which Nature did not intend them. Strange
that their very elevation was a misapplication, that to
raise seemed to falsify.
Yet could it be so? She would admit the ungenerous
sentiment no longer. D'Urberville was not the first wicked
man who had turned away from his wickedness to save his soul
alive, and why should she deem it unnatural in him? It was
but the usage of thought which had been jarred in her at
hearing good new words in bad old notes. The greater the
sinner, the greater the saint; it was not necessary to dive
far into Christian history to discover that.
Such impressions as these moved her vaguely, and without
strict definiteness. As soon as the nerveless pause of her
surprise would allow her to stir, her impulse was to pass on
out of his sight. He had obviously not discerned her yet in
her position against the sun.
But the moment that she moved again he recognized her.
The effect upon her old lover was electric, far stronger
than the effect of his presence upon her. His fire, the
tumultuous ring of his eloquence, seemed to go out of him.
His lip struggled and trembled under the words that lay upon
it; but deliver them it could not as long as she faced him.
His eyes, after their first glance upon her face, hung
confusedly in every other direction but hers, but came back
in a desperate leap every few seconds. This paralysis
lasted, however, but a short time; for Tess's energies
returned with the atrophy of his, and she walked as fast as
she was able past the barn and onward.
As soon as she could reflect, it appalled her, this
change in their relative platforms. He who had wrought her
undoing was now on the side of the Spirit, while she
remained unregenerate. And, as in the legend, it had
resulted that her Cyprian image had suddenly appeared upon
his altar, whereby the fire of the priest had been well nigh
extinguished.
She went on without turning her head. Her back seemed to
be endowed with a sensitiveness to ocular beams—even her
clothing—so alive was she to a fancied gaze which might be
resting upon her from the outside of that barn. All the way
along to this point her heart had been heavy with an
inactive sorrow; now there was a change in the quality of
its trouble. That hunger for affection too long withheld was
for the time displaced by an almost physical sense of an
implacable past which still engirdled her. It intensified
her consciousness of error to a practical despair; the break
of continuity between her earlier and present existence,
which she had hoped for, had not, after all, taken place.
Bygones would never be complete bygones till she was a
bygone herself.
Thus absorbed, she recrossed the northern part of
Long-Ash Lane at right angles, and presently saw before her
the road ascending whitely to the upland along whose margin
the remainder of her journey lay. Its dry pale surface
stretched severely onward, unbroken by a single figure,
vehicle, or mark, save some occasional brown horse-droppings
which dotted its cold aridity here and there. While slowly
breasting this ascent Tess became conscious of footsteps
behind her, and turning she saw approaching that well-known
form—so strangely accoutred as the Methodist—the one
personage in all the world she wished not to encounter alone
on this side of the grave.
There was not much time, however, for thought or elusion,
and she yielded as calmly as she could to the necessity of
letting him overtake her. She saw that he was excited, less
by the speed of his walk than by the feelings within him.
"Tess!" he said.
She slackened speed without looking round.
"Tess!" he repeated. "It is I—Alec d'Urberville."
She then looked back at him, and he came up.
"I see it is," she answered coldly.
"Well—is that all? Yet I deserve no more! Of course," he
added, with a slight laugh, "there is something of the
ridiculous to your eyes in seeing me like this. But—I must
put up with that. … I heard you had gone away; nobody knew
where. Tess, you wonder why I have followed you?"
"I do, rather; and I would that you had not, with all my
heart!"
"Yes—you may well say it," he returned grimly, as they
moved onward together, she with unwilling tread. "But don't
mistake me; I beg this because you may have been led to do
so in noticing—if you did notice it—how your sudden
appearance unnerved me down there. It was but a momentary
faltering; and considering what you have been to me, it was
natural enough. But will helped me through it—though perhaps
you think me a humbug for saying it—and immediately
afterwards I felt that of all persons in the world whom it
was my duty and desire to save from the wrath to come—sneer
if you like—the woman whom I had so grievously wronged was
that person. I have come with that sole purpose in
view—nothing more."
There was the smallest vein of scorn in her words of
rejoinder: "Have you saved yourself? Charity begins at home,
they say."
"I have done nothing!" said he indifferently.
"Heaven, as I have been telling my hearers, has done all. No
amount of contempt that you can pour upon me, Tess, will
equal what I have poured upon myself—the old Adam of my
former years! Well, it is a strange story; believe it or
not; but I can tell you the means by which my conversion was
brought about, and I hope you will be interested enough at
least to listen. Have you ever heard the name of the parson
of Emminster—you must have done do?—old Mr Clare; one of the
most earnest of his school; one of the few intense men left
in the Church; not so intense as the extreme wing of
Christian believers with which I have thrown in my lot, but
quite an exception among the Established clergy, the younger
of whom are gradually attenuating the true doctrines by
their sophistries, till they are but the shadow of what they
were. I only differ from him on the question of Church and
State—the interpretation of the text, 'Come out from among
them and be ye separate, saith the Lord'—that's all. He is
one who, I firmly believe, has been the humble means of
saving more souls in this country than any other man you can
name. You have heard of him?"
"I have," she said.
"He came to Trantridge two or three years ago to preach
on behalf of some missionary society; and I, wretched fellow
that I was, insulted him when, in his disinterestedness, he
tried to reason with me and show me the way. He did not
resent my conduct, he simply said that some day I should
receive the first-fruits of the Spirit—that those who came
to scoff sometimes remained to pray. There was a strange
magic in his words. They sank into my mind. But the loss of
my mother hit me most; and by degrees I was brought to see
daylight. Since then my one desire has been to hand on the
true view to others, and that is what I was trying to do
to-day; though it is only lately that I have preached
hereabout. The first months of my ministry have been spent
in the North of England among strangers, where I preferred
to make my earliest clumsy attempts, so as to acquire
courage before undergoing that severest of all tests of
one's sincerity, addressing those who have known one, and
have been one's companions in the days of darkness. If you
could only know, Tess, the pleasure of having a good slap at
yourself, I am sure—"
"Don't go on with it!" she cried passionately, as she
turned away from him to a stile by the wayside, on which she
bent herself. "I can't believe in such sudden things! I feel
indignant with you for talking to me like this, when you
know—when you know what harm you've done me! You, and those
like you, take your fill of pleasure on earth by making the
life of such as me bitter and black with sorrow; and then it
is a fine thing, when you have had enough of that, to think
of securing your pleasure in heaven by becoming converted!
Out upon such—I don't believe in you—I hate it!"
"Tess," he insisted; "don't speak so! It came to me like
a jolly new idea! And you don't believe me? What don't you
believe?"
"Your conversion. Your scheme of religion."
"Why?"
She dropped her voice. "Because a better man than you
does not believe in such."
"What a woman's reason! Who is this better man?"
"I cannot tell you."
"Well," he declared, a resentment beneath his words
seeming ready to spring out at a moment's notice, "God
forbid that I should say I am a good man—and you know I
don't say any such thing. I am new to goodness, truly; but
newcomers see furthest sometimes."
"Yes," she replied sadly. "But I cannot believe in your
conversion to a new spirit. Such flashes as you feel, Alec,
I fear don't last!"
Thus speaking she turned from the stile over which she
had been leaning, and faced him; whereupon his eyes, falling
casually upon the familiar countenance and form, remained
contemplating her. The inferior man was quiet in him now;
but it was surely not extracted, nor even entirely subdued.
"Don't look at me like that!" he said abruptly.
Tess, who had been quite unconscious of her action and
mien, instantly withdrew the large dark gaze of her eyes,
stammering with a flush, "I beg your pardon!" And there was
revived in her the wretched sentiment which had often come
to her before, that in inhabiting the fleshly tabernacle
with which Nature had endowed her she was somehow doing
wrong.
"No, no! Don't beg my pardon. But since you wear a veil
to hide your good looks, why don't you keep it down?"
She pulled down the veil, saying hastily, "It was mostly
to keep off the wind."
"It may seem harsh of me to dictate like this," he went
on; "but it is better that I should not look too often on
you. It might be dangerous."
"Ssh!" said Tess.
"Well, women's faces have had too much power over me
already for me not to fear them! An evangelist has nothing
to do with such as they; and it reminds me of the old times
that I would forget!"
After this their conversation dwindled to a casual remark
now and then as they rambled onward, Tess inwardly wondering
how far he was going with her, and not liking to send him
back by positive mandate. Frequently when they came to a
gate or stile they found painted thereon in red or blue
letters some text of Scripture, and she asked him if he knew
who had been at the pains to blazon these announcements. He
told her that the man was employed by himself and others who
were working with him in that district, to paint these
reminders that no means might be left untried which might
move the hearts of a wicked generation.
At length the road touched the spot called
"Cross-in-Hand." Of all spots on the bleached and desolate
upland this was the most forlorn. It was so far removed from
the charm which is sought in landscape by artists and
view-lovers as to reach a new kind of beauty, a negative
beauty of tragic tone. The place took its name from a stone
pillar which stood there, a strange rude monolith, from a
stratum unknown in any local quarry, on which was roughly
carved a human hand. Differing accounts were given of its
history and purport. Some authorities stated that a
devotional cross had once formed the complete erection
thereon, of which the present relic was but the stump;
others that the stone as it stood was entire, and that it
had been fixed there to mark a boundary or place of meeting.
Anyhow, whatever the origin of the relic, there was and is
something sinister, or solemn, according to mood, in the
scene amid which it stands; something tending to impress the
most phlegmatic passer-by.
"I think I must leave you now," he remarked, as they drew
near to this spot. "I have to preach at Abbot's-Cernel at
six this evening, and my way lies across to the right from
here. And you upset me somewhat too, Tessy—I cannot, will
not, say why. I must go away and get strength. … How is it
that you speak so fluently now? Who has taught you such good
English?"
"I have learnt things in my troubles," she said
evasively.
"What troubles have you had?"
She told him of the first one—the only one that related
to him.
D'Urberville was struck mute. "I knew nothing of this
till now!" he next murmured. "Why didn't you write to me
when you felt your trouble coming on?"
She did not reply; and he broke the silence by adding:
"Well—you will see me again."
"No," she answered. "Do not again come near me!"
"I will think. But before we part come here." He stepped
up to the pillar. "This was once a Holy Cross. Relics are
not in my creed; but I fear you at moments—far more than you
need fear me at present; and to lessen my fear, put your
hand upon that stone hand, and swear that you will never
tempt me—by your charms or ways."
"Good God—how can you ask what is so unnecessary! All
that is furthest from my thought!"
"Yes—but swear it."
Tess, half frightened, gave way to his importunity;
placed her hand upon the stone and swore.
"I am sorry you are not a believer," he continued; "that
some unbeliever should have got hold of you and unsettled
your mind. But no more now. At home at least I can pray for
you; and I will; and who knows what may not happen? I'm off.
Goodbye!"
He turned to a hunting-gate in the hedge and, without
letting his eyes again rest upon her, leapt over and struck
out across the down in the direction of Abbot's-Cernel. As
he walked his pace showed perturbation, and by-and-by, as if
instigated by a former thought, he drew from his pocket a
small book, between the leaves of which was folded a letter,
worn and soiled, as from much re-reading. D'Urberville
opened the letter. It was dated several months before this
time, and was signed by Parson Clare.
The letter began by expressing the writer's unfeigned joy
at d'Urberville's conversion, and thanked him for his
kindness in communicating with the parson on the subject. It
expressed Mr Clare's warm assurance of forgiveness for
d'Urberville's former conduct and his interest in the young
man's plans for the future. He, Mr Clare, would much have
liked to see d'Urberville in the Church to whose ministry he
had devoted so many years of his own life, and would have
helped him to enter a theological college to that end; but
since his correspondent had possibly not cared to do this on
account of the delay it would have entailed, he was not the
man to insist upon its paramount importance. Every man must
work as he could best work, and in the method towards which
he felt impelled by the Spirit.
D'Urberville read and re-read this letter, and seemed to
quiz himself cynically. He also read some passages from
memoranda as he walked till his face assumed a calm, and
apparently the image of Tess no longer troubled his mind.
She meanwhile had kept along the edge of the hill by
which lay her nearest way home. Within the distance of a
mile she met a solitary shepherd.
"What is the meaning of that old stone I have passed?"
she asked of him. "Was it ever a Holy Cross?"
"Cross—no; 'twer not a cross! 'Tis a thing of ill-omen,
Miss. It was put up in wuld times by the relations of a
malefactor who was tortured there by nailing his hand to a
post and afterwards hung. The bones lie underneath. They say
he sold his soul to the devil, and that he walks at times."
She felt the petite mort at this unexpectedly
gruesome information, and left the solitary man behind her.
It was dusk when she drew near to Flintcomb-Ash, and in the
lane at the entrance to the hamlet she approached a girl and
her lover without their observing her. They were talking no
secrets, and the clear unconcerned voice of the young woman,
in response to the warmer accents of the man, spread into
the chilly air as the one soothing thing within the dusky
horizon, full of a stagnant obscurity upon which nothing
else intruded. For a moment the voices cheered the heart of
Tess, till she reasoned that this interview had its origin,
on one side or the other, in the same attraction which had
been the prelude to her own tribulation. When she came
close, the girl turned serenely and recognized her, the
young man walking off in embarrassment. The woman was Izz
Huett, whose interest in Tess's excursion immediately
superseded her own proceedings. Tess did not explain very
clearly its results, and Izz, who was a girl of tact, began
to speak of her own little affair, a phase of which Tess had
just witnessed.
"He is Amby Seedling, the chap who used to sometimes come
and help at Talbothays," she explained indifferently. "He
actually inquired and found out that I had come here, and
has followed me. He says he's been in love wi' me these two
years. But I've hardly answered him."
XLVI
Several days had passed since her futile journey, and
Tess was afield. The dry winter wind still blew, but a
screen of thatched hurdles erected in the eye of the blast
kept its force away from her. On the sheltered side was a
turnip-slicing machine, whose bright blue hue of new paint
seemed almost vocal in the otherwise subdued scene. Opposite
its front was a long mound or "grave", in which the roots
had been preserved since early winter. Tess was standing at
the uncovered end, chopping off with a bill-hook the fibres
and earth from each root, and throwing it after the
operation into the slicer. A man was turning the handle of
the machine, and from its trough came the newly-cut swedes,
the fresh smell of whose yellow chips was accompanied by the
sounds of the snuffling wind, the smart swish of the
slicing-blades, and the choppings of the hook in Tess's
leather-gloved hand.
The wide acreage of blank agricultural brownness,
apparent where the swedes had been pulled, was beginning to
be striped in wales of darker brown, gradually broadening to
ribands. Along the edge of each of these something crept
upon ten legs, moving without haste and without rest up and
down the whole length of the field; it was two horses and a
man, the plough going between them, turning up the cleared
ground for a spring sowing.
For hours nothing relieved the joyless monotony of
things. Then, far beyond the ploughing-teams, a black speck
was seen. It had come from the corner of a fence, where
there was a gap, and its tendency was up the incline,
towards the swede-cutters. From the proportions of a mere
point it advanced to the shape of a ninepin, and was soon
perceived to be a man in black, arriving from the direction
of Flintcomb-Ash. The man at the slicer, having nothing else
to do with his eyes, continually observed the comer, but
Tess, who was occupied, did not perceive him till her
companion directed her attention to his approach.
It was not her hard taskmaster, Farmer Groby; it was one
in a semi-clerical costume, who now represented what had
once been the free-and-easy Alec d'Urberville. Not being hot
at his preaching there was less enthusiasm about him now,
and the presence of the grinder seemed to embarrass him. A
pale distress was already on Tess's face, and she pulled her
curtained hood further over it.
D'Urberville came up and said quietly—
"I want to speak to you, Tess."
"You have refused my last request, not to come near me!"
said she.
"Yes, but I have a good reason."
"Well, tell it."
"It is more serious than you may think."
He glanced round to see if he were overheard. They were
at some distance from the man who turned the slicer, and the
movement of the machine, too, sufficiently prevented Alec's
words reaching other ears. D'Urberville placed himself so as
to screen Tess from the labourer, turning his back to the
latter.
"It is this," he continued, with capricious compunction.
"In thinking of your soul and mine when we last met, I
neglected to inquire as to your worldly condition. You were
well dressed, and I did not think of it. But I see now that
it is hard—harder than it used to be when I—knew you—harder
than you deserve. Perhaps a good deal of it is owning to
me!"
She did not answer, and he watched her inquiringly, as,
with bent head, her face completely screened by the hood,
she resumed her trimming of the swedes. By going on with her
work she felt better able to keep him outside her emotions.
"Tess," he added, with a sigh of discontent,—"yours was
the very worst case I ever was concerned in! I had no idea
of what had resulted till you told me. Scamp that I was to
foul that innocent life! The whole blame was mine—the whole
unconventional business of our time at Trantridge. You, too,
the real blood of which I am but the base imitation, what a
blind young thing you were as to possibilities! I say in all
earnestness that it is a shame for parents to bring up their
girls in such dangerous ignorance of the gins and nets that
the wicked may set for them, whether their motive be a good
one or the result of simple indifference."
Tess still did no more than listen, throwing down one
globular root and taking up another with automatic
regularity, the pensive contour of the mere fieldwoman alone
marking her.
"But it is not that I came to say," d'Urberville went on.
"My circumstances are these. I have lost my mother since you
were at Trantridge, and the place is my own. But I intend to
sell it, and devote myself to missionary work in Africa. A
devil of a poor hand I shall make at the trade, no doubt.
However, what I want to ask you is, will you put it in my
power to do my duty—to make the only reparation I can make
for the trick played you: that is, will you be my wife, and
go with me? … I have already obtained this precious
document. It was my old mother's dying wish."
He drew a piece of parchment from his pocket, with a
slight fumbling of embarrassment.
"What is it?" said she.
"A marriage licence."
"O no, sir—no!" she said quickly, starting back.
"You will not? Why is that?"
And as he asked the question a disappointment which was
not entirely the disappointment of thwarted duty crossed
d'Urberville's face. It was unmistakably a symptom that
something of his old passion for her had been revived; duty
and desire ran hand-in-hand.
"Surely," he began again, in more impetuous tones, and
then looked round at the labourer who turned the slicer.
Tess, too, felt that the argument could not be ended
there. Informing the man that a gentleman had come to see
her, with whom she wished to walk a little way, she moved
off with d'Urberville across the zebra-striped field. When
they reached the first newly-ploughed section he held out
his hand to help her over it; but she stepped forward on the
summits of the earth-rolls as if she did not see him.
"You will not marry me, Tess, and make me a
self-respecting man?" he repeated, as soon as they were over
the furrows.
"I cannot."
"But why?"
"You know I have no affection for you."
"But you would get to feel that in time, perhaps—as soon
as you really could forgive me?"
"Never!"
"Why so positive?"
"I love somebody else."
The words seemed to astonish him.
"You do?" he cried. "Somebody else? But has not a sense
of what is morally right and proper any weight with you?"
"No, no, no—don't say that!"
"Anyhow, then, your love for this other man may be only a
passing feeling which you will overcome—"
"No—no."
"Yes, yes! Why not?"
"I cannot tell you."
"You must in honour!"
"Well then … I have married him."
"Ah!" he exclaimed; and he stopped dead and gazed at her.
"I did not wish to tell—I did not mean to!" she pleaded.
"It is a secret here, or at any rate but dimly known. So
will you, please will you, keep from questioning me?
You must remember that we are now strangers."
"Strangers—are we? Strangers!"
For a moment a flash of his old irony marked his face;
but he determinedly chastened it down.
"Is that man your husband?" he asked mechanically,
denoting by a sign the labourer who turned the machine.
"That man!" she said proudly. "I should think not!"
"Who, then?"
"Do not ask what I do not wish to tell!" she begged, and
flashed her appeal to him from her upturned face and
lash-shadowed eyes.
D'Urberville was disturbed.
"But I only asked for your sake!" he retorted hotly.
"Angels of heaven!—God forgive me for such an expression—I
came here, I swear, as I thought for your good. Tess—don't
look at me so—I cannot stand your looks! There never were
such eyes, surely, before Christianity or since! There—I
won't lose my head; I dare not. I own that the sight of you
had waked up my love for you, which, I believed, was
extinguished with all such feelings. But I thought that our
marriage might be a sanctification for us both. 'The
unbelieving husband is sanctified by the wife, and the
unbelieving wife is sanctified by the husband,' I said to
myself. But my plan is dashed from me; and I must bear the
disappointment!"
He moodily reflected with his eyes on the ground.
"Married. Married! … Well, that being so," he added,
quite calmly, tearing the licence slowly into halves and
putting them in his pocket; "that being prevented, I should
like to do some good to you and your husband, whoever he may
be. There are many questions that I am tempted to ask, but I
will not do so, of course, in opposition to your wishes.
Though, if I could know your husband, I might more easily
benefit him and you. Is he on this farm?"
"No," she murmured. "He is far away."
"Far away? From you? What sort of husband can he
be?"
"O, do not speak against him! It was through you! He
found out—"
"Ah, is it so! … That's sad, Tess!"
"Yes."
"But to stay away from you—to leave you to work like
this!"
"He does not leave me to work!" she cried, springing to
the defence of the absent one with all her fervour. "He
don't know it! It is by my own arrangement."
"Then, does he write?"
"I—I cannot tell you. There are things which are private
to ourselves."
"Of course that means that he does not. You are a
deserted wife, my fair Tess—"
In an impulse he turned suddenly to take her hand; the
buff-glove was on it, and he seized only the rough leather
fingers which did not express the life or shape of those
within.
"You must not—you must not!" she cried fearfully,
slipping her hand from the glove as from a pocket, and
leaving it in his grasp. "O, will you go away—for the sake
of me and my husband—go, in the name of your own
Christianity!"
"Yes, yes; I will," he said abruptly, and thrusting the
glove back to her he turned to leave. Facing round, however,
he said, "Tess, as God is my judge, I meant no humbug in
taking your hand!"
A pattering of hoofs on the soil of the field, which they
had not noticed in their preoccupation, ceased close behind
them; and a voice reached her ear:
"What the devil are you doing away from your work at this
time o' day?"
Farmer Groby had espied the two figures from the
distance, and had inquisitively ridden across, to learn what
was their business in his field.
"Don't speak like that to her!" said d'Urberville, his
face blackening with something that was not Christianity.
"Indeed, Mister! And what mid Methodist pa'sons have to
do with she?"
"Who is the fellow?" asked d'Urberville, turning to Tess.
She went close up to him.
"Go—I do beg you!" she said.
"What! And leave you to that tyrant? I can see in his
face what a churl he is."
"He won't hurt me. He's not in love with me. I can
leave at Lady-Day."
"Well, I have no right but to obey, I suppose. But—well,
goodbye!"
Her defender, whom she dreaded more than her assailant,
having reluctantly disappeared, the farmer continued his
reprimand, which Tess took with the greatest coolness, that
sort of attack being independent of sex. To have as a master
this man of stone, who would have cuffed her if he had
dared, was almost a relief after her former experiences. She
silently walked back towards the summit of the field that
was the scene of her labour, so absorbed in the interview
which had just taken place that she was hardly aware that
the nose of Groby's horse almost touched her shoulders.
"If so be you make an agreement to work for me till
Lady-Day, I'll see that you carry it out," he growled. "'Od
rot the women—now 'tis one thing, and then 'tis another. But
I'll put up with it no longer!"
Knowing very well that he did not harass the other women
of the farm as he harassed her out of spite for the flooring
he had once received, she did for one moment picture what
might have been the result if she had been free to accept
the offer just made her of being the monied Alec's wife. It
would have lifted her completely out of subjection, not only
to her present oppressive employer, but to a whole world who
seemed to despise her. "But no, no!" she said breathlessly;
"I could not have married him now! He is so unpleasant to
me."
That very night she began an appealing letter to Clare,
concealing from him her hardships, and assuring him of her
undying affection. Any one who had been in a position to
read between the lines would have seen that at the back of
her great love was some monstrous fear—almost a
desperation—as to some secret contingencies which were not
disclosed. But again she did not finish her effusion; he had
asked Izz to go with him, and perhaps he did not care for
her at all. She put the letter in her box, and wondered if
it would ever reach Angel's hands.
After this her daily tasks were gone through heavily
enough, and brought on the day which was of great import to
agriculturists—the day of the Candlemas Fair. It was at this
fair that new engagements were entered into for the twelve
months following the ensuing Lady-Day, and those of the
farming population who thought of changing their places duly
attended at the county-town where the fair was held. Nearly
all the labourers on Flintcomb-Ash farm intended flight, and
early in the morning there was a general exodus in the
direction of the town, which lay at a distance of from ten
to a dozen miles over hilly country. Though Tess also meant
to leave at the quarter-day, she was one of the few who did
not go to the fair, having a vaguely-shaped hope that
something would happen to render another outdoor engagement
unnecessary.
It was a peaceful February day, of wonderful softness for
the time, and one would almost have thought that winter was
over. She had hardly finished her dinner when d'Urberville's
figure darkened the window of the cottage wherein she was a
lodger, which she had all to herself to-day.
Tess jumped up, but her visitor had knocked at the door,
and she could hardly in reason run away. D'Urberville's
knock, his walk up to the door, had some indescribable
quality of difference from his air when she last saw him.
They seemed to be acts of which the doer was ashamed. She
thought that she would not open the door; but, as there was
no sense in that either, she arose, and having lifted the
latch stepped back quickly. He came in, saw her, and flung
himself down into a chair before speaking.
"Tess—I couldn't help it!" he began desperately, as he
wiped his heated face, which had also a superimposed flush
of excitement. "I felt that I must call at least to ask how
you are. I assure you I had not been thinking of you at all
till I saw you that Sunday; now I cannot get rid of your
image, try how I may! It is hard that a good woman should do
harm to a bad man; yet so it is. If you would only pray for
me, Tess!"
The suppressed discontent of his manner was almost
pitiable, and yet Tess did not pity him.
"How can I pray for you," she said, "when I am forbidden
to believe that the great Power who moves the world would
alter His plans on my account?"
"You really think that?"
"Yes. I have been cured of the presumption of thinking
otherwise."
"Cured? By whom?"
"By my husband, if I must tell."
"Ah—your husband—your husband! How strange it seems! I
remember you hinted something of the sort the other day.
What do you really believe in these matters, Tess?" he
asked. "You seem to have no religion—perhaps owing to me."
"But I have. Though I don't believe in anything
supernatural."
D'Urberville looked at her with misgiving.
"Then do you think that the line I take is all wrong?"
"A good deal of it."
"H'm—and yet I've felt so sure about it," he said
uneasily.
"I believe in the spirit of the Sermon on the
Mount, and so did my dear husband… But I don't believe—"
Here she gave her negations.
"The fact is," said d'Urberville drily, "whatever your
dear husband believed you accept, and whatever he rejected
you reject, without the least inquiry or reasoning on your
own part. That's just like you women. Your mind is enslaved
to his."
"Ah, because he knew everything!" said she, with a
triumphant simplicity of faith in Angel Clare that the most
perfect man could hardly have deserved, much less her
husband.
"Yes, but you should not take negative opinions wholesale
from another person like that. A pretty fellow he must be to
teach you such scepticism!"
"He never forced my judgement! He would never argue on
the subject with me! But I looked at it in this way; what he
believed, after inquiring deep into doctrines, was much more
likely to be right than what I might believe, who hadn't
looked into doctrines at all."
"What used he to say? He must have said something?"
She reflected; and with her acute memory for the letter
of Angel Clare's remarks, even when she did not comprehend
their spirit, she recalled a merciless polemical syllogism
that she had heard him use when, as it occasionally
happened, he indulged in a species of thinking aloud with
her at his side. In delivering it she gave also Clare's
accent and manner with reverential faithfulness.
"Say that again," asked d'Urberville, who had listened
with the greatest attention.
She repeated the argument, and d'Urberville thoughtfully
murmured the words after her.
"Anything else?" he presently asked.
"He said at another time something like this"; and she
gave another, which might possibly have been paralleled in
many a work of the pedigree ranging from the Dictionnaire
Philosophique to Huxley's Essays.
"Ah—ha! How do you remember them?"
"I wanted to believe what he believed, though he didn't
wish me to; and I managed to coax him to tell me a few of
his thoughts. I can't say I quite understand that one; but I
know it is right."
"H'm. Fancy your being able to teach me what you don't
know yourself!"
He fell into thought.
"And so I threw in my spiritual lot with his," she
resumed. "I didn't wish it to be different. What's good
enough for him is good enough for me."
"Does he know that you are as big an infidel as he?"
"No—I never told him—if I am an infidel."
"Well—you are better off to-day that I am, Tess, after
all! You don't believe that you ought to preach my doctrine,
and, therefore, do no despite to your conscience in
abstaining. I do believe I ought to preach it, but, like the
devils, I believe and tremble, for I suddenly leave off
preaching it, and give way to my passion for you."
"How?"
"Why," he said aridly; "I have come all the way here to
see you to-day! But I started from home to go to
Casterbridge Fair, where I have undertaken to preach the
Word from a waggon at half-past two this afternoon, and
where all the brethren are expecting me this minute. Here's
the announcement."
He drew from his breast-pocket a poster whereon was
printed the day, hour, and place of meeting, at which he,
d'Urberville, would preach the Gospel as aforesaid.
"But how can you get there?" said Tess, looking at the
clock.
"I cannot get there! I have come here."
"What, you have really arranged to preach, and—"
"I have arranged to preach, and I shall not be there—by
reason of my burning desire to see a woman whom I once
despised!—No, by my word and truth, I never despised you; if
I had I should not love you now! Why I did not despise you
was on account of your being unsmirched in spite of all; you
withdrew yourself from me so quickly and resolutely when you
saw the situation; you did not remain at my pleasure; so
there was one petticoat in the world for whom I had no
contempt, and you are she. But you may well despise me now!
I thought I worshipped on the mountains, but I find I still
serve in the groves! Ha! ha!"
"O Alec d'Urberville! what does this mean? What have I
done!"
"Done?" he said, with a soulless sneer in the word.
"Nothing intentionally. But you have been the means—the
innocent means—of my backsliding, as they call it. I ask
myself, am I, indeed, one of those 'servants of corruption'
who, 'after they have escaped the pollutions of the world,
are again entangled therein and overcome'—whose latter end
is worse than their beginning?" He laid his hand on her
shoulder. "Tess, my girl, I was on the way to, at least,
social salvation till I saw you again!" he said freakishly
shaking her, as if she were a child. "And why then have you
tempted me? I was firm as a man could be till I saw those
eyes and that mouth again—surely there never was such a
maddening mouth since Eve's!" His voice sank, and a hot
archness shot from his own black eyes. "You temptress, Tess;
you dear damned witch of Babylon—I could not resist you as
soon as I met you again!"
"I couldn't help your seeing me again!" said Tess,
recoiling.
"I know it—I repeat that I do not blame you. But the fact
remains. When I saw you ill-used on the farm that day I was
nearly mad to think that I had no legal right to protect
you—that I could not have it; whilst he who has it seems to
neglect you utterly!"
"Don't speak against him—he is absent!" she cried in much
excitement. "Treat him honourably—he has never wronged you!
O leave his wife before any scandal spreads that may do harm
to his honest name!"
"I will—I will," he said, like a man awakening from a
luring dream. "I have broken my engagement to preach to
those poor drunken boobies at the fair—it is the first time
I have played such a practical joke. A month ago I should
have been horrified at such a possibility. I'll go away—to
swear—and—ah, can I! to keep away." Then, suddenly: "One
clasp, Tessy—one! Only for old friendship—"
"I am without defence. Alec! A good man's honour is in my
keeping—think—be ashamed!"
"Pooh! Well, yes—yes!"
He clenched his lips, mortified with himself for his
weakness. His eyes were equally barren of worldly and
religious faith. The corpses of those old fitful passions
which had lain inanimate amid the lines of his face ever
since his reformation seemed to wake and come together as in
a resurrection. He went out indeterminately.
Though d'Urberville had declared that this breach of his
engagement to-day was the simple backsliding of a believer,
Tess's words, as echoed from Angel Clare, had made a deep
impression upon him, and continued to do so after he had
left her. He moved on in silence, as if his energies were
benumbed by the hitherto undreamt-of possibility that his
position was untenable. Reason had had nothing to do with
his whimsical conversion, which was perhaps the mere freak
of a careless man in search of a new sensation, and
temporarily impressed by his mother's death.
The drops of logic Tess had let fall into the sea of his
enthusiasm served to chill its effervescence to stagnation.
He said to himself, as he pondered again and again over the
crystallized phrases that she had handed on to him, "That
clever fellow little thought that, by telling her those
things, he might be paving my way back to her!"
XLVII
It is the threshing of the last wheat-rick at
Flintcomb-Ash farm. The dawn of the March morning is
singularly inexpressive, and there is nothing to show where
the eastern horizon lies. Against the twilight rises the
trapezoidal top of the stack, which has stood forlornly here
through the washing and bleaching of the wintry weather.
When Izz Huett and Tess arrived at the scene of
operations only a rustling denoted that others had preceded
them; to which, as the light increased, there were presently
added the silhouettes of two men on the summit. They were
busily "unhaling" the rick, that is, stripping off the
thatch before beginning to throw down the sheaves; and while
this was in progress Izz and Tess, with the other
women-workers, in their whitey-brown pinners, stood waiting
and shivering, Farmer Groby having insisted upon their being
on the spot thus early to get the job over if possible by
the end of the day. Close under the eaves of the stack, and
as yet barely visible, was the red tyrant that the women had
come to serve—a timber-framed construction, with straps and
wheels appertaining—the threshing-machine which, whilst it
was going, kept up a despotic demand upon the endurance of
their muscles and nerves.
A little way off there was another indistinct figure;
this one black, with a sustained hiss that spoke of strength
very much in reserve. The long chimney running up beside an
ash-tree, and the warmth which radiated from the spot,
explained without the necessity of much daylight that here
was the engine which was to act as the primum mobile
of this little world. By the engine stood a dark, motionless
being, a sooty and grimy embodiment of tallness, in a sort
of trance, with a heap of coals by his side: it was the
engine-man. The isolation of his manner and colour lent him
the appearance of a creature from Tophet, who had strayed
into the pellucid smokelessness of this region of yellow
grain and pale soil, with which he had nothing in common, to
amaze and to discompose its aborigines.
What he looked he felt. He was in the agricultural world,
but not of it. He served fire and smoke; these denizens of
the fields served vegetation, weather, frost, and sun. He
travelled with his engine from farm to farm, from county to
county, for as yet the steam threshing-machine was itinerant
in this part of Wessex. He spoke in a strange northern
accent; his thoughts being turned inwards upon himself, his
eye on his iron charge, hardly perceiving the scenes around
him, and caring for them not at all: holding only strictly
necessary intercourse with the natives, as if some ancient
doom compelled him to wander here against his will in the
service of his Plutonic master. The long strap which ran
from the driving-wheel of his engine to the red thresher
under the rick was the sole tie-line between agriculture and
him.
While they uncovered the sheaves he stood apathetic
beside his portable repository of force, round whose hot
blackness the morning air quivered. He had nothing to do
with preparatory labour. His fire was waiting incandescent,
his steam was at high pressure, in a few seconds he could
make the long strap move at an invisible velocity. Beyond
its extent the environment might be corn, straw, or chaos;
it was all the same to him. If any of the autochthonous
idlers asked him what he called himself, he replied shortly,
"an engineer."
The rick was unhaled by full daylight; the men then took
their places, the women mounted, and the work began. Farmer
Groby—or, as they called him, "he"—had arrived ere this, and
by his orders Tess was placed on the platform of the
machine, close to the man who fed it, her business being to
untie every sheaf of corn handed on to her by Izz Huett, who
stood next, but on the rick; so that the feeder could seize
it and spread it over the revolving drum, which whisked out
every grain in one moment.
They were soon in full progress, after a preparatory
hitch or two, which rejoiced the hearts of those who hated
machinery. The work sped on till breakfast time, when the
thresher was stopped for half an hour; and on starting again
after the meal the whole supplementary strength of the farm
was thrown into the labour of constructing the straw-rick,
which began to grow beside the stack of corn. A hasty lunch
was eaten as they stood, without leaving their positions,
and then another couple of hours brought them near to
dinner-time; the inexorable wheel continuing to spin, and
the penetrating hum of the thresher to thrill to the very
marrow all who were near the revolving wire-cage.
The old men on the rising straw-rick talked of the past
days when they had been accustomed to thresh with flails on
the oaken barn-floor; when everything, even to winnowing,
was effected by hand-labour, which, to their thinking,
though slow, produced better results. Those, too, on the
corn-rick talked a little; but the perspiring ones at the
machine, including Tess, could not lighten their duties by
the exchange of many words. It was the ceaselessness of the
work which tried her so severely, and began to make her wish
that she had never some to Flintcomb-Ash. The women on the
corn-rick—Marian, who was one of them, in particular—could
stop to drink ale or cold tea from the flagon now and then,
or to exchange a few gossiping remarks while they wiped
their faces or cleared the fragments of straw and husk from
their clothing; but for Tess there was no respite; for, as
the drum never stopped, the man who fed it could not stop,
and she, who had to supply the man with untied sheaves,
could not stop either, unless Marian changed places with
her, which she sometimes did for half an hour in spite of
Groby's objections that she was too slow-handed for a
feeder.
For some probably economical reason it was usually a
woman who was chosen for this particular duty, and Groby
gave as his motive in selecting Tess that she was one of
those who best combined strength with quickness in untying,
and both with staying power, and this may have been true.
The hum of the thresher, which prevented speech, increased
to a raving whenever the supply of corn fell short of the
regular quantity. As Tess and the man who fed could never
turn their heads she did not know that just before the
dinner-hour a person had come silently into the field by the
gate, and had been standing under a second rick watching the
scene and Tess in particular. He was dressed in a tweed suit
of fashionable pattern, and he twirled a gay walking-cane.
"Who is that?" said Izz Huett to Marian. She had at first
addressed the inquiry to Tess, but the latter could not hear
it.
"Somebody's fancy-man, I s'pose," said Marian
laconically.
"I'll lay a guinea he's after Tess."
"O no. 'Tis a ranter pa'son who's been sniffing after her
lately; not a dandy like this."
"Well—this is the same man."
"The same man as the preacher? But he's quite different!"
"He hev left off his black coat and white neckercher, and
hev cut off his whiskers; but he's the same man for all
that."
"D'ye really think so? Then I'll tell her," said Marian.
"Don't. She'll see him soon enough, good-now."
"Well, I don't think it at all right for him to join his
preaching to courting a married woman, even though her
husband mid be abroad, and she, in a sense, a widow."
"Oh—he can do her no harm," said Izz drily. "Her mind can
no more be heaved from that one place where it do bide than
a stooded waggon from the hole he's in. Lord love 'ee,
neither court-paying, nor preaching, nor the seven thunders
themselves, can wean a woman when 'twould be better for her
that she should be weaned."
Dinner-time came, and the whirling ceased; whereupon Tess
left her post, her knees trembling so wretchedly with the
shaking of the machine that she could scarcely walk.
"You ought to het a quart o' drink into 'ee, as I've
done," said Marian. "You wouldn't look so white then. Why,
souls above us, your face is as if you'd been hagrode!"
It occurred to the good-natured Marian that, as Tess was
so tired, her discovery of her visitor's presence might have
the bad effect of taking away her appetite; and Marian was
thinking of inducing Tess to descend by a ladder on the
further side of the stack when the gentleman came forward
and looked up.
Tess uttered a short little "Oh!" And a moment after she
said, quickly, "I shall eat my dinner here—right on the
rick."
Sometimes, when they were so far from their cottages,
they all did this; but as there was rather a keen wind going
to-day, Marian and the rest descended, and sat under the
straw-stack.
The newcomer was, indeed, Alec d'Urberville, the late
Evangelist, despite his changed attire and aspect. It was
obvious at a glance that the original Weltlust had
come back; that he had restored himself, as nearly as a man
could do who had grown three or four years older, to the old
jaunty, slapdash guise under which Tess had first known her
admirer, and cousin so-called. Having decided to remain
where she was, Tess sat down among the bundles, out of sight
of the ground, and began her meal; till, by-and-by, she
heard footsteps on the ladder, and immediately after Alec
appeared upon the stack—now an oblong and level platform of
sheaves. He strode across them, and sat down opposite of her
without a word.
Tess continued to eat her modest dinner, a slice of thick
pancake which she had brought with her. The other workfolk
were by this time all gathered under the rick, where the
loose straw formed a comfortable retreat.
"I am here again, as you see," said d'Urberville.
"Why do you trouble me so!" she cried, reproach flashing
from her very finger-ends.
"I trouble you? I think I may ask, why do you
trouble me?"
"Sure, I don't trouble you any-when!"
"You say you don't? But you do! You haunt me. Those very
eyes that you turned upon my with such a bitter flash a
moment ago, they come to me just as you showed them then, in
the night and in the day! Tess, ever since you told me of
that child of ours, it is just as if my feelings, which have
been flowing in a strong puritanical stream, had suddenly
found a way open in the direction of you, and had all at
once gushed through. The religious channel is left dry
forthwith; and it is you who have done it!"
She gazed in silence.
"What—you have given up your preaching entirely?" she
asked. She had gathered from Angel sufficient of the
incredulity of modern thought to despise flash enthusiasm;
but, as a woman, she was somewhat appalled.
In affected severity d'Urberville continued—
"Entirely. I have broken every engagement since that
afternoon I was to address the drunkards at Casterbridge
Fair. The deuce only knows what I am thought of by the
brethren. Ah-ha! The brethren! No doubt they pray for
me—weep for me; for they are kind people in their way. But
what do I care? How could I go on with the thing when I had
lost my faith in it?—it would have been hypocrisy of the
basest kind! Among them I should have stood like Hymenaeus
and Alexander, who were delivered over to Satan that they
might learn not to blaspheme. What a grand revenge you have
taken! I saw you innocent, and I deceived you. Four years
after, you find me a Christian enthusiast; you then work
upon me, perhaps to my complete perdition! But Tess, my coz,
as I used to call you, this is only my way of talking, and
you must not look so horribly concerned. Of course you have
done nothing except retain your pretty face and shapely
figure. I saw it on the rick before you saw me—that tight
pinafore-thing sets it off, and that wing-bonnet—you
field-girls should never wear those bonnets if you wish to
keep out of danger." He regarded her silently for a few
moments, and with a short cynical laugh resumed: "I believe
that if the bachelor-apostle, whose deputy I thought I was,
had been tempted by such a pretty face, he would have let go
the plough for her sake as I do!"
Tess attempted to expostulate, but at this juncture all
her fluency failed her, and without heeding he added:
"Well, this paradise that you supply is perhaps as good
as any other, after all. But to speak seriously, Tess."
D'Urberville rose and came nearer, reclining sideways amid
the sheaves, and resting upon his elbow. "Since I last saw
you, I have been thinking of what you said that he
said. I have come to the conclusion that there does seem
rather a want of common-sense in these threadbare old
propositions; how I could have been so fired by poor Parson
Clare's enthusiasm, and have gone so madly to work,
transcending even him, I cannot make out! As for what you
said last time, on the strength of your wonderful husband's
intelligence—whose name you have never told me—about having
what they call an ethical system without any dogma, I don't
see my way to that at all."
"Why, you can have the religion of loving-kindness and
purity at least, if you can't have—what do you call
it—dogma."
"O no! I'm a different sort of fellow from that! If
there's nobody to say, 'Do this, and it will be a good thing
for you after you are dead; do that, and if will be a bad
thing for you,' I can't warm up. Hang it, I am not going to
feel responsible for my deeds and passions if there's nobody
to be responsible to; and if I were you, my dear, I wouldn't
either!"
She tried to argue, and tell him that he had mixed in his
dull brain two matters, theology and morals, which in the
primitive days of mankind had been quite distinct. But owing
to Angel Clare's reticence, to her absolute want of
training, and to her being a vessel of emotions rather than
reasons, she could not get on.
"Well, never mind," he resumed. "Here I am, my love, as
in the old times!"
"Not as then—never as then—'tis different!" she
entreated. "And there was never warmth with me! O why didn't
you keep your faith, if the loss of it has brought you to
speak to me like this!"
"Because you've knocked it out of me; so the evil be upon
your sweet head! Your husband little thought how his
teaching would recoil upon him! Ha-ha—I'm awfully glad you
have made an apostate of me all the same! Tess, I am more
taken with you than ever, and I pity you too. For all your
closeness, I see you are in a bad way—neglected by one who
ought to cherish you."
She could not get her morsels of food down her throat;
her lips were dry, and she was ready to choke. The voices
and laughs of the workfolk eating and drinking under the
rick came to her as if they were a quarter of a mile off.
"It is cruelty to me!" she said. "How—how can you treat
me to this talk, if you care ever so little for me?"
"True, true," he said, wincing a little. "I did not come
to reproach you for my deeds. I came Tess, to say that I
don't like you to be working like this, and I have come on
purpose for you. You say you have a husband who is not I.
Well, perhaps you have; but I've never seen him, and you've
not told me his name; and altogether he seems rather a
mythological personage. However, even if you have one, I
think I am nearer to you than he is. I, at any rate, try to
help you out of trouble, but he does not, bless his
invisible face! The words of the stern prophet Hosea that I
used to read come back to me. Don't you know them,
Tess?—'And she shall follow after her lover, but she shall
not overtake him; and she shall seek him, but shall not find
him; then shall she say, I will go and return to my first
husband; for then was it better with me than now!' … Tess,
my trap is waiting just under the hill, and—darling mine,
not his!—you know the rest."
Her face had been rising to a dull crimson fire while he
spoke; but she did not answer.
"You have been the cause of my backsliding," he
continued, stretching his arm towards her waist; "you should
be willing to share it, and leave that mule you call husband
for ever."
One of her leather gloves, which she had taken off to eat
her skimmer-cake, lay in her lap, and without the slightest
warning she passionately swung the glove by the gauntlet
directly in his face. It was heavy and thick as a warrior's,
and it struck him flat on the mouth. Fancy might have
regarded the act as the recrudescence of a trick in which
her armed progenitors were not unpractised. Alec fiercely
started up from his reclining position. A scarlet oozing
appeared where her blow had alighted, and in a moment the
blood began dropping from his mouth upon the straw. But he
soon controlled himself, calmly drew his handkerchief from
his pocket, and mopped his bleeding lips.
She too had sprung up, but she sank down again. "Now,
punish me!" she said, turning up her eyes to him with the
hopeless defiance of the sparrow's gaze before its captor
twists its neck. "Whip me, crush me; you need not mind those
people under the rick! I shall not cry out. Once victim,
always victim—that's the law!"
"O no, no, Tess," he said blandly. "I can make full
allowance for this. Yet you most unjustly forget one thing,
that I would have married you if you had not put it out of
my power to do so. Did I not ask you flatly to be my
wife—hey? Answer me."
"You did."
"And you cannot be. But remember one thing!" His voice
hardened as his temper got the better of him with the
recollection of his sincerity in asking her and her present
ingratitude, and he stepped across to her side and held her
by the shoulders, so that she shook under his grasp.
"Remember, my lady, I was your master once! I will be your
master again. If you are any man's wife you are mine!"
The threshers now began to stir below.
"So much for our quarrel," he said, letting her go. "Now
I shall leave you, and shall come again for your answer
during the afternoon. You don't know me yet! But I know
you."
She had not spoken again, remaining as if stunned.
D'Urberville retreated over the sheaves, and descended the
ladder, while the workers below rose and stretched their
arms, and shook down the beer they had drunk. Then the
threshing-machine started afresh; and amid the renewed
rustle of the straw Tess resumed her position by the buzzing
drum as one in a dream, untying sheaf after sheaf in endless
succession.
XLVIII
In the afternoon the farmer made it known that the rick
was to be finished that night, since there was a moon by
which they could see to work, and the man with the engine
was engaged for another farm on the morrow. Hence the
twanging and humming and rustling proceeded with even less
intermission than usual.
It was not till "nammet"-time, about three o-clock, that
Tess raised her eyes and gave a momentary glance round. She
felt but little surprise at seeing that Alec d'Urberville
had come back, and was standing under the hedge by the gate.
He had seen her lift her eyes, and waved his hand urbanely
to her, while he blew her a kiss. It meant that their
quarrel was over. Tess looked down again, and carefully
abstained from gazing in that direction.
Thus the afternoon dragged on. The wheat-rick shrank
lower, and the straw-rick grew higher, and the corn-sacks
were carted away. At six o'clock the wheat-rick was about
shoulder-high from the ground. But the unthreshed sheaves
remaining untouched seemed countless still, notwithstanding
the enormous numbers that had been gulped down by the
insatiable swallower, fed by the man and Tess, through whose
two young hands the greater part of them had passed. And the
immense stack of straw where in the morning there had been
nothing, appeared as the faeces of the same buzzing red
glutton. From the west sky a wrathful shine—all that wild
March could afford in the way of sunset—had burst forth
after the cloudy day, flooding the tired and sticky faces of
the threshers, and dyeing them with a coppery light, as also
the flapping garments of the women, which clung to them like
dull flames.
A panting ache ran through the rick. The man who fed was
weary, and Tess could see that the red nape of his neck was
encrusted with dirt and husks. She still stood at her post,
her flushed and perspiring face coated with the corndust,
and her white bonnet embrowned by it. She was the only woman
whose place was upon the machine so as to be shaken bodily
by its spinning, and the decrease of the stack now separated
her from Marian and Izz, and prevented their changing duties
with her as they had done. The incessant quivering, in which
every fibre of her frame participated, had thrown her into a
stupefied reverie in which her arms worked on independently
of her consciousness. She hardly knew where she was, and did
not hear Izz Huett tell her from below that her hair was
tumbling down.
By degrees the freshest among them began to grow
cadaverous and saucer-eyed. Whenever Tess lifted her head
she beheld always the great upgrown straw-stack, with the
men in shirt-sleeves upon it, against the gray north sky; in
front of it the long red elevator like a Jacob's ladder, on
which a perpetual stream of threshed straw ascended, a
yellow river running uphill, and spouting out on the top of
the rick.
She knew that Alec d'Urberville was still on the scene,
observing her from some point or other, though she could not
say where. There was an excuse for his remaining, for when
the threshed rick drew near its final sheaves a little
ratting was always done, and men unconnected with the
threshing sometimes dropped in for that performance—sporting
characters of all descriptions, gents with terriers and
facetious pipes, roughs with sticks and stones.
But there was another hour's work before the layer of
live rats at the base of the stack would be reached; and as
the evening light in the direction of the Giant's Hill by
Abbot's-Cernel dissolved away, the white-faced moon of the
season arose from the horizon that lay towards Middleton
Abbey and Shottsford on the other side. For the last hour or
two Marian had felt uneasy about Tess, whom she could not
get near enough to speak to, the other women having kept up
their strength by drinking ale, and Tess having done without
it through traditionary dread, owing to its results at her
home in childhood. But Tess still kept going: if she could
not fill her part she would have to leave; and this
contingency, which she would have regarded with equanimity
and even with relief a month or two earlier, had become a
terror since d'Urberville had begun to hover round her.
The sheaf-pitchers and feeders had now worked the rick so
low that people on the ground could talk to them. To Tess's
surprise Farmer Groby came up on the machine to her, and
said that if she desired to join her friend he did not wish
her to keep on any longer, and would send somebody else to
take her place. The "friend" was d'Urberville, she knew, and
also that this concession had been granted in obedience to
the request of that friend, or enemy. She shook her head and
toiled on.
The time for the rat-catching arrived at last, and the
hunt began. The creatures had crept downwards with the
subsidence of the rick till they were all together at the
bottom, and being now uncovered from their last refuge, they
ran across the open ground in all directions, a loud shriek
from the by-this-time half-tipsy Marian informing her
companions that one of the rats had invaded her person—a
terror which the rest of the women had guarded against by
various schemes of skirt-tucking and self-elevation. The rat
was at last dislodged, and, amid the barking of dogs,
masculine shouts, feminine screams, oaths, stampings, and
confusion as of Pandemonium, Tess untied her last sheaf; the
drum slowed, the whizzing ceased, and she stepped from the
machine to the ground.
Her lover, who had only looked on at the rat-catching,
was promptly at her side.
"What—after all—my insulting slap, too!" said she in an
underbreath. She was so utterly exhausted that she had not
strength to speak louder.
"I should indeed be foolish to feel offended at anything
you say or do," he answered, in the seductive voice of the
Trantridge time. "How the little limbs tremble! You are as
weak as a bled calf, you know you are; and yet you need have
done nothing since I arrived. How could you be so obstinate?
However, I have told the farmer that he has no right to
employ women at steam-threshing. It is not proper work for
them; and on all the better class of farms it has been given
up, as he knows very well. I will walk with you as far as
your home."
"O yes," she answered with a jaded gait. "Walk wi' me if
you will! I do bear in mind that you came to marry me before
you knew o' my state. Perhaps—perhaps you are a little
better and kinder than I have been thinking you were.
Whatever is meant as kindness I am grateful for; whatever is
meant in any other way I am angered at. I cannot sense your
meaning sometimes."
"If I cannot legitimize our former relations at least I
can assist you. And I will do it with much more regard for
your feelings than I formerly showed. My religious mania, or
whatever it was, is over. But I retain a little good nature;
I hope I do. Now, Tess, by all that's tender and strong
between man and woman, trust me! I have enough and more than
enough to put you out of anxiety, both for yourself and your
parents and sisters. I can make them all comfortable if you
will only show confidence in me."
"Have you seen 'em lately?" she quickly inquired.
"Yes. They didn't know where you were. It was only by
chance that I found you here."
The cold moon looked aslant upon Tess's fagged face
between the twigs of the garden-hedge as she paused outside
the cottage which was her temporary home, d'Urberville
pausing beside her.
"Don't mention my little brothers and sisters—don't make
me break down quite!" she said. "If you want to help
them—God knows they need it—do it without telling me. But
no, no!" she cried. "I will take nothing from you, either
for them or for me!"
He did not accompany her further, since, as she lived
with the household, all was public indoors. No sooner had
she herself entered, laved herself in a washing-tub, and
shared supper with the family than she fell into thought,
and withdrawing to the table under the wall, by the light of
her own little lamp wrote in a passionate mood—
My own Husband,—
Let me call you so—I must—even if it makes you angry to think of such
an unworthy wife as I. I must cry to you in my
trouble—I have no one else! I am so exposed to
temptation, Angel. I fear to say who it is, and I do
not like to write about it at all. But I cling to
you in a way you cannot think! Can you not come to
me now, at once, before anything terrible happens?
O, I know you cannot, because you are so far away! I
think I must die if you do not come soon, or tell me
to come to you. The punishment you have measured out
to me is deserved—I do know that—well deserved—and
you are right and just to be angry with me. But,
Angel, please, please, not to be just—only a little
kind to me, even if I do not deserve it, and come to
me! If you would come, I could die in your arms! I
would be well content to do that if so be you had
forgiven me!
Angel, I live entirely for you. I love you too
much to blame you for going away, and I know it was
necessary you should find a farm. Do not think I
shall say a word of sting or bitterness. Only come
back to me. I am desolate without you, my darling,
O, so desolate! I do not mind having to work: but if
you will send me one little line, and say, "I am
coming soon," I will bide on, Angel—O, so
cheerfully!
It has been so much my religion ever since we
were married to be faithful to you in every thought
and look, that even when a man speaks a compliment
to me before I am aware, it seems wronging you. Have
you never felt one little bit of what you used to
feel when we were at the dairy? If you have, how can
you keep away from me? I am the same women, Angel,
as you fell in love with; yes, the very same!—not
the one you disliked but never saw. What was the
past to me as soon as I met you? It was a dead thing
altogether. I became another woman, filled full of
new life from you. How could I be the early one? Why
do you not see this? Dear, if you would only be a
little more conceited, and believe in yourself so
far as to see that you were strong enough to work
this change in me, you would perhaps be in a mind to
come to me, your poor wife.
How silly I was in my happiness when I thought I
could trust you always to love me! I ought to have
known that such as that was not for poor me. But I
am sick at heart, not only for old times, but for
the present. Think—think how it do hurt my heart not
to see you ever—ever! Ah, if I could only make your
dear heart ache one little minute of each day as
mine does every day and all day long, it might lead
you to show pity to your poor lonely one.
People still say that I am rather pretty, Angel
(handsome is the word they use, since I wish to be
truthful). Perhaps I am what they say. But I do not
value my good looks; I only like to have them
because they belong to you, my dear, and that there
may be at least one thing about me worth your
having. So much have I felt this, that when I met
with annoyance on account of the same, I tied up my
face in a bandage as long as people would believe in
it. O Angel, I tell you all this not from vanity—you
will certainly know I do not—but only that you may
come to me!
If you really cannot come to me, will you let me
come to you? I am, as I say, worried, pressed to do
what I will not do. It cannot be that I shall yield
one inch, yet I am in terror as to what an accident
might lead to, and I so defenceless on account of my
first error. I cannot say more about this—it makes
me too miserable. But if I break down by falling
into some fearful snare, my last state will be worse
than my first. O God, I cannot think of it! Let me
come at once, or at once come to me!
I would be content, ay, glad, to live with you as
your servant, if I may not as your wife; so that I
could only be near you, and get glimpses of you, and
think of you as mine.
The daylight has nothing to show me, since you
are not here, and I don't like to see the rooks and
starlings in the field, because I grieve and grieve
to miss you who used to see them with me. I long for
only one thing in heaven or earth or under the
earth, to meet you, my own dear! Come to me—come to
me, and save me from what threatens me!—
Your faithful heartbroken
Tess
XLIX
The appeal duly found its way to the breakfast-table of
the quiet Vicarage to the westward, in that valley where the
air is so soft and the soil so rich that the effort of
growth requires but superficial aid by comparison with the
tillage at Flintcomb-Ash, and where to Tess the human world
seemed so different (though it was much the same). It was
purely for security that she had been requested by Angel to
send her communications through his father, whom he kept
pretty well informed of his changing addresses in the
country he had gone to exploit for himself with a heavy
heart.
"Now," said old Mr Clare to his wife, when he had read
the envelope, "if Angel proposes leaving Rio for a visit
home at the end of next month, as he told us that he hoped
to do, I think this may hasten his plans; for I believe it
to be from his wife." He breathed deeply at the thought of
her; and the letter was redirected to be promptly sent on to
Angel.
"Dear fellow, I hope he will get home safely," murmured
Mrs Clare. "To my dying day I shall feel that he has been
ill-used. You should have sent him to Cambridge in spite of
his want of faith and given him the same chance as the other
boys had. He would have grown out of it under proper
influence, and perhaps would have taken Orders after all.
Church or no Church, it would have been fairer to him."
This was the only wail with which Mrs Clare ever
disturbed her husband's peace in respect to their sons. And
she did not vent this often; for she was as considerate as
she was devout, and knew that his mind too was troubled by
doubts as to his justice in this matter. Only too often had
she heard him lying awake at night, stifling sighs for Angel
with prayers. But the uncompromising Evangelical did not
even now hold that he would have been justified in giving
his son, an unbeliever, the same academic advantages that he
had given to the two others, when it was possible, if not
probable, that those very advantages might have been used to
decry the doctrines which he had made it his life's mission
and desire to propagate, and the mission of his ordained
sons likewise. To put with one hand a pedestal under the
feet of the two faithful ones, and with the other to exalt
the unfaithful by the same artificial means, he deemed to be
alike inconsistent with his convictions, his position, and
his hopes. Nevertheless, he loved his misnamed Angel, and in
secret mourned over this treatment of him as Abraham might
have mourned over the doomed Isaac while they went up the
hill together. His silent self-generated regrets were far
bitterer than the reproaches which his wife rendered
audible.
They blamed themselves for this unlucky marriage. If
Angel had never been destined for a farmer he would never
have been thrown with agricultural girls. They did not
distinctly know what had separated him and his wife, nor the
date on which the separation had taken place. At first they
had supposed it must be something of the nature of a serious
aversion. But in his later letters he occasionally alluded
to the intention of coming home to fetch her; from which
expressions they hoped the division might not owe its origin
to anything so hopelessly permanent as that. He had told
them that she was with her relatives, and in their doubts
they had decided not to intrude into a situation which they
knew no way of bettering.
The eyes for which Tess's letter was intended were gazing
at this time on a limitless expanse of country from the back
of a mule which was bearing him from the interior of the
South-American Continent towards the coast. His experiences
of this strange land had been sad. The severe illness from
which he had suffered shortly after his arrival had never
wholly left him, and he had by degrees almost decided to
relinquish his hope of farming here, though, as long as the
bare possibility existed of his remaining, he kept this
change of view a secret from his parents.
The crowds of agricultural labourers who had come out to
the country in his wake, dazzled by representations of easy
independence, had suffered, died, and wasted away. He would
see mothers from English farms trudging along with their
infants in their arms, when the child would be stricken with
fever and would die; the mother would pause to dig a hole in
the loose earth with her bare hands, would bury the babe
therein with the same natural grave-tools, shed one tear,
and again trudge on.
Angel's original intention had not been emigration to
Brazil but a northern or eastern farm in his own country. He
had come to this place in a fit of desperation, the Brazil
movement among the English agriculturists having by chance
coincided with his desire to escape from his past existence.
During this time of absence he had mentally aged a dozen
years. What arrested him now as of value in life was less
its beauty than its pathos. Having long discredited the old
systems of mysticism, he now began to discredit the old
appraisements of morality. He thought they wanted
readjusting. Who was the moral man? Still more pertinently,
who was the moral woman? The beauty or ugliness of a
character lay not only in its achievements, but in its aims
and impulses; its true history lay, not among things done,
but among things willed.
How, then, about Tess?
Viewing her in these lights, a regret for his hasty
judgement began to oppress him. Did he reject her eternally,
or did he not? He could no longer say that he would always
reject her, and not to say that was in spirit to accept her
now.
This growing fondness for her memory coincided in point
of time with her residence at Flintcomb-Ash, but it was
before she had felt herself at liberty to trouble him with a
word about her circumstances or her feelings. He was greatly
perplexed; and in his perplexity as to her motives in
withholding intelligence, he did not inquire. Thus her
silence of docility was misinterpreted. How much it really
said if he had understood!—that she adhered with literal
exactness to orders which he had given and forgotten; that
despite her natural fearlessness she asserted no rights,
admitted his judgement to be in every respect the true one,
and bent her head dumbly thereto.
In the before-mentioned journey by mules through the
interior of the country, another man rode beside him.
Angel's companion was also an Englishman, bent on the same
errand, though he came from another part of the island. They
were both in a state of mental depression, and they spoke of
home affairs. Confidence begat confidence. With that curious
tendency evinced by men, more especially when in distant
lands, to entrust to strangers details of their lives which
they would on no account mention to friends, Angel admitted
to this man as they rode along the sorrowful facts of his
marriage.
The stranger had sojourned in many more lands and among
many more peoples than Angel; to his cosmopolitan mind such
deviations from the social norm, so immense to domesticity,
were no more than are the irregularities of vale and
mountain-chain to the whole terrestrial curve. He viewed the
matter in quite a different light from Angel; thought that
what Tess had been was of no importance beside what she
would be, and plainly told Clare that he was wrong in coming
away from her.
The next day they were drenched in a thunder-storm.
Angel's companion was struck down with fever, and died by
the week's end. Clare waited a few hours to bury him, and
then went on his way.
The cursory remarks of the large-minded stranger, of whom
he knew absolutely nothing beyond a commonplace name, were
sublimed by his death, and influenced Clare more than all
the reasoned ethics of the philosophers. His own
parochialism made him ashamed by its contrast. His
inconsistencies rushed upon him in a flood. He had
persistently elevated Hellenic Paganism at the expense of
Christianity; yet in that civilization an illegal surrender
was not certain disesteem. Surely then he might have
regarded that abhorrence of the un-intact state, which he
had inherited with the creed of mysticism, as at least open
to correction when the result was due to treachery. A
remorse struck into him. The words of Izz Huett, never quite
stilled in his memory, came back to him. He had asked Izz if
she loved him, and she had replied in the affirmative. Did
she love him more than Tess did? No, she had replied; Tess
would lay down her life for him, and she herself could do no
more.
He thought of Tess as she had appeared on the day of the
wedding. How her eyes had lingered upon him; how she had
hung upon his words as if they were a god's! And during the
terrible evening over the hearth, when her simple soul
uncovered itself to his, how pitiful her face had looked by
the rays of the fire, in her inability to realize that his
love and protection could possibly be withdrawn.
Thus from being her critic he grew to be her advocate.
Cynical things he had uttered to himself about her; but no
man can be always a cynic and live; and he withdrew them.
The mistake of expressing them had arisen from his allowing
himself to be influenced by general principles to the
disregard of the particular instance.
But the reasoning is somewhat musty; lovers and husbands
have gone over the ground before to-day. Clare had been
harsh towards her; there is no doubt of it. Men are too
often harsh with women they love or have loved; women with
men. And yet these harshnesses are tenderness itself when
compared with the universal harshness out of which they
grow; the harshness of the position towards the temperament,
of the means towards the aims, of to-day towards yesterday,
of hereafter towards to-day.
The historic interest of her family—that masterful line
of d'Urbervilles—whom he had despised as a spent force,
touched his sentiments now. Why had he not known the
difference between the political value and the imaginative
value of these things? In the latter aspect her d'Urberville
descent was a fact of great dimensions; worthless to
economics, it was a most useful ingredient to the dreamer,
to the moralizer on declines and falls. It was a fact that
would soon be forgotten—that bit of distinction in poor
Tess's blood and name, and oblivion would fall upon her
hereditary link with the marble monuments and leaded
skeletons at Kingsbere. So does Time ruthlessly destroy his
own romances. In recalling her face again and again, he
thought now that he could see therein a flash of the dignity
which must have graced her grand-dames; and the vision sent
that aura through his veins which he had formerly
felt, and which left behind it a sense of sickness.
Despite her not-inviolate past, what still abode in such
a woman as Tess outvalued the freshness of her fellows. Was
not the gleaning of the grapes of Ephraim better than the
vintage of Abiezer?
So spoke love renascent, preparing the way for Tess's
devoted outpouring, which was then just being forwarded to
him by his father; though owing to his distance inland it
was to be a long time in reaching him.
Meanwhile the writer's expectation that Angel would come
in response to the entreaty was alternately great and small.
What lessened it was that the facts of her life which had
led to the parting had not changed—could never change; and
that, if her presence had not attenuated them, her absence
could not. Nevertheless she addressed her mind to the tender
question of what she could do to please him best if he
should arrive. Sighs were expended on the wish that she had
taken more notice of the tunes he played on his harp, that
she had inquired more curiously of him which were his
favourite ballads among those the country-girls sang. She
indirectly inquired of Amby Seedling, who had followed Izz
from Talbothays, and by chance Amby remembered that, amongst
the snatches of melody in which they had indulged at the
dairyman's, to induce the cows to let down their milk, Clare
had seemed to like "Cupid's Gardens", "I have parks, I have
hounds", and "The break o' the day"; and had seemed not to
care for "The Tailor's Breeches" and "Such a beauty I did
grow", excellent ditties as they were.
To perfect the ballads was now her whimsical desire. She
practised them privately at odd moments, especially "The
break o' the day":
Arise, arise, arise!
And pick your love a posy,
All o' the sweetest flowers
That in the garden grow.
The turtle doves and sma' birds
In every bough a-building,
So early in the May-time
At the break o' the day!
It would have melted the heart of a stone to hear her singing these
ditties whenever she worked apart from the rest of the girls
in this cold dry time; the tears running down her cheeks all
the while at the thought that perhaps he would not, after
all, come to hear her, and the simple silly words of the
songs resounding in painful mockery of the aching heart of
the singer.
Tess was so wrapt up in this fanciful dream that she
seemed not to know how the season was advancing; that the
days had lengthened, that Lady-Day was at hand, and would
soon be followed by Old Lady-Day, the end of her term here.
But before the quarter-day had quite come, something
happened which made Tess think of far different matters. She
was at her lodging as usual one evening, sitting in the
downstairs room with the rest of the family, when somebody
knocked at the door and inquired for Tess. Through the
doorway she saw against the declining light a figure with
the height of a woman and the breadth of a child, a tall,
thin, girlish creature whom she did not recognize in the
twilight till the girl said "Tess!"
"What—is it 'Liza-Lu?" asked Tess, in startled accents.
Her sister, whom a little over a year ago she had left at
home as a child, had sprung up by a sudden shoot to a form
of this presentation, of which as yet Lu seemed herself
scarce able to understand the meaning. Her thin legs,
visible below her once-long frock, now short by her growing,
and her uncomfortable hands and arms revealed her youth and
inexperience.
"Yes, I have been traipsing about all day, Tess," said
Lu, with unemotional gravity, "a-trying to find 'ee; and I'm
very tired."
"What is the matter at home?"
"Mother is took very bad, and the doctor says she's
dying, and as father is not very well neither, and says 'tis
wrong for a man of such a high family as his to slave and
drave at common labouring work, we don't know what to do."
Tess stood in reverie a long time before she thought of
asking 'Liza-Lu to come in and sit down. When she had done
so, and 'Liza-Lu was having some tea, she came to a
decision. It was imperative that she should go home. Her
agreement did not end till Old Lady-Day, the sixth of April,
but as the interval thereto was not a long one she resolved
to run the risk of starting at once.
To go that night would be a gain of twelve-hours; but her
sister was too tired to undertake such a distance till the
morrow. Tess ran down to where Marian and Izz lived,
informed them of what had happened, and begged them to make
the best of her case to the farmer. Returning, she got Lu a
supper, and after that, having tucked the younger into her
own bed, packed up as many of her belongings as would go
into a withy basket, and started, directing Lu to follow her
next morning.
L
She plunged into the chilly equinoctial darkness as the
clock struck ten, for her fifteen miles' walk under the
steely stars. In lonely districts night is a protection
rather than a danger to a noiseless pedestrian, and knowing
this, Tess pursued the nearest course along by-lanes that
she would almost have feared in the day-time; but marauders
were wanting now, and spectral fears were driven out of her
mind by thoughts of her mother. Thus she proceeded mile
after mile, ascending and descending till she came to
Bulbarrow, and about midnight looked from that height into
the abyss of chaotic shade which was all that revealed
itself of the vale on whose further side she was born.
Having already traversed about five miles on the upland, she
had now some ten or eleven in the lowland before her journey
would be finished. The winding road downwards became just
visible to her under the wan starlight as she followed it,
and soon she paced a soil so contrasting with that above it
that the difference was perceptible to the tread and to the
smell. It was the heavy clay land of Blackmoor Vale, and a
part of the Vale to which turnpike-roads had never
penetrated. Superstitions linger longest on these heavy
soils. Having once been forest, at this shadowy time it
seemed to assert something of its old character, the far and
the near being blended, and every tree and tall hedge making
the most of its presence. The harts that had been hunted
here, the witches that had been pricked and ducked, the
green-spangled fairies that "whickered" at you as you
passed;—the place teemed with beliefs in them still, and
they formed an impish multitude now.
At Nuttlebury she passed the village inn, whose sign
creaked in response to the greeting of her footsteps, which
not a human soul heard but herself. Under the thatched roofs
her mind's eye beheld relaxed tendons and flaccid muscles,
spread out in the darkness beneath coverlets made of little
purple patchwork squares, and undergoing a bracing process
at the hands of sleep for renewed labour on the morrow, as
soon as a hint of pink nebulosity appeared on Hambledon
Hill.
At three she turned the last corner of the maze of lanes
she had threaded, and entered Marlott, passing the field in
which as a club-girl she had first seen Angel Clare, when he
had not danced with her; the sense of disappointment
remained with her yet. In the direction of her mother's
house she saw a light. It came from the bedroom window, and
a branch waved in front of it and made it wink at her. As
soon as she could discern the outline of the house—newly
thatched with her money—it had all its old effect upon
Tess's imagination. Part of her body and life it ever seemed
to be; the slope of its dormers, the finish of its gables,
the broken courses of brick which topped the chimney, all
had something in common with her personal character. A
stupefaction had come into these features, to her regard; it
meant the illness of her mother.
She opened the door so softly as to disturb nobody; the
lower room was vacant, but the neighbour who was sitting up
with her mother came to the top of the stairs, and whispered
that Mrs Durbeyfield was no better, though she was sleeping
just then. Tess prepared herself a breakfast, and then took
her place as nurse in her mother's chamber.
In the morning, when she contemplated the children, they
had all a curiously elongated look; although she had been
away little more than a year, their growth was astounding;
and the necessity of applying herself heart and soul to
their needs took her out of her own cares.
Her father's ill-health was the same indefinite kind, and
he sat in his chair as usual. But the day after her arrival
he was unusually bright. He had a rational scheme for
living, and Tess asked him what it was. "I'm thinking of
sending round to all the old antiqueerians in this part of
England," he said, "asking them to subscribe to a fund to
maintain me. I'm sure they'd see it as a romantical,
artistical, and proper thing to do. They spend lots o' money
in keeping up old ruins, and finding the bones o' things,
and such like; and living remains must be more interesting
to 'em still, if they only knowed of me. Would that somebody
would go round and tell 'em what there is living among 'em,
and they thinking nothing of him! If Pa'son Tringham, who
discovered me, had lived, he'd ha' done it, I'm sure."
Tess postponed her arguments on this high project till
she had grappled with pressing matters in hand, which seemed
little improved by her remittances. When indoor necessities
had been eased, she turned her attention to external things.
It was now the season for planting and sowing; many gardens
and allotments of the villagers had already received their
spring tillage; but the garden and the allotment of the
Durbeyfields were behindhand. She found, to her dismay, that
this was owing to their having eaten all the seed
potatoes,—that last lapse of the improvident. At the
earliest moment she obtained what others she could procure,
and in a few days her father was well enough to see to the
garden, under Tess's persuasive efforts: while she herself
undertook the allotment-plot which they rented in a field a
couple of hundred yards out of the village.
She liked doing it after the confinement of the sick
chamber, where she was not now required by reason of her
mother's improvement. Violent motion relieved thought. The
plot of ground was in a high, dry, open enclosure, where
there were forty or fifty such pieces, and where labour was
at its briskest when the hired labour of the day had ended.
Digging began usually at six o'clock and extended
indefinitely into the dusk or moonlight. Just now heaps of
dead weeds and refuse were burning on many of the plots, the
dry weather favouring their combustion.
One fine day Tess and 'Liza-Lu worked on here with their
neighbours till the last rays of the sun smote flat upon the
white pegs that divided the plots. As soon as twilight
succeeded to sunset the flare of the couch-grass and
cabbage-stalk fires began to light up the allotments
fitfully, their outlines appearing and disappearing under
the dense smoke as wafted by the wind. When a fire glowed,
banks of smoke, blown level along the ground, would
themselves become illuminated to an opaque lustre, screening
the workpeople from one another; and the meaning of the
"pillar of a cloud", which was a wall by day and a light by
night, could be understood.
As evening thickened, some of the gardening men and women
gave over for the night, but the greater number remained to
get their planting done, Tess being among them, though she
sent her sister home. It was on one of the couch-burning
plots that she laboured with her fork, its four shining
prongs resounding against the stones and dry clods in little
clicks. Sometimes she was completely involved in the smoke
of her fire; then it would leave her figure free, irradiated
by the brassy glare from the heap. She was oddly dressed
to-night, and presented a somewhat staring aspect, her
attire being a gown bleached by many washings, with a short
black jacket over it, the effect of the whole being that of
a wedding and funeral guest in one. The women further back
wore white aprons, which, with their pale faces, were all
that could be seen of them in the gloom, except when at
moments they caught a flash from the flames.
Westward, the wiry boughs of the bare thorn hedge which
formed the boundary of the field rose against the pale
opalescence of the lower sky. Above, Jupiter hung like a
full-blown jonquil, so bright as almost to throw a shade. A
few small nondescript stars were appearing elsewhere. In the
distance a dog barked, and wheels occasionally rattled along
the dry road.
Still the prongs continued to click assiduously, for it
was not late; and though the air was fresh and keen there
was a whisper of spring in it that cheered the workers on.
Something in the place, the hours, the crackling fires, the
fantastic mysteries of light and shade, made others as well
as Tess enjoy being there. Nightfall, which in the frost of
winter comes as a fiend and in the warmth of summer as a
lover, came as a tranquillizer on this March day.
Nobody looked at his or her companions. The eyes of all
were on the soil as its turned surface was revealed by the
fires. Hence as Tess stirred the clods and sang her foolish
little songs with scarce now a hope that Clare would ever
hear them, she did not for a long time notice the person who
worked nearest to her—a man in a long smockfrock who, she
found, was forking the same plot as herself, and whom she
supposed her father had sent there to advance the work. She
became more conscious of him when the direction of his
digging brought him closer. Sometimes the smoke divided
them; then it swerved, and the two were visible to each
other but divided from all the rest.
Tess did not speak to her fellow-worker, nor did he speak
to her. Nor did she think of him further than to recollect
that he had not been there when it was broad daylight, and
that she did not know him as any one of the Marlott
labourers, which was no wonder, her absences having been so
long and frequent of late years. By-and-by he dug so close
to her that the fire-beams were reflected as distinctly from
the steel prongs of his fork as from her own. On going up to
the fire to throw a pitch of dead weeds upon it, she found
that he did the same on the other side. The fire flared up,
and she beheld the face of d'Urberville.
The unexpectedness of his presence, the grotesqueness of
his appearance in a gathered smockfrock, such as was now
worn only by the most old-fashioned of the labourers, had a
ghastly comicality that chilled her as to its bearing.
D'Urberville emitted a low, long laugh.
"If I were inclined to joke, I should say, How much this
seems like Paradise!" he remarked whimsically, looking at
her with an inclined head.
"What do you say?" she weakly asked.
"A jester might say this is just like Paradise. You are
Eve, and I am the old Other One come to tempt you in the
disguise of an inferior animal. I used to be quite up in
that scene of Milton's when I was theological. Some of it
goes—
"'Empress, the way is ready, and not long,
Beyond a row of myrtles…
… If thou accept
My conduct, I can bring thee thither soon.'
'Lead then,' said Eve.
"And so on. My dear Tess, I am only putting this to you as a thing that
you might have supposed or said quite untruly, because you
think so badly of me."
"I never said you were Satan, or thought it. I don't
think of you in that way at all. My thoughts of you are
quite cold, except when you affront me. What, did you come
digging here entirely because of me?"
"Entirely. To see you; nothing more. The smockfrock,
which I saw hanging for sale as I came along, was an
afterthought, that I mightn't be noticed. I come to protest
against your working like this."
"But I like doing it—it is for my father."
"Your engagement at the other place is ended?"
"Yes."
"Where are you going to next? To join your dear husband?"
She could not bear the humiliating reminder.
"O—I don't know!" she said bitterly. "I have no husband!"
"It is quite true—in the sense you mean. But you have a
friend, and I have determined that you shall be comfortable
in spite of yourself. When you get down to your house you
will see what I have sent there for you."
"O, Alec, I wish you wouldn't give me anything at all! I
cannot take it from you! I don't like—it is not right!"
"It is right!" he cried lightly. "I am not going
to see a woman whom I feel so tenderly for as I do for you
in trouble without trying to help her."
"But I am very well off! I am only in trouble
about—about—not about living at all!"
She turned, and desperately resumed her digging, tears
dripping upon the fork-handle and upon the clods.
"About the children—your brothers and sisters," he
resumed. "I've been thinking of them."
Tess's heart quivered—he was touching her in a weak
place. He had divined her chief anxiety. Since returning
home her soul had gone out to those children with an
affection that was passionate.
"If your mother does not recover, somebody ought to do
something for them; since your father will not be able to do
much, I suppose?"
"He can with my assistance. He must!"
"And with mine."
"No, sir!"
"How damned foolish this is!" burst out d'Urberville.
"Why, he thinks we are the same family; and will be quite
satisfied!"
"He don't. I've undeceived him."
"The more fool you!"
D'Urberville in anger retreated from her to the hedge,
where he pulled off the long smockfrock which had disguised
him; and rolling it up and pushing it into the couch-fire,
went away.
Tess could not get on with her digging after this; she
felt restless; she wondered if he had gone back to her
father's house; and taking the fork in her hand proceeded
homewards.
Some twenty yards from the house she was met by one of
her sisters.
"O, Tessy—what do you think! 'Liza-Lu is a-crying, and
there's a lot of folk in the house, and mother is a good
deal better, but they think father is dead!"
The child realized the grandeur of the news; but not as
yet its sadness, and stood looking at Tess with round-eyed
importance till, beholding the effect produced upon her, she
said—
"What, Tess, shan't we talk to father never no more?"
"But father was only a little bit ill!" exclaimed Tess
distractedly.
'Liza-Lu came up.
"He dropped down just now, and the doctor who was there
for mother said there was no chance for him, because his
heart was growed in."
Yes; the Durbeyfield couple had changed places; the dying
one was out of danger, and the indisposed one was dead. The
news meant even more than it sounded. Her father's life had
a value apart from his personal achievements, or perhaps it
would not have had much. It was the last of the three lives
for whose duration the house and premises were held under a
lease; and it had long been coveted by the tenant-farmer for
his regular labourers, who were stinted in cottage
accommodation. Moreover, "liviers" were disapproved of in
villages almost as much as little freeholders, because of
their independence of manner, and when a lease determined it
was never renewed.
Thus the Durbeyfields, once d'Urbervilles, saw descending
upon them the destiny which, no doubt, when they were among
the Olympians of the county, they had caused to descend many
a time, and severely enough, upon the heads of such landless
ones as they themselves were now. So do flux and reflux—the
rhythm of change—alternate and persist in everything under
the sky.
LI
At length it was the eve of Old Lady-Day, and the
agricultural world was in a fever of mobility such as only
occurs at that particular date of the year. It is a day of
fulfilment; agreements for outdoor service during the
ensuing year, entered into at Candlemas, are to be now
carried out. The labourers—or "work-folk", as they used to
call themselves immemorially till the other word was
introduced from without—who wish to remain no longer in old
places are removing to the new farms.
These annual migrations from farm to farm were on the
increase here. When Tess's mother was a child the majority
of the field-folk about Marlott had remained all their lives
on one farm, which had been the home also of their fathers
and grandfathers; but latterly the desire for yearly removal
had risen to a high pitch. With the younger families it was
a pleasant excitement which might possibly be an advantage.
The Egypt of one family was the Land of Promise to the
family who saw it from a distance, till by residence there
it became it turn their Egypt also; and so they changed and
changed.
However, all the mutations so increasingly discernible in
village life did not originate entirely in the agricultural
unrest. A depopulation was also going on. The village had
formerly contained, side by side with the argicultural
labourers, an interesting and better-informed class, ranking
distinctly above the former—the class to which Tess's father
and mother had belonged—and including the carpenter, the
smith, the shoemaker, the huckster, together with
nondescript workers other than farm-labourers; a set of
people who owed a certain stability of aim and conduct to
the fact of their being lifeholders like Tess's father, or
copyholders, or occasionally, small freeholders. But as the
long holdings fell in, they were seldom again let to similar
tenants, and were mostly pulled down, if not absolutely
required by the farmer for his hands. Cottagers who were not
directly employed on the land were looked upon with
disfavour, and the banishment of some starved the trade of
others, who were thus obliged to follow. These families, who
had formed the backbone of the village life in the past, who
were the depositaries of the village traditions, had to seek
refuge in the large centres; the process, humorously
designated by statisticians as "the tendency of the rural
population towards the large towns", being really the
tendency of water to flow uphill when forced by machinery.
The cottage accommodation at Marlott having been in this
manner considerably curtailed by demolitions, every house
which remained standing was required by the agriculturist
for his work-people. Ever since the occurrence of the event
which had cast such a shadow over Tess's life, the
Durbeyfield family (whose descent was not credited) had been
tacitly looked on as one which would have to go when their
lease ended, if only in the interests of morality. It was,
indeed, quite true that the household had not been shining
examples either of temperance, soberness, or chastity. The
father, and even the mother, had got drunk at times, the
younger children seldom had gone to church, and the eldest
daughter had made queer unions. By some means the village
had to be kept pure. So on this, the first Lady-Day on which
the Durbeyfields were expellable, the house, being roomy,
was required for a carter with a large family; and Widow
Joan, her daughters Tess and 'Liza-Lu, the boy Abraham, and
the younger children had to go elsewhere.
On the evening preceding their removal it was getting
dark betimes by reason of a drizzling rain which blurred the
sky. As it was the last night they would spend in the
village which had been their home and birthplace, Mrs
Durbeyfield, 'Liza-Lu, and Abraham had gone out to bid some
friends goodbye, and Tess was keeping house till they should
return.
She was kneeling in the window-bench, her face close to
the casement, where an outer pane of rain-water was sliding
down the inner pane of glass. Her eyes rested on the web of
a spider, probably starved long ago, which had been
mistakenly placed in a corner where no flies ever came, and
shivered in the slight draught through the casement. Tess
was reflecting on the position of the household, in which
she perceived her own evil influence. Had she not come home,
her mother and the children might probably have been allowed
to stay on as weekly tenants. But she had been observed
almost immediately on her return by some people of
scrupulous character and great influence: they had seen her
idling in the churchyard, restoring as well as she could
with a little trowel a baby's obliterated grave. By this
means they had found that she was living here again; her
mother was scolded for "harbouring" her; sharp retorts had
ensued from Joan, who had independently offered to leave at
once; she had been taken at her word; and here was the
result.
"I ought never to have come home," said Tess to herself,
bitterly.
She was so intent upon these thoughts that she hardly at
first took note of a man in a white mackintosh whom she saw
riding down the street. Possibly it was owing to her face
being near to the pane that he saw her so quickly, and
directed his horse so close to the cottage-front that his
hoofs were almost upon the narrow border for plants growing
under the wall. It was not till he touched the window with
his riding-crop that she observed him. The rain had nearly
ceased, and she opened the casement in obedience to his
gesture.
"Didn't you see me?" asked d'Urberville.
"I was not attending," she said. "I heard you, I believe,
though I fancied it was a carriage and horses. I was in a
sort of dream."
"Ah! you heard the d'Urberville Coach, perhaps. You know
the legend, I suppose?"
"No. My—somebody was going to tell it me once, but
didn't."
"If you are a genuine d'Urberville I ought not to tell
you either, I suppose. As for me, I'm a sham one, so it
doesn't matter. It is rather dismal. It is that this sound
of a non-existent coach can only be heard by one of
d'Urberville blood, and it is held to be of ill-omen to the
one who hears it. It has to do with a murder, committed by
one of the family, centuries ago."
"Now you have begun it, finish it."
"Very well. One of the family is said to have abducted
some beautiful woman, who tried to escape from the coach in
which he was carrying her off, and in the struggle he killed
her—or she killed him—I forget which. Such is one version of
the tale… I see that your tubs and buckets are packed. Going
away, aren't you?"
"Yes, to-morrow—Old Lady Day."
"I heard you were, but could hardly believe it; it seems
so sudden. Why is it?"
"Father's was the last life on the property, and when
that dropped we had no further right to stay. Though we
might, perhaps, have stayed as weekly tenants—if it had not
been for me."
"What about you?"
"I am not a—proper woman."
D'Urberville's face flushed.
"What a blasted shame! Miserable snobs! May their dirty
souls be burnt to cinders!" he exclaimed in tones of ironic
resentment. "That's why you are going, is it? Turned out?"
"We are not turned out exactly; but as they said we
should have to go soon, it was best to go now everybody was
moving, because there are better chances."
"Where are you going to?"
"Kingsbere. We have taken rooms there. Mother is so
foolish about father's people that she will go there."
"But your mother's family are not fit for lodgings, and
in a little hole of a town like that. Now why not come to my
garden-house at Trantridge? There are hardly any poultry
now, since my mother's death; but there's the house, as you
know it, and the garden. It can be whitewashed in a day, and
your mother can live there quite comfortably; and I will put
the children to a good school. Really I ought to do
something for you!"
"But we have already taken the rooms at Kingsbere!" she
declared. "And we can wait there—"
"Wait—what for? For that nice husband, no doubt. Now look
here, Tess, I know what men are, and, bearing in mind the
grounds of your separation, I am quite positive he will
never make it up with you. Now, though I have been your
enemy, I am your friend, even if you won't believe it. Come
to this cottage of mine. We'll get up a regular colony of
fowls, and your mother can attend to them excellently; and
the children can go to school."
Tess breathed more and more quickly, and at length she
said—
"How do I know that you would do all this? Your views may
change—and then—we should be—my mother would be—homeless
again."
"O no—no. I would guarantee you against such as that in
writing, if necessary. Think it over."
Tess shook her head. But d'Urberville persisted; she had
seldom seen him so determined; he would not take a negative.
"Please just tell your mother," he said, in emphatic
tones. "It is her business to judge—not yours. I shall get
the house swept out and whitened to-morrow morning, and
fires lit; and it will be dry by the evening, so that you
can come straight there. Now mind, I shall expect you."
Tess again shook her head, her throat swelling with
complicated emotion. She could not look up at d'Urberville.
"I owe you something for the past, you know," he resumed.
"And you cured me, too, of that craze; so I am glad—"
"I would rather you had kept the craze, so that you had
kept the practice which went with it!"
"I am glad of this opportunity of repaying you a little.
To-morrow I shall expect to hear your mother's goods
unloading… Give me your hand on it now—dear, beautiful
Tess!"
With the last sentence he had dropped his voice to a
murmur, and put his hand in at the half-open casement. With
stormy eyes she pulled the stay-bar quickly, and, in doing
so, caught his arm between the casement and the stone
mullion.
"Damnation—you are very cruel!" he said, snatching out
his arm. "No, no!—I know you didn't do it on purpose. Well I
shall expect you, or your mother and children at least."
"I shall not come—I have plenty of money!" she cried.
"Where?"
"At my father-in-law's, if I ask for it."
"If you ask for it. But you won't, Tess; I know
you; you'll never ask for it—you'll starve first!"
With these words he rode off. Just at the corner of the
street he met the man with the paint-pot, who asked him if
he had deserted the brethren.
"You go to the devil!" said d'Urberville.
Tess remained where she was a long while, till a sudden
rebellious sense of injustice caused the region of her eyes
to swell with the rush of hot tears thither. Her husband,
Angel Clare himself, had, like others, dealt out hard
measure to her; surely he had! She had never before admitted
such a thought; but he had surely! Never in her life—she
could swear it from the bottom of her soul—had she ever
intended to do wrong; yet these hard judgements had come.
Whatever her sins, they were not sins of intention, but of
inadvertence, and why should she have been punished so
persistently?
She passionately seized the first piece of paper that
came to hand, and scribbled the following lines:
O why have you treated me so monstrously, Angel!
I do not deserve it. I have thought it all over
carefully, and I can never, never forgive you! You
know that I did not intend to wrong you—why have you
so wronged me? You are cruel, cruel indeed! I will
try to forget you. It is all injustice I have
received at your hands!
T.
She watched till the postman passed by, ran out to him with her
epistle, and then again took her listless place inside the
window-panes.
It was just as well to write like that as to write
tenderly. How could he give way to entreaty? The facts had
not changed: there was no new event to alter his opinion.
It grew darker, the fire-light shining over the room. The
two biggest of the younger children had gone out with their
mother; the four smallest, their ages ranging from
three-and-a-half years to eleven, all in black frocks, were
gathered round the hearth babbling their own little
subjects. Tess at length joined them, without lighting a
candle.
"This is the last night that we shall sleep here, dears,
in the house where we were born," she said quickly. "We
ought to think of it, oughtn't we?"
They all became silent; with the impressibility of their
age they were ready to burst into tears at the picture of
finality she had conjured up, though all the day hitherto
they had been rejoicing in the idea of a new place. Tess
changed the subject.
"Sing to me, dears," she said.
"What shall we sing?"
"Anything you know; I don't mind."
There was a momentary pause; it was broken, first, in one
little tentative note; then a second voice strengthened it,
and a third and a fourth chimed in unison, with words they
had learnt at the Sunday-school—
Here we suffer grief and pain,
Here we meet to part again;
In Heaven we part no more.
The four sang on with the phlegmatic passivity of persons who had long
ago settled the question, and there being no mistake about
it, felt that further thought was not required. With
features strained hard to enunciate the syllables they
continued to regard the centre of the flickering fire, the
notes of the youngest straying over into the pauses of the
rest.
Tess turned from them, and went to the window again.
Darkness had now fallen without, but she put her face to the
pane as though to peer into the gloom. It was really to hide
her tears. If she could only believe what the children were
singing; if she were only sure, how different all would now
be; how confidently she would leave them to Providence and
their future kingdom! But, in default of that, it behoved
her to do something; to be their Providence; for to Tess, as
to not a few millions of others, there was ghastly satire in
the poet's lines—
Not in utter nakedness
But trailing clouds of glory do we come.
To her and her like, birth itself was an ordeal of degrading personal
compulsion, whose gratuitousness nothing in the result
seemed to justify, and at best could only palliate.
In the shades of the wet road she soon discerned her
mother with tall 'Liza-Lu and Abraham. Mrs Durbeyfield's
pattens clicked up to the door, and Tess opened it.
"I see the tracks of a horse outside the window," said
Joan. "Hev somebody called?"
"No," said Tess.
The children by the fire looked gravely at her, and one
murmured—
"Why, Tess, the gentleman a-horseback!"
"He didn't call," said Tess. "He spoke to me in passing."
"Who was the gentleman?" asked the mother. "Your
husband?"
"No. He'll never, never come," answered Tess in stony
hopelessness.
"Then who was it?"
"Oh, you needn't ask. You've seen him before, and so have
I."
"Ah! What did he say?" said Joan curiously.
"I will tell you when we are settled in our lodging at
Kingsbere to-morrow—every word."
It was not her husband, she had said. Yet a consciousness
that in a physical sense this man alone was her husband
seemed to weigh on her more and more.
LII
During the small hours of the next morning, while it was
still dark, dwellers near the highways were conscious of a
disturbance of their night's rest by rumbling noises,
intermittently continuing till daylight—noises as certain to
recur in this particular first week of the month as the
voice of the cuckoo in the third week of the same. They were
the preliminaries of the general removal, the passing of the
empty waggons and teams to fetch the goods of the migrating
families; for it was always by the vehicle of the farmer who
required his services that the hired man was conveyed to his
destination. That this might be accomplished within the day
was the explanation of the reverberation occurring so soon
after midnight, the aim of the carters being to reach the
door of the outgoing households by six o'clock, when the
loading of their movables at once began.
But to Tess and her mother's household no such anxious
farmer sent his team. They were only women; they were not
regular labourers; they were not particularly required
anywhere; hence they had to hire a waggon at their own
expense, and got nothing sent gratuitously.
It was a relief to Tess, when she looked out of the
window that morning, to find that though the weather was
windy and louring, it did not rain, and that the waggon had
come. A wet Lady-Day was a spectre which removing families
never forgot; damp furniture, damp bedding, damp clothing
accompanied it, and left a train of ills.
Her mother, 'Liza-Lu, and Abraham were also awake, but
the younger children were let sleep on. The four breakfasted
by the thin light, and the "house-ridding" was taken in
hand.
It proceeded with some cheerfulness, a friendly neighbour
or two assisting. When the large articles of furniture had
been packed in position, a circular nest was made of the
beds and bedding, in which Joan Durbeyfield and the young
children were to sit through the journey. After loading
there was a long delay before the horses were brought, these
having been unharnessed during the ridding; but at length,
about two o'clock, the whole was under way, the cooking-pot
swinging from the axle of the waggon, Mrs Durbeyfield and
family at the top, the matron having in her lap, to prevent
injury to its works, the head of the clock, which, at any
exceptional lurch of the waggon, struck one, or
one-and-a-half, in hurt tones. Tess and the next eldest girl
walked alongside till they were out of the village.
They had called on a few neighbours that morning and the
previous evening, and some came to see them off, all wishing
them well, though, in their secret hearts, hardly expecting
welfare possible to such a family, harmless as the
Durbeyfields were to all except themselves. Soon the
equipage began to ascend to higher ground, and the wind grew
keener with the change of level and soil.
The day being the sixth of April, the Durbeyfield waggon
met many other waggons with families on the summit of the
load, which was built on a wellnigh unvarying principle, as
peculiar, probably, to the rural labourer as the hexagon to
the bee. The groundwork of the arrangement was the family
dresser, which, with its shining handles, and finger-marks,
and domestic evidences thick upon it, stood importantly in
front, over the tails of the shaft-horses, in its erect and
natural position, like some Ark of the Covenant that they
were bound to carry reverently.
Some of the households were lively, some mournful; some
were stopping at the doors of wayside inns; where, in due
time, the Durbeyfield menagerie also drew up to bait horses
and refresh the travellers.
During the halt Tess's eyes fell upon a three-pint blue
mug, which was ascending and descending through the air to
and from the feminine section of a household, sitting on the
summit of a load that had also drawn up at a little distance
from the same inn. She followed one of the mug's journeys
upward, and perceived it to be clasped by hands whose owner
she well knew. Tess went towards the waggon.
"Marian and Izz!" she cried to the girls, for it was
they, sitting with the moving family at whose house they had
lodged. "Are you house-ridding to-day, like everybody else?"
They were, they said. It had been too rough a life for
them at Flintcomb-Ash, and they had come away, almost
without notice, leaving Groby to prosecute them if he chose.
They told Tess their destination, and Tess told them hers.
Marian leant over the load, and lowered her voice. "Do
you know that the gentleman who follows 'ee—you'll guess who
I mean—came to ask for 'ee at Flintcomb after you had gone?
We didn't tell'n where you was, knowing you wouldn't wish to
see him."
"Ah—but I did see him!" Tess murmured. "He found me."
"And do he know where you be going?"
"I think so."
"Husband come back?"
"No."
She bade her acquaintance goodbye—for the respective
carters had now come out from the inn—and the two waggons
resumed their journey in opposite directions; the vehicle
whereon sat Marian, Izz, and the ploughman's family with
whom they had thrown in their lot, being brightly painted,
and drawn by three powerful horses with shining brass
ornaments on their harness; while the waggon on which Mrs
Durbeyfield and her family rode was a creaking erection that
would scarcely bear the weight of the superincumbent load;
one which had known no paint since it was made, and drawn by
two horses only. The contrast well marked the difference
between being fetched by a thriving farmer and conveying
oneself whither no hirer waited one's coming.
The distance was great—too great for a day's journey—and
it was with the utmost difficulty that the horses performed
it. Though they had started so early, it was quite late in
the afternoon when they turned the flank of an eminence
which formed part of the upland called Greenhill. While the
horses stood to stale and breathe themselves Tess looked
around. Under the hill, and just ahead of them, was the
half-dead townlet of their pilgrimage, Kingsbere, where lay
those ancestors of whom her father had spoken and sung to
painfulness: Kingsbere, the spot of all spots in the world
which could be considered the d'Urbervilles' home, since
they had resided there for full five hundred years.
A man could be seen advancing from the outskirts towards
them, and when he beheld the nature of their waggon-load he
quickened his steps.
"You be the woman they call Mrs Durbeyfield, I reckon?"
he said to Tess's mother, who had descended to walk the
remainder of the way.
She nodded. "Though widow of the late Sir John
d'Urberville, poor nobleman, if I cared for my rights; and
returning to the domain of his forefathers."
"Oh? Well, I know nothing about that; but if you be Mrs
Durbeyfield, I am sent to tell 'ee that the rooms you wanted
be let. We didn't know that you was coming till we got your
letter this morning—when 'twas too late. But no doubt you
can get other lodgings somewhere."
The man had noticed the face of Tess, which had become
ash-pale at his intelligence. Her mother looked hopelessly
at fault. "What shall we do now, Tess?" she said bitterly.
"Here's a welcome to your ancestors' lands! However, let's
try further."
They moved on into the town, and tried with all their
might, Tess remaining with the waggon to take care of the
children whilst her mother and 'Liza-Lu made inquiries. At
the last return of Joan to the vehicle, an hour later, when
her search for accommodation had still been fruitless, the
driver of the waggon said the goods must be unloaded, as the
horses were half-dead, and he was bound to return part of
the way at least that night.
"Very well—unload it here," said Joan recklessly. "I'll
get shelter somewhere."
The waggon had drawn up under the churchyard wall, in a
spot screened from view, and the driver, nothing loth, soon
hauled down the poor heap of household goods. This done, she
paid him, reducing herself to almost her last shilling
thereby, and he moved off and left them, only too glad to
get out of further dealings with such a family. It was a dry
night, and he guessed that they would come to no harm.
Tess gazed desperately at the pile of furniture. The cold
sunlight of this spring evening peered invidiously upon the
crocks and kettles, upon the bunches of dried herbs
shivering in the breeze, upon the brass handles of the
dresser, upon the wicker-cradle they had all been rocked in,
and upon the well-rubbed clock-case, all of which gave out
the reproachful gleam of indoor articles abandoned to the
vicissitudes of a roofless exposure for which they were
never made. Round about were deparked hills and slopes—now
cut up into little paddocks—and the green foundations that
showed where the d'Urberville mansion once had stood; also
an outlying stretch of Egdon Heath that had always belonged
to the estate. Hard by, the aisle of the church called the
d'Urberville Aisle looked on imperturbably.
"Isn't your family vault your own freehold?" said Tess's
mother, as she returned from a reconnoitre of the church and
graveyard. "Why, of course 'tis, and that's where we will
camp, girls, till the place of your ancestors finds us a
roof! Now, Tess and 'Liza and Abraham, you help me. We'll
make a nest for these children, and then we'll have another
look round."
Tess listlessly lent a hand, and in a quarter of an hour
the old four-post bedstead was dissociated from the heap of
goods, and erected under the south wall of the church, the
part of the building known as the d'Urberville Aisle,
beneath which the huge vaults lay. Over the tester of the
bedstead was a beautiful traceried window, of many lights,
its date being the fifteenth century. It was called the
d'Urberville Window, and in the upper part could be
discerned heraldic emblems like those on Durbeyfield's old
seal and spoon.
Joan drew the curtains round the bed so as to make an
excellent tent of it, and put the smaller children inside.
"If it comes to the worst we can sleep there too, for one
night," she said. "But let us try further on, and get
something for the dears to eat! O, Tess, what's the use of
your playing at marrying gentlemen, if it leaves us like
this!"
Accompanied by 'Liza-Lu and the boy, she again ascended
the little lane which secluded the church from the townlet.
As soon as they got into the street they beheld a man on
horseback gazing up and down. "Ah—I'm looking for you!" he
said, riding up to them. "This is indeed a family gathering
on the historic spot!"
It was Alec d'Urberville. "Where is Tess?" he asked.
Personally Joan had no liking for Alec. She cursorily
signified the direction of the church, and went on,
d'Urberville saying that he would see them again, in case
they should be still unsuccessful in their search for
shelter, of which he had just heard. When they had gone,
d'Urberville rode to the inn, and shortly after came out on
foot.
In the interim Tess, left with the children inside the
bedstead, remained talking with them awhile, till, seeing
that no more could be done to make them comfortable just
then, she walked about the churchyard, now beginning to be
embrowned by the shades of nightfall. The door of the church
was unfastened, and she entered it for the first time in her
life.
Within the window under which the bedstead stood were the
tombs of the family, covering in their dates several
centuries. They were canopied, altar-shaped, and plain;
their carvings being defaced and broken; their brasses torn
from the matrices, the rivet-holes remaining like
martin-holes in a sandcliff. Of all the reminders that she
had ever received that her people were socially extinct,
there was none so forcible as this spoliation.
She drew near to a dark stone on which was inscribed:
OSTIUM SEPULCHRI
ANTIQUAE FAMILIAE D'URBERVILLE
Tess did not read Church-Latin like a Cardinal, but she knew that this
was the door of her ancestral sepulchre, and that the tall
knights of whom her father had chanted in his cups lay
inside.
She musingly turned to withdraw, passing near an
altar-tomb, the oldest of them all, on which was a recumbent
figure. In the dusk she had not noticed it before, and would
hardly have noticed it now but for an odd fancy that the
effigy moved. As soon as she drew close to it she discovered
all in a moment that the figure was a living person; and the
shock to her sense of not having been alone was so violent
that she was quite overcome, and sank down nigh to fainting,
not, however, till she had recognized Alec d'Urberville in
the form.
He leapt off the slab and supported her.
"I saw you come in," he said smiling, "and got up there
not to interrupt your meditations. A family gathering, is it
not, with these old fellows under us here? Listen."
He stamped with his heel heavily on the floor; whereupon
there arose a hollow echo from below.
"That shook them a bit, I'll warrant!" he continued. "And
you thought I was the mere stone reproduction of one of
them. But no. The old order changeth. The little finger of
the sham d'Urberville can do more for you than the whole
dynasty of the real underneath … Now command me. What shall
I do?"
"Go away!" she murmured.
"I will—I'll look for your mother," said he blandly. But
in passing her he whispered: "Mind this; you'll be civil
yet!"
When he was gone she bent down upon the entrance to the
vaults, and said—
"Why am I on the wrong side of this door!"
In the meantime Marian and Izz Huett had journeyed onward
with the chattels of the ploughman in the direction of their
land of Canaan—the Egypt of some other family who had left
it only that morning. But the girls did not for a long time
think of where they were going. Their talk was of Angel
Clare and Tess, and Tess's persistent lover, whose
connection with her previous history they had partly heard
and partly guessed ere this.
"'Tisn't as though she had never known him afore," said
Marian. "His having won her once makes all the difference in
the world. 'Twould be a thousand pities if he were to tole
her away again. Mr Clare can never be anything to us, Izz;
and why should we grudge him to her, and not try to mend
this quarrel? If he could on'y know what straits she's put
to, and what's hovering round, he might come to take care of
his own."
"Could we let him know?"
They thought of this all the way to their destination;
but the bustle of re-establishment in their new place took
up all their attention then. But when they were settled, a
month later, they heard of Clare's approaching return,
though they had learnt nothing more of Tess. Upon that,
agitated anew by their attachment to him, yet honourably
disposed to her, Marian uncorked the penny ink-bottle they
shared, and a few lines were concocted between the two
girls.
Honour'd Sir—
Look to your Wife if you do love her as much as she
do love you. For she is sore put to by an Enemy in
the shape of a Friend. Sir, there is one near her
who ought to be Away. A woman should not be try'd
beyond her Strength, and continual dropping will
wear away a Stone—ay, more—a Diamond.
From Two Well-Wishers
This was addressed to Angel Clare at the only place they had ever heard
him to be connected with, Emminster Vicarage; after which
they continued in a mood of emotional exaltation at their
own generosity, which made them sing in hysterical snatches
and weep at the same time.
End of Phase the Sixth

Phase the Seventh: Fulfilment, LIII-LIX
LIII
It was evening at Emminster Vicarage. The two customary candles were
burning under their green shades in the Vicar's study, but
he had not been sitting there. Occasionally he came in,
stirred the small fire which sufficed for the increasing
mildness of the spring, and went out again; sometimes
pausing at the front door, going on to the drawing-room,
then returning again to the front door.
It faced westward, and though gloom prevailed inside,
there was still light enough without to see with
distinctness. Mrs Clare, who had been sitting in the
drawing-room, followed him hither.
"Plenty of time yet," said the Vicar. "He doesn't reach
Chalk-Newton till six, even if the train should be punctual,
and ten miles of country-road, five of them in Crimmercrock
Lane, are not jogged over in a hurry by our old horse."
"But he has done it in an hour with us, my dear."
"Years ago."
Thus they passed the minutes, each well knowing that this
was only waste of breath, the one essential being simply to
wait.
At length there was a slight noise in the lane, and the
old pony-chaise appeared indeed outside the railings. They
saw alight therefrom a form which they affected to
recognize, but would actually have passed by in the street
without identifying had he not got out of their carriage at
the particular moment when a particular person was due.
Mrs Clare rushed through the dark passage to the door,
and her husband came more slowly after her.
The new arrival, who was just about to enter, saw their
anxious faces in the doorway and the gleam of the west in
their spectacles because they confronted the last rays of
day; but they could only see his shape against the light.
"O, my boy, my boy—home again at last!" cried Mrs Clare,
who cared no more at that moment for the stains of
heterodoxy which had caused all this separation than for the
dust upon his clothes. What woman, indeed, among the most
faithful adherents of the truth, believes the promises and
threats of the Word in the sense in which she believes in
her own children, or would not throw her theology to the
wind if weighed against their happiness? As soon as they
reached the room where the candles were lighted she looked
at his face.
"O, it is not Angel—not my son—the Angel who went away!"
she cried in all the irony of sorrow, as she turned herself
aside.
His father, too, was shocked to see him, so reduced was
that figure from its former contours by worry and the bad
season that Clare had experienced, in the climate to which
he had so rashly hurried in his first aversion to the
mockery of events at home. You could see the skeleton behind
the man, and almost the ghost behind the skeleton. He
matched Crivelli's dead Christus. His sunken eye-pits
were of morbid hue, and the light in his eyes had waned. The
angular hollows and lines of his aged ancestors had
succeeded to their reign in his face twenty years before
their time.
"I was ill over there, you know," he said. "I am all
right now."
As if, however, to falsify this assertion, his legs
seemed to give way, and he suddenly sat down to save himself
from falling. It was only a slight attack of faintness,
resulting from the tedious day's journey, and the excitement
of arrival.
"Has any letter come for me lately?" he asked. "I
received the last you sent on by the merest chance, and
after considerable delay through being inland; or I might
have come sooner."
"It was from your wife, we supposed?"
"It was."
Only one other had recently come. They had not sent it on
to him, knowing he would start for home so soon.
He hastily opened the letter produced, and was much
disturbed to read in Tess's handwriting the sentiments
expressed in her last hurried scrawl to him.
O why have you treated me so monstrously, Angel!
I do not deserve it. I have thought it all over
carefully, and I can never, never forgive you! You
know that I did not intend to wrong you—why have you
so wronged me? You are cruel, cruel indeed! I will
try to forget you. It is all injustice I have
received at your hands!
T.
"It is quite true!" said Angel, throwing down the letter. "Perhaps she
will never be reconciled to me!"
"Don't, Angel, be so anxious about a mere child of the
soil!" said his mother.
"Child of the soil! Well, we all are children of the
soil. I wish she were so in the sense you mean; but let me
now explain to you what I have never explained before, that
her father is a descendant in the male line of one of the
oldest Norman houses, like a good many others who lead
obscure agricultural lives in our villages, and are dubbed
'sons of the soil.'"
He soon retired to bed; and the next morning, feeling
exceedingly unwell, he remained in his room pondering. The
circumstances amid which he had left Tess were such that
though, while on the south of the Equator and just in
receipt of her loving epistle, it had seemed the easiest
thing in the world to rush back into her arms the moment he
chose to forgive her, now that he had arrived it was not so
easy as it had seemed. She was passionate, and her present
letter, showing that her estimate of him had changed under
his delay—too justly changed, he sadly owned,—made him ask
himself if it would be wise to confront her unannounced in
the presence of her parents. Supposing that her love had
indeed turned to dislike during the last weeks of
separation, a sudden meeting might lead to bitter words.
Clare therefore thought it would be best to prepare Tess
and her family by sending a line to Marlott announcing his
return, and his hope that she was still living with them
there, as he had arranged for her to do when he left
England. He despatched the inquiry that very day, and before
the week was out there came a short reply from Mrs
Durbeyfield which did not remove his embarrassment, for it
bore no address, though to his surprise it was not written
from Marlott.
Sir,
J write these few lines to say that my Daughter
is away from me at present, and J am not sure when
she will return, but J will let you know as Soon as
she do. J do not feel at liberty to tell you Where
she is temperly biding. J should say that me and my
Family have left Marlott for some Time.—
Yours,
J.
Durbeyfield
It was such a relief to Clare to learn that Tess was at least
apparently well that her mother's stiff reticence as to her
whereabouts did not long distress him. They were all angry
with him, evidently. He would wait till Mrs Durbeyfield
could inform him of Tess's return, which her letter implied
to be soon. He deserved no more. His had been a love "which
alters when it alteration finds". He had undergone some
strange experiences in his absence; he had seen the virtual
Faustina in the literal Cornelia, a spiritual Lucretia in a
corporeal Phryne; he had thought of the woman taken and set
in the midst as one deserving to be stoned, and of the wife
of Uriah being made a queen; and he had asked himself why he
had not judged Tess constructively rather than
biographically, by the will rather than by the deed?
A day or two passed while he waited at his father's house
for the promised second note from Joan Durbeyfield, and
indirectly to recover a little more strength. The strength
showed signs of coming back, but there was no sign of Joan's
letter. Then he hunted up the old letter sent on to him in
Brazil, which Tess had written from Flintcomb-Ash, and
re-read it. The sentences touched him now as much as when he
had first perused them.
…I must cry to you in my trouble—I have no one else!
… I think I must die if you do not come soon, or
tell me to come to you… please, please, not to be
just—only a little kind to me … If you would come, I
could die in your arms! I would be well content to
do that if so be you had forgiven me! … if you will
send me one little line, and say, "I am coming
soon," I will bide on, Angel—O, so cheerfully! …
think how it do hurt my heart not to see you
ever—ever! Ah, if I could only make your dear heart
ache one little minute of each day as mine does
every day and all day long, it might lead you to
show pity to your poor lonely one. … I would be
content, ay, glad, to live with you as your servant,
if I may not as your wife; so that I could only be
near you, and get glimpses of you, and think of you
as mine. … I long for only one thing in heaven or
earth or under the earth, to meet you, my own dear!
Come to me—come to me, and save me from what
threatens me!
Clare determined that he would no longer believe in her more recent and
severer regard of him, but would go and find her
immediately. He asked his father if she had applied for any
money during his absence. His father returned a negative,
and then for the first time it occurred to Angel that her
pride had stood in her way, and that she had suffered
privation. From his remarks his parents now gathered the
real reason of the separation; and their Christianity was
such that, reprobates being their especial care, the
tenderness towards Tess which her blood, her simplicity,
even her poverty, had not engendered, was instantly excited
by her sin.
Whilst he was hastily packing together a few articles for
his journey he glanced over a poor plain missive also lately
come to hand—the one from Marian and Izz Huett, beginning—
"Honour'd Sir, Look to your Wife if you do love her as
much as she do love you," and signed, "From Two
Well-Wishers."
LIV
In a quarter of an hour Clare was leaving the house,
whence his mother watched his thin figure as it disappeared
into the street. He had declined to borrow his father's old
mare, well knowing of its necessity to the household. He
went to the inn, where he hired a trap, and could hardly
wait during the harnessing. In a very few minutes after, he
was driving up the hill out of the town which, three or four
months earlier in the year, Tess had descended with such
hopes and ascended with such shattered purposes.
Benvill Lane soon stretched before him, its hedges and
trees purple with buds; but he was looking at other things,
and only recalled himself to the scene sufficiently to
enable him to keep the way. In something less than an
hour-and-a-half he had skirted the south of the King's
Hintock estates and ascended to the untoward solitude of
Cross-in-Hand, the unholy stone whereon Tess had been
compelled by Alec d'Urberville, in his whim of reformation,
to swear the strange oath that she would never wilfully
tempt him again. The pale and blasted nettle-stems of the
preceding year even now lingered nakedly in the banks, young
green nettles of the present spring growing from their
roots.
Thence he went along the verge of the upland overhanging
the other Hintocks, and, turning to the right, plunged into
the bracing calcareous region of Flintcomb-Ash, the address
from which she had written to him in one of the letters, and
which he supposed to be the place of sojourn referred to by
her mother. Here, of course, he did not find her; and what
added to his depression was the discovery that no "Mrs
Clare" had ever been heard of by the cottagers or by the
farmer himself, though Tess was remembered well enough by
her Christian name. His name she had obviously never used
during their separation, and her dignified sense of their
total severance was shown not much less by this abstention
than by the hardships she had chosen to undergo (of which he
now learnt for the first time) rather than apply to his
father for more funds.
From this place they told him Tess Durbeyfield had gone,
without due notice, to the home of her parents on the other
side of Blackmoor, and it therefore became necessary to find
Mrs Durbeyfield. She had told him she was not now at
Marlott, but had been curiously reticent as to her actual
address, and the only course was to go to Marlott and
inquire for it. The farmer who had been so churlish with
Tess was quite smooth-tongued to Clare, and lent him a horse
and man to drive him towards Marlott, the gig he had arrived
in being sent back to Emminster; for the limit of a day's
journey with that horse was reached.
Clare would not accept the loan of the farmer's vehicle
for a further distance than to the outskirts of the Vale,
and, sending it back with the man who had driven him, he put
up at an inn, and next day entered on foot the region
wherein was the spot of his dear Tess's birth. It was as yet
too early in the year for much colour to appear in the
gardens and foliage; the so-called spring was but winter
overlaid with a thin coat of greenness, and it was of a
parcel with his expectations.
The house in which Tess had passed the years of her
childhood was now inhabited by another family who had never
known her. The new residents were in the garden, taking as
much interest in their own doings as if the homestead had
never passed its primal time in conjunction with the
histories of others, beside which the histories of these
were but as a tale told by an idiot. They walked about the
garden paths with thoughts of their own concerns entirely
uppermost, bringing their actions at every moment in jarring
collision with the dim ghosts behind them, talking as though
the time when Tess lived there were not one whit intenser in
story than now. Even the spring birds sang over their heads
as if they thought there was nobody missing in particular.
On inquiry of these precious innocents, to whom even the
name of their predecessors was a failing memory, Clare
learned that John Durbeyfield was dead; that his widow and
children had left Marlott, declaring that they were going to
live at Kingsbere, but instead of doing so had gone on to
another place they mentioned. By this time Clare abhorred
the house for ceasing to contain Tess, and hastened away
from its hated presence without once looking back.
His way was by the field in which he had first beheld her
at the dance. It was as bad as the house—even worse. He
passed on through the churchyard, where, amongst the new
headstones, he saw one of a somewhat superior design to the
rest. The inscription ran thus:
In memory of John
Durbeyfield, rightly d'Urberville, of the once
powerful family of that Name, and Direct Descendant
through an illustrious Line from Sir Pagan
d'Urberville, one of the Knights of the Conqueror.
Died March 10th, 18—
How Are the Mighty
Fallen.
Some man, apparently the sexton, had observed Clare standing there, and
drew nigh. "Ah, sir, now that's a man who didn't want to lie
here, but wished to be carried to Kingsbere, where his
ancestors be."
"And why didn't they respect his wish?"
"Oh—no money. Bless your soul, sir, why—there, I wouldn't
wish to say it everywhere, but—even this headstone, for all
the flourish wrote upon en, is not paid for."
"Ah, who put it up?"
The man told the name of a mason in the village, and, on
leaving the churchyard, Clare called at the mason's house.
He found that the statement was true, and paid the bill.
This done, he turned in the direction of the migrants.
The distance was too long for a walk, but Clare felt such
a strong desire for isolation that at first he would neither
hire a conveyance nor go to a circuitous line of railway by
which he might eventually reach the place. At Shaston,
however, he found he must hire; but the way was such that he
did not enter Joan's place till about seven o'clock in the
evening, having traversed a distance of over twenty miles
since leaving Marlott.
The village being small he had little difficulty in
finding Mrs Durbeyfield's tenement, which was a house in a
walled garden, remote from the main road, where she had
stowed away her clumsy old furniture as best she could. It
was plain that for some reason or other she had not wished
him to visit her, and he felt his call to be somewhat of an
intrusion. She came to the door herself, and the light from
the evening sky fell upon her face.
This was the first time that Clare had ever met her, but
he was too preoccupied to observe more than that she was
still a handsome woman, in the garb of a respectable widow.
He was obliged to explain that he was Tess's husband, and
his object in coming there, and he did it awkwardly enough.
"I want to see her at once," he added. "You said you would
write to me again, but you have not done so."
"Because she've not come home," said Joan.
"Do you know if she is well?"
"I don't. But you ought to, sir," said she.
"I admit it. Where is she staying?"
From the beginning of the interview Joan had disclosed
her embarrassment by keeping her hand to the side of her
cheek.
"I—don't know exactly where she is staying," she
answered. "She was—but—"
"Where was she?"
"Well, she is not there now."
In her evasiveness she paused again, and the younger
children had by this time crept to the door, where, pulling
at his mother's skirts, the youngest murmured—
"Is this the gentleman who is going to marry Tess?"
"He has married her," Joan whispered. "Go inside."
Clare saw her efforts for reticence, and asked—
"Do you think Tess would wish me to try and find her? If
not, of course—"
"I don't think she would."
"Are you sure?"
"I am sure she wouldn't."
He was turning away; and then he thought of Tess's tender
letter.
"I am sure she would!" he retorted passionately. "I know
her better than you do."
"That's very likely, sir; for I have never really known
her."
"Please tell me her address, Mrs Durbeyfield, in kindness
to a lonely wretched man!" Tess's mother again restlessly
swept her cheek with her vertical hand, and seeing that he
suffered, she at last said, is a low voice—
"She is at Sandbourne."
"Ah—where there? Sandbourne has become a large place,
they say."
"I don't know more particularly than I have
said—Sandbourne. For myself, I was never there."
It was apparent that Joan spoke the truth in this, and he
pressed her no further.
"Are you in want of anything?" he said gently.
"No, sir," she replied. "We are fairly well provided
for."
Without entering the house Clare turned away. There was a
station three miles ahead, and paying off his coachman, he
walked thither. The last train to Sandbourne left shortly
after, and it bore Clare on its wheels.
LV
At eleven o'clock that night, having secured a bed at one
of the hotels and telegraphed his address to his father
immediately on his arrival, he walked out into the streets
of Sandbourne. It was too late to call on or inquire for any
one, and he reluctantly postponed his purpose till the
morning. But he could not retire to rest just yet.
This fashionable watering-place, with its eastern and its
western stations, its piers, its groves of pines, its
promenades, and its covered gardens, was, to Angel Clare,
like a fairy place suddenly created by the stroke of a wand,
and allowed to get a little dusty. An outlying eastern tract
of the enormous Egdon Waste was close at hand, yet on the
very verge of that tawny piece of antiquity such a
glittering novelty as this pleasure city had chosen to
spring up. Within the space of a mile from its outskirts
every irregularity of the soil was prehistoric, every
channel an undisturbed British trackway; not a sod having
been turned there since the days of the Caesars. Yet the
exotic had grown here, suddenly as the prophet's gourd; and
had drawn hither Tess.
By the midnight lamps he went up and down the winding way
of this new world in an old one, and could discern between
the trees and against the stars the lofty roofs, chimneys,
gazebos, and towers of the numerous fanciful residences of
which the place was composed. It was a city of detached
mansions; a Mediterranean lounging-place on the English
Channel; and as seen now by night it seemed even more
imposing than it was.
The sea was near at hand, but not intrusive; it murmured,
and he thought it was the pines; the pines murmured in
precisely the same tones, and he thought they were the sea.
Where could Tess possibly be, a cottage-girl, his young
wife, amidst all this wealth and fashion? The more he
pondered, the more was he puzzled. Were there any cows to
milk here? There certainly were no fields to till. She was
most probably engaged to do something in one of these large
houses; and he sauntered along, looking at the
chamber-windows and their lights going out one by one, and
wondered which of them might be hers.
Conjecture was useless, and just after twelve o'clock he
entered and went to bed. Before putting out his light he
re-read Tess's impassioned letter. Sleep, however, he could
not—so near her, yet so far from her—and he continually
lifted the window-blind and regarded the backs of the
opposite houses, and wondered behind which of the sashes she
reposed at that moment.
He might almost as well have sat up all night. In the
morning he arose at seven, and shortly after went out,
taking the direction of the chief post-office. At the door
he met an intelligent postman coming out with letters for
the morning delivery.
"Do you know the address of a Mrs Clare?" asked Angel.
The postman shook his head.
Then, remembering that she would have been likely to
continue the use of her maiden name, Clare said—
"Of a Miss Durbeyfield?"
"Durbeyfield?"
This also was strange to the postman addressed.
"There's visitors coming and going every day, as you
know, sir," he said; "and without the name of the house 'tis
impossible to find 'em."
One of his comrades hastening out at that moment, the
name was repeated to him.
"I know no name of Durbeyfield; but there is the name of
d'Urberville at The Herons," said the second.
"That's it!" cried Clare, pleased to think that she had
reverted to the real pronunciation. "What place is The
Herons?"
"A stylish lodging-house. 'Tis all lodging-houses here,
bless 'ee."
Clare received directions how to find the house, and
hastened thither, arriving with the milkman. The Herons,
though an ordinary villa, stood in its own grounds, and was
certainly the last place in which one would have expected to
find lodgings, so private was its appearance. If poor Tess
was a servant here, as he feared, she would go to the
back-door to that milkman, and he was inclined to go thither
also. However, in his doubts he turned to the front, and
rang.
The hour being early, the landlady herself opened the
door. Clare inquired for Teresa d'Urberville or Durbeyfield.
"Mrs d'Urberville?"
"Yes."
Tess, then, passed as a married woman, and he felt glad,
even though she had not adopted his name.
"Will you kindly tell her that a relative is anxious to
see her?"
"It is rather early. What name shall I give, sir?"
"Angel."
"Mr Angel?"
"No; Angel. It is my Christian name. She'll understand."
"I'll see if she is awake."
He was shown into the front room—the dining-room—and
looked out through the spring curtains at the little lawn,
and the rhododendrons and other shrubs upon it. Obviously
her position was by no means so bad as he had feared, and it
crossed his mind that she must somehow have claimed and sold
the jewels to attain it. He did not blame her for one
moment. Soon his sharpened ear detected footsteps upon the
stairs, at which his heart thumped so painfully that he
could hardly stand firm. "Dear me! what will she think of
me, so altered as I am!" he said to himself; and the door
opened.
Tess appeared on the threshold—not at all as he had
expected to see her—bewilderingly otherwise, indeed. Her
great natural beauty was, if not heightened, rendered more
obvious by her attire. She was loosely wrapped in a cashmere
dressing-gown of gray-white, embroidered in half-mourning
tints, and she wore slippers of the same hue. Her neck rose
out of a frill of down, and her well-remembered cable of
dark-brown hair was partially coiled up in a mass at the
back of her head and partly hanging on her shoulder—the
evident result of haste.
He had held out his arms, but they had fallen again to
his side; for she had not come forward, remaining still in
the opening of the doorway. Mere yellow skeleton that he was
now, he felt the contrast between them, and thought his
appearance distasteful to her.
"Tess!" he said huskily, "can you forgive me for going
away? Can't you—come to me? How do you get to be—like this?"
"It is too late," said she, her voice sounding hard
through the room, her eyes shining unnaturally.
"I did not think rightly of you—I did not see you as you
were!" he continued to plead. "I have learnt to since,
dearest Tessy mine!"
"Too late, too late!" she said, waving her hand in the
impatience of a person whose tortures cause every instant to
seem an hour. "Don't come close to me, Angel! No—you must
not. Keep away."
"But don't you love me, my dear wife, because I have been
so pulled down by illness? You are not so fickle—I am come
on purpose for you—my mother and father will welcome you
now!"
"Yes—O, yes, yes! But I say, I say it is too late."
She seemed to feel like a fugitive in a dream, who tries
to move away, but cannot. "Don't you know all—don't you know
it? Yet how do you come here if you do not know?"
"I inquired here and there, and I found the way."
"I waited and waited for you," she went on, her tones
suddenly resuming their old fluty pathos. "But you did not
come! And I wrote to you, and you did not come! He kept on
saying you would never come any more, and that I was a
foolish woman. He was very kind to me, and to mother, and to
all of us after father's death. He—"
"I don't understand."
"He has won me back to him."
Clare looked at her keenly, then, gathering her meaning,
flagged like one plague-stricken, and his glance sank; it
fell on her hands, which, once rosy, were now white and more
delicate.
She continued—
"He is upstairs. I hate him now, because he told me a
lie—that you would not come again; and you have come!
These clothes are what he's put upon me: I didn't care what
he did wi' me! But—will you go away, Angel, please, and
never come any more?"
They stood fixed, their baffled hearts looking out of
their eyes with a joylessness pitiful to see. Both seemed to
implore something to shelter them from reality.
"Ah—it is my fault!" said Clare.
But he could not get on. Speech was as inexpressive as
silence. But he had a vague consciousness of one thing,
though it was not clear to him till later; that his original
Tess had spiritually ceased to recognize the body before him
as hers—allowing it to drift, like a corpse upon the
current, in a direction dissociated from its living will.
A few instants passed, and he found that Tess was gone.
His face grew colder and more shrunken as he stood
concentrated on the moment, and a minute or two after, he
found himself in the street, walking along he did not know
whither.
LVI
Mrs Brooks, the lady who was the householder at The
Herons and owner of all the handsome furniture, was not a
person of an unusually curious turn of mind. She was too
deeply materialized, poor woman, by her long and enforced
bondage to that arithmetical demon Profit-and-Loss, to
retain much curiousity for its own sake, and apart from
possible lodgers' pockets. Nevertheless, the visit of Angel
Clare to her well-paying tenants, Mr and Mrs d'Urberville,
as she deemed them, was sufficiently exceptional in point of
time and manner to reinvigorate the feminine proclivity
which had been stifled down as useless save in its bearings
to the letting trade.
Tess had spoken to her husband from the doorway, without
entering the dining-room, and Mrs Brooks, who stood within
the partly-closed door of her own sitting-room at the back
of the passage, could hear fragments of the conversation—if
conversation it could be called—between those two wretched
souls. She heard Tess re-ascend the stairs to the first
floor, and the departure of Clare, and the closing of the
front door behind him. Then the door of the room above was
shut, and Mrs Brooks knew that Tess had re-entered her
apartment. As the young lady was not fully dressed, Mrs
Brooks knew that she would not emerge again for some time.
She accordingly ascended the stairs softly, and stood at
the door of the front room—a drawing-room, connected with
the room immediately behind it (which was a bedroom) by
folding-doors in the common manner. This first floor,
containing Mrs Brooks's best apartments, had been taken by
the week by the d'Urbervilles. The back room was now in
silence; but from the drawing-room there came sounds.
All that she could at first distinguish of them was one
syllable, continually repeated in a low note of moaning, as
if it came from a soul bound to some Ixionian wheel—
"O—O—O!"
Then a silence, then a heavy sigh, and again—
"O—O—O!"
The landlady looked through the keyhole. Only a small
space of the room inside was visible, but within that space
came a corner of the breakfast table, which was already
spread for the meal, and also a chair beside. Over the seat
of the chair Tess's face was bowed, her posture being a
kneeling one in front of it; her hands were clasped over her
head, the skirts of her dressing-gown and the embroidery of
her night-gown flowed upon the floor behind her, and her
stockingless feet, from which the slippers had fallen,
protruded upon the carpet. It was from her lips that came
the murmur of unspeakable despair.
Then a man's voice from the adjoining bedroom—
"What's the matter?"
She did not answer, but went on, in a tone which was a
soliloquy rather than an exclamation, and a dirge rather
than a soliloquy. Mrs Brooks could only catch a portion:
"And then my dear, dear husband came home to me … and I
did not know it! … And you had used your cruel persuasion
upon me … you did not stop using it—no—you did not stop! My
little sisters and brothers and my mother's needs—they were
the things you moved me by … and you said my husband would
never come back—never; and you taunted me, and said what a
simpleton I was to expect him! … And at last I believed you
and gave way! … And then he came back! Now he is gone. Gone
a second time, and I have lost him now for ever … and he
will not love me the littlest bit ever any more—only hate
me! … O yes, I have lost him now—again because of—you!" In
writhing, with her head on the chair, she turned her face
towards the door, and Mrs Brooks could see the pain upon it,
and that her lips were bleeding from the clench of her teeth
upon them, and that the long lashes of her closed eyes stuck
in wet tags to her cheeks. She continued: "And he is
dying—he looks as if he is dying! … And my sin will kill him
and not kill me! … O, you have torn my life all to pieces …
made me be what I prayed you in pity not to make me be
again! … My own true husband will never, never—O God—I can't
bear this!—I cannot!"
There were more and sharper words from the man; then a
sudden rustle; she had sprung to her feet. Mrs Brooks,
thinking that the speaker was coming to rush out of the
door, hastily retreated down the stairs.
She need not have done so, however, for the door of the
sitting-room was not opened. But Mrs Brooks felt it unsafe
to watch on the landing again, and entered her own parlour
below.
She could hear nothing through the floor, although she
listened intently, and thereupon went to the kitchen to
finish her interrupted breakfast. Coming up presently to the
front room on the ground floor she took up some sewing,
waiting for her lodgers to ring that she might take away the
breakfast, which she meant to do herself, to discover what
was the matter if possible. Overhead, as she sat, she could
now hear the floorboards slightly creak, as if some one were
walking about, and presently the movement was explained by
the rustle of garments against the banisters, the opening
and the closing of the front door, and the form of Tess
passing to the gate on her way into the street. She was
fully dressed now in the walking costume of a well-to-do
young lady in which she had arrived, with the sole addition
that over her hat and black feathers a veil was drawn.
Mrs Brooks had not been able to catch any word of
farewell, temporary or otherwise, between her tenants at the
door above. They might have quarrelled, or Mr d'Urberville
might still be asleep, for he was not an early riser.
She went into the back room, which was more especially
her own apartment, and continued her sewing there. The lady
lodger did not return, nor did the gentleman ring his bell.
Mrs Brooks pondered on the delay, and on what probable
relation the visitor who had called so early bore to the
couple upstairs. In reflecting she leant back in her chair.
As she did so her eyes glanced casually over the ceiling
till they were arrested by a spot in the middle of its white
surface which she had never noticed there before. It was
about the size of a wafer when she first observed it, but it
speedily grew as large as the palm of her hand, and then she
could perceive that it was red. The oblong white ceiling,
with this scarlet blot in the midst, had the appearance of a
gigantic ace of hearts.
Mrs Brooks had strange qualms of misgiving. She got upon
the table, and touched the spot in the ceiling with her
fingers. It was damp, and she fancied that it was a blood
stain.
Descending from the table, she left the parlour, and went
upstairs, intending to enter the room overhead, which was
the bedchamber at the back of the drawing-room. But,
nerveless woman as she had now become, she could not bring
herself to attempt the handle. She listened. The dead
silence within was broken only by a regular beat.
Drip, drip, drip.
Mrs Brooks hastened downstairs, opened the front door,
and ran into the street. A man she knew, one of the workmen
employed at an adjoining villa, was passing by, and she
begged him to come in and go upstairs with her; she feared
something had happened to one of her lodgers. The workman
assented, and followed her to the landing.
She opened the door of the drawing-room, and stood back
for him to pass in, entering herself behind him. The room
was empty; the breakfast—a substantial repast of coffee,
eggs, and a cold ham—lay spread upon the table untouched, as
when she had taken it up, excepting that the carving-knife
was missing. She asked the man to go through the
folding-doors into the adjoining room.
He opened the doors, entered a step or two, and came back
almost instantly with a rigid face. "My good God, the
gentleman in bed is dead! I think he has been hurt with a
knife—a lot of blood had run down upon the floor!"
The alarm was soon given, and the house which had lately
been so quiet resounded with the tramp of many footsteps, a
surgeon among the rest. The wound was small, but the point
of the blade had touched the heart of the victim, who lay on
his back, pale, fixed, dead, as if he had scarcely moved
after the infliction of the blow. In a quarter of an hour
the news that a gentleman who was a temporary visitor to the
town had been stabbed in his bed, spread through every
street and villa of the popular watering-place.
LVII
Meanwhile Angel Clare had walked automatically along the
way by which he had come, and, entering his hotel, sat down
over the breakfast, staring at nothingness. He went on
eating and drinking unconsciously till on a sudden he
demanded his bill; having paid which, he took his
dressing-bag in his hand, the only luggage he had brought
with him, and went out.
At the moment of his departure a telegram was handed to
him—a few words from his mother, stating that they were glad
to know his address, and informing him that his brother
Cuthbert had proposed to and been accepted by Mercy Chant.
Clare crumpled up the paper and followed the route to the
station; reaching it, he found that there would be no train
leaving for an hour and more. He sat down to wait, and
having waited a quarter of an hour felt that he could wait
there no longer. Broken in heart and numbed, he had nothing
to hurry for; but he wished to get out of a town which had
been the scene of such an experience, and turned to walk to
the first station onward, and let the train pick him up
there.
The highway that he followed was open, and at a little
distance dipped into a valley, across which it could be seen
running from edge to edge. He had traversed the greater part
of this depression, and was climbing the western acclivity
when, pausing for breath, he unconsciously looked back. Why
he did so he could not say, but something seemed to impel
him to the act. The tape-like surface of the road diminished
in his rear as far as he could see, and as he gazed a moving
spot intruded on the white vacuity of its perspective.
It was a human figure running. Clare waited, with a dim
sense that somebody was trying to overtake him.
The form descending the incline was a woman's, yet so
entirely was his mind blinded to the idea of his wife's
following him that even when she came nearer he did not
recognize her under the totally changed attire in which he
now beheld her. It was not till she was quite close that he
could believe her to be Tess.
"I saw you—turn away from the station—just before I got
there—and I have been following you all this way!"
She was so pale, so breathless, so quivering in every
muscle, that he did not ask her a single question, but
seizing her hand, and pulling it within his arm, he led her
along. To avoid meeting any possible wayfarers he left the
high road and took a footpath under some fir-trees. When
they were deep among the moaning boughs he stopped and
looked at her inquiringly.
"Angel," she said, as if waiting for this, "do you know
what I have been running after you for? To tell you that I
have killed him!" A pitiful white smile lit her face as she
spoke.
"What!" said he, thinking from the strangeness of her
manner that she was in some delirium.
"I have done it—I don't know how," she continued. "Still,
I owed it to you, and to myself, Angel. I feared long ago,
when I struck him on the mouth with my glove, that I might
do it some day for the trap he set for me in my simple
youth, and his wrong to you through me. He has come between
us and ruined us, and now he can never do it any more. I
never loved him at all, Angel, as I loved you. You know it,
don't you? You believe it? You didn't come back to me, and I
was obliged to go back to him. Why did you go away—why did
you—when I loved you so? I can't think why you did it. But I
don't blame you; only, Angel, will you forgive me my sin
against you, now I have killed him? I thought as I ran along
that you would be sure to forgive me now I have done that.
It came to me as a shining light that I should get you back
that way. I could not bear the loss of you any longer—you
don't know how entirely I was unable to bear your not loving
me! Say you do now, dear, dear husband; say you do, now I
have killed him!"
"I do love you, Tess—O, I do—it is all come back!" he
said, tightening his arms round her with fervid pressure.
"But how do you mean—you have killed him?"
"I mean that I have," she murmured in a reverie.
"What, bodily? Is he dead?"
"Yes. He heard me crying about you, and he bitterly
taunted me; and called you by a foul name; and then I did
it. My heart could not bear it. He had nagged me about you
before. And then I dressed myself and came away to find
you."
By degrees he was inclined to believe that she had
faintly attempted, at least, what she said she had done; and
his horror at her impulse was mixed with amazement at the
strength of her affection for himself, and at the
strangeness of its quality, which had apparently
extinguished her moral sense altogether. Unable to realize
the gravity of her conduct, she seemed at last content; and
he looked at her as she lay upon his shoulder, weeping with
happiness, and wondered what obscure strain in the
d'Urberville blood had led to this aberration—if it were an
aberration. There momentarily flashed through his mind that
the family tradition of the coach and murder might have
arisen because the d'Urbervilles had been known to do these
things. As well as his confused and excited ideas could
reason, he supposed that in the moment of mad grief of which
she spoke, her mind had lost its balance, and plunged her
into this abyss.
It was very terrible if true; if a temporary
hallucination, sad. But, anyhow, here was this deserted wife
of his, this passionately-fond woman, clinging to him
without a suspicion that he would be anything to her but a
protector. He saw that for him to be otherwise was not, in
her mind, within the region of the possible. Tenderness was
absolutely dominant in Clare at last. He kissed her
endlessly with his white lips, and held her hand, and said—
"I will not desert you! I will protect you by every means
in my power, dearest love, whatever you may have done or not
have done!"
They then walked on under the trees, Tess turning her
head every now and then to look at him. Worn and unhandsome
as he had become, it was plain that she did not discern the
least fault in his appearance. To her he was, as of old, all
that was perfection, personally and mentally. He was still
her Antinous, her Apollo even; his sickly face was beautiful
as the morning to her affectionate regard on this day no
less than when she first beheld him; for was it not the face
of the one man on earth who had loved her purely, and who
had believed in her as pure!
With an instinct as to possibilities, he did not now, as
he had intended, make for the first station beyond the town,
but plunged still farther under the firs, which here
abounded for miles. Each clasping the other round the waist
they promenaded over the dry bed of fir-needles, thrown into
a vague intoxicating atmosphere at the consciousness of
being together at last, with no living soul between them;
ignoring that there was a corpse. Thus they proceeded for
several miles till Tess, arousing herself, looked about her,
and said, timidly—
"Are we going anywhere in particular?"
"I don't know, dearest. Why?"
"I don't know."
"Well, we might walk a few miles further, and when it is
evening find lodgings somewhere or other—in a lonely
cottage, perhaps. Can you walk well, Tessy?"
"O yes! I could walk for ever and ever with your arm
round me!"
Upon the whole it seemed a good thing to do. Thereupon
they quickened their pace, avoiding high roads, and
following obscure paths tending more or less northward. But
there was an unpractical vagueness in their movements
throughout the day; neither one of them seemed to consider
any question of effectual escape, disguise, or long
concealment. Their every idea was temporary and
unforefending, like the plans of two children.
At mid-day they drew near to a roadside inn, and Tess
would have entered it with him to get something to eat, but
he persuaded her to remain among the trees and bushes of
this half-woodland, half-moorland part of the country till
he should come back. Her clothes were of recent fashion;
even the ivory-handled parasol that she carried was of a
shape unknown in the retired spot to which they had now
wandered; and the cut of such articles would have attracted
attention in the settle of a tavern. He soon returned, with
food enough for half-a-dozen people and two bottles of
wine—enough to last them for a day or more, should any
emergency arise.
They sat down upon some dead boughs and shared their
meal. Between one and two o'clock they packed up the
remainder and went on again.
"I feel strong enough to walk any distance," said she.
"I think we may as well steer in a general way towards
the interior of the country, where we can hide for a time,
and are less likely to be looked for than anywhere near the
coast," Clare remarked. "Later on, when they have forgotten
us, we can make for some port."
She made no reply to this beyond that of grasping him
more tightly, and straight inland they went. Though the
season was an English May, the weather was serenely bright,
and during the afternoon it was quite warm. Through the
latter miles of their walk their footpath had taken them
into the depths of the New Forest, and towards evening,
turning the corner of a lane, they perceived behind a brook
and bridge a large board on which was painted in white
letters, "This desirable Mansion to be Let Furnished";
particulars following, with directions to apply to some
London agents. Passing through the gate they could see the
house, an old brick building of regular design and large
accommodation.
"I know it," said Clare. "It is Bramshurst Court. You can
see that it is shut up, and grass is growing on the drive."
"Some of the windows are open," said Tess.
"Just to air the rooms, I suppose."
"All these rooms empty, and we without a roof to our
heads!"
"You are getting tired, my Tess!" he said. "We'll stop
soon." And kissing her sad mouth, he again led her onwards.
He was growing weary likewise, for they had wandered a
dozen or fifteen miles, and it became necessary to consider
what they should do for rest. They looked from afar at
isolated cottages and little inns, and were inclined to
approach one of the latter, when their hearts failed them,
and they sheered off. At length their gait dragged, and they
stood still.
"Could we sleep under the trees?" she asked.
He thought the season insufficiently advanced.
"I have been thinking of that empty mansion we passed,"
he said. "Let us go back towards it again."
They retraced their steps, but it was half an hour before
they stood without the entrance-gate as earlier. He then
requested her to stay where she was, whilst he went to see
who was within.
She sat down among the bushes within the gate, and Clare
crept towards the house. His absence lasted some
considerable time, and when he returned Tess was wildly
anxious, not for herself, but for him. He had found out from
a boy that there was only an old woman in charge as
caretaker, and she only came there on fine days, from the
hamlet near, to open and shut the windows. She would come to
shut them at sunset. "Now, we can get in through one of the
lower windows, and rest there," said he.
Under his escort she went tardily forward to the main
front, whose shuttered windows, like sightless eyeballs,
excluded the possibility of watchers. The door was reached a
few steps further, and one of the windows beside it was
open. Clare clambered in, and pulled Tess in after him.
Except the hall, the rooms were all in darkness, and they
ascended the staircase. Up here also the shutters were
tightly closed, the ventilation being perfunctorily done,
for this day at least, by opening the hall-window in front
and an upper window behind. Clare unlatched the door of a
large chamber, felt his way across it, and parted the
shutters to the width of two or three inches. A shaft of
dazzling sunlight glanced into the room, revealing heavy,
old-fashioned furniture, crimson damask hangings, and an
enormous four-post bedstead, along the head of which were
carved running figures, apparently Atalanta's race.
"Rest at last!" said he, setting down his bag and the
parcel of viands.
They remained in great quietness till the caretaker
should have come to shut the windows: as a precaution,
putting themselves in total darkness by barring the shutters
as before, lest the woman should open the door of their
chamber for any casual reason. Between six and seven o'clock
she came, but did not approach the wing they were in. They
heard her close the windows, fasten them, lock the door, and
go away. Then Clare again stole a chink of light from the
window, and they shared another meal, till by-and-by they
were enveloped in the shades of night which they had no
candle to disperse.
LVIII
The night was strangely solemn and still. In the small
hours she whispered to him the whole story of how he had
walked in his sleep with her in his arms across the Froom
stream, at the imminent risk of both their lives, and laid
her down in the stone coffin at the ruined abbey. He had
never known of that till now.
"Why didn't you tell me next day?" he said. "It might
have prevented much misunderstanding and woe."
"Don't think of what's past!" said she. "I am not going
to think outside of now. Why should we! Who knows what
to-morrow has in store?"
But it apparently had no sorrow. The morning was wet and
foggy, and Clare, rightly informed that the caretaker only
opened the windows on fine days, ventured to creep out of
their chamber and explore the house, leaving Tess asleep.
There was no food on the premises, but there was water, and
he took advantage of the fog to emerge from the mansion and
fetch tea, bread, and butter from a shop in a little place
two miles beyond, as also a small tin kettle and
spirit-lamp, that they might get fire without smoke. His
re-entry awoke her; and they breakfasted on what he had
brought.
They were indisposed to stir abroad, and the day passed,
and the night following, and the next, and next; till,
almost without their being aware, five days had slipped by
in absolute seclusion, not a sight or sound of a human being
disturbing their peacefulness, such as it was. The changes
of the weather were their only events, the birds of the New
Forest their only company. By tacit consent they hardly once
spoke of any incident of the past subsequent to their
wedding-day. The gloomy intervening time seemed to sink into
chaos, over which the present and prior times closed as if
it never had been. Whenever he suggested that they should
leave their shelter, and go forwards towards Southampton or
London, she showed a strange unwillingness to move.
"Why should we put an end to all that's sweet and
lovely!" she deprecated. "What must come will come." And,
looking through the shutter-chink: "All is trouble outside
there; inside here content."
He peeped out also. It was quite true; within was
affection, union, error forgiven: outside was the
inexorable.
"And—and," she said, pressing her cheek against his, "I
fear that what you think of me now may not last. I do not
wish to outlive your present feeling for me. I would rather
not. I would rather be dead and buried when the time comes
for you to despise me, so that it may never be known to me
that you despised me."
"I cannot ever despise you."
"I also hope that. But considering what my life has been,
I cannot see why any man should, sooner or later, be able to
help despising me. … How wickedly mad I was! Yet formerly I
never could bear to hurt a fly or a worm, and the sight of a
bird in a cage used often to make me cry."
They remained yet another day. In the night the dull sky
cleared, and the result was that the old caretaker at the
cottage awoke early. The brilliant sunrise made her
unusually brisk; she decided to open the contiguous mansion
immediately, and to air it thoroughly on such a day. Thus it
occurred that, having arrived and opened the lower rooms
before six o'clock, she ascended to the bedchambers, and was
about to turn the handle of the one wherein they lay. At
that moment she fancied she could hear the breathing of
persons within. Her slippers and her antiquity had rendered
her progress a noiseless one so far, and she made for
instant retreat; then, deeming that her hearing might have
deceived her, she turned anew to the door and softly tried
the handle. The lock was out of order, but a piece of
furniture had been moved forward on the inside, which
prevented her opening the door more than an inch or two. A
stream of morning light through the shutter-chink fell upon
the faces of the pair, wrapped in profound slumber, Tess's
lips being parted like a half-opened flower near his cheek.
The caretaker was so struck with their innocent appearance,
and with the elegance of Tess's gown hanging across a chair,
her silk stockings beside it, the pretty parasol, and the
other habits in which she had arrived because she had none
else, that her first indignation at the effrontery of tramps
and vagabonds gave way to a momentary sentimentality over
this genteel elopement, as it seemed. She closed the door,
and withdrew as softly as she had come, to go and consult
with her neighbours on the odd discovery.
Not more than a minute had elapsed after her withdrawal
when Tess woke, and then Clare. Both had a sense that
something had disturbed them, though they could not say
what; and the uneasy feeling which it engendered grew
stronger. As soon as he was dressed he narrowly scanned the
lawn through the two or three inches of shutter-chink.
"I think we will leave at once," said he. "It is a fine
day. And I cannot help fancying somebody is about the house.
At any rate, the woman will be sure to come to-day."
She passively assented, and putting the room in order,
they took up the few articles that belonged to them, and
departed noiselessly. When they had got into the Forest she
turned to take a last look at the house.
"Ah, happy house—goodbye!" she said. "My life can only be
a question of a few weeks. Why should we not have stayed
there?"
"Don't say it, Tess! We shall soon get out of this
district altogether. We'll continue our course as we've
begun it, and keep straight north. Nobody will think of
looking for us there. We shall be looked for at the Wessex
ports if we are sought at all. When we are in the north we
will get to a port and away."
Having thus persuaded her, the plan was pursued, and they
kept a bee-line northward. Their long repose at the
manor-house lent them walking power now; and towards mid-day
they found that they were approaching the steepled city of
Melchester, which lay directly in their way. He decided to
rest her in a clump of trees during the afternoon, and push
onward under cover of darkness. At dusk Clare purchased food
as usual, and their night march began, the boundary between
Upper and Mid-Wessex being crossed about eight o'clock.
To walk across country without much regard to roads was
not new to Tess, and she showed her old agility in the
performance. The intercepting city, ancient Melchester, they
were obliged to pass through in order to take advantage of
the town bridge for crossing a large river that obstructed
them. It was about midnight when they went along the
deserted streets, lighted fitfully by the few lamps, keeping
off the pavement that it might not echo their footsteps. The
graceful pile of cathedral architecture rose dimly on their
left hand, but it was lost upon them now. Once out of the
town they followed the turnpike-road, which after a few
miles plunged across an open plain.
Though the sky was dense with cloud, a diffused light
from some fragment of a moon had hitherto helped them a
little. But the moon had now sunk, the clouds seemed to
settle almost on their heads, and the night grew as dark as
a cave. However, they found their way along, keeping as much
on the turf as possible that their tread might not resound,
which it was easy to do, there being no hedge or fence of
any kind. All around was open loneliness and black solitude,
over which a stiff breeze blew.
They had proceeded thus gropingly two or three miles
further when on a sudden Clare became conscious of some vast
erection close in his front, rising sheer from the grass.
They had almost struck themselves against it.
"What monstrous place is this?" said Angel.
"It hums," said she. "Hearken!"
He listened. The wind, playing upon the edifice, produced
a booming tune, like the note of some gigantic one-stringed
harp. No other sound came from it, and lifting his hand and
advancing a step or two, Clare felt the vertical surface of
the structure. It seemed to be of solid stone, without joint
or moulding. Carrying his fingers onward he found that what
he had come in contact with was a colossal rectangular
pillar; by stretching out his left hand he could feel a
similar one adjoining. At an indefinite height overhead
something made the black sky blacker, which had the
semblance of a vast architrave uniting the pillars
horizontally. They carefully entered beneath and between;
the surfaces echoed their soft rustle; but they seemed to be
still out of doors. The place was roofless. Tess drew her
breath fearfully, and Angel, perplexed, said—
"What can it be?"
Feeling sideways they encountered another tower-like
pillar, square and uncompromising as the first; beyond it
another and another. The place was all doors and pillars,
some connected above by continuous architraves.
"A very Temple of the Winds," he said.
The next pillar was isolated; others composed a
trilithon; others were prostrate, their flanks forming a
causeway wide enough for a carriage; and it was soon obvious
that they made up a forest of monoliths grouped upon the
grassy expanse of the plain. The couple advanced further
into this pavilion of the night till they stood in its
midst.
"It is Stonehenge!" said Clare.
"The heathen temple, you mean?"
"Yes. Older than the centuries; older than the
d'Urbervilles! Well, what shall we do, darling? We may find
shelter further on."
But Tess, really tired by this time, flung herself upon
an oblong slab that lay close at hand, and was sheltered
from the wind by a pillar. Owing to the action of the sun
during the preceding day, the stone was warm and dry, in
comforting contrast to the rough and chill grass around,
which had damped her skirts and shoes.
"I don't want to go any further, Angel," she said,
stretching out her hand for his. "Can't we bide here?"
"I fear not. This spot is visible for miles by day,
although it does not seem so now."
"One of my mother's people was a shepherd hereabouts, now
I think of it. And you used to say at Talbothays that I was
a heathen. So now I am at home."
He knelt down beside her outstretched form, and put his
lips upon hers.
"Sleepy are you, dear? I think you are lying on an
altar."
"I like very much to be here," she murmured. "It is so
solemn and lonely—after my great happiness—with nothing but
the sky above my face. It seems as if there were no folk in
the world but we two; and I wish there were not—except
'Liza-Lu."
Clare though she might as well rest here till it should
get a little lighter, and he flung his overcoat upon her,
and sat down by her side.
"Angel, if anything happens to me, will you watch over
'Liza-Lu for my sake?" she asked, when they had listened a
long time to the wind among the pillars.
"I will."
"She is so good and simple and pure. O, Angel—I wish you
would marry her if you lose me, as you will do shortly. O,
if you would!"
"If I lose you I lose all! And she is my sister-in-law."
"That's nothing, dearest. People marry sister-laws
continually about Marlott; and 'Liza-Lu is so gentle and
sweet, and she is growing so beautiful. O, I could share you
with her willingly when we are spirits! If you would train
her and teach her, Angel, and bring her up for your own
self! … She had all the best of me without the bad of me;
and if she were to become yours it would almost seem as if
death had not divided us… Well, I have said it. I won't
mention it again."
She ceased, and he fell into thought. In the far
north-east sky he could see between the pillars a level
streak of light. The uniform concavity of black cloud was
lifting bodily like the lid of a pot, letting in at the
earth's edge the coming day, against which the towering
monoliths and trilithons began to be blackly defined.
"Did they sacrifice to God here?" asked she.
"No," said he.
"Who to?"
"I believe to the sun. That lofty stone set away by
itself is in the direction of the sun, which will presently
rise behind it."
"This reminds me, dear," she said. "You remember you
never would interfere with any belief of mine before we were
married? But I knew your mind all the same, and I thought as
you thought—not from any reasons of my own, but because you
thought so. Tell me now, Angel, do you think we shall meet
again after we are dead? I want to know."
He kissed her to avoid a reply at such a time.
"O, Angel—I fear that means no!" said she, with a
suppressed sob. "And I wanted so to see you again—so much,
so much! What—not even you and I, Angel, who love each other
so well?"
Like a greater than himself, to the critical question at
the critical time he did not answer; and they were again
silent. In a minute or two her breathing became more
regular, her clasp of his hand relaxed, and she fell asleep.
The band of silver paleness along the east horizon made even
the distant parts of the Great Plain appear dark and near;
and the whole enormous landscape bore that impress of
reserve, taciturnity, and hesitation which is usual just
before day. The eastward pillars and their architraves stood
up blackly against the light, and the great flame-shaped
Sun-stone beyond them; and the Stone of Sacrifice midway.
Presently the night wind died out, and the quivering little
pools in the cup-like hollows of the stones lay still. At
the same time something seemed to move on the verge of the
dip eastward—a mere dot. It was the head of a man
approaching them from the hollow beyond the Sun-stone. Clare
wished they had gone onward, but in the circumstances
decided to remain quiet. The figure came straight towards
the circle of pillars in which they were.
He heard something behind him, the brush of feet.
Turning, he saw over the prostrate columns another figure;
then before he was aware, another was at hand on the right,
under a trilithon, and another on the left. The dawn shone
full on the front of the man westward, and Clare could
discern from this that he was tall, and walked as if
trained. They all closed in with evident purpose. Her story
then was true! Springing to his feet, he looked around for a
weapon, loose stone, means of escape, anything. By this time
the nearest man was upon him.
"It is no use, sir," he said. "There are sixteen of us on
the Plain, and the whole country is reared."
"Let her finish her sleep!" he implored in a whisper of
the men as they gathered round.
When they saw where she lay, which they had not done till
then, they showed no objection, and stood watching her, as
still as the pillars around. He went to the stone and bent
over her, holding one poor little hand; her breathing now
was quick and small, like that of a lesser creature than a
woman. All waited in the growing light, their faces and
hands as if they were silvered, the remainder of their
figures dark, the stones glistening green-gray, the Plain
still a mass of shade. Soon the light was strong, and a ray
shone upon her unconscious form, peering under her eyelids
and waking her.
"What is it, Angel?" she said, starting up. "Have they
come for me?"
"Yes, dearest," he said. "They have come."
"It is as it should be," she murmured. "Angel, I am
almost glad—yes, glad! This happiness could not have lasted.
It was too much. I have had enough; and now I shall not live
for you to despise me!"
She stood up, shook herself, and went forward, neither of
the men having moved.
"I am ready," she said quietly.
LIX
The city of Wintoncester, that fine old city, aforetime
capital of Wessex, lay amidst its convex and concave
downlands in all the brightness and warmth of a July
morning. The gabled brick, tile, and freestone houses had
almost dried off for the season their integument of lichen,
the streams in the meadows were low, and in the sloping High
Street, from the West Gateway to the mediæval cross, and
from the mediæval cross to the bridge, that leisurely
dusting and sweeping was in progress which usually ushers in
an old-fashioned market-day.
From the western gate aforesaid the highway, as every
Wintoncestrian knows, ascends a long and regular incline of
the exact length of a measured mile, leaving the houses
gradually behind. Up this road from the precincts of the
city two persons were walking rapidly, as if unconscious of
the trying ascent—unconscious through preoccupation and not
through buoyancy. They had emerged upon this road through a
narrow, barred wicket in a high wall a little lower down.
They seemed anxious to get out of the sight of the houses
and of their kind, and this road appeared to offer the
quickest means of doing so. Though they were young, they
walked with bowed heads, which gait of grief the sun's rays
smiled on pitilessly.
One of the pair was Angel Clare, the other a tall budding
creature—half girl, half woman—a spiritualized image of
Tess, slighter than she, but with the same beautiful
eyes—Clare's sister-in-law, 'Liza-Lu. Their pale faces
seemed to have shrunk to half their natural size. They moved
on hand in hand, and never spoke a word, the drooping of
their heads being that of Giotto's "Two Apostles".
When they had nearly reached the top of the great West
Hill the clocks in the town struck eight. Each gave a start
at the notes, and, walking onward yet a few steps, they
reached the first milestone, standing whitely on the green
margin of the grass, and backed by the down, which here was
open to the road. They entered upon the turf, and, impelled
by a force that seemed to overrule their will, suddenly
stood still, turned, and waited in paralyzed suspense beside
the stone.
The prospect from this summit was almost unlimited. In
the valley beneath lay the city they had just left, its more
prominent buildings showing as in an isometric drawing—among
them the broad cathedral tower, with its Norman windows and
immense length of aisle and nave, the spires of St Thomas's,
the pinnacled tower of the College, and, more to the right,
the tower and gables of the ancient hospice, where to this
day the pilgrim may receive his dole of bread and ale.
Behind the city swept the rotund upland of St Catherine's
Hill; further off, landscape beyond landscape, till the
horizon was lost in the radiance of the sun hanging above
it.
Against these far stretches of country rose, in front of
the other city edifices, a large red-brick building, with
level gray roofs, and rows of short barred windows
bespeaking captivity, the whole contrasting greatly by its
formalism with the quaint irregularities of the Gothic
erections. It was somewhat disguised from the road in
passing it by yews and evergreen oaks, but it was visible
enough up here. The wicket from which the pair had lately
emerged was in the wall of this structure. From the middle
of the building an ugly flat-topped octagonal tower ascended
against the east horizon, and viewed from this spot, on its
shady side and against the light, it seemed the one blot on
the city's beauty. Yet it was with this blot, and not with
the beauty, that the two gazers were concerned.
Upon the cornice of the tower a tall staff was fixed.
Their eyes were riveted on it. A few minutes after the hour
had struck something moved slowly up the staff, and extended
itself upon the breeze. It was a black flag.
"Justice" was done, and the President of the Immortals,
in Aeschylean phrase, had ended his sport with Tess. And the
d'Urberville knights and dames slept on in their tombs
unknowing. The two speechless gazers bent themselves down to
the earth, as if in prayer, and remained thus a long time,
absolutely motionless: the flag continued to wave silently.
As soon as they had strength, they arose, joined hands
again, and went on.