(1891)

Phase the First: The Maiden



I



On an evening in the latter part of May a middle-aged man was walking
homeward from Shaston to the village of Marlott, in the adjoining Vale
of Blakemore, or Blackmoor. The pair of legs that carried him were
rickety, and there was a bias in his gait which inclined him somewhat
to the left of a straight line. He occasionally gave a smart nod, as if
in confirmation of some opinion, though he was not thinking of anything
in particular. An empty egg-basket was slung upon his arm, the nap of
his hat was ruffled, a patch being quite worn away at its brim where
his thumb came in taking it off. Presently he was met by an elderly
parson astride on a gray mare, who, as he rode, hummed a wandering
tune.

“Good night t’ee,” said the man with the basket.

“Good night, Sir John,” said the parson.

The pedestrian, after another pace or two, halted, and turned round.

“Now, sir, begging your pardon; we met last market-day on this road
about this time, and I said ‘Good night,’ and you made reply ‘Good
night, Sir John,’ as now.”

“I did,” said the parson.

“And once before that—near a month ago.”

“I may have.”

“Then what might your meaning be in calling me ‘Sir John’ these
different times, when I be plain Jack Durbeyfield, the haggler?”

The parson rode a step or two nearer.

“It was only my whim,” he said; and, after a moment’s hesitation: “It
was on account of a discovery I made some little time ago, whilst I was
hunting up pedigrees for the new county history. I am Parson Tringham,
the antiquary, of Stagfoot Lane. Don’t you really know, Durbeyfield,
that you are the lineal representative of the ancient and knightly
family of the d’Urbervilles, who derive their descent from Sir Pagan
d’Urberville, that renowned knight who came from Normandy with William
the Conqueror, as appears by Battle Abbey Roll?”

“Never heard it before, sir!”

“Well it’s true. Throw up your chin a moment, so that I may catch the
profile of your face better. Yes, that’s the d’Urberville nose and
chin—a little debased. Your ancestor was one of the twelve knights who
assisted the Lord of Estremavilla in Normandy in his conquest of
Glamorganshire. Branches of your family held manors over all this part
of England; their names appear in the Pipe Rolls in the time of King
Stephen. In the reign of King John one of them was rich enough to give
a manor to the Knights Hospitallers; and in Edward the Second’s time
your forefather Brian was summoned to Westminster to attend the great
Council there. You declined a little in Oliver Cromwell’s time, but to
no serious extent, and in Charles the Second’s reign you were made
Knights of the Royal Oak for your loyalty. Aye, there have been
generations of Sir Johns among you, and if knighthood were hereditary,
like a baronetcy, as it practically was in old times, when men were
knighted from father to son, you would be Sir John now.”

“Ye don’t say so!”

“In short,” concluded the parson, decisively smacking his leg with his
switch, “there’s hardly such another family in England.”

“Daze my eyes, and isn’t there?” said Durbeyfield. “And here have I
been knocking about, year after year, from pillar to post, as if I was
no more than the commonest feller in the parish.... And how long hev
this news about me been knowed, Pa’son Tringham?”

The clergyman explained that, as far as he was aware, it had quite died
out of knowledge, and could hardly be said to be known at all. His own
investigations had begun on a day in the preceding spring when, having
been engaged in tracing the vicissitudes of the d’Urberville family, he
had observed Durbeyfield’s name on his waggon, and had thereupon been
led to make inquiries about his father and grandfather till he had no
doubt on the subject.

“At first I resolved not to disturb you with such a useless piece of
information,” said he. “However, our impulses are too strong for our
judgement sometimes. I thought you might perhaps know something of it
all the while.”

“Well, I have heard once or twice, ’tis true, that my family had seen
better days afore they came to Blackmoor. But I took no notice o’t,
thinking it to mean that we had once kept two horses where we now keep
only one. I’ve got a wold silver spoon, and a wold graven seal at home,
too; but, Lord, what’s a spoon and seal?... And to think that I and
these noble d’Urbervilles were one flesh all the time. ’Twas said that
my gr’t-granfer had secrets, and didn’t care to talk of where he came
from.... And where do we raise our smoke, now, parson, if I may make so
bold; I mean, where do we d’Urbervilles live?”

“You don’t live anywhere. You are extinct—as a county family.”

“That’s bad.”

“Yes—what the mendacious family chronicles call extinct in the male
line—that is, gone down—gone under.”

“Then where do we lie?”

“At Kingsbere-sub-Greenhill: rows and rows of you in your vaults, with
your effigies under Purbeck-marble canopies.”

“And where be our family mansions and estates?”

“You haven’t any.”

“Oh? No lands neither?”

“None; though you once had ’em in abundance, as I said, for your family
consisted of numerous branches. In this county there was a seat of
yours at Kingsbere, and another at Sherton, and another in Millpond,
and another at Lullstead, and another at Wellbridge.”

“And shall we ever come into our own again?”

“Ah—that I can’t tell!”

“And what had I better do about it, sir?” asked Durbeyfield, after a
pause.

“Oh—nothing, nothing; except chasten yourself with the thought of ‘how
are the mighty fallen.’ It is a fact of some interest to the local
historian and genealogist, nothing more. There are several families
among the cottagers of this county of almost equal lustre. Good night.”

“But you’ll turn back and have a quart of beer wi’ me on the strength
o’t, Pa’son Tringham? There’s a very pretty brew in tap at The Pure
Drop—though, to be sure, not so good as at Rolliver’s.”

“No, thank you—not this evening, Durbeyfield. You’ve had enough
already.” Concluding thus, the parson rode on his way, with doubts as
to his discretion in retailing this curious bit of lore.

When he was gone, Durbeyfield walked a few steps in a profound reverie,
and then sat down upon the grassy bank by the roadside, depositing his
basket before him. In a few minutes a youth appeared in the distance,
walking in the same direction as that which had been pursued by
Durbeyfield. The latter, on seeing him, held up his hand, and the lad
quickened his pace and came near.

“Boy, take up that basket! I want ’ee to go on an errand for me.”

The lath-like stripling frowned. “Who be you, then, John Durbeyfield,
to order me about and call me ‘boy’? You know my name as well as I know
yours!”

“Do you, do you? That’s the secret—that’s the secret! Now obey my
orders, and take the message I’m going to charge ’ee wi’... Well, Fred,
I don’t mind telling you that the secret is that I’m one of a noble
race—it has been just found out by me this present afternoon, p.m.” And
as he made the announcement, Durbeyfield, declining from his sitting
position, luxuriously stretched himself out upon the bank among the
daisies.

The lad stood before Durbeyfield, and contemplated his length from
crown to toe.

“Sir John d’Urberville—that’s who I am,” continued the prostrate man.
“That is if knights were baronets—which they be. ’Tis recorded in
history all about me. Dost know of such a place, lad, as
Kingsbere-sub-Greenhill?”

“Ees. I’ve been there to Greenhill Fair.”

“Well, under the church of that city there lie—”

“’Tisn’t a city, the place I mean; leastwise ’twaddn’ when I was
there—’twas a little one-eyed, blinking sort o’ place.”

“Never you mind the place, boy, that’s not the question before us.
Under the church of that there parish lie my ancestors—hundreds of
’em—in coats of mail and jewels, in gr’t lead coffins weighing tons and
tons. There’s not a man in the county o’ South-Wessex that’s got
grander and nobler skillentons in his family than I.”

“Oh?”

“Now take up that basket, and goo on to Marlott, and when you’ve come
to The Pure Drop Inn, tell ’em to send a horse and carriage to me
immed’ately, to carry me home. And in the bottom o’ the carriage they
be to put a noggin o’ rum in a small bottle, and chalk it up to my
account. And when you’ve done that go on to my house with the basket,
and tell my wife to put away that washing, because she needn’t finish
it, and wait till I come home, as I’ve news to tell her.”

As the lad stood in a dubious attitude, Durbeyfield put his hand in his
pocket, and produced a shilling, one of the chronically few that he
possessed.

“Here’s for your labour, lad.”

This made a difference in the young man’s estimate of the position.

“Yes, Sir John. Thank ’ee. Anything else I can do for ’ee, Sir John?”

“Tell ’em at home that I should like for supper,—well, lamb’s fry if
they can get it; and if they can’t, black-pot; and if they can’t get
that, well chitterlings will do.”

“Yes, Sir John.”

The boy took up the basket, and as he set out the notes of a brass band
were heard from the direction of the village.

“What’s that?” said Durbeyfield. “Not on account o’ I?”

“’Tis the women’s club-walking, Sir John. Why, your da’ter is one o’
the members.”

“To be sure—I’d quite forgot it in my thoughts of greater things! Well,
vamp on to Marlott, will ye, and order that carriage, and maybe I’ll
drive round and inspect the club.”

The lad departed, and Durbeyfield lay waiting on the grass and daisies
in the evening sun. Not a soul passed that way for a long while, and
the faint notes of the band were the only human sounds audible within
the rim of blue hills.



II



The village of Marlott lay amid the north-eastern undulations of the
beautiful Vale of Blakemore, or Blackmoor, aforesaid, an engirdled and
secluded region, for the most part untrodden as yet by tourist or
landscape-painter, though within a four hours’ journey from London.

It is a vale whose acquaintance is best made by viewing it from the
summits of the hills that surround it—except perhaps during the
droughts of summer. An unguided ramble into its recesses in bad weather
is apt to engender dissatisfaction with its narrow, tortuous, and miry
ways.

This fertile and sheltered tract of country, in which the fields are
never brown and the springs never dry, is bounded on the south by the
bold chalk ridge that embraces the prominences of Hambledon Hill,
Bulbarrow, Nettlecombe-Tout, Dogbury, High Stoy, and Bubb Down. The
traveller from the coast, who, after plodding northward for a score of
miles over calcareous downs and corn-lands, suddenly reaches the verge
of one of these escarpments, is surprised and delighted to behold,
extended like a map beneath him, a country differing absolutely from
that which he has passed through. Behind him the hills are open, the
sun blazes down upon fields so large as to give an unenclosed character
to the landscape, the lanes are white, the hedges low and plashed, the
atmosphere colourless. Here, in the valley, the world seems to be
constructed upon a smaller and more delicate scale; the fields are mere
paddocks, so reduced that from this height their hedgerows appear a
network of dark green threads overspreading the paler green of the
grass. The atmosphere beneath is languorous, and is so tinged with
azure that what artists call the middle distance partakes also of that
hue, while the horizon beyond is of the deepest ultramarine. Arable
lands are few and limited; with but slight exceptions the prospect is a
broad rich mass of grass and trees, mantling minor hills and dales
within the major. Such is the Vale of Blackmoor.

The district is of historic, no less than of topographical interest.
The Vale was known in former times as the Forest of White Hart, from
a curious legend of King Henry III’s reign, in which the killing by a
certain Thomas de la Lynd of a beautiful white hart which the king had
run down and spared, was made the occasion of a heavy fine. In those
days, and till comparatively recent times, the country was densely
wooded. Even now, traces of its earlier condition are to be found in
the old oak copses and irregular belts of timber that yet survive upon
its slopes, and the hollow-trunked trees that shade so many of its
pastures.

The forests have departed, but some old customs of their shades remain.
Many, however, linger only in a metamorphosed or disguised form. The
May-Day dance, for instance, was to be discerned on the afternoon under
notice, in the guise of the club revel, or “club-walking,” as it was
there called.

It was an interesting event to the younger inhabitants of Marlott,
though its real interest was not observed by the participators in the
ceremony. Its singularity lay less in the retention of a custom of
walking in procession and dancing on each anniversary than in the
members being solely women. In men’s clubs such celebrations were,
though expiring, less uncommon; but either the natural shyness of the
softer sex, or a sarcastic attitude on the part of male relatives, had
denuded such women’s clubs as remained (if any other did) or this their
glory and consummation. The club of Marlott alone lived to uphold the
local Cerealia. It had walked for hundreds of years, if not as
benefit-club, as votive sisterhood of some sort; and it walked still.

The banded ones were all dressed in white gowns—a gay survival from Old
Style days, when cheerfulness and May-time were synonyms—days before
the habit of taking long views had reduced emotions to a monotonous
average. Their first exhibition of themselves was in a processional
march of two and two round the parish. Ideal and real clashed slightly
as the sun lit up their figures against the green hedges and
creeper-laced house-fronts; for, though the whole troop wore white
garments, no two whites were alike among them. Some approached pure
blanching; some had a bluish pallor; some worn by the older characters
(which had possibly lain by folded for many a year) inclined to a
cadaverous tint, and to a Georgian style.

In addition to the distinction of a white frock, every woman and girl
carried in her right hand a peeled willow wand, and in her left a bunch
of white flowers. The peeling of the former, and the selection of the
latter, had been an operation of personal care.

There were a few middle-aged and even elderly women in the train, their
silver-wiry hair and wrinkled faces, scourged by time and trouble,
having almost a grotesque, certainly a pathetic, appearance in such a
jaunty situation. In a true view, perhaps, there was more to be
gathered and told of each anxious and experienced one, to whom the
years were drawing nigh when she should say, “I have no pleasure in
them,” than of her juvenile comrades. But let the elder be passed over
here for those under whose bodices the life throbbed quick and warm.

The young girls formed, indeed, the majority of the band, and their
heads of luxuriant hair reflected in the sunshine every tone of gold,
and black, and brown. Some had beautiful eyes, others a beautiful nose,
others a beautiful mouth and figure: few, if any, had all. A difficulty
of arranging their lips in this crude exposure to public scrutiny, an
inability to balance their heads, and to dissociate self-consciousness
from their features, was apparent in them, and showed that they were
genuine country girls, unaccustomed to many eyes.

And as each and all of them were warmed without by the sun, so each
had a private little sun for her soul to bask in; some dream, some
affection, some hobby, at least some remote and distant hope which,
though perhaps starving to nothing, still lived on, as hopes will. They
were all cheerful, and many of them merry.

They came round by The Pure Drop Inn, and were turning out of the high
road to pass through a wicket-gate into the meadows, when one of the
women said—

“The Load-a-Lord! Why, Tess Durbeyfield, if there isn’t thy father
riding home in a carriage!”

A young member of the band turned her head at the exclamation. She was
a fine and handsome girl—not handsomer than some others, possibly—but
her mobile peony mouth and large innocent eyes added eloquence to
colour and shape. She wore a red ribbon in her hair, and was the only
one of the white company who could boast of such a pronounced
adornment. As she looked round Durbeyfield was seen moving along the
road in a chaise belonging to The Pure Drop, driven by a frizzle-headed
brawny damsel with her gown-sleeves rolled above her elbows. This was
the cheerful servant of that establishment, who, in her part of
factotum, turned groom and ostler at times. Durbeyfield, leaning back,
and with his eyes closed luxuriously, was waving his hand above his
head, and singing in a slow recitative—

“I’ve-got-a-gr’t-family-vault-at-Kingsbere—and
knighted-forefathers-in-lead-coffins-there!”

The clubbists tittered, except the girl called Tess—in whom a slow heat
seemed to rise at the sense that her father was making himself foolish
in their eyes.

“He’s tired, that’s all,” she said hastily, “and he has got a lift
home, because our own horse has to rest to-day.”

“Bless thy simplicity, Tess,” said her companions. “He’s got his
market-nitch. Haw-haw!”

“Look here; I won’t walk another inch with you, if you say any jokes
about him!” Tess cried, and the colour upon her cheeks spread over her
face and neck. In a moment her eyes grew moist, and her glance drooped
to the ground. Perceiving that they had really pained her they said no
more, and order again prevailed. Tess’s pride would not allow her to
turn her head again, to learn what her father’s meaning was, if he had
any; and thus she moved on with the whole body to the enclosure where
there was to be dancing on the green. By the time the spot was reached
she had recovered her equanimity, and tapped her neighbour with her
wand and talked as usual.

Tess Durbeyfield at this time of her life was a mere vessel of emotion
untinctured by experience. The dialect was on her tongue to some
extent, despite the village school: the characteristic intonation of
that dialect for this district being the voicing approximately rendered
by the syllable UR, probably as rich an utterance as any to be found in
human speech. The pouted-up deep red mouth to which this syllable was
native had hardly as yet settled into its definite shape, and her lower
lip had a way of thrusting the middle of her top one upward, when they
closed together after a word.

Phases of her childhood lurked in her aspect still. As she walked along
to-day, for all her bouncing handsome womanliness, you could sometimes
see her twelfth year in her cheeks, or her ninth sparkling from her
eyes; and even her fifth would flit over the curves of her mouth now
and then.

Yet few knew, and still fewer considered this. A small minority, mainly
strangers, would look long at her in casually passing by, and grow
momentarily fascinated by her freshness, and wonder if they would ever
see her again: but to almost everybody she was a fine and picturesque
country girl, and no more.

Nothing was seen or heard further of Durbeyfield in his triumphal
chariot under the conduct of the ostleress, and the club having entered
the allotted space, dancing began. As there were no men in the company,
the girls danced at first with each other, but when the hour for the
close of labour drew on, the masculine inhabitants of the village,
together with other idlers and pedestrians, gathered round the spot,
and appeared inclined to negotiate for a partner.

Among these on-lookers were three young men of a superior class,
carrying small knapsacks strapped to their shoulders, and stout sticks
in their hands. Their general likeness to each other, and their
consecutive ages, would almost have suggested that they might be, what
in fact they were, brothers. The eldest wore the white tie, high
waistcoat, and thin-brimmed hat of the regulation curate; the second
was the normal undergraduate; the appearance of the third and youngest
would hardly have been sufficient to characterize him; there was an
uncribbed, uncabined aspect in his eyes and attire, implying that he
had hardly as yet found the entrance to his professional groove. That
he was a desultory tentative student of something and everything might
only have been predicted of him.

These three brethren told casual acquaintance that they were spending
their Whitsun holidays in a walking tour through the Vale of Blackmoor,
their course being south-westerly from the town of Shaston on the
north-east.

They leant over the gate by the highway, and inquired as to the meaning
of the dance and the white-frocked maids. The two elder of the brothers
were plainly not intending to linger more than a moment, but the
spectacle of a bevy of girls dancing without male partners seemed to
amuse the third, and make him in no hurry to move on. He unstrapped his
knapsack, put it, with his stick, on the hedge-bank, and opened the
gate.

“What are you going to do, Angel?” asked the eldest.

“I am inclined to go and have a fling with them. Why not all of us—just
for a minute or two—it will not detain us long?”

“No—no; nonsense!” said the first. “Dancing in public with a troop of
country hoydens—suppose we should be seen! Come along, or it will be
dark before we get to Stourcastle, and there’s no place we can sleep at
nearer than that; besides, we must get through another chapter of A
Counterblast to Agnosticism before we turn in, now I have taken the
trouble to bring the book.”

“All right—I’ll overtake you and Cuthbert in five minutes; don’t stop;
I give my word that I will, Felix.”

The two elder reluctantly left him and walked on, taking their
brother’s knapsack to relieve him in following, and the youngest
entered the field.

“This is a thousand pities,” he said gallantly, to two or three of the
girls nearest him, as soon as there was a pause in the dance. “Where
are your partners, my dears?”

“They’ve not left off work yet,” answered one of the boldest. “They’ll
be here by and by. Till then, will you be one, sir?”

“Certainly. But what’s one among so many!”

“Better than none. ’Tis melancholy work facing and footing it to one
of your own sort, and no clipsing and colling at all. Now, pick and
choose.”

“’Ssh—don’t be so for’ard!” said a shyer girl.

The young man, thus invited, glanced them over, and attempted some
discrimination; but, as the group were all so new to him, he could not
very well exercise it. He took almost the first that came to hand,
which was not the speaker, as she had expected; nor did it happen to be
Tess Durbeyfield. Pedigree, ancestral skeletons, monumental record, the
d’Urberville lineaments, did not help Tess in her life’s battle as yet,
even to the extent of attracting to her a dancing-partner over the
heads of the commonest peasantry. So much for Norman blood unaided by
Victorian lucre.

The name of the eclipsing girl, whatever it was, has not been handed
down; but she was envied by all as the first who enjoyed the luxury of
a masculine partner that evening. Yet such was the force of example
that the village young men, who had not hastened to enter the gate
while no intruder was in the way, now dropped in quickly, and soon the
couples became leavened with rustic youth to a marked extent, till at
length the plainest woman in the club was no longer compelled to foot
it on the masculine side of the figure.

The church clock struck, when suddenly the student said that he must
leave—he had been forgetting himself—he had to join his companions. As
he fell out of the dance his eyes lighted on Tess Durbeyfield, whose
own large orbs wore, to tell the truth, the faintest aspect of reproach
that he had not chosen her. He, too, was sorry then that, owing to her
backwardness, he had not observed her; and with that in his mind he
left the pasture.

On account of his long delay he started in a flying-run down the lane
westward, and had soon passed the hollow and mounted the next rise. He
had not yet overtaken his brothers, but he paused to get breath, and
looked back. He could see the white figures of the girls in the green
enclosure whirling about as they had whirled when he was among them.
They seemed to have quite forgotten him already.

All of them, except, perhaps, one. This white shape stood apart by the
hedge alone. From her position he knew it to be the pretty maiden with
whom he had not danced. Trifling as the matter was, he yet
instinctively felt that she was hurt by his oversight. He wished that
he had asked her; he wished that he had inquired her name. She was so
modest, so expressive, she had looked so soft in her thin white gown
that he felt he had acted stupidly.

However, it could not be helped, and turning, and bending himself to a
rapid walk, he dismissed the subject from his mind.



III



As for Tess Durbeyfield, she did not so easily dislodge the incident
from her consideration. She had no spirit to dance again for a long
time, though she might have had plenty of partners; but ah! they did
not speak so nicely as the strange young man had done. It was not till
the rays of the sun had absorbed the young stranger’s retreating figure
on the hill that she shook off her temporary sadness and answered her
would-be partner in the affirmative.

She remained with her comrades till dusk, and participated with a
certain zest in the dancing; though, being heart-whole as yet, she
enjoyed treading a measure purely for its own sake; little divining
when she saw “the soft torments, the bitter sweets, the pleasing pains,
and the agreeable distresses” of those girls who had been wooed and
won, what she herself was capable of in that kind. The struggles and
wrangles of the lads for her hand in a jig were an amusement to her—no
more; and when they became fierce she rebuked them.

She might have stayed even later, but the incident of her father’s odd
appearance and manner returned upon the girl’s mind to make her
anxious, and wondering what had become of him she dropped away from the
dancers and bent her steps towards the end of the village at which the
parental cottage lay.

While yet many score yards off, other rhythmic sounds than those she
had quitted became audible to her; sounds that she knew well—so well.
They were a regular series of thumpings from the interior of the house,
occasioned by the violent rocking of a cradle upon a stone floor, to
which movement a feminine voice kept time by singing, in a vigorous
gallopade, the favourite ditty of “The Spotted Cow”—

　　　　I saw her lie do′-own in yon′-der green gro′-ove;
　　　　　　Come, love!′ and I'll tell′ you where!′

The cradle-rocking and the song would cease simultaneously for a
moment, and an exclamation at highest vocal pitch would take the place
of the melody.

“God bless thy diment eyes! And thy waxen cheeks! And thy cherry mouth!
And thy Cubit’s thighs! And every bit o’ thy blessed body!”

After this invocation the rocking and the singing would recommence, and
the “Spotted Cow” proceed as before. So matters stood when Tess opened
the door and paused upon the mat within it, surveying the scene.

The interior, in spite of the melody, struck upon the girl’s senses
with an unspeakable dreariness. From the holiday gaieties of the
field—the white gowns, the nosegays, the willow-wands, the whirling
movements on the green, the flash of gentle sentiment towards the
stranger—to the yellow melancholy of this one-candled spectacle,
what a step! Besides the jar of contrast there came to her a chill
self-reproach that she had not returned sooner, to help her mother
in these domesticities, instead of indulging herself out-of-doors.

There stood her mother amid the group of children, as Tess had left
her, hanging over the Monday washing-tub, which had now, as always,
lingered on to the end of the week. Out of that tub had come the day
before—Tess felt it with a dreadful sting of remorse—the very white
frock upon her back which she had so carelessly greened about the skirt
on the damping grass—which had been wrung up and ironed by her mother’s
own hands.

As usual, Mrs Durbeyfield was balanced on one foot beside the tub, the
other being engaged in the aforesaid business of rocking her youngest
child. The cradle-rockers had done hard duty for so many years, under
the weight of so many children, on that flagstone floor, that they were
worn nearly flat, in consequence of which a huge jerk accompanied each
swing of the cot, flinging the baby from side to side like a weaver’s
shuttle, as Mrs Durbeyfield, excited by her song, trod the rocker with
all the spring that was left in her after a long day’s seething in the
suds.

Nick-knock, nick-knock, went the cradle; the candle-flame stretched
itself tall, and began jigging up and down; the water dribbled from the
matron’s elbows, and the song galloped on to the end of the verse, Mrs
Durbeyfield regarding her daughter the while. Even now, when burdened
with a young family, Joan Durbeyfield was a passionate lover of tune.
No ditty floated into Blackmoor Vale from the outer world but Tess’s
mother caught up its notation in a week.

There still faintly beamed from the woman’s features something of the
freshness, and even the prettiness, of her youth; rendering it probable
that the personal charms which Tess could boast of were in main part
her mother’s gift, and therefore unknightly, unhistorical.

“I’ll rock the cradle for ’ee, mother,” said the daughter gently. “Or
I’ll take off my best frock and help you wring up? I thought you had
finished long ago.”

Her mother bore Tess no ill-will for leaving the housework to her
single-handed efforts for so long; indeed, Joan seldom upbraided her
thereon at any time, feeling but slightly the lack of Tess’s assistance
whilst her instinctive plan for relieving herself of her labours lay in
postponing them. To-night, however, she was even in a blither mood than
usual. There was a dreaminess, a pre-occupation, an exaltation, in the
maternal look which the girl could not understand.

“Well, I’m glad you’ve come,” her mother said, as soon as the last note
had passed out of her. “I want to go and fetch your father; but what’s
more’n that, I want to tell ’ee what have happened. Y’ll be fess
enough, my poppet, when th’st know!” (Mrs Durbeyfield habitually spoke
the dialect; her daughter, who had passed the Sixth Standard in the
National School under a London-trained mistress, spoke two languages:
the dialect at home, more or less; ordinary English abroad and to
persons of quality.)

“Since I’ve been away?” Tess asked.

“Ay!”

“Had it anything to do with father’s making such a mommet of himself in
thik carriage this afternoon? Why did ’er? I felt inclined to sink into
the ground with shame!”

“That wer all a part of the larry! We’ve been found to be the greatest
gentlefolk in the whole county—reaching all back long before Oliver
Grumble’s time—to the days of the Pagan Turks—with monuments, and
vaults, and crests, and ’scutcheons, and the Lord knows what all. In
Saint Charles’s days we was made Knights o’ the Royal Oak, our real
name being d’Urberville!... Don’t that make your bosom plim? ’Twas on
this account that your father rode home in the vlee; not because he’d
been drinking, as people supposed.”

“I’m glad of that. Will it do us any good, mother?”

“O yes! ’Tis thoughted that great things may come o’t. No doubt a
mampus of volk of our own rank will be down here in their carriages as
soon as ’tis known. Your father learnt it on his way home from
Shaston, and he has been telling me the whole pedigree of the matter.”

“Where is father now?” asked Tess suddenly.

Her mother gave irrelevant information by way of answer: “He called to
see the doctor to-day in Shaston. It is not consumption at all, it
seems. It is fat round his heart, ’a says. There, it is like this.”
Joan Durbeyfield, as she spoke, curved a sodden thumb and forefinger to
the shape of the letter C, and used the other forefinger as a pointer.
“‘At the present moment,’ he says to your father, ‘your heart is
enclosed all round there, and all round there; this space is still
open,’ ’a says. ‘As soon as it do meet, so,’”—Mrs Durbeyfield closed
her fingers into a circle complete—“‘off you will go like a shadder, Mr
Durbeyfield,’ ’a says. ‘You mid last ten years; you mid go off in ten
months, or ten days.’”

Tess looked alarmed. Her father possibly to go behind the eternal cloud
so soon, notwithstanding this sudden greatness!

“But where is father?” she asked again.

Her mother put on a deprecating look. “Now don’t you be bursting out
angry! The poor man—he felt so rafted after his uplifting by the
pa’son’s news—that he went up to Rolliver’s half an hour ago. He do
want to get up his strength for his journey to-morrow with that load of
beehives, which must be delivered, family or no. He’ll have to start
shortly after twelve to-night, as the distance is so long.”

“Get up his strength!” said Tess impetuously, the tears welling to her
eyes. “O my God! Go to a public-house to get up his strength! And you
as well agreed as he, mother!”

Her rebuke and her mood seemed to fill the whole room, and to impart a
cowed look to the furniture, and candle, and children playing about,
and to her mother’s face.

“No,” said the latter touchily, “I be not agreed. I have been waiting
for ’ee to bide and keep house while I go fetch him.”

“I’ll go.”

“O no, Tess. You see, it would be no use.”

Tess did not expostulate. She knew what her mother’s objection meant.
Mrs Durbeyfield’s jacket and bonnet were already hanging slily upon a
chair by her side, in readiness for this contemplated jaunt, the reason
for which the matron deplored more than its necessity.

“And take the Compleat Fortune-Teller to the outhouse,” Joan
continued, rapidly wiping her hands, and donning the garments.

The Compleat Fortune-Teller was an old thick volume, which lay on a
table at her elbow, so worn by pocketing that the margins had reached
the edge of the type. Tess took it up, and her mother started.

This going to hunt up her shiftless husband at the inn was one of Mrs
Durbeyfield’s still extant enjoyments in the muck and muddle of rearing
children. To discover him at Rolliver’s, to sit there for an hour or
two by his side and dismiss all thought and care of the children during
the interval, made her happy. A sort of halo, an occidental glow, came
over life then. Troubles and other realities took on themselves a
metaphysical impalpability, sinking to mere mental phenomena for serene
contemplation, and no longer stood as pressing concretions which chafed
body and soul. The youngsters, not immediately within sight, seemed
rather bright and desirable appurtenances than otherwise; the incidents
of daily life were not without humorousness and jollity in their aspect
there. She felt a little as she had used to feel when she sat by her
now wedded husband in the same spot during his wooing, shutting her
eyes to his defects of character, and regarding him only in his ideal
presentation as lover.

Tess, being left alone with the younger children, went first to the
outhouse with the fortune-telling book, and stuffed it into the thatch.
A curious fetishistic fear of this grimy volume on the part of her
mother prevented her ever allowing it to stay in the house all night,
and hither it was brought back whenever it had been consulted. Between
the mother, with her fast-perishing lumber of superstitions, folk-lore,
dialect, and orally transmitted ballads, and the daughter, with her
trained National teachings and Standard knowledge under an infinitely
Revised Code, there was a gap of two hundred years as ordinarily
understood. When they were together the Jacobean and the Victorian ages
were juxtaposed.

Returning along the garden path Tess mused on what the mother could
have wished to ascertain from the book on this particular day. She
guessed the recent ancestral discovery to bear upon it, but did not
divine that it solely concerned herself. Dismissing this, however, she
busied herself with sprinkling the linen dried during the day-time, in
company with her nine-year-old brother Abraham, and her sister
Eliza-Louisa of twelve and a half, called “’Liza-Lu,” the youngest ones
being put to bed. There was an interval of four years and more between
Tess and the next of the family, the two who had filled the gap having
died in their infancy, and this lent her a deputy-maternal attitude
when she was alone with her juniors. Next in juvenility to Abraham came
two more girls, Hope and Modesty; then a boy of three, and then the
baby, who had just completed his first year.

All these young souls were passengers in the Durbeyfield ship—entirely
dependent on the judgement of the two Durbeyfield adults for their
pleasures, their necessities, their health, even their existence. If
the heads of the Durbeyfield household chose to sail into difficulty,
disaster, starvation, disease, degradation, death, thither were these
half-dozen little captives under hatches compelled to sail with
them—six helpless creatures, who had never been asked if they wished
for life on any terms, much less if they wished for it on such hard
conditions as were involved in being of the shiftless house of
Durbeyfield. Some people would like to know whence the poet whose
philosophy is in these days deemed as profound and trustworthy as his
song is breezy and pure, gets his authority for speaking of “Nature’s
holy plan.”

It grew later, and neither father nor mother reappeared. Tess looked
out of the door, and took a mental journey through Marlott. The village
was shutting its eyes. Candles and lamps were being put out everywhere:
she could inwardly behold the extinguisher and the extended hand.

Her mother’s fetching simply meant one more to fetch. Tess began to
perceive that a man in indifferent health, who proposed to start on a
journey before one in the morning, ought not to be at an inn at this
late hour celebrating his ancient blood.

“Abraham,” she said to her little brother, “do you put on your hat—you
bain’t afraid?—and go up to Rolliver’s, and see what has gone wi’
father and mother.”

The boy jumped promptly from his seat, and opened the door, and the
night swallowed him up. Half an hour passed yet again; neither man,
woman, nor child returned. Abraham, like his parents, seemed to have
been limed and caught by the ensnaring inn.

“I must go myself,” she said.

’Liza-Lu then went to bed, and Tess, locking them all in, started on
her way up the dark and crooked lane or street not made for hasty
progress; a street laid out before inches of land had value, and when
one-handed clocks sufficiently subdivided the day.



IV



Rolliver’s inn, the single alehouse at this end of the long and broken
village, could only boast of an off-licence; hence, as nobody could
legally drink on the premises, the amount of overt accommodation for
consumers was strictly limited to a little board about six inches wide
and two yards long, fixed to the garden palings by pieces of wire, so
as to form a ledge. On this board thirsty strangers deposited their
cups as they stood in the road and drank, and threw the dregs on the
dusty ground to the pattern of Polynesia, and wished they could have a
restful seat inside.

Thus the strangers. But there were also local customers who felt the
same wish; and where there’s a will there’s a way.

In a large bedroom upstairs, the window of which was thickly curtained
with a great woollen shawl lately discarded by the landlady, Mrs
Rolliver, were gathered on this evening nearly a dozen persons, all
seeking beatitude; all old inhabitants of the nearer end of Marlott,
and frequenters of this retreat. Not only did the distance to the The
Pure Drop, the fully-licensed tavern at the further part of the
dispersed village, render its accommodation practically unavailable for
dwellers at this end; but the far more serious question, the quality of
the liquor, confirmed the prevalent opinion that it was better to drink
with Rolliver in a corner of the housetop than with the other landlord
in a wide house.

A gaunt four-post bedstead which stood in the room afforded
sitting-space for several persons gathered round three of its sides; a
couple more men had elevated themselves on a chest of drawers; another
rested on the oak-carved “cwoffer”; two on the wash-stand; another on
the stool; and thus all were, somehow, seated at their ease. The stage
of mental comfort to which they had arrived at this hour was one
wherein their souls expanded beyond their skins, and spread their
personalities warmly through the room. In this process the chamber and
its furniture grew more and more dignified and luxurious; the shawl
hanging at the window took upon itself the richness of tapestry; the
brass handles of the chest of drawers were as golden knockers; and the
carved bedposts seemed to have some kinship with the magnificent
pillars of Solomon’s temple.

Mrs Durbeyfield, having quickly walked hitherward after parting from
Tess, opened the front door, crossed the downstairs room, which was in
deep gloom, and then unfastened the stair-door like one whose fingers
knew the tricks of the latches well. Her ascent of the crooked
staircase was a slower process, and her face, as it rose into the light
above the last stair, encountered the gaze of all the party assembled
in the bedroom.

“—Being a few private friends I’ve asked in to keep up club-walking at
my own expense,” the landlady exclaimed at the sound of footsteps, as
glibly as a child repeating the Catechism, while she peered over the
stairs. “Oh, ’tis you, Mrs Durbeyfield—Lard—how you frightened me!—I
thought it might be some gaffer sent by Gover’ment.”

Mrs Durbeyfield was welcomed with glances and nods by the remainder
of the conclave, and turned to where her husband sat. He was humming
absently to himself, in a low tone: “I be as good as some folks here
and there! I’ve got a great family vault at Kingsbere-sub-Greenhill,
and finer skillentons than any man in Wessex!”

“I’ve something to tell ’ee that’s come into my head about that—a grand
projick!” whispered his cheerful wife. “Here, John, don’t ’ee see me?”
She nudged him, while he, looking through her as through a window-pane,
went on with his recitative.

“Hush! Don’t ’ee sing so loud, my good man,” said the landlady; “in
case any member of the Gover’ment should be passing, and take away my
licends.”

“He’s told ’ee what’s happened to us, I suppose?” asked Mrs
Durbeyfield.

“Yes—in a way. D’ye think there’s any money hanging by it?”

“Ah, that’s the secret,” said Joan Durbeyfield sagely. “However, ’tis
well to be kin to a coach, even if you don’t ride in ’en.” She dropped
her public voice, and continued in a low tone to her husband: “I’ve
been thinking since you brought the news that there’s a great rich lady
out by Trantridge, on the edge o’ The Chase, of the name of
d’Urberville.”

“Hey—what’s that?” said Sir John.

She repeated the information. “That lady must be our relation,” she
said. “And my projick is to send Tess to claim kin.”

“There is a lady of the name, now you mention it,” said Durbeyfield.
“Pa’son Tringham didn’t think of that. But she’s nothing beside we—a
junior branch of us, no doubt, hailing long since King Norman’s day.”

While this question was being discussed neither of the pair noticed, in
their preoccupation, that little Abraham had crept into the room, and
was awaiting an opportunity of asking them to return.

“She is rich, and she’d be sure to take notice o’ the maid,” continued
Mrs Durbeyfield; “and ’twill be a very good thing. I don’t see why two
branches o’ one family should not be on visiting terms.”

“Yes; and we’ll all claim kin!” said Abraham brightly from under the
bedstead. “And we’ll all go and see her when Tess has gone to live with
her; and we’ll ride in her coach and wear black clothes!”

“How do you come here, child? What nonsense be ye talking! Go away, and
play on the stairs till father and mother be ready!... Well, Tess ought
to go to this other member of our family. She’d be sure to win the
lady—Tess would; and likely enough ’twould lead to some noble gentleman
marrying her. In short, I know it.”

“How?”

“I tried her fate in the Fortune-Teller, and it brought out that very
thing!... You should ha’ seen how pretty she looked to-day; her skin is
as sumple as a duchess’.”

“What says the maid herself to going?”

“I’ve not asked her. She don’t know there is any such lady-relation
yet. But it would certainly put her in the way of a grand marriage, and
she won’t say nay to going.”

“Tess is queer.”

“But she’s tractable at bottom. Leave her to me.”

Though this conversation had been private, sufficient of its import
reached the understandings of those around to suggest to them that the
Durbeyfields had weightier concerns to talk of now than common folks
had, and that Tess, their pretty eldest daughter, had fine prospects in
store.

“Tess is a fine figure o’ fun, as I said to myself to-day when I zeed
her vamping round parish with the rest,” observed one of the elderly
boozers in an undertone. “But Joan Durbeyfield must mind that she don’t
get green malt in floor.” It was a local phrase which had a peculiar
meaning, and there was no reply.

The conversation became inclusive, and presently other footsteps were
heard crossing the room below.

“—Being a few private friends asked in to-night to keep up club-walking
at my own expense.” The landlady had rapidly re-used the formula she
kept on hand for intruders before she recognized that the newcomer was
Tess.

Even to her mother’s gaze the girl’s young features looked sadly out of
place amid the alcoholic vapours which floated here as no unsuitable
medium for wrinkled middle-age; and hardly was a reproachful flash from
Tess’s dark eyes needed to make her father and mother rise from their
seats, hastily finish their ale, and descend the stairs behind her, Mrs
Rolliver’s caution following their footsteps.

“No noise, please, if ye’ll be so good, my dears; or I mid lose my
licends, and be summons’d, and I don’t know what all! ’Night t’ye!”

They went home together, Tess holding one arm of her father, and Mrs
Durbeyfield the other. He had, in truth, drunk very little—not a fourth
of the quantity which a systematic tippler could carry to church on a
Sunday afternoon without a hitch in his eastings or genuflections; but
the weakness of Sir John’s constitution made mountains of his petty
sins in this kind. On reaching the fresh air he was sufficiently
unsteady to incline the row of three at one moment as if they were
marching to London, and at another as if they were marching to
Bath—which produced a comical effect, frequent enough in families on
nocturnal homegoings; and, like most comical effects, not quite so
comic after all. The two women valiantly disguised these forced
excursions and countermarches as well as they could from Durbeyfield,
their cause, and from Abraham, and from themselves; and so they
approached by degrees their own door, the head of the family bursting
suddenly into his former refrain as he drew near, as if to fortify his
soul at sight of the smallness of his present residence—

　　　　“I’ve got a fam—ily vault at Kingsbere!”

“Hush—don’t be so silly, Jacky,” said his wife. “Yours is not the only
family that was of ’count in wold days. Look at the Anktells, and
Horseys, and the Tringhams themselves—gone to seed a’most as much as
you—though you was bigger folks than they, that’s true. Thank God, I
was never of no family, and have nothing to be ashamed of in that way!”

“Don’t you be so sure o’ that. From your nater ’tis my belief you’ve
disgraced yourselves more than any o’ us, and was kings and queens
outright at one time.”

Tess turned the subject by saying what was far more prominent in her
own mind at the moment than thoughts of her ancestry—“I am afraid
father won’t be able to take the journey with the beehives to-morrow so
early.”

“I? I shall be all right in an hour or two,” said Durbeyfield.

It was eleven o’clock before the family were all in bed, and two
o’clock next morning was the latest hour for starting with the beehives
if they were to be delivered to the retailers in Casterbridge before
the Saturday market began, the way thither lying by bad roads over a
distance of between twenty and thirty miles, and the horse and waggon
being of the slowest. At half-past one Mrs Durbeyfield came into the
large bedroom where Tess and all her little brothers and sisters slept.

“The poor man can’t go,” she said to her eldest daughter, whose great
eyes had opened the moment her mother’s hand touched the door.

Tess sat up in bed, lost in a vague interspace between a dream and this
information.

“But somebody must go,” she replied. “It is late for the hives already.
Swarming will soon be over for the year; and it we put off taking ’em
till next week’s market the call for ’em will be past, and they’ll be
thrown on our hands.”

Mrs Durbeyfield looked unequal to the emergency. “Some young feller,
perhaps, would go? One of them who were so much after dancing with ’ee
yesterday,” she presently suggested.

“O no—I wouldn’t have it for the world!” declared Tess proudly. “And
letting everybody know the reason—such a thing to be ashamed of! I
think I could go if Abraham could go with me to kip me company.”

Her mother at length agreed to this arrangement. Little Abraham was
aroused from his deep sleep in a corner of the same apartment, and
made to put on his clothes while still mentally in the other world.
Meanwhile Tess had hastily dressed herself; and the twain, lighting a
lantern, went out to the stable. The rickety little waggon was already
laden, and the girl led out the horse, Prince, only a degree less
rickety than the vehicle.

The poor creature looked wonderingly round at the night, at the
lantern, at their two figures, as if he could not believe that at that
hour, when every living thing was intended to be in shelter and at
rest, he was called upon to go out and labour. They put a stock of
candle-ends into the lantern, hung the latter to the off-side of the
load, and directed the horse onward, walking at his shoulder at first
during the uphill parts of the way, in order not to overload an animal
of so little vigour. To cheer themselves as well as they could, they
made an artificial morning with the lantern, some bread and butter, and
their own conversation, the real morning being far from come. Abraham,
as he more fully awoke (for he had moved in a sort of trance so far),
began to talk of the strange shapes assumed by the various dark objects
against the sky; of this tree that looked like a raging tiger springing
from a lair; of that which resembled a giant’s head.

When they had passed the little town of Stourcastle, dumbly somnolent
under its thick brown thatch, they reached higher ground. Still higher,
on their left, the elevation called Bulbarrow, or Bealbarrow, well-nigh
the highest in South Wessex, swelled into the sky, engirdled by its
earthen trenches. From hereabout the long road was fairly level for
some distance onward. They mounted in front of the waggon, and Abraham
grew reflective.

“Tess!” he said in a preparatory tone, after a silence.

“Yes, Abraham.”

“Bain’t you glad that we’ve become gentlefolk?”

“Not particular glad.”

“But you be glad that you ’m going to marry a gentleman?”

“What?” said Tess, lifting her face.

“That our great relation will help ’ee to marry a gentleman.”

“I? Our great relation? We have no such relation. What has put that
into your head?”

“I heard ’em talking about it up at Rolliver’s when I went to find
father. There’s a rich lady of our family out at Trantridge, and mother
said that if you claimed kin with the lady, she’d put ’ee in the way of
marrying a gentleman.”

His sister became abruptly still, and lapsed into a pondering silence.
Abraham talked on, rather for the pleasure of utterance than for
audition, so that his sister’s abstraction was of no account. He leant
back against the hives, and with upturned face made observations on the
stars, whose cold pulses were beating amid the black hollows above, in
serene dissociation from these two wisps of human life. He asked how
far away those twinklers were, and whether God was on the other side of
them. But ever and anon his childish prattle recurred to what impressed
his imagination even more deeply than the wonders of creation. If Tess
were made rich by marrying a gentleman, would she have money enough to
buy a spyglass so large that it would draw the stars as near to her as
Nettlecombe-Tout?

The renewed subject, which seemed to have impregnated the whole family,
filled Tess with impatience.

“Never mind that now!” she exclaimed.

“Did you say the stars were worlds, Tess?”

“Yes.”

“All like ours?”

“I don’t know; but I think so. They sometimes seem to be like the
apples on our stubbard-tree. Most of them splendid and sound—a few
blighted.”

“Which do we live on—a splendid one or a blighted one?”

“A blighted one.”

“’Tis very unlucky that we didn’t pitch on a sound one, when there were
so many more of ’em!”

“Yes.”

“Is it like that really, Tess?” said Abraham, turning to her much
impressed, on reconsideration of this rare information. “How would it
have been if we had pitched on a sound one?”

“Well, father wouldn’t have coughed and creeped about as he does, and
wouldn’t have got too tipsy to go on this journey; and mother wouldn’t
have been always washing, and never getting finished.”

“And you would have been a rich lady ready-made, and not have had to be
made rich by marrying a gentleman?”

“O Aby, don’t—don’t talk of that any more!”

Left to his reflections Abraham soon grew drowsy. Tess was not skilful
in the management of a horse, but she thought that she could take upon
herself the entire conduct of the load for the present and allow
Abraham to go to sleep if he wished to do so. She made him a sort of
nest in front of the hives, in such a manner that he could not fall,
and, taking the reins into her own hands, jogged on as before.

Prince required but slight attention, lacking energy for superfluous
movements of any sort. With no longer a companion to distract her, Tess
fell more deeply into reverie than ever, her back leaning against the
hives. The mute procession past her shoulders of trees and hedges
became attached to fantastic scenes outside reality, and the occasional
heave of the wind became the sigh of some immense sad soul,
conterminous with the universe in space, and with history in time.

Then, examining the mesh of events in her own life, she seemed to see
the vanity of her father’s pride; the gentlemanly suitor awaiting
herself in her mother’s fancy; to see him as a grimacing personage,
laughing at her poverty and her shrouded knightly ancestry. Everything
grew more and more extravagant, and she no longer knew how time passed.
A sudden jerk shook her in her seat, and Tess awoke from the sleep into
which she, too, had fallen.

They were a long way further on than when she had lost consciousness,
and the waggon had stopped. A hollow groan, unlike anything she had
ever heard in her life, came from the front, followed by a shout of
“Hoi there!”

The lantern hanging at her waggon had gone out, but another was shining
in her face—much brighter than her own had been. Something terrible had
happened. The harness was entangled with an object which blocked the
way.

In consternation Tess jumped down, and discovered the dreadful truth.
The groan had proceeded from her father’s poor horse Prince. The
morning mail-cart, with its two noiseless wheels, speeding along these
lanes like an arrow, as it always did, had driven into her slow and
unlighted equipage. The pointed shaft of the cart had entered the
breast of the unhappy Prince like a sword, and from the wound his
life’s blood was spouting in a stream, and falling with a hiss into the
road.

In her despair Tess sprang forward and put her hand upon the hole, with
the only result that she became splashed from face to skirt with the
crimson drops. Then she stood helplessly looking on. Prince also stood
firm and motionless as long as he could; till he suddenly sank down in
a heap.

By this time the mail-cart man had joined her, and began dragging and
unharnessing the hot form of Prince. But he was already dead, and,
seeing that nothing more could be done immediately, the mail-cart man
returned to his own animal, which was uninjured.

“You was on the wrong side,” he said. “I am bound to go on with the
mail-bags, so that the best thing for you to do is bide here with your
load. I’ll send somebody to help you as soon as I can. It is getting
daylight, and you have nothing to fear.”

He mounted and sped on his way; while Tess stood and waited. The
atmosphere turned pale, the birds shook themselves in the hedges,
arose, and twittered; the lane showed all its white features, and Tess
showed hers, still whiter. The huge pool of blood in front of her was
already assuming the iridescence of coagulation; and when the sun rose
a hundred prismatic hues were reflected from it. Prince lay alongside,
still and stark; his eyes half open, the hole in his chest looking
scarcely large enough to have let out all that had animated him.

“’Tis all my doing—all mine!” the girl cried, gazing at the spectacle.
“No excuse for me—none. What will mother and father live on now? Aby,
Aby!” She shook the child, who had slept soundly through the whole
disaster. “We can’t go on with our load—Prince is killed!”

When Abraham realized all, the furrows of fifty years were extemporized
on his young face.

“Why, I danced and laughed only yesterday!” she went on to herself. “To
think that I was such a fool!”

“’Tis because we be on a blighted star, and not a sound one, isn’t it,
Tess?” murmured Abraham through his tears.

In silence they waited through an interval which seemed endless. At
length a sound, and an approaching object, proved to them that the
driver of the mail-car had been as good as his word. A farmer’s man
from near Stourcastle came up, leading a strong cob. He was harnessed
to the waggon of beehives in the place of Prince, and the load taken on
towards Casterbridge.

The evening of the same day saw the empty waggon reach again the spot
of the accident. Prince had lain there in the ditch since the morning;
but the place of the blood-pool was still visible in the middle of the
road, though scratched and scraped over by passing vehicles. All that
was left of Prince was now hoisted into the waggon he had formerly
hauled, and with his hoofs in the air, and his shoes shining in the
setting sunlight, he retraced the eight or nine miles to Marlott.

Tess had gone back earlier. How to break the news was more than she
could think. It was a relief to her tongue to find from the faces of
her parents that they already knew of their loss, though this did not
lessen the self-reproach which she continued to heap upon herself for
her negligence.

But the very shiftlessness of the household rendered the misfortune a
less terrifying one to them than it would have been to a thriving
family, though in the present case it meant ruin, and in the other it
would only have meant inconvenience. In the Durbeyfield countenances
there was nothing of the red wrath that would have burnt upon the girl
from parents more ambitious for her welfare. Nobody blamed Tess as she
blamed herself.

When it was discovered that the knacker and tanner would give only a
very few shillings for Prince’s carcase because of his decrepitude,
Durbeyfield rose to the occasion.

“No,” said he stoically, “I won’t sell his old body. When we
d’Urbervilles was knights in the land, we didn’t sell our chargers for
cat’s meat. Let ’em keep their shillings! He’ve served me well in his
lifetime, and I won’t part from him now.”

He worked harder the next day in digging a grave for Prince in the
garden than he had worked for months to grow a crop for his family.
When the hole was ready, Durbeyfield and his wife tied a rope round the
horse and dragged him up the path towards it, the children following in
funeral train. Abraham and ’Liza-Lu sobbed, Hope and Modesty discharged
their griefs in loud blares which echoed from the walls; and when
Prince was tumbled in they gathered round the grave. The bread-winner
had been taken away from them; what would they do?

“Is he gone to heaven?” asked Abraham, between the sobs.

Then Durbeyfield began to shovel in the earth, and the children cried
anew. All except Tess. Her face was dry and pale, as though she
regarded herself in the light of a murderess.



V



The haggling business, which had mainly depended on the horse, be-
came disorganized forthwith. Distress, if not penury, loomed in the
distance. Durbeyfield was what was locally called a slack-twisted
fellow; he had good strength to work at times; but the times could not
be relied on to coincide with the hours of requirement; and, having
been unaccustomed to the regular toil of the day-labourer, he was not
particularly persistent when they did so coincide.

Tess, meanwhile, as the one who had dragged her parents into this
quagmire, was silently wondering what she could do to help them out of
it; and then her mother broached her scheme.

“We must take the ups wi’ the downs, Tess,” said she; “and never could
your high blood have been found out at a more called-for moment. You
must try your friends. Do ye know that there is a very rich Mrs
d’Urberville living on the outskirts o’ The Chase, who must be our
relation? You must go to her and claim kin, and ask for some help in
our trouble.”

“I shouldn’t care to do that,” says Tess. “If there is such a lady,
’twould be enough for us if she were friendly—not to expect her to give
us help.”

“You could win her round to do anything, my dear. Besides, perhaps
there’s more in it than you know of. I’ve heard what I’ve heard,
good-now.”

The oppressive sense of the harm she had done led Tess to be more
deferential than she might otherwise have been to the maternal wish;
but she could not understand why her mother should find such
satisfaction in contemplating an enterprise of, to her, such doubtful
profit. Her mother might have made inquiries, and have discovered that
this Mrs d’Urberville was a lady of unequalled virtues and charity. But
Tess’s pride made the part of poor relation one of particular distaste
to her.

“I’d rather try to get work,” she murmured.

“Durbeyfield, you can settle it,” said his wife, turning to where he
sat in the background. “If you say she ought to go, she will go.”

“I don’t like my children going and making themselves beholden to
strange kin,” murmured he. “I’m the head of the noblest branch o’ the
family, and I ought to live up to it.”

His reasons for staying away were worse to Tess than her own objections
to going. “Well, as I killed the horse, mother,” she said mournfully,
“I suppose I ought to do something. I don’t mind going and seeing her,
but you must leave it to me about asking for help. And don’t go
thinking about her making a match for me—it is silly.”

“Very well said, Tess!” observed her father sententiously.

“Who said I had such a thought?” asked Joan.

“I fancy it is in your mind, mother. But I’ll go.”

Rising early next day she walked to the hill-town called Shaston, and
there took advantage of a van which twice in the week ran from Shaston
eastward to Chaseborough, passing near Trantridge, the parish in which
the vague and mysterious Mrs d’Urberville had her residence.

Tess Durbeyfield’s route on this memorable morning lay amid the
north-eastern undulations of the Vale in which she had been born, and
in which her life had unfolded. The Vale of Blackmoor was to her the
world, and its inhabitants the races thereof. From the gates and stiles
of Marlott she had looked down its length in the wondering days of
infancy, and what had been mystery to her then was not much less than
mystery to her now. She had seen daily from her chamber-window towers,
villages, faint white mansions; above all, the town of Shaston standing
majestically on its height; its windows shining like lamps in the
evening sun. She had hardly ever visited the place, only a small tract
even of the Vale and its environs being known to her by close
inspection. Much less had she been far outside the valley. Every
contour of the surrounding hills was as personal to her as that of her
relatives’ faces; but for what lay beyond, her judgment was dependent
on the teaching of the village school, where she had held a leading
place at the time of her leaving, a year or two before this date.

In those early days she had been much loved by others of her own sex
and age, and had used to be seen about the village as one of three—all
nearly of the same year—walking home from school side by side; Tess the
middle one—in a pink print pinafore, of a finely reticulated pattern,
worn over a stuff frock that had lost its original colour for a
nondescript tertiary—marching on upon long stalky legs, in tight
stockings which had little ladder-like holes at the knees, torn by
kneeling in the roads and banks in search of vegetable and mineral
treasures; her then earth-coloured hair hanging like pot-hooks; the
arms of the two outside girls resting round the waist of Tess; her arms
on the shoulders of the two supporters.

As Tess grew older, and began to see how matters stood, she felt quite
a Malthusian towards her mother for thoughtlessly giving her so many
little sisters and brothers, when it was such a trouble to nurse and
provide for them. Her mother’s intelligence was that of a happy child:
Joan Durbeyfield was simply an additional one, and that not the eldest,
to her own long family of waiters on Providence.

However, Tess became humanely beneficent towards the small ones, and to
help them as much as possible she used, as soon as she left school, to
lend a hand at haymaking or harvesting on neighbouring farms; or, by
preference, at milking or butter-making processes, which she had learnt
when her father had owned cows; and being deft-fingered it was a kind
of work in which she excelled.

Every day seemed to throw upon her young shoulders more of the family
burdens, and that Tess should be the representative of the Durbeyfields
at the d’Urberville mansion came as a thing of course. In this instance
it must be admitted that the Durbeyfields were putting their fairest
side outward.

She alighted from the van at Trantridge Cross, and ascended on foot a
hill in the direction of the district known as The Chase, on the
borders of which, as she had been informed, Mrs d’Urberville’s seat,
The Slopes, would be found. It was not a manorial home in the ordinary
sense, with fields, and pastures, and a grumbling farmer, out of whom
the owner had to squeeze an income for himself and his family by hook
or by crook. It was more, far more; a country-house built for enjoyment
pure and simple, with not an acre of troublesome land attached to it
beyond what was required for residential purposes, and for a little
fancy farm kept in hand by the owner, and tended by a bailiff.

The crimson brick lodge came first in sight, up to its eaves in dense
evergreens. Tess thought this was the mansion itself till, passing
through the side wicket with some trepidation, and onward to a point at
which the drive took a turn, the house proper stood in full view. It
was of recent erection—indeed almost new—and of the same rich red
colour that formed such a contrast with the evergreens of the lodge.
Far behind the corner of the house—which rose like a geranium bloom
against the subdued colours around—stretched the soft azure landscape
of The Chase—a truly venerable tract of forest land, one of the few
remaining woodlands in England of undoubted primaeval date, wherein
Druidical mistletoe was still found on aged oaks, and where enormous
yew-trees, not planted by the hand of man grew as they had grown when
they were pollarded for bows. All this sylvan antiquity, however,
though visible from The Slopes, was outside the immediate boundaries of
the estate.

Everything on this snug property was bright, thriving, and well kept;
acres of glass-houses stretched down the inclines to the copses at
their feet. Everything looked like money—like the last coin issued from
the Mint. The stables, partly screened by Austrian pines and evergreen
oaks, and fitted with every late appliance, were as dignified as
Chapels-of-Ease. On the extensive lawn stood an ornamental tent, its
door being towards her.

Simple Tess Durbeyfield stood at gaze, in a half-alarmed attitude, on
the edge of the gravel sweep. Her feet had brought her onward to this
point before she had quite realized where she was; and now all was
contrary to her expectation.

“I thought we were an old family; but this is all new!” she said, in
her artlessness. She wished that she had not fallen in so readily with
her mother’s plans for “claiming kin,” and had endeavoured to gain
assistance nearer home.

The d’Urbervilles—or Stoke-d’Urbervilles, as they at first called
themselves—who owned all this, were a somewhat unusual family to find
in such an old-fashioned part of the country. Parson Tringham had
spoken truly when he said that our shambling John Durbeyfield was the
only really lineal representative of the old d’Urberville family
existing in the county, or near it; he might have added, what he knew
very well, that the Stoke-d’Urbervilles were no more d’Urbervilles of
the true tree then he was himself. Yet it must be admitted that this
family formed a very good stock whereon to regraft a name which sadly
wanted such renovation.

When old Mr Simon Stoke, latterly deceased, had made his fortune as an
honest merchant (some said money-lender) in the North, he decided to
settle as a county man in the South of England, out of hail of his
business district; and in doing this he felt the necessity of
recommencing with a name that would not too readily identify him with
the smart tradesman of the past, and that would be less commonplace
than the original bald, stark words. Conning for an hour in the British
Museum the pages of works devoted to extinct, half-extinct, obscured,
and ruined families appertaining to the quarter of England in which he
proposed to settle, he considered that d’Urberville looked and
sounded as well as any of them: and d’Urberville accordingly was
annexed to his own name for himself and his heirs eternally. Yet he was
not an extravagant-minded man in this, and in constructing his family
tree on the new basis was duly reasonable in framing his
inter-marriages and aristocratic links, never inserting a single title
above a rank of strict moderation.

Of this work of imagination poor Tess and her parents were naturally in
ignorance—much to their discomfiture; indeed, the very possibility of
such annexations was unknown to them; who supposed that, though to be
well-favoured might be the gift of fortune, a family name came by
nature.

Tess still stood hesitating like a bather about to make his plunge,
hardly knowing whether to retreat or to persevere, when a figure came
forth from the dark triangular door of the tent. It was that of a tall
young man, smoking.

He had an almost swarthy complexion, with full lips, badly moulded,
though red and smooth, above which was a well-groomed black moustache
with curled points, though his age could not be more than three- or
four-and-twenty. Despite the touches of barbarism in his contours,
there was a singular force in the gentleman’s face, and in his bold
rolling eye.

“Well, my Beauty, what can I do for you?” said he, coming forward. And
perceiving that she stood quite confounded: “Never mind me. I am Mr
d’Urberville. Have you come to see me or my mother?”

This embodiment of a d’Urberville and a namesake differed even more
from what Tess had expected than the house and grounds had differed.
She had dreamed of an aged and dignified face, the sublimation of all
the d’Urberville lineaments, furrowed with incarnate memories
representing in hieroglyphic the centuries of her family’s and
England’s history. But she screwed herself up to the work in hand,
since she could not get out of it, and answered—

“I came to see your mother, sir.”

“I am afraid you cannot see her—she is an invalid,” replied the present
representative of the spurious house; for this was Mr Alec, the only
son of the lately deceased gentleman. “Cannot I answer your purpose?
What is the business you wish to see her about?”

“It isn’t business—it is—I can hardly say what!”

“Pleasure?”

“Oh no. Why, sir, if I tell you, it will seem—”

Tess’s sense of a certain ludicrousness in her errand was now so strong
that, notwithstanding her awe of him, and her general discomfort at
being here, her rosy lips curved towards a smile, much to the
attraction of the swarthy Alexander.

“It is so very foolish,” she stammered; “I fear I can’t tell you!”

“Never mind; I like foolish things. Try again, my dear,” said he
kindly.

“Mother asked me to come,” Tess continued; “and, indeed, I was in the
mind to do so myself likewise. But I did not think it would be like
this. I came, sir, to tell you that we are of the same family as you.”

“Ho! Poor relations?”

“Yes.”

“Stokes?”

“No; d’Urbervilles.”

“Ay, ay; I mean d’Urbervilles.”

“Our names are worn away to Durbeyfield; but we have several proofs
that we are d’Urbervilles. Antiquarians hold we are,—and—and we have an
old seal, marked with a ramping lion on a shield, and a castle over
him. And we have a very old silver spoon, round in the bowl like a
little ladle, and marked with the same castle. But it is so worn that
mother uses it to stir the pea-soup.”

“A castle argent is certainly my crest,” said he blandly. “And my arms
a lion rampant.”

“And so mother said we ought to make ourselves beknown to you—as we’ve
lost our horse by a bad accident, and are the oldest branch o’ the
family.”

“Very kind of your mother, I’m sure. And I, for one, don’t regret her
step.” Alec looked at Tess as he spoke, in a way that made her blush a
little. “And so, my pretty girl, you’ve come on a friendly visit to us,
as relations?”

“I suppose I have,” faltered Tess, looking uncomfortable again.

“Well—there’s no harm in it. Where do you live? What are you?”

She gave him brief particulars; and responding to further inquiries
told him that she was intending to go back by the same carrier who had
brought her.

“It is a long while before he returns past Trantridge Cross. Supposing
we walk round the grounds to pass the time, my pretty Coz?”

Tess wished to abridge her visit as much as possible; but the young man
was pressing, and she consented to accompany him. He conducted her
about the lawns, and flower-beds, and conservatories; and thence to the
fruit-garden and greenhouses, where he asked her if she liked
strawberries.

“Yes,” said Tess, “when they come.”

“They are already here.” D’Urberville began gathering specimens of the
fruit for her, handing them back to her as he stooped; and, presently,
selecting a specially fine product of the “British Queen” variety, he
stood up and held it by the stem to her mouth.

“No—no!” she said quickly, putting her fingers between his hand and her
lips. “I would rather take it in my own hand.”

“Nonsense!” he insisted; and in a slight distress she parted her lips
and took it in.

They had spent some time wandering desultorily thus, Tess eating in a
half-pleased, half-reluctant state whatever d’Urberville offered her.
When she could consume no more of the strawberries he filled her little
basket with them; and then the two passed round to the rose-trees,
whence he gathered blossoms and gave her to put in her bosom. She
obeyed like one in a dream, and when she could affix no more he himself
tucked a bud or two into her hat, and heaped her basket with others in
the prodigality of his bounty. At last, looking at his watch, he said,
“Now, by the time you have had something to eat, it will be time for
you to leave, if you want to catch the carrier to Shaston. Come here,
and I’ll see what grub I can find.”

Stoke d’Urberville took her back to the lawn and into the tent, where
he left her, soon reappearing with a basket of light luncheon, which he
put before her himself. It was evidently the gentleman’s wish not to be
disturbed in this pleasant tête-à-tête by the servantry.

“Do you mind my smoking?” he asked.

“Oh, not at all, sir.”

He watched her pretty and unconscious munching through the skeins of
smoke that pervaded the tent, and Tess Durbeyfield did not divine, as
she innocently looked down at the roses in her bosom, that there behind
the blue narcotic haze was potentially the “tragic mischief” of her
drama—one who stood fair to be the blood-red ray in the spectrum of her
young life. She had an attribute which amounted to a disadvantage just
now; and it was this that caused Alec d’Urberville’s eyes to rivet
themselves upon her. It was a luxuriance of aspect, a fulness of
growth, which made her appear more of a woman than she really was. She
had inherited the feature from her mother without the quality it
denoted. It had troubled her mind occasionally, till her companions had
said that it was a fault which time would cure.

She soon had finished her lunch. “Now I am going home, sir,” she said,
rising.

“And what do they call you?” he asked, as he accompanied her along the
drive till they were out of sight of the house.

“Tess Durbeyfield, down at Marlott.”

“And you say your people have lost their horse?”

“I—killed him!” she answered, her eyes filling with tears as she gave
particulars of Prince’s death. “And I don’t know what to do for father
on account of it!”

“I must think if I cannot do something. My mother must find a berth for
you. But, Tess, no nonsense about ‘d’Urberville’;—‘Durbeyfield’ only,
you know—quite another name.”

“I wish for no better, sir,” said she with something of dignity.

For a moment—only for a moment—when they were in the turning of the
drive, between the tall rhododendrons and conifers, before the lodge
became visible, he inclined his face towards her as if—but, no: he
thought better of it, and let her go.

Thus the thing began. Had she perceived this meeting’s import she might
have asked why she was doomed to be seen and coveted that day by the
wrong man, and not by some other man, the right and desired one in all
respects—as nearly as humanity can supply the right and desired; yet to
him who amongst her acquaintance might have approximated to this kind,
she was but a transient impression, half forgotten.

In the ill-judged execution of the well-judged plan of things the call
seldom produces the comer, the man to love rarely coincides with the
hour for loving. Nature does not often say “See!” to her poor creature
at a time when seeing can lead to happy doing; or reply “Here!” to a
body’s cry of “Where?” till the hide-and-seek has become an irksome,
outworn game. We may wonder whether at the acme and summit of the
human progress these anachronisms will be corrected by a finer intuition,
a closer interaction of the social machinery than that which now jolts us
round and along; but such completeness is not to be prophesied, or even
conceived as possible. Enough that in the present case, as in millions,
it was not the two halves of a perfect whole that confronted each other
at the perfect moment; a missing counterpart wandered independently
about the earth waiting in crass obtuseness till the late time came.
Out of which maladroit delay sprang anxieties, disappointments, shocks,
catastrophes, and passing-strange destinies.

When d’Urberville got back to the tent he sat down astride on a chair,
reflecting, with a pleased gleam in his face. Then he broke into a loud
laugh.

“Well, I’m damned! What a funny thing! Ha-ha-ha! And what a crumby
girl!”



VI



Tess went down the hill to Trantridge Cross, and inattentively waited
to take her seat in the van returning from Chaseborough to Shaston. She
did not know what the other occupants said to her as she entered,
though she answered them; and when they had started anew she rode along
with an inward and not an outward eye.

One among her fellow-travellers addressed her more pointedly than any
had spoken before: “Why, you be quite a posy! And such roses in early
June!”

Then she became aware of the spectacle she presented to their surprised
vision: roses at her breasts; roses in her hat; roses and strawberries
in her basket to the brim. She blushed, and said confusedly that the
flowers had been given to her. When the passengers were not looking she
stealthily removed the more prominent blooms from her hat and placed
them in the basket, where she covered them with her handkerchief. Then
she fell to reflecting again, and in looking downwards a thorn of the
rose remaining in her breast accidentally pricked her chin. Like all
the cottagers in Blackmoor Vale, Tess was steeped in fancies and
prefigurative superstitions; she thought this an ill omen—the first she
had noticed that day.

The van travelled only so far as Shaston, and there were several miles
of pedestrian descent from that mountain-town into the vale to Marlott.
Her mother had advised her to stay here for the night, at the house of
a cottage-woman they knew, if she should feel too tired to come on; and
this Tess did, not descending to her home till the following afternoon.

When she entered the house she perceived in a moment from her mother’s
triumphant manner that something had occurred in the interim.

“Oh yes; I know all about it! I told ’ee it would be all right, and now
’tis proved!”

“Since I’ve been away? What has?” said Tess rather wearily.

Her mother surveyed the girl up and down with arch approval, and went
on banteringly: “So you’ve brought ’em round!”

“How do you know, mother?”

“I’ve had a letter.”

Tess then remembered that there would have been time for this.

“They say—Mrs d’Urberville says—that she wants you to look after a
little fowl-farm which is her hobby. But this is only her artful way of
getting ’ee there without raising your hopes. She’s going to own ’ee as
kin—that’s the meaning o’t.”

“But I didn’t see her.”

“You zid somebody, I suppose?”

“I saw her son.”

“And did he own ’ee?”

“Well—he called me Coz.”

“An’ I knew it! Jacky—he called her Coz!” cried Joan to her husband.
“Well, he spoke to his mother, of course, and she do want ’ee there.”

“But I don’t know that I am apt at tending fowls,” said the dubious
Tess.

“Then I don’t know who is apt. You’ve be’n born in the business, and
brought up in it. They that be born in a business always know more
about it than any ’prentice. Besides, that’s only just a show of
something for you to do, that you midn’t feel beholden.”

“I don’t altogether think I ought to go,” said Tess thoughtfully. “Who
wrote the letter? Will you let me look at it?”

“Mrs d’Urberville wrote it. Here it is.”

The letter was in the third person, and briefly informed Mrs
Durbeyfield that her daughter’s services would be useful to that lady
in the management of her poultry-farm, that a comfortable room would be
provided for her if she could come, and that the wages would be on a
liberal scale if they liked her.

“Oh—that’s all!” said Tess.

“You couldn’t expect her to throw her arms round ’ee, an’ to kiss and
to coll ’ee all at once.”

Tess looked out of the window.

“I would rather stay here with father and you,” she said.

“But why?”

“I’d rather not tell you why, mother; indeed, I don’t quite know why.”

A week afterwards she came in one evening from an unavailing search for
some light occupation in the immediate neighbourhood. Her idea had been
to get together sufficient money during the summer to purchase another
horse. Hardly had she crossed the threshold before one of the children
danced across the room, saying, “The gentleman’s been here!”

Her mother hastened to explain, smiles breaking from every inch of her
person. Mrs d’Urberville’s son had called on horseback, having been
riding by chance in the direction of Marlott. He had wished to know,
finally, in the name of his mother, if Tess could really come to manage
the old lady’s fowl-farm or not; the lad who had hitherto superintended
the birds having proved untrustworthy. “Mr d’Urberville says you must
be a good girl if you are at all as you appear; he knows you must be
worth your weight in gold. He is very much interested in ’ee—truth to
tell.”

Tess seemed for the moment really pleased to hear that she had won such
high opinion from a stranger when, in her own esteem, she had sunk so
low.

“It is very good of him to think that,” she murmured; “and if I was
quite sure how it would be living there, I would go any-when.”

“He is a mighty handsome man!”

“I don’t think so,” said Tess coldly.

“Well, there’s your chance, whether or no; and I’m sure he wears a
beautiful diamond ring!”

“Yes,” said little Abraham, brightly, from the window-bench; “and I
seed it! and it did twinkle when he put his hand up to his mistarshers.
Mother, why did our grand relation keep on putting his hand up to his
mistarshers?”

“Hark at that child!” cried Mrs Durbeyfield, with parenthetic
admiration.

“Perhaps to show his diamond ring,” murmured Sir John, dreamily, from
his chair.

“I’ll think it over,” said Tess, leaving the room.

“Well, she’s made a conquest o’ the younger branch of us, straight
off,” continued the matron to her husband, “and she’s a fool if she
don’t follow it up.”

“I don’t quite like my children going away from home,” said the
haggler. “As the head of the family, the rest ought to come to me.”

“But do let her go, Jacky,” coaxed his poor witless wife. “He’s struck
wi’ her—you can see that. He called her Coz! He’ll marry her, most
likely, and make a lady of her; and then she’ll be what her forefathers
was.”

John Durbeyfield had more conceit than energy or health, and this
supposition was pleasant to him.

“Well, perhaps that’s what young Mr d’Urberville means,” he admitted;
“and sure enough he mid have serious thoughts about improving his blood
by linking on to the old line. Tess, the little rogue! And have she
really paid ’em a visit to such an end as this?”

Meanwhile Tess was walking thoughtfully among the gooseberry-bushes in
the garden, and over Prince’s grave. When she came in her mother
pursued her advantage.

“Well, what be you going to do?” she asked.

“I wish I had seen Mrs d’Urberville,” said Tess.

“I think you mid as well settle it. Then you’ll see her soon enough.”

Her father coughed in his chair.

“I don’t know what to say!” answered the girl restlessly. “It is for
you to decide. I killed the old horse, and I suppose I ought to do
something to get ye a new one. But—but—I don’t quite like Mr
d’Urberville being there!”

The children, who had made use of this idea of Tess being taken up by
their wealthy kinsfolk (which they imagined the other family to be) as
a species of dolorifuge after the death of the horse, began to cry at
Tess’s reluctance, and teased and reproached her for hesitating.

“Tess won’t go-o-o and be made a la-a-dy of!—no, she says she
wo-o-on’t!” they wailed, with square mouths. “And we shan’t have a nice
new horse, and lots o’ golden money to buy fairlings! And Tess won’t
look pretty in her best cloze no mo-o-ore!”

Her mother chimed in to the same tune: a certain way she had of making
her labours in the house seem heavier than they were by prolonging them
indefinitely, also weighed in the argument. Her father alone preserved
an attitude of neutrality.

“I will go,” said Tess at last.

Her mother could not repress her consciousness of the nuptial vision
conjured up by the girl’s consent.

“That’s right! For such a pretty maid as ’tis, this is a fine chance!”

Tess smiled crossly.

“I hope it is a chance for earning money. It is no other kind of
chance. You had better say nothing of that silly sort about parish.”

Mrs Durbeyfield did not promise. She was not quite sure that she did
not feel proud enough, after the visitor’s remarks, to say a good deal.

Thus it was arranged; and the young girl wrote, agreeing to be ready to
set out on any day on which she might be required. She was duly
informed that Mrs d’Urberville was glad of her decision, and that a
spring-cart should be sent to meet her and her luggage at the top of
the Vale on the day after the morrow, when she must hold herself
prepared to start. Mrs d’Urberville’s handwriting seemed rather
masculine.

“A cart?” murmured Joan Durbeyfield doubtingly. “It might have been a
carriage for her own kin!”

Having at last taken her course Tess was less restless and abstracted,
going about her business with some self-assurance in the thought of
acquiring another horse for her father by an occupation which would not
be onerous. She had hoped to be a teacher at the school, but the fates
seemed to decide otherwise. Being mentally older than her mother she
did not regard Mrs Durbeyfield’s matrimonial hopes for her in a serious
aspect for a moment. The light-minded woman had been discovering good
matches for her daughter almost from the year of her birth.



VII



On the morning appointed for her departure Tess was awake before
dawn—at the marginal minute of the dark when the grove is still mute,
save for one prophetic bird who sings with a clear-voiced conviction
that he at least knows the correct time of day, the rest preserving
silence as if equally convinced that he is mistaken. She remained
upstairs packing till breakfast-time, and then came down in her
ordinary week-day clothes, her Sunday apparel being carefully folded in
her box.

Her mother expostulated. “You will never set out to see your folks
without dressing up more the dand than that?”

“But I am going to work!” said Tess.

“Well, yes,” said Mrs Durbeyfield; and in a private tone, “at first
there mid be a little pretence o’t.... But I think it will be wiser of
’ee to put your best side outward,” she added.

“Very well; I suppose you know best,” replied Tess with calm
abandonment.

And to please her parent the girl put herself quite in Joan’s hands,
saying serenely—“Do what you like with me, mother.”

Mrs Durbeyfield was only too delighted at this tractability. First she
fetched a great basin, and washed Tess’s hair with such thoroughness
that when dried and brushed it looked twice as much as at other times.
She tied it with a broader pink ribbon than usual. Then she put upon
her the white frock that Tess had worn at the club-walking, the airy
fulness of which, supplementing her enlarged coiffure, imparted to
her developing figure an amplitude which belied her age, and might
cause her to be estimated as a woman when she was not much more
than a child.

“I declare there’s a hole in my stocking-heel!” said Tess.

“Never mind holes in your stockings—they don’t speak! When I was a
maid, so long as I had a pretty bonnet the devil might ha’ found me in
heels.”

Her mother’s pride in the girl’s appearance led her to step back, like
a painter from his easel, and survey her work as a whole.

“You must zee yourself!” she cried. “It is much better than you was
t’other day.”

As the looking-glass was only large enough to reflect a very small
portion of Tess’s person at one time, Mrs Durbeyfield hung a black
cloak outside the casement, and so made a large reflector of the panes,
as it is the wont of bedecking cottagers to do. After this she went
downstairs to her husband, who was sitting in the lower room.

“I’ll tell ’ee what ’tis, Durbeyfield,” said she exultingly; “he’ll
never have the heart not to love her. But whatever you do, don’t zay
too much to Tess of his fancy for her, and this chance she has got. She
is such an odd maid that it mid zet her against him, or against going
there, even now. If all goes well, I shall certainly be for making some
return to pa’son at Stagfoot Lane for telling us—dear, good man!”

However, as the moment for the girl’s setting out drew nigh, when the
first excitement of the dressing had passed off, a slight misgiving
found place in Joan Durbeyfield’s mind. It prompted the matron to say
that she would walk a little way—as far as to the point where the
acclivity from the valley began its first steep ascent to the outer
world. At the top Tess was going to be met with the spring-cart sent by
the Stoke-d’Urbervilles, and her box had already been wheeled ahead
towards this summit by a lad with trucks, to be in readiness.

Seeing their mother put on her bonnet, the younger children clamoured
to go with her.

“I do want to walk a little-ways wi’ Sissy, now she’s going to marry
our gentleman-cousin, and wear fine cloze!”

“Now,” said Tess, flushing and turning quickly, “I’ll hear no more o’
that! Mother, how could you ever put such stuff into their heads?”

“Going to work, my dears, for our rich relation, and help get enough
money for a new horse,” said Mrs Durbeyfield pacifically.

“Goodbye, father,” said Tess, with a lumpy throat.

“Goodbye, my maid,” said Sir John, raising his head from his breast as
he suspended his nap, induced by a slight excess this morning in honour
of the occasion. “Well, I hope my young friend will like such a comely
sample of his own blood. And tell’n, Tess, that being sunk, quite, from
our former grandeur, I’ll sell him the title—yes, sell it—and at no
onreasonable figure.”

“Not for less than a thousand pound!” cried Lady Durbeyfield.

“Tell’n—I’ll take a thousand pound. Well, I’ll take less, when I come
to think o’t. He’ll adorn it better than a poor lammicken feller like
myself can. Tell’n he shall hae it for a hundred. But I won’t stand
upon trifles—tell’n he shall hae it for fifty—for twenty pound! Yes,
twenty pound—that’s the lowest. Dammy, family honour is family honour,
and I won’t take a penny less!”

Tess’s eyes were too full and her voice too choked to utter the
sentiments that were in her. She turned quickly, and went out.

So the girls and their mother all walked together, a child on each side
of Tess, holding her hand and looking at her meditatively from time to
time, as at one who was about to do great things; her mother just
behind with the smallest; the group forming a picture of honest beauty
flanked by innocence, and backed by simple-souled vanity. They followed
the way till they reached the beginning of the ascent, on the crest of
which the vehicle from Trantridge was to receive her, this limit having
been fixed to save the horse the labour of the last slope. Far away
behind the first hills the cliff-like dwellings of Shaston broke the
line of the ridge. Nobody was visible in the elevated road which
skirted the ascent save the lad whom they had sent on before them,
sitting on the handle of the barrow that contained all Tess’s worldly
possessions.

“Bide here a bit, and the cart will soon come, no doubt,” said Mrs
Durbeyfield. “Yes, I see it yonder!”

It had come—appearing suddenly from behind the forehead of the nearest
upland, and stopping beside the boy with the barrow. Her mother and the
children thereupon decided to go no farther, and bidding them a hasty
goodbye, Tess bent her steps up the hill.

They saw her white shape draw near to the spring-cart, on which her box
was already placed. But before she had quite reached it another vehicle
shot out from a clump of trees on the summit, came round the bend of
the road there, passed the luggage-cart, and halted beside Tess, who
looked up as if in great surprise.

Her mother perceived, for the first time, that the second vehicle was
not a humble conveyance like the first, but a spick-and-span gig or
dog-cart, highly varnished and equipped. The driver was a young man of
three- or four-and-twenty, with a cigar between his teeth; wearing a
dandy cap, drab jacket, breeches of the same hue, white neckcloth,
stick-up collar, and brown driving-gloves—in short, he was the hand-
some, horsey young buck who had visited Joan a week or two before
to get her answer about Tess.

Mrs Durbeyfield clapped her hands like a child. Then she looked down,
then stared again. Could she be deceived as to the meaning of this?

“Is dat the gentleman-kinsman who’ll make Sissy a lady?” asked the
youngest child.

Meanwhile the muslined form of Tess could be seen standing still,
undecided, beside this turn-out, whose owner was talking to her. Her
seeming indecision was, in fact, more than indecision: it was
misgiving. She would have preferred the humble cart. The young man
dismounted, and appeared to urge her to ascend. She turned her face
down the hill to her relatives, and regarded the little group.
Something seemed to quicken her to a determination; possibly the
thought that she had killed Prince. She suddenly stepped up; he mounted
beside her, and immediately whipped on the horse. In a moment they had
passed the slow cart with the box, and disappeared behind the shoulder
of the hill.

Directly Tess was out of sight, and the interest of the matter as a
drama was at an end, the little ones’ eyes filled with tears. The
youngest child said, “I wish poor, poor Tess wasn’t gone away to be a
lady!” and, lowering the corners of his lips, burst out crying. The new
point of view was infectious, and the next child did likewise, and then
the next, till the whole three of them wailed loud.

There were tears also in Joan Durbeyfield’s eyes as she turned to go
home. But by the time she had got back to the village she was passively
trusting to the favour of accident. However, in bed that night she
sighed, and her husband asked her what was the matter.

“Oh, I don’t know exactly,” she said. “I was thinking that perhaps it
would ha’ been better if Tess had not gone.”

“Oughtn’t ye to have thought of that before?”

“Well, ’tis a chance for the maid—Still, if ’twere the doing again, I
wouldn’t let her go till I had found out whether the gentleman is
really a good-hearted young man and choice over her as his kinswoman.”

“Yes, you ought, perhaps, to ha’ done that,” snored Sir John.

Joan Durbeyfield always managed to find consolation somewhere: “Well,
as one of the genuine stock, she ought to make her way with ’en, if she
plays her trump card aright. And if he don’t marry her afore he will
after. For that he’s all afire wi’ love for her any eye can see.”

“What’s her trump card? Her d’Urberville blood, you mean?”

“No, stupid; her face—as ’twas mine.”



VIII



Having mounted beside her, Alec d’Urberville drove rapidly along the
crest of the first hill, chatting compliments to Tess as they went, the
cart with her box being left far behind. Rising still, an immense
landscape stretched around them on every side; behind, the green valley
of her birth, before, a gray country of which she knew nothing except
from her first brief visit to Trantridge. Thus they reached the verge
of an incline down which the road stretched in a long straight descent
of nearly a mile.

Ever since the accident with her father’s horse Tess Durbeyfield,
courageous as she naturally was, had been exceedingly timid on wheels;
the least irregularity of motion startled her. She began to get uneasy
at a certain recklessness in her conductor’s driving.

“You will go down slow, sir, I suppose?” she said with attempted
unconcern.

D’Urberville looked round upon her, nipped his cigar with the tips of
his large white centre-teeth, and allowed his lips to smile slowly of
themselves.

“Why, Tess,” he answered, after another whiff or two, “it isn’t a brave
bouncing girl like you who asks that? Why, I always go down at full
gallop. There’s nothing like it for raising your spirits.”

“But perhaps you need not now?”

“Ah,” he said, shaking his head, “there are two to be reckoned with. It
is not me alone. Tib has to be considered, and she has a very queer
temper.”

“Who?”

“Why, this mare. I fancy she looked round at me in a very grim way just
then. Didn’t you notice it?”

“Don’t try to frighten me, sir,” said Tess stiffly.

“Well, I don’t. If any living man can manage this horse I can: I won’t
say any living man can do it—but if such has the power, I am he.”

“Why do you have such a horse?”

“Ah, well may you ask it! It was my fate, I suppose. Tib has killed one
chap; and just after I bought her she nearly killed me. And then, take
my word for it, I nearly killed her. But she’s touchy still, very
touchy; and one’s life is hardly safe behind her sometimes.”

They were just beginning to descend; and it was evident that the horse,
whether of her own will or of his (the latter being the more likely),
knew so well the reckless performance expected of her that she hardly
required a hint from behind.

Down, down, they sped, the wheels humming like a top, the dog-cart
rocking right and left, its axis acquiring a slightly oblique set in
relation to the line of progress; the figure of the horse rising and
falling in undulations before them. Sometimes a wheel was off the
ground, it seemed, for many yards; sometimes a stone was sent spinning
over the hedge, and flinty sparks from the horse’s hoofs outshone the
daylight. The aspect of the straight road enlarged with their advance,
the two banks dividing like a splitting stick; one rushing past at each
shoulder.

The wind blew through Tess’s white muslin to her very skin, and her
washed hair flew out behind. She was determined to show no open fear,
but she clutched d’Urberville’s rein-arm.

“Don’t touch my arm! We shall be thrown out if you do! Hold on round my
waist!”

She grasped his waist, and so they reached the bottom.

“Safe, thank God, in spite of your fooling!” said she, her face on
fire.

“Tess—fie! that’s temper!” said d’Urberville.

“’Tis truth.”

“Well, you need not let go your hold of me so thanklessly the moment
you feel yourself out of danger.”

She had not considered what she had been doing; whether he were man or
woman, stick or stone, in her involuntary hold on him. Recovering her
reserve, she sat without replying, and thus they reached the summit of
another declivity.

“Now then, again!” said d’Urberville.

“No, no!” said Tess. “Show more sense, do, please.”

“But when people find themselves on one of the highest points in the
county, they must get down again,” he retorted.

He loosened rein, and away they went a second time. D’Urberville turned
his face to her as they rocked, and said, in playful raillery: “Now
then, put your arms round my waist again, as you did before, my
Beauty.”

“Never!” said Tess independently, holding on as well as she could
without touching him.

“Let me put one little kiss on those holmberry lips, Tess, or even on
that warmed cheek, and I’ll stop—on my honour, I will!”

Tess, surprised beyond measure, slid farther back still on her seat, at
which he urged the horse anew, and rocked her the more.

“Will nothing else do?” she cried at length, in desperation, her large
eyes staring at him like those of a wild animal. This dressing her up
so prettily by her mother had apparently been to lamentable purpose.

“Nothing, dear Tess,” he replied.

“Oh, I don’t know—very well; I don’t mind!” she panted miserably.

He drew rein, and as they slowed he was on the point of imprinting the
desired salute, when, as if hardly yet aware of her own modesty, she
dodged aside. His arms being occupied with the reins there was left him
no power to prevent her manœuvre.

“Now, damn it—I’ll break both our necks!” swore her capriciously
passionate companion. “So you can go from your word like that, you
young witch, can you?”

“Very well,” said Tess, “I’ll not move since you be so determined! But
I—thought you would be kind to me, and protect me, as my kinsman!”

“Kinsman be hanged! Now!”

“But I don’t want anybody to kiss me, sir!” she implored, a big tear
beginning to roll down her face, and the corners of her mouth trembling
in her attempts not to cry. “And I wouldn’t ha’ come if I had known!”

He was inexorable, and she sat still, and d’Urberville gave her the
kiss of mastery. No sooner had he done so than she flushed with shame,
took out her handkerchief, and wiped the spot on her cheek that had
been touched by his lips. His ardour was nettled at the sight, for the
act on her part had been unconsciously done.

“You are mighty sensitive for a cottage girl!” said the young man.

Tess made no reply to this remark, of which, indeed, she did not quite
comprehend the drift, unheeding the snub she had administered by her
instinctive rub upon her cheek. She had, in fact, undone the kiss, as
far as such a thing was physically possible. With a dim sense that he
was vexed she looked steadily ahead as they trotted on near Melbury
Down and Wingreen, till she saw, to her consternation, that there was
yet another descent to be undergone.

“You shall be made sorry for that!” he resumed, his injured tone still
remaining, as he flourished the whip anew. “Unless, that is, you agree
willingly to let me do it again, and no handkerchief.”

She sighed. “Very well, sir!” she said. “Oh—let me get my hat!”

At the moment of speaking her hat had blown off into the road, their
present speed on the upland being by no means slow. D’Urberville pulled
up, and said he would get it for her, but Tess was down on the other
side.

She turned back and picked up the article.

“You look prettier with it off, upon my soul, if that’s possible,” he
said, contemplating her over the back of the vehicle. “Now then, up
again! What’s the matter?”

The hat was in place and tied, but Tess had not stepped forward.

“No, sir,” she said, revealing the red and ivory of her mouth as her
eye lit in defiant triumph; “not again, if I know it!”

“What—you won’t get up beside me?”

“No; I shall walk.”

“’Tis five or six miles yet to Trantridge.”

“I don’t care if ’tis dozens. Besides, the cart is behind.”

“You artful hussy! Now, tell me—didn’t you make that hat blow off on
purpose? I’ll swear you did!”

Her strategic silence confirmed his suspicion.

Then d’Urberville cursed and swore at her, and called her everything he
could think of for the trick. Turning the horse suddenly he tried to
drive back upon her, and so hem her in between the gig and the hedge.
But he could not do this short of injuring her.

“You ought to be ashamed of yourself for using such wicked words!”
cried Tess with spirit, from the top of the hedge into which she had
scrambled. “I don’t like ’ee at all! I hate and detest you! I’ll go
back to mother, I will!”

D’Urberville’s bad temper cleared up at sight of hers; and he laughed
heartily.

“Well, I like you all the better,” he said. “Come, let there be peace.
I’ll never do it any more against your will. My life upon it now!”

Still Tess could not be induced to remount. She did not, however,
object to his keeping his gig alongside her; and in this manner, at a
slow pace, they advanced towards the village of Trantridge. From time
to time d’Urberville exhibited a sort of fierce distress at the sight
of the tramping he had driven her to undertake by his misdemeanour. She
might in truth have safely trusted him now; but he had forfeited her
confidence for the time, and she kept on the ground progressing
thoughtfully, as if wondering whether it would be wiser to return home.
Her resolve, however, had been taken, and it seemed vacillating even to
childishness to abandon it now, unless for graver reasons. How could
she face her parents, get back her box, and disconcert the whole scheme
for the rehabilitation of her family on such sentimental grounds?

A few minutes later the chimneys of The Slopes appeared in view, and in
a snug nook to the right the poultry-farm and cottage of Tess’s
destination.



IX



The community of fowls to which Tess had been appointed as supervisor,
purveyor, nurse, surgeon, and friend made its headquarters in an old
thatched cottage standing in an enclosure that had once been a garden,
but was now a trampled and sanded square. The house was overrun with
ivy, its chimney being enlarged by the boughs of the parasite to the
aspect of a ruined tower. The lower rooms were entirely given over to
the birds, who walked about them with a proprietary air, as though the
place had been built by themselves, and not by certain dusty
copyholders who now lay east and west in the churchyard. The
descendants of these bygone owners felt it almost as a slight to their
family when the house which had so much of their affection, had cost so
much of their forefathers’ money, and had been in their possession for
several generations before the d’Urbervilles came and built here, was
indifferently turned into a fowl-house by Mrs Stoke-d’Urberville as
soon as the property fell into hand according to law. “’Twas good
enough for Christians in grandfather’s time,” they said.

The rooms wherein dozens of infants had wailed at their nursing now
resounded with the tapping of nascent chicks. Distracted hens in coops
occupied spots where formerly stood chairs supporting sedate
agriculturists. The chimney-corner and once-blazing hearth was now
filled with inverted beehives, in which the hens laid their eggs; while
out of doors the plots that each succeeding householder had carefully
shaped with his spade were torn by the cocks in wildest fashion.

The garden in which the cottage stood was surrounded by a wall, and
could only be entered through a door.

When Tess had occupied herself about an hour the next morning in
altering and improving the arrangements, according to her skilled ideas
as the daughter of a professed poulterer, the door in the wall opened
and a servant in white cap and apron entered. She had come from the
manor-house.

“Mrs d’Urberville wants the fowls as usual,” she said; but perceiving
that Tess did not quite understand, she explained, “Mis’ess is a old
lady, and blind.”

“Blind!” said Tess.

Almost before her misgiving at the news could find time to shape itself
she took, under her companion’s direction, two of the most beautiful of
the Hamburghs in her arms, and followed the maid-servant, who had
likewise taken two, to the adjacent mansion, which, though ornate and
imposing, showed traces everywhere on this side that some occupant of
its chambers could bend to the love of dumb creatures—feathers floating
within view of the front, and hen-coops standing on the grass.

In a sitting-room on the ground-floor, ensconced in an armchair with
her back to the light, was the owner and mistress of the estate, a
white-haired woman of not more than sixty, or even less, wearing a
large cap. She had the mobile face frequent in those whose sight has
decayed by stages, has been laboriously striven after, and reluctantly
let go, rather than the stagnant mien apparent in persons long
sightless or born blind. Tess walked up to this lady with her feathered
charges—one sitting on each arm.

“Ah, you are the young woman come to look after my birds?” said Mrs
d’Urberville, recognizing a new footstep. “I hope you will be kind to
them. My bailiff tells me you are quite the proper person. Well, where
are they? Ah, this is Strut! But he is hardly so lively to-day, is he?
He is alarmed at being handled by a stranger, I suppose. And Phena
too—yes, they are a little frightened—aren’t you, dears? But they will
soon get used to you.”

While the old lady had been speaking Tess and the other maid, in
obedience to her gestures, had placed the fowls severally in her lap,
and she had felt them over from head to tail, examining their beaks,
their combs, the manes of the cocks, their wings, and their claws. Her
touch enabled her to recognize them in a moment, and to discover if a
single feather were crippled or draggled. She handled their crops, and
knew what they had eaten, and if too little or too much; her face
enacting a vivid pantomime of the criticisms passing in her mind.

The birds that the two girls had brought in were duly returned to the
yard, and the process was repeated till all the pet cocks and hens had
been submitted to the old woman—Hamburghs, Bantams, Cochins, Brahmas,
Dorkings, and such other sorts as were in fashion just then—her
perception of each visitor being seldom at fault as she received the
bird upon her knees.

It reminded Tess of a Confirmation, in which Mrs d’Urberville was the
bishop, the fowls the young people presented, and herself and the
maid-servant the parson and curate of the parish bringing them up. At
the end of the ceremony Mrs d’Urberville abruptly asked Tess, wrinkling
and twitching her face into undulations, “Can you whistle?”

“Whistle, Ma’am?”

“Yes, whistle tunes.”

Tess could whistle like most other country-girls, though the
accomplishment was one which she did not care to profess in genteel
company. However, she blandly admitted that such was the fact.

“Then you will have to practise it every day. I had a lad who did it
very well, but he has left. I want you to whistle to my bullfinches; as
I cannot see them, I like to hear them, and we teach ’em airs that way.
Tell her where the cages are, Elizabeth. You must begin to-morrow, or
they will go back in their piping. They have been neglected these
several days.”

“Mr d’Urberville whistled to ’em this morning, ma’am,” said Elizabeth.

“He! Pooh!”

The old lady’s face creased into furrows of repugnance, and she made no
further reply.

Thus the reception of Tess by her fancied kinswoman terminated, and the
birds were taken back to their quarters. The girl’s surprise at Mrs
d’Urberville’s manner was not great; for since seeing the size of the
house she had expected no more. But she was far from being aware that
the old lady had never heard a word of the so-called kinship. She
gathered that no great affection flowed between the blind woman and her
son. But in that, too, she was mistaken. Mrs d’Urberville was not the
first mother compelled to love her offspring resentfully, and to be
bitterly fond.

In spite of the unpleasant initiation of the day before, Tess inclined
to the freedom and novelty of her new position in the morning when the
sun shone, now that she was once installed there; and she was curious
to test her powers in the unexpected direction asked of her, so as to
ascertain her chance of retaining her post. As soon as she was alone
within the walled garden she sat herself down on a coop, and seriously
screwed up her mouth for the long-neglected practice. She found her
former ability to have degenerated to the production of a hollow rush
of wind through the lips, and no clear note at all.

She remained fruitlessly blowing and blowing, wondering how she could
have so grown out of the art which had come by nature, till she became
aware of a movement among the ivy-boughs which cloaked the garden-wall
no less then the cottage. Looking that way she beheld a form springing
from the coping to the plot. It was Alec d’Urberville, whom she had not
set eyes on since he had conducted her the day before to the door of
the gardener’s cottage where she had lodgings.

“Upon my honour!” cried he, “there was never before such a beautiful
thing in Nature or Art as you look, ‘Cousin’ Tess (‘Cousin’ had a faint
ring of mockery). I have been watching you from over the wall—sitting
like Im-patience on a monument, and pouting up that pretty red mouth
to whistling shape, and whooing and whooing, and privately swearing,
and never being able to produce a note. Why, you are quite cross
because you can’t do it.”

“I may be cross, but I didn’t swear.”

“Ah! I understand why you are trying—those bullies! My mother wants
you to carry on their musical education. How selfish of her! As if at-
tending to these curst cocks and hens here were not enough work for
any girl. I would flatly refuse, if I were you.”

“But she wants me particularly to do it, and to be ready by to-morrow
morning.”

“Does she? Well then—I’ll give you a lesson or two.”

“Oh no, you won’t!” said Tess, withdrawing towards the door.

“Nonsense; I don’t want to touch you. See—I’ll stand on this side of
the wire-netting, and you can keep on the other; so you may feel quite
safe. Now, look here; you screw up your lips too harshly. There
’tis—so.”

He suited the action to the word, and whistled a line of “Take, O take
those lips away.” But the allusion was lost upon Tess.

“Now try,” said d’Urberville.

She attempted to look reserved; her face put on a sculptural severity.
But he persisted in his demand, and at last, to get rid of him, she did
put up her lips as directed for producing a clear note; laughing
distressfully, however, and then blushing with vexation that she had
laughed.

He encouraged her with “Try again!”

Tess was quite serious, painfully serious by this time; and she
tried—ultimately and unexpectedly emitting a real round sound. The
momentary pleasure of success got the better of her; her eyes enlarged,
and she involuntarily smiled in his face.

“That’s it! Now I have started you—you’ll go on beautifully. There—I
said I would not come near you; and, in spite of such temptation as
never before fell to mortal man, I’ll keep my word.... Tess, do you
think my mother a queer old soul?”

“I don’t know much of her yet, sir.”

“You’ll find her so; she must be, to make you learn to whistle to her
bullfinches. I am rather out of her books just now, but you will be
quite in favour if you treat her live-stock well. Good morning. If you
meet with any difficulties and want help here, don’t go to the bailiff,
come to me.”


It was in the economy of this régime that Tess Durbeyfield had
undertaken to fill a place. Her first day’s experiences were fairly
typical of those which followed through many succeeding days. A
familiarity with Alec d’Urberville’s presence—which that young man
carefully cultivated in her by playful dialogue, and by jestingly
calling her his cousin when they were alone—removed much of her
original shyness of him, without, however, implanting any feeling which
could engender shyness of a new and tenderer kind. But she was more
pliable under his hands than a mere companionship would have made her,
owing to her unavoidable dependence upon his mother, and, through that
lady’s comparative helplessness, upon him.

She soon found that whistling to the bullfinches in Mrs d’Urberville’s
room was no such onerous business when she had regained the art, for
she had caught from her musical mother numerous airs that suited those
songsters admirably. A far more satisfactory time than when she
practised in the garden was this whistling by the cages each morning.
Unrestrained by the young man’s presence she threw up her mouth, put
her lips near the bars, and piped away in easeful grace to the
attentive listeners.

Mrs d’Urberville slept in a large four-post bedstead hung with heavy
damask curtains, and the bullfinches occupied the same apartment, where
they flitted about freely at certain hours, and made little white spots
on the furniture and upholstery. Once while Tess was at the window
where the cages were ranged, giving her lesson as usual, she thought
she heard a rustling behind the bed. The old lady was not present, and
turning round the girl had an impression that the toes of a pair of
boots were visible below the fringe of the curtains. Thereupon her
whistling became so disjointed that the listener, if such there were,
must have discovered her suspicion of his presence. She searched the
curtains every morning after that, but never found anybody within them.
Alec d’Urberville had evidently thought better of his freak to terrify
her by an ambush of that kind.



X



Every village has its idiosyncrasy, its constitution, often its own code
of morality. The levity of some of the younger women in and about
Trantridge was marked, and was perhaps symptomatic of the choice
spirit who ruled The Slopes in that vicinity. The place had also a more
abiding defect; it drank hard. The staple conversation on the farms
around was on the uselessness of saving money; and smock-frocked
arithmeticians, leaning on their ploughs or hoes, would enter into
calculations of great nicety to prove that parish relief was a fuller
provision for a man in his old age than any which could result from
savings out of their wages during a whole lifetime.

The chief pleasure of these philosophers lay in going every Saturday
night, when work was done, to Chaseborough, a decayed market-town two
or three miles distant; and, returning in the small hours of the next
morning, to spend Sunday in sleeping off the dyspeptic effects of the
curious compounds sold to them as beer by the monopolizers of the
once-independent inns.

For a long time Tess did not join in the weekly pilgrimages. But under
pressure from matrons not much older than herself—for a field-man's
wages being as high at twenty-one as at forty, marriage was early
here—Tess at length consented to go. Her first experience of the
journey afforded her more enjoyment than she had expected, the
hilariousness of the others being quite contagious after her monotonous
attention to the poultry-farm all the week. She went again and again.
Being graceful and interesting, standing moreover on the momentary
threshold of womanhood, her appearance drew down upon her some sly
regards from loungers in the streets of Chaseborough; hence, though
sometimes her journey to the town was made independently, she always
searched for her fellows at nightfall, to have the protection of their
companionship homeward.

This had gone on for a month or two when there came a Saturday in
September, on which a fair and a market coincided; and the pilgrims
from Trantridge sought double delights at the inns on that account.
Tess's occupations made her late in setting out, so that her comrades
reached the town long before her. It was a fine September evening, just
before sunset, when yellow lights struggle with blue shades in hairlike
lines, and the atmosphere itself forms a prospect without aid from more
solid objects, except the innumerable winged insects that dance in it.
Through this low-lit mistiness Tess walked leisurely along.

She did not discover the coincidence of the market with the fair till
she had reached the place, by which time it was close upon dusk. Her
limited marketing was soon completed; and then as usual she began to
look about for some of the Trantridge cottagers.

At first she could not find them, and she was informed that most of
them had gone to what they called a private little jig at the house of
a hay-trusser and peat-dealer who had transactions with their farm. He
lived in an out-of-the-way nook of the townlet, and in trying to find
her course thither her eyes fell upon Mr d'Urberville standing at a
street corner.

"What—my Beauty? You here so late?" he said.

She told him that she was simply waiting for company homeward.

"I'll see you again," said he over her shoulder as she went on down the
back lane.

Approaching the hay-trussers, she could hear the fiddled notes of a
reel proceeding from some building in the rear; but no sound of dancing
was audible—an exceptional state of things for these parts, where as a
rule the stamping drowned the music. The front door being open she
could see straight through the house into the garden at the back as far
as the shades of night would allow; and nobody appearing to her knock,
she traversed the dwelling and went up the path to the outhouse whence
the sound had attracted her.

It was a windowless erection used for storage, and from the open door
there floated into the obscurity a mist of yellow radiance, which at
first Tess thought to be illuminated smoke. But on drawing nearer she
perceived that it was a cloud of dust, lit by candles within the
outhouse, whose beams upon the haze carried forward the outline of the
doorway into the wide night of the garden.

When she came close and looked in she beheld indistinct forms racing
up and down to the figure of the dance, the silence of their footfalls
arising from their being overshoe in "scroff"—that is to say, the
powdery residuum from the storage of peat and other products, the
stirring of which by their turbulent feet created the nebulosity that
involved the scene. Through this floating, fusty débris of peat and
hay, mixed with the perspirations and warmth of the dancers, and
forming together a sort of vegeto-human pollen, the muted fiddles
feebly pushed their notes, in marked contrast to the spirit with which
the measure was trodden out. They coughed as they danced, and laughed
as they coughed. Of the rushing couples there could barely be discerned
more than the high lights—the indistinctness shaping them to satyrs
clasping nymphs—a multiplicity of Pans whirling a multiplicity of
Syrinxes; Lotis attempting to elude Priapus, and always failing.

At intervals a couple would approach the doorway for air, and the haze
no longer veiling their features, the demigods resolved themselves into
the homely personalities of her own next-door neighbours. Could
Trantridge in two or three short hours have metamorphosed itself thus
madly!

Some Sileni of the throng sat on benches and hay-trusses by the wall;
and one of them recognized her.

"The maids don't think it respectable to dance at The Flower-de-Luce,"
he explained. "They don't like to let everybody see which be their
fancy-men. Besides, the house sometimes shuts up just when their jints
begin to get greased. So we come here and send out for liquor."

"But when be any of you going home?" asked Tess with some anxiety.

"Now—a'most directly. This is all but the last jig."

She waited. The reel drew to a close, and some of the party were in the
mind of starting. But others would not, and another dance was formed.
This surely would end it, thought Tess. But it merged in yet another.
She became restless and uneasy; yet, having waited so long, it was
necessary to wait longer; on account of the fair the roads were dotted
with roving characters of possibly ill intent; and, though not fearful
of measurable dangers, she feared the unknown. Had she been near
Marlott she would have had less dread.

"Don't ye be nervous, my dear good soul," expostulated, between his
coughs, a young man with a wet face and his straw hat so far back upon
his head that the brim encircled it like the nimbus of a saint. "What's
yer hurry? To-morrow is Sunday, thank God, and we can sleep it off in
church-time. Now, have a turn with me?"

She did not abhor dancing, but she was not going to dance here. The
movement grew more passionate: the fiddlers behind the luminous pillar
of cloud now and then varied the air by playing on the wrong side of
the bridge or with the back of the bow. But it did not matter; the
panting shapes spun onwards.

They did not vary their partners if their inclination were to stick to
previous ones. Changing partners simply meant that a satisfactory
choice had not as yet been arrived at by one or other of the pair, and
by this time every couple had been suitably matched. It was then that
the ecstasy and the dream began, in which emotion was the matter of the
universe, and matter but an adventitious intrusion likely to hinder you
from spinning where you wanted to spin.

Suddenly there was a dull thump on the ground: a couple had fallen, and
lay in a mixed heap. The next couple, unable to check its progress,
came toppling over the obstacle. An inner cloud of dust rose around the
prostrate figures amid the general one of the room, in which a
twitching entanglement of arms and legs was discernible.

"You shall catch it for this, my gentleman, when you get home!" burst
in female accents from the human heap—those of the unhappy partner of
the man whose clumsiness had caused the mishap; she happened also to
be his recently married wife, in which assortment there was nothing
unusual at Trantridge as long as any affection remained between wedded
couples; and, indeed, it was not uncustomary in their later lives, to
avoid making odd lots of the single people between whom there might be
a warm understanding.

A loud laugh from behind Tess's back, in the shade of the garden,
united with the titter within the room. She looked round, and saw the
red coal of a cigar: Alec d'Urberville was standing there alone. He
beckoned to her, and she reluctantly retreated towards him.

"Well, my Beauty, what are you doing here?"

She was so tired after her long day and her walk that she confided her
trouble to him—that she had been waiting ever since he saw her to have
their company home, because the road at night was strange to her. "But
it seems they will never leave off, and I really think I will wait no
longer."

"Certainly do not. I have only a saddle-horse here to-day; but come to
The Flower-de-Luce, and I'll hire a trap, and drive you home with me."

Tess, though flattered, had never quite got over her original mistrust
of him, and, despite their tardiness, she preferred to walk home with
the work-folk. So she answered that she was much obliged to him, but
would not trouble him. "I have said that I will wait for 'em, and they
will expect me to now."

"Very well, Miss Independence. Please yourself... Then I shall not
hurry... My good Lord, what a kick-up they are having there!"

He had not put himself forward into the light, but some of them had
perceived him, and his presence led to a slight pause and a
consideration of how the time was flying. As soon as he had re-lit a
cigar and walked away the Trantridge people began to collect themselves
from amid those who had come in from other farms, and prepared to leave
in a body. Their bundles and baskets were gathered up, and half an hour
later, when the clock-chime sounded a quarter past eleven, they were
straggling along the lane which led up the hill towards their homes.

It was a three-mile walk, along a dry white road, made whiter to-night
by the light of the moon.

Tess soon perceived as she walked in the flock, sometimes with this
one, sometimes with that, that the fresh night air was producing
staggerings and serpentine courses among the men who had partaken too
freely; some of the more careless women also were wandering in their
gait—to wit, a dark virago, Car Darch, dubbed Queen of Spades, till
lately a favourite of d'Urberville's; Nancy, her sister, nicknamed the
Queen of Diamonds; and the young married woman who had already tumbled
down. Yet however terrestrial and lumpy their appearance just now to
the mean unglamoured eye, to themselves the case was different. They
followed the road with a sensation that they were soaring along in a
supporting medium, possessed of original and profound thoughts,
themselves and surrounding nature forming an organism of which all the
parts harmoniously and joyously interpenetrated each other. They were
as sublime as the moon and stars above them, and the moon and stars
were as ardent as they.

Tess, however, had undergone such painful experiences of this kind in
her father's house that the discovery of their condition spoilt the
pleasure she was beginning to feel in the moonlight journey. Yet she
stuck to the party, for reasons above given.

In the open highway they had progressed in scattered order; but now
their route was through a field-gate, and the foremost finding a
difficulty in opening it, they closed up together.

This leading pedestrian was Car the Queen of Spades, who carried a
wicker-basket containing her mother's groceries, her own draperies, and
other purchases for the week. The basket being large and heavy, Car had
placed it for convenience of porterage on the top of her head, where it
rode on in jeopardized balance as she walked with arms akimbo.

"Well—whatever is that a-creeping down thy back, Car Darch?" said one
of the group suddenly.

All looked at Car. Her gown was a light cotton print, and from the back
of her head a kind of rope could be seen descending to some distance
below her waist, like a Chinaman's queue.

"'Tis her hair falling down," said another.

No; it was not her hair: it was a black stream of something oozing from
her basket, and it glistened like a slimy snake in the cold still rays
of the moon.

"'Tis treacle," said an observant matron.

Treacle it was. Car's poor old grandmother had a weakness for the sweet
stuff. Honey she had in plenty out of her own hives, but treacle was
what her soul desired, and Car had been about to give her a treat of
surprise. Hastily lowering the basket the dark girl found that the
vessel containing the syrup had been smashed within.

By this time there had arisen a shout of laughter at the extraordinary
appearance of Car's back, which irritated the dark queen into getting
rid of the disfigurement by the first sudden means available, and
independently of the help of the scoffers. She rushed excitedly into
the field they were about to cross, and flinging herself flat on her
back upon the grass, began to wipe her gown as well as she could by
spinning horizontally on the herbage and dragging herself over it upon
her elbows.

The laughter rang louder; they clung to the gate, to the posts, rested
on their staves, in the weakness engendered by their convulsions at the
spectacle of Car. Our heroine, who had hitherto held her peace, at this
wild moment could not help joining in with the rest.

It was a misfortune—in more ways than one. No sooner did the dark
queen hear the soberer richer note of Tess among those of the other
work-people than a long-smouldering sense of rivalry inflamed her to
madness. She sprang to her feet and closely faced the object of her
dislike.

"How darest th' laugh at me, hussy!" she cried.

"I couldn't really help it when t'others did," apologized Tess, still
tittering.

"Ah, th'st think th' beest everybody, dostn't, because th' beest first
favourite with He just now! But stop a bit, my lady, stop a bit! I'm as
good as two of such! Look here—here's at 'ee!"

To Tess's horror the dark queen began stripping off the bodice of her
gown—which for the added reason of its ridiculed condition she was only
too glad to be free of—till she had bared her plump neck, shoulders,
and arms to the moonshine, under which they looked as luminous and
beautiful as some Praxitelean creation, in their possession of the
faultless rotundities of a lusty country-girl. She closed her fists and
squared up at Tess.

"Indeed, then, I shall not fight!" said the latter majestically; "and
if I had known you was of that sort, I wouldn't have so let myself down
as to come with such a whorage as this is!"

The rather too inclusive speech brought down a torrent of vituperation
from other quarters upon fair Tess's unlucky head, particularly from
the Queen of Diamonds, who having stood in the relations to
d'Urberville that Car had also been suspected of, united with the
latter against the common enemy. Several other women also chimed in,
with an animus which none of them would have been so fatuous as to show
but for the rollicking evening they had passed. Thereupon, finding Tess
unfairly browbeaten, the husbands and lovers tried to make peace by
defending her; but the result of that attempt was directly to increase
the war.

Tess was indignant and ashamed. She no longer minded the loneliness of
the way and the lateness of the hour; her one object was to get away
from the whole crew as soon as possible. She knew well enough that the
better among them would repent of their passion next day. They were all
now inside the field, and she was edging back to rush off alone when a
horseman emerged almost silently from the corner of the hedge that
screened the road, and Alec d'Urberville looked round upon them.

"What the devil is all this row about, work-folk?" he asked.

The explanation was not readily forthcoming; and, in truth, he did not
require any. Having heard their voices while yet some way off he had
ridden creepingly forward, and learnt enough to satisfy himself.

Tess was standing apart from the rest, near the gate. He bent over
towards her. "Jump up behind me," he whispered, "and we'll get shot of
the screaming cats in a jiffy!"

She felt almost ready to faint, so vivid was her sense of the crisis.
At almost any other moment of her life she would have refused such
proffered aid and company, as she had refused them several times
before; and now the loneliness would not of itself have forced her to
do otherwise. But coming as the invitation did at the particular
juncture when fear and indignation at these adversaries could be
transformed by a spring of the foot into a triumph over them, she
abandoned herself to her impulse, climbed the gate, put her toe upon
his instep, and scrambled into the saddle behind him. The pair were
speeding away into the distant gray by the time that the contentious
revellers became aware of what had happened.

The Queen of Spades forgot the stain on her bodice, and stood beside
the Queen of Diamonds and the new-married, staggering young woman—all
with a gaze of fixity in the direction in which the horse's tramp was
diminishing into silence on the road.

"What be ye looking at?" asked a man who had not observed the incident.

"Ho-ho-ho!" laughed dark Car.

"Hee-hee-hee!" laughed the tippling bride, as she steadied herself on
the arm of her fond husband.

"Heu-heu-heu!" laughed dark Car's mother, stroking her moustache as she
explained laconically: "Out of the frying-pan into the fire!"

Then these children of the open air, whom even excess of alcohol could
scarce injure permanently, betook themselves to the field-path; and as
they went there moved onward with them, around the shadow of each
one's head, a circle of opalized light, formed by the moon's rays upon the
glistening sheet of dew. Each pedestrian could see no halo but his or
her own, which never deserted the head-shadow, whatever its vulgar
unsteadiness might be; but adhered to it, and persistently beautified
it; till the erratic motions seemed an inherent part of the irradiation,
and the fumes of their breathing a component of the night's mist; and
the spirit of the scene, and of the moonlight, and of Nature, seemed
harmoniously to mingle with the spirit of wine.



XI



The twain cantered along for some time without speech, Tess as she
clung to him still panting in her triumph, yet in other respects
dubious. She had perceived that the horse was not the spirited one he
sometimes rose, and felt no alarm on that score, though her seat was
precarious enough despite her tight hold of him. She begged him to slow
the animal to a walk, which Alec accordingly did.

"Neatly done, was it not, dear Tess?" he said by and by.

"Yes!" said she. "I am sure I ought to be much obliged to you."

"And are you?"

She did not reply.

"Tess, why do you always dislike my kissing you?"

"I suppose—because I don't love you."

"You are quite sure?"

"I am angry with you sometimes!"

"Ah, I half feared as much." Nevertheless, Alec did not object to that
confession. He knew that anything was better then frigidity. "Why
haven't you told me when I have made you angry?"

"You know very well why. Because I cannot help myself here."

"I haven't offended you often by love-making?"

"You have sometimes."

"How many times?"

"You know as well as I—too many times."

"Every time I have tried?"

She was silent, and the horse ambled along for a considerable distance,
till a faint luminous fog, which had hung in the hollows all the
evening, became general and enveloped them. It seemed to hold the
moonlight in suspension, rendering it more pervasive than in clear air.
Whether on this account, or from absent-mindedness, or from sleepiness,
she did not perceive that they had long ago passed the point at which
the lane to Trantridge branched from the highway, and that her
conductor had not taken the Trantridge track.

She was inexpressibly weary. She had risen at five o'clock every
morning of that week, had been on foot the whole of each day, and on
this evening had in addition walked the three miles to Chaseborough,
waited three hours for her neighbours without eating or drinking, her
impatience to start them preventing either; she had then walked a mile
of the way home, and had undergone the excitement of the quarrel, till,
with the slow progress of their steed, it was now nearly one o'clock.
Only once, however, was she overcome by actual drowsiness. In that
moment of oblivion her head sank gently against him.

D'Urberville stopped the horse, withdrew his feet from the stirrups,
turned sideways on the saddle, and enclosed her waist with his arm to
support her.

This immediately put her on the defensive, and with one of those sudden
impulses of reprisal to which she was liable she gave him a little push
from her. In his ticklish position he nearly lost his balance and only
just avoided rolling over into the road, the horse, though a powerful
one, being fortunately the quietest he rode.

"That is devilish unkind!" he said. "I mean no harm—only to keep you
from falling."

She pondered suspiciously, till, thinking that this might after all be
true, she relented, and said quite humbly, "I beg your pardon, sir."

"I won't pardon you unless you show some confidence in me. Good God!"
he burst out, "what am I, to be repulsed so by a mere chit like you?
For near three mortal months have you trifled with my feelings, eluded
me, and snubbed me; and I won't stand it!"

"I'll leave you to-morrow, sir."

"No, you will not leave me to-morrow! Will you, I ask once more, show
your belief in me by letting me clasp you with my arm? Come, between us
two and nobody else, now. We know each other well; and you know that I
love you, and think you the prettiest girl in the world, which you are.
Mayn't I treat you as a lover?"

She drew a quick pettish breath of objection, writhing uneasily on her
seat, looked far ahead, and murmured, "I don't know—I wish—how can I
say yes or no when—"

He settled the matter by clasping his arm round her as he desired, and
Tess expressed no further negative. Thus they sidled slowly onward till
it struck her they had been advancing for an unconscionable time—far
longer than was usually occupied by the short journey from Chase-
borough, even at this walking pace, and that they were no longer
on hard road, but in a mere trackway.

"Why, where be we?" she exclaimed.

"Passing by a wood."

"A wood—what wood? Surely we are quite out of the road?"

"A bit of The Chase—the oldest wood in England. It is a lovely night,
and why should we not prolong our ride a little?"

"How could you be so treacherous!" said Tess, between archness and
real dismay, and getting rid of his arm by pulling open his fingers one by
one, though at the risk of slipping off herself. "Just when I've been
putting such trust in you, and obliging you to please you, because I
thought I had wronged you by that push! Please set me down, and let me
walk home."

"You cannot walk home, darling, even if the air were clear. We are
miles away from Trantridge, if I must tell you, and in this growing fog
you might wander for hours among these trees."

"Never mind that," she coaxed. "Put me down, I beg you. I don't mind
where it is; only let me get down, sir, please!"

"Very well, then, I will—on one condition. Having brought you here to
this out-of-the-way place, I feel myself responsible for your safe-
conduct home, whatever you may yourself feel about it. As to your
getting to Trantridge without assistance, it is quite impossible; for,
to tell the truth, dear, owing to this fog, which so disguises
everything, I don't quite know where we are myself. Now, if you will
promise to wait beside the horse while I walk through the bushes till I
come to some road or house, and ascertain exactly our whereabouts, I'll
deposit you here willingly. When I come back I'll give you full
directions, and if you insist upon walking you may; or you may ride—at
your pleasure."

She accepted these terms, and slid off on the near side, though not
till he had stolen a cursory kiss. He sprang down on the other side.

"I suppose I must hold the horse?" said she.

"Oh no; it's not necessary," replied Alec, patting the panting
creature. "He's had enough of it for to-night."

He turned the horse's head into the bushes, hitched him on to a bough,
and made a sort of couch or nest for her in the deep mass of dead
leaves.

"Now, you sit there," he said. "The leaves have not got damp as yet.
Just give an eye to the horse—it will be quite sufficient."

He took a few steps away from her, but, returning, said, "By the bye,
Tess, your father has a new cob to-day. Somebody gave it to him."

"Somebody? You!"

D'Urberville nodded.

"O how very good of you that is!" she exclaimed, with a painful sense
of the awkwardness of having to thank him just then.

"And the children have some toys."

"I didn't know—you ever sent them anything!" she murmured, much moved.
"I almost wish you had not—yes, I almost wish it!"

"Why, dear?"

"It—hampers me so."

"Tessy—don't you love me ever so little now?"

"I'm grateful," she reluctantly admitted. "But I fear I do not—" The
sudden vision of his passion for herself as a factor in this result so
distressed her that, beginning with one slow tear, and then following
with another, she wept outright.

"Don't cry, dear, dear one! Now sit down here, and wait till I come."
She passively sat down amid the leaves he had heaped, and shivered
slightly. "Are you cold?" he asked.

"Not very—a little."

He touched her with his fingers, which sank into her as into down. "You
have only that puffy muslin dress on—how's that?"

"It's my best summer one. 'Twas very warm when I started, and I didn't
know I was going to ride, and that it would be night."

"Nights grow chilly in September. Let me see." He pulled off a light
overcoat that he had worn, and put it round her tenderly. "That's
it—now you'll feel warmer," he continued. "Now, my pretty, rest there;
I shall soon be back again."

Having buttoned the overcoat round her shoulders he plunged into the
webs of vapour which by this time formed veils between the trees. She
could hear the rustling of the branches as he ascended the adjoining
slope, till his movements were no louder than the hopping of a bird,
and finally died away. With the setting of the moon the pale light
lessened, and Tess became invisible as she fell into reverie upon the
leaves where he had left her.

In the meantime Alec d'Urberville had pushed on up the slope to clear
his genuine doubt as to the quarter of The Chase they were in. He had,
in fact, ridden quite at random for over an hour, taking any turning
that came to hand in order to prolong companionship with her, and
giving far more attention to Tess's moonlit person than to any wayside
object. A little rest for the jaded animal being desirable, he did not
hasten his search for landmarks. A clamber over the hill into the
adjoining vale brought him to the fence of a highway whose contours he
recognized, which settled the question of their whereabouts.
D'Urberville thereupon turned back; but by this time the moon had quite
gone down, and partly on account of the fog The Chase was wrapped in
thick darkness, although morning was not far off. He was obliged to
advance with outstretched hands to avoid contact with the boughs, and
discovered that to hit the exact spot from which he had started was at
first entirely beyond him. Roaming up and down, round and round, he at
length heard a slight movement of the horse close at hand; and the
sleeve of his overcoat unexpectedly caught his foot.

"Tess!" said d'Urberville.

There was no answer. The obscurity was now so great that he could see
absolutely nothing but a pale nebulousness at his feet, which
represented the white muslin figure he had left upon the dead leaves.
Everything else was blackness alike. D'Urberville stooped; and heard a
gentle regular breathing. He knelt and bent lower, till her breath
warmed his face, and in a moment his cheek was in contact with hers.
She was sleeping soundly, and upon her eyelashes there lingered tears.

Darkness and silence ruled everywhere around. Above them rose the
primaeval yews and oaks of The Chase, in which there poised gentle
roosting birds in their last nap; and about them stole the hopping
rabbits and hares. But, might some say, where was Tess's guardian
angel? where was the providence of her simple faith? Perhaps, like that
other god of whom the ironical Tishbite spoke, he was talking, or he
was pursuing, or he was in a journey, or he was sleeping and not to be
awaked.

Already at that hour some sons of the forest were stirring and striking
lights in not very distant cottages; good and sincere hearts among them,
patterns of honesty and devotion and chivalry. And powerful horses were
stamping in their stalls, ready to be let out into the morning air. But
no dart or thread of intelligence inspired these men to harness and mount,
or gave them by any means the least inkling that their sister was in the
hands of the spoiler; and they did not come that way.


Why it was that upon this beautiful feminine tissue, sensitive as
gossamer, and practically blank as snow as yet, there should have been
traced such a coarse pattern as it was doomed to receive; why so often
the coarse appropriates the finer thus, the wrong man the woman, the
wrong woman the man, many thousand years of analytical philosophy have
failed to explain to our sense of order. One may, indeed, admit the
possibility of a retribution lurking in the present catastrophe.
Doubtless some of Tess d'Urberville's mailed ancestors rollicking home
from a fray had dealt the same measure even more ruthlessly towards
peasant girls of their time. But though to visit the sins of the
fathers upon the children may be a morality good enough for divinities,
it is scorned by average human nature; and it therefore does not mend
the matter.

As Tess's own people down in those retreats are never tired of saying
among each other in their fatalistic way: "It was to be." There lay the
pity of it. An immeasurable social chasm was to divide our heroine's
personality thereafter from that previous self of hers who stepped from
her mother's door to try her fortune at Trantridge poultry-farm.



　　　　　　　END OF PHASE THE FIRST




Phase the Second: Maiden No More



XII



The basket was heavy and the bundle was large, but she lugged them
along like a person who did not find her especial burden in material
things. Occasionally she stopped to rest in a mechanical way by some
gate or post; and then, giving the baggage another hitch upon her full
round arm, went steadily on again.

It was a Sunday morning in late October, about four months after Tess
Durbeyfield's arrival at Trantridge, and some few weeks subsequent to
the night ride in The Chase. The time was not long past daybreak, and
the yellow luminosity upon the horizon behind her back lighted the
ridge towards which her face was set—the barrier of the vale wherein
she had of late been a stranger—which she would have to climb over to
reach her birthplace. The ascent was gradual on this side, and the soil
and scenery differed much from those within Blakemore Vale. Even the
character and accent of the two peoples had shades of difference,
despite the amalgamating effects of a roundabout railway; so that,
though less than twenty miles from the place of her sojourn at
Trantridge, her native village had seemed a far-away spot. The
field-folk shut in there traded northward and westward, travelled,
courted, and married northward and westward, thought northward and
westward; those on this side mainly directed their energies and
attention to the east and south.

The incline was the same down which d'Urberville had driven her so
wildly on that day in June. Tess went up the remainder of its length
without stopping, and on reaching the edge of the escarpment gazed over
the familiar green world beyond, now half-veiled in mist. It was always
beautiful from here; it was terribly beautiful to Tess to-day, for
since her eyes last fell upon it she had learnt that the serpent hisses
where the sweet birds sing, and her views of life had been totally
changed for her by the lesson. Verily another girl than the simple one
she had been at home was she who, bowed by thought, stood still here,
and turned to look behind her. She could not bear to look forward into
the Vale.

Ascending by the long white road that Tess herself had just laboured
up, she saw a two-wheeled vehicle, beside which walked a man, who held
up his hand to attract her attention.

She obeyed the signal to wait for him with unspeculative repose, and in
a few minutes man and horse stopped beside her.

"Why did you slip away by stealth like this?" said d'Urberville, with
upbraiding breathlessness; "on a Sunday morning, too, when people were
all in bed! I only discovered it by accident, and I have been driving
like the deuce to overtake you. Just look at the mare. Why go off like
this? You know that nobody wished to hinder your going. And how
unnecessary it has been for you to toil along on foot, and encumber
yourself with this heavy load! I have followed like a madman, simply to
drive you the rest of the distance, if you won't come back."

"I shan't come back," said she.

"I thought you wouldn't—I said so! Well, then, put up your basket, and
let me help you on."

She listlessly placed her basket and bundle within the dog-cart, and
stepped up, and they sat side by side. She had no fear of him now, and
in the cause of her confidence her sorrow lay.

D'Urberville mechanically lit a cigar, and the journey was continued
with broken unemotional conversation on the commonplace objects by the
wayside. He had quite forgotten his struggle to kiss her when, in the
early summer, they had driven in the opposite direction along the same
road. But she had not, and she sat now, like a puppet, replying to his
remarks in monosyllables. After some miles they came in view of the
clump of trees beyond which the village of Marlott stood. It was only
then that her still face showed the least emotion, a tear or two
beginning to trickle down.

"What are you crying for?" he coldly asked.

"I was only thinking that I was born over there," murmured Tess.

"Well—we must all be born somewhere."

"I wish I had never been born—there or anywhere else!"

"Pooh! Well, if you didn't wish to come to Trantridge why did you
come?"

She did not reply.

"You didn't come for love of me, that I'll swear."

"'Tis quite true. If I had gone for love o' you, if I had ever
sincerely loved you, if I loved you still, I should not so loathe and
hate myself for my weakness as I do now!... My eyes were dazed by you
for a little, and that was all."

He shrugged his shoulders. She resumed—

"I didn't understand your meaning till it was too late."

"That's what every woman says."

"How can you dare to use such words!" she cried, turning impetuously
upon him, her eyes flashing as the latent spirit (of which he was to
see more some day) awoke in her. "My God! I could knock you out of the
gig! Did it never strike your mind that what every woman says some
women may feel?"

"Very well," he said, laughing; "I am sorry to wound you. I did wrong—I
admit it." He dropped into some little bitterness as he continued:
"Only you needn't be so everlastingly flinging it in my face. I am
ready to pay to the uttermost farthing. You know you need not work in
the fields or the dairies again. You know you may clothe yourself with
the best, instead of in the bald plain way you have lately affected, as
if you couldn't get a ribbon more than you earn."

Her lip lifted slightly, though there was little scorn, as a rule, in
her large and impulsive nature.

"I have said I will not take anything more from you, and I will not—I
cannot! I should be your creature to go on doing that, and I won't!"

"One would think you were a princess from your manner, in addition to
a true and original d'Urberville—ha! ha! Well, Tess, dear, I can say no
more. I suppose I am a bad fellow—a damn bad fellow. I was born bad,
and I have lived bad, and I shall die bad in all probability. But, upon
my lost soul, I won't be bad towards you again, Tess. And if certain
circumstances should arise—you understand—in which you are in the least
need, the least difficulty, send me one line, and you shall have by
return whatever you require. I may not be at Trantridge—I am going to
London for a time—I can't stand the old woman. But all letters will be
forwarded."

She said that she did not wish him to drive her further, and they
stopped just under the clump of trees. D'Urberville alighted, and
lifted her down bodily in his arms, afterwards placing her articles on
the ground beside her. She bowed to him slightly, her eye just
lingering in his; and then she turned to take the parcels for
departure.

Alec d'Urberville removed his cigar, bent towards her, and said—

"You are not going to turn away like that, dear! Come!"

"If you wish," she answered indifferently. "See how you've mastered
me!"

She thereupon turned round and lifted her face to his, and remained
like a marble term while he imprinted a kiss upon her cheek—half
perfunctorily, half as if zest had not yet quite died out. Her eyes
vaguely rested upon the remotest trees in the lane while the kiss was
given, as though she were nearly unconscious of what he did.

"Now the other side, for old acquaintance' sake."

She turned her head in the same passive way, as one might turn at the
request of a sketcher or hairdresser, and he kissed the other side, his
lips touching cheeks that were damp and smoothly chill as the skin of
the mushrooms in the fields around.

"You don't give me your mouth and kiss me back. You never willingly do
that—you'll never love me, I fear."

"I have said so, often. It is true. I have never really and truly loved
you, and I think I never can." She added mournfully, "Perhaps, of all
things, a lie on this thing would do the most good to me now; but I
have honour enough left, little as 'tis, not to tell that lie. If I did
love you, I may have the best o' causes for letting you know it. But I
don't."

He emitted a laboured breath, as if the scene were getting rather
oppressive to his heart, or to his conscience, or to his gentility.

"Well, you are absurdly melancholy, Tess. I have no reason for
flattering you now, and I can say plainly that you need not be so sad.
You can hold your own for beauty against any woman of these parts,
gentle or simple; I say it to you as a practical man and well-wisher.
If you are wise you will show it to the world more than you do before
it fades... And yet, Tess, will you come back to me! Upon my soul, I
don't like to let you go like this!"

"Never, never! I made up my mind as soon as I saw—what I ought to have
seen sooner; and I won't come."

"Then good morning, my four months' cousin—good-bye!"

He leapt up lightly, arranged the reins, and was gone between the tall
red-berried hedges.

Tess did not look after him, but slowly wound along the crooked lane.
It was still early, and though the sun's lower limb was just free of
the hill, his rays, ungenial and peering, addressed the eye rather than
the touch as yet. There was not a human soul near. Sad October and her
sadder self seemed the only two existences haunting that lane.

As she walked, however, some footsteps approached behind her, the
footsteps of a man; and owing to the briskness of his advance he was
close at her heels and had said "Good morning" before she had been long
aware of his propinquity. He appeared to be an artisan of some sort,
and carried a tin pot of red paint in his hand. He asked in a
business-like manner if he should take her basket, which she permitted
him to do, walking beside him.

"It is early to be astir this Sabbath morn!" he said cheerfully.

"Yes," said Tess.

"When most people are at rest from their week's work."

She also assented to this.

"Though I do more real work to-day than all the week besides."

"Do you?"

"All the week I work for the glory of man, and on Sunday for the glory
of God. That's more real than the other—hey? I have a little to do here
at this stile." The man turned, as he spoke, to an opening at the
roadside leading into a pasture. "If you'll wait a moment," he added,
"I shall not be long."

As he had her basket she could not well do otherwise; and she waited,
observing him. He set down her basket and the tin pot, and stirring the
paint with the brush that was in it began painting large square letters
on the middle board of the three composing the stile, placing a comma
after each word, as if to give pause while that word was driven well
home to the reader's heart—

　　　　　THY, DAMNATION, SLUMBERETH, NOT.
　　　　　　　　　　　　　　　　　　　　　　　　　2 Pet. ii. 3.

Against the peaceful landscape, the pale, decaying tints of the copses,
the blue air of the horizon, and the lichened stile-boards, these
staring vermilion words shone forth. They seemed to shout themselves
out and make the atmosphere ring. Some people might have cried "Alas,
poor Theology!" at the hideous defacement—the last grotesque phase of a
creed which had served mankind well in its time. But the words entered
Tess with accusatory horror. It was as if this man had known her recent
history; yet he was a total stranger.

Having finished his text he picked up her basket, and she mechanically
resumed her walk beside him.

"Do you believe what you paint?" she asked in low tones.

"Believe that tex? Do I believe in my own existence!"

"But," said she tremulously, "suppose your sin was not of your own
seeking?"

He shook his head.

"I cannot split hairs on that burning query," he said. "I have walked
hundreds of miles this past summer, painting these texes on every wall,
gate, and stile the length and breadth of this district. I leave their
application to the hearts of the people who read 'em."

"I think they are horrible," said Tess. "Crushing! Killing!"

"That's what they are meant to be!" he replied in a trade voice. "But
you should read my hottest ones—them I kips for slums and seaports.
They'd make ye wriggle! Not but what this is a very good tex for rural
districts.... Ah—there's a nice bit of blank wall up by that barn
standing to waste. I must put one there—one that it will be good for
dangerous young females like yerself to heed. Will ye wait, missy?"

"No," said she; and taking her basket Tess trudged on. A little way
forward she turned her head. The old gray wall began to advertise a
similar fiery lettering to the first, with a strange and unwonted mien,
as if distressed at duties it had never before been called upon to
perform. It was with a sudden flush that she read and realized what was
to be the inscription he was now halfway through—

　　　　　THOU, SHALT, NOT, COMMIT—

Her cheerful friend saw her looking, stopped his brush, and shouted—

"If you want to ask for edification on these things of moment, there's
a very earnest good man going to preach a charity-sermon to-day in the
parish you are going to—Mr Clare of Emminster. I'm not of his
persuasion now, but he's a good man, and he'll expound as well as any
parson I know. 'Twas he began the work in me."

But Tess did not answer; she throbbingly resumed her walk, her eyes
fixed on the ground. "Pooh—I don't believe God said such things!" she
murmured contemptuously when her flush had died away.

A plume of smoke soared up suddenly from her father's chimney, the
sight of which made her heart ache. The aspect of the interior, when
she reached it, made her heart ache more. Her mother, who had just
come　downstairs, turned to greet her from the fireplace, where she was
kindling barked-oak twigs under the breakfast kettle. The young
children were still above, as was also her father, it being Sunday
morning, when he felt justified in lying an additional half-hour.

"Well!—my dear Tess!" exclaimed her surprised mother, jumping up and
kissing the girl. "How be ye? I didn't see you till you was in upon me!
Have you come home to be married?"

"No, I have not come for that, mother."

"Then for a holiday?"

"Yes—for a holiday; for a long holiday," said Tess.

"What, isn't your cousin going to do the handsome thing?"

"He's not my cousin, and he's not going to marry me."

Her mother eyed her narrowly.

"Come, you have not told me all," she said.

Then Tess went up to her mother, put her face upon Joan's neck, and
told.

"And yet th'st not got him to marry 'ee!" reiterated her mother. "Any
woman would have done it but you, after that!"

"Perhaps any woman would except me."

"It would have been something like a story to come back with, if you
had!" continued Mrs Durbeyfield, ready to burst into tears of vexation.
"After all the talk about you and him which has reached us here, who
would have expected it to end like this! Why didn't ye think of doing
some good for your family instead o' thinking only of yourself? See how
I've got to teave and slave, and your poor weak father with his heart
clogged like a dripping-pan. I did hope for something to come out o'
this! To see what a pretty pair you and he made that day when you drove
away together four months ago! See what he has given us—all, as we
thought, because we were his kin. But if he's not, it must have been
done because of his love for 'ee. And yet you've not got him to marry!"

Get Alec d'Urberville in the mind to marry her! He marry her! On
matrimony he had never once said a word. And what if he had? How a
convulsive snatching at social salvation might have impelled her to
answer him she could not say. But her poor foolish mother little knew
her present feeling towards this man. Perhaps it was unusual in the
circumstances, unlucky, unaccountable; but there it was; and this, as
she had said, was what made her detest herself. She had never wholly
cared for him; she did not at all care for him now. She had dreaded
him, winced before him, succumbed to adroit advantages he took of her
helplessness; then, temporarily blinded by his ardent manners, had been
stirred to confused surrender awhile: had suddenly despised and
disliked him, and had run away. That was all. Hate him she did not
quite; but he was dust and ashes to her, and even for her name's sake
she scarcely wished to marry him.

"You ought to have been more careful if you didn't mean to get him to
make you his wife!"

"O mother, my mother!" cried the agonized girl, turning passionately
upon her parent as if her poor heart would break. "How could I be
expected to know? I was a child when I left this house four months ago.
Why didn't you tell me there was danger in men-folk? Why didn't you
warn me? Ladies know what to fend hands against, because they read
novels that tell them of these tricks; but I never had the chance o'
learning in that way, and you did not help me!"

Her mother was subdued.

"I thought if I spoke of his fond feelings and what they might lead to,
you would be hontish wi' him and lose your chance," she murmured,
wiping her eyes with her apron. "Well, we must make the best of it, I
suppose. 'Tis nater, after all, and what do please God!"



XIII



The event of Tess Durbeyfield's return from the manor of her bogus
kinsfolk was rumoured abroad, if rumour be not too large a word for a
space of a square mile. In the afternoon several young girls of
Marlott, former schoolfellows and acquaintances of Tess, called to see
her, arriving dressed in their best starched and ironed, as became
visitors to a person who had made a transcendent conquest (as they
supposed), and sat round the room looking at her with great curiosity.
For the fact that it was this said thirty-first cousin, Mr
d'Urberville, who had fallen in love with her, a gentleman not
altogether local, whose reputation as a reckless gallant and
heartbreaker was beginning to spread beyond the immediate boundaries of
Trantridge, lent Tess's supposed position, by its fearsomeness, a far
higher fascination that it would have exercised if unhazardous.

Their interest was so deep that the younger ones whispered when her
back was turned—

"How pretty she is; and how that best frock do set her off! I believe
it cost an immense deal, and that it was a gift from him."

Tess, who was reaching up to get the tea-things from the
corner-cupboard, did not hear these commentaries. If she had heard
them, she might soon have set her friends right on the matter. But her
mother heard, and Joan's simple vanity, having been denied the hope of
a dashing marriage, fed itself as well as it could upon the sensation
of a dashing flirtation. Upon the whole she felt gratified, even though
such a limited and evanescent triumph should involve her daughter's
reputation; it might end in marriage yet, and in the warmth of her
responsiveness to their admiration she invited her visitors to stay to
tea.

Their chatter, their laughter, their good-humoured innuendoes, above
all, their flashes and flickerings of envy, revived Tess's spirits
also; and, as the evening wore on, she caught the infection of their
excitement, and grew almost gay. The marble hardness left her face, she
moved with something of her old bounding step, and flushed in all her
young beauty.

At moments, in spite of thought, she would reply to their inquiries
with a manner of superiority, as if recognizing that her experiences in
the field of courtship had, indeed, been slightly enviable. But so far
was she from being, in the words of Robert South, "in love with her own
ruin," that the illusion was transient as lightning; cold reason came
back to mock her spasmodic weakness; the ghastliness of her momentary
pride would convict her, and recall her to reserved listlessness again.

And the despondency of the next morning's dawn, when it was no longer
Sunday, but Monday; and no best clothes; and the laughing visitors were
gone, and she awoke alone in her old bed, the innocent younger children
breathing softly around her. In place of the excitement of her return,
and the interest it had inspired, she saw before her a long and stony
highway which she had to tread, without aid, and with little sympathy.
Her depression was then terrible, and she could have hidden herself in
a tomb.

In the course of a few weeks Tess revived sufficiently to show herself
so far as was necessary to get to church one Sunday morning. She liked
to hear the chanting—such as it was—and the old Psalms, and to join in
the Morning Hymn. That innate love of melody, which she had inherited
from her ballad-singing mother, gave the simplest music a power over
her which could well-nigh drag her heart out of her bosom at times.

To be as much out of observation as possible for reasons of her own,
and to escape the gallantries of the young men, she set out before the
chiming began, and took a back seat under the gallery, close to the
lumber, where only old men and women came, and where the bier stood on
end among the churchyard tools.

Parishioners dropped in by twos and threes, deposited themselves in
rows before her, rested three-quarters of a minute on their foreheads
as if they were praying, though they were not; then sat up, and looked
around. When the chants came on, one of her favourites happened to be
chosen among the rest—the old double chant "Langdon"—but she did not
know what it was called, though she would much have liked to know. She
thought, without exactly wording the thought, how strange and god-like
was a composer's power, who from the grave could lead through sequences
of emotion, which he alone had felt at first, a girl like her who had
never heard of his name, and never would have a clue to his
personality.

The people who had turned their heads turned them again as the service
proceeded; and at last observing her, they whispered to each other. She
knew what their whispers were about, grew sick at heart, and felt that
she could come to church no more.

The bedroom which she shared with some of the children formed her
retreat more continually than ever. Here, under her few square yards of
thatch, she watched winds, and snows, and rains, gorgeous sunsets, and
successive moons at their full. So close kept she that at length almost
everybody thought she had gone away.

The only exercise that Tess took at this time was after dark; and it
was then, when out in the woods, that she seemed least solitary. She
knew how to hit to a hair's-breadth that moment of evening when the
light and the darkness are so evenly balanced that the constraint of
day and the suspense of night neutralize each other, leaving absolute
mental liberty. It is then that the plight of being alive becomes
attenuated to its least possible dimensions. She had no fear of the
shadows; her sole idea seemed to be to shun mankind—or rather that cold
accretion called the world, which, so terrible in the mass, is so
unformidable, even pitiable, in its units.

On these lonely hills and dales her quiescent glide was of a piece with
the element she moved in. Her flexuous and stealthy figure became an
integral part of the scene. At times her whimsical fancy would
intensify natural processes around her till they seemed a part of her
own story. Rather they became a part of it; for the world is only a
psychological phenomenon, and what they seemed they were. The midnight
airs and gusts, moaning amongst the tightly-wrapped buds and bark of
the winter twigs, were formulae of bitter reproach. A wet day was the
expression of irremediable grief at her weakness in the mind of some
vague ethical being whom she could not class definitely as the God of
her childhood, and could not comprehend as any other.

But this encompassment of her own characterization, based on shreds of
convention, peopled by phantoms and voices antipathetic to her, was a
sorry and mistaken creation of Tess's fancy—a cloud of moral hobgoblins
by which she was terrified without reason. It was they that were out of
harmony with the actual world, not she. Walking among the sleeping
birds in the hedges, watching the skipping rabbits on a moonlit warren,
or standing under a pheasant-laden bough, she looked upon herself as a
figure of Guilt intruding into the haunts of Innocence. But all the
while she was making a distinction where there was no difference.
Feeling herself in antagonism, she was quite in accord. She had been
made to break an accepted social law, but no law known to the
environment in which she fancied herself such an anomaly.



XIV



It was a hazy sunrise in August. The denser nocturnal vapours, attacked
by the warm beams, were dividing and shrinking into isolated fleeces
within hollows and coverts, where they waited till they should be dried
away to nothing.

The sun, on account of the mist, had a curious sentient, personal look,
demanding the masculine pronoun for its adequate expression. His
present aspect, coupled with the lack of all human forms in the scene,
explained the old-time heliolatries in a moment. One could feel that a
saner religion had never prevailed under the sky. The luminary was a
golden-haired, beaming, mild-eyed, God-like creature, gazing down in
the vigour and intentness of youth upon an earth that was brimming with
interest for him.

His light, a little later, broke though chinks of cottage shutters,
throwing stripes like red-hot pokers upon cupboards, chests of drawers,
and other furniture within; and awakening harvesters who were not
already astir.

But of all ruddy things that morning the brightest were two broad arms
of painted wood, which rose from the margin of yellow cornfield hard by
Marlott village. They, with two others below, formed the revolving
Maltese cross of the reaping-machine, which had been brought to the
field on the previous evening to be ready for operations this day. The
paint with which they were smeared, intensified in hue by the sunlight,
imparted to them a look of having been dipped in liquid fire.

The field had already been "opened"; that is to say, a lane a few feet
wide had been hand-cut through the wheat along the whole circumference
of the field for the first passage of the horses and machine.

Two groups, one of men and lads, the other of women, had come down the
lane just at the hour when the shadows of the eastern hedge-top struck
the west hedge midway, so that the heads of the groups were enjoying
sunrise while their feet were still in the dawn. They disappeared from
the lane between the two stone posts which flanked the nearest
field-gate.

Presently there arose from within a ticking like the love-making of the
grasshopper. The machine had begun, and a moving concatenation of three
horses and the aforesaid long rickety machine was visible over the
gate, a driver sitting upon one of the hauling horses, and an attendant
on the seat of the implement. Along one side of the field the whole
wain went, the arms of the mechanical reaper revolving slowly, till it
passed down the hill quite out of sight. In a minute it came up on the
other side of the field at the same equable pace; the glistening brass
star in the forehead of the fore horse first catching the eye as it
rose into view over the stubble, then the bright arms, and then the
whole machine.

The narrow lane of stubble encompassing the field grew wider with each
circuit, and the standing corn was reduced to a smaller area as the
morning wore on. Rabbits, hares, snakes, rats, mice, retreated inwards
as into a fastness, unaware of the ephemeral nature of their refuge,
and of the doom that awaited them later in the day when, their covert
shrinking to a more and more horrible narrowness, they were huddled
together, friends and foes, till the last few yards of upright wheat
fell also under the teeth of the unerring reaper, and they were every
one put to death by the sticks and stones of the harvesters.

The reaping-machine left the fallen corn behind it in little heaps,
each heap being of the quantity for a sheaf; and upon these the active
binders in the rear laid their hands—mainly women, but some of them men
in print shirts, and trousers supported round their waists by leather
straps, rendering useless the two buttons behind, which twinkled and
bristled with sunbeams at every movement of each wearer, as if they
were a pair of eyes in the small of his back.

But those of the other sex were the most interesting of this company of
binders, by reason of the charm which is acquired by woman when she
becomes part and parcel of outdoor nature, and is not merely an object
set down therein as at ordinary times. A field-man is a personality
afield; a field-woman is a portion of the field; she had somehow lost
her own margin, imbibed the essence of her surrounding, and assimilated
herself with it.

The women—or rather girls, for they were mostly young—wore drawn cotton
bonnets with great flapping curtains to keep off the sun, and gloves to
prevent their hands being wounded by the stubble. There was one wearing
a pale pink jacket, another in a cream-coloured tight-sleeved gown,
another in a petticoat as red as the arms of the reaping-machine; and
others, older, in the brown-rough "wropper" or over-all—the
old-established and most appropriate dress of the field-woman, which
the young ones were abandoning. This morning the eye returns
involuntarily to the girl in the pink cotton jacket, she being the most
flexuous and finely-drawn figure of them all. But her bonnet is pulled
so far over her brow that none of her face is disclosed while she
binds, though her complexion may be guessed from a stray twine or two
of dark brown hair which extends below the curtain of her bonnet.
Perhaps one reason why she seduces casual attention is that she never
courts it, though the other women often gaze around them.

Her binding proceeds with clock-like monotony. From the sheaf last
finished she draws a handful of ears, patting their tips with her left
palm to bring them even. Then, stooping low, she moves forward,
gathering the corn with both hands against her knees, and pushing her
left gloved hand under the bundle to meet the right on the other side,
holding the corn in an embrace like that of a lover. She brings the
ends of the bond together, and kneels on the sheaf while she ties it,
beating back her skirts now and then when lifted by the breeze. A bit
of her naked arm is visible between the buff leather of the gauntlet
and the sleeve of her gown; and as the day wears on its feminine
smoothness becomes scarified by the stubble and bleeds.

At intervals she stands up to rest, and to retie her disarranged apron,
or to pull her bonnet straight. Then one can see the oval face of a
handsome young woman with deep dark eyes and long heavy clinging
tresses, which seem to clasp in a beseeching way anything they fall
against. The cheeks are paler, the teeth more regular, the red lips
thinner than is usual in a country-bred girl.

It is Tess Durbeyfield, otherwise d'Urberville, somewhat changed—the
same, but not the same; at the present stage of her existence living as
a stranger and an alien here, though it was no strange land that she
was in. After a long seclusion she had come to a resolve to undertake
outdoor work in her native village, the busiest season of the year in
the agricultural world having arrived, and nothing that she could do
within the house being so remunerative for the time as harvesting in
the fields.

The movements of the other women were more or less similar to Tess's,
the whole bevy of them drawing together like dancers in a quadrille at
the completion of a sheaf by each, every one placing her sheaf on end
against those of the rest, till a shock, or "stitch" as it was here
called, of ten or a dozen was formed.

They went to breakfast, and came again, and the work proceeded as
before. As the hour of eleven drew near a person watching her might
have noticed that every now and then Tess's glance flitted wistfully to
the brow of the hill, though she did not pause in her sheafing. On the
verge of the hour the heads of a group of children, of ages ranging
from six to fourteen, rose over the stubbly convexity of the hill.

The face of Tess flushed slightly, but still she did not pause.

The eldest of the comers, a girl who wore a triangular shawl, its
corner draggling on the stubble, carried in her arms what at first
sight seemed to be a doll, but proved to be an infant in long clothes.
Another brought some lunch. The harvesters ceased working, took their
provisions, and sat down against one of the shocks. Here they fell to,
the men plying a stone jar freely, and passing round a cup.

Tess Durbeyfield had been one of the last to suspend her labours. She
sat down at the end of the shock, her face turned somewhat away from
her companions. When she had deposited herself a man in a rabbit-skin
cap, and with a red handkerchief tucked into his belt, held the cup of
ale over the top of the shock for her to drink. But she did not accept
his offer. As soon as her lunch was spread she called up the big girl,
her sister, and took the baby of her, who, glad to be relieved of the
burden, went away to the next shock and joined the other children
playing there. Tess, with a curiously stealthy yet courageous movement,
and with a still rising colour, unfastened her frock and began suckling
the child.

The men who sat nearest considerately turned their faces towards the
other end of the field, some of them beginning to smoke; one, with
absent-minded fondness, regretfully stroking the jar that would no
longer yield a stream. All the women but Tess fell into animated talk,
and adjusted the disarranged knots of their hair.

When the infant had taken its fill, the young mother sat it upright in
her lap, and looking into the far distance, dandled it with a gloomy
indifference that was almost dislike; then all of a sudden she fell to
violently kissing it some dozens of times, as if she could never leave
off, the child crying at the vehemence of an onset which strangely
combined passionateness with contempt.

"She's fond of that there child, though she mid pretend to hate en, and
say she wishes the baby and her too were in the churchyard," observed
the woman in the red petticoat.

"She'll soon leave off saying that," replied the one in buff. "Lord,
'tis wonderful what a body can get used to o' that sort in time!"

"A little more than persuading had to do wi' the coming o't, I reckon.
There were they that heard a sobbing one night last year in The Chase;
and it mid ha' gone hard wi' a certain party if folks had come along."

"Well, a little more, or a little less, 'twas a thousand pities that it
should have happened to she, of all others. But 'tis always the
comeliest! The plain ones be as safe as churches—hey, Jenny?" The
speaker turned to one of the group who certainly was not ill-defined as
plain.

It was a thousand pities, indeed; it was impossible for even an enemy
to feel otherwise on looking at Tess as she sat there, with her
flower-like mouth and large tender eyes, neither black nor blue nor
grey nor violet; rather all those shades together, and a hundred
others, which could be seen if one looked into their irises—shade
behind shade—tint beyond tint—around pupils that had no bottom; an
almost standard woman, but for the slight incautiousness of character
inherited from her race.

A resolution which had surprised herself had brought her into the
fields this week for the first time during many months. After wearing
and wasting her palpitating heart with every engine of regret that
lonely inexperience could devise, common sense had illuminated her. She
felt that she would do well to be useful again—to taste anew sweet
independence at any price. The past was past; whatever it had been, it
was no more at hand. Whatever its consequences, time would close over
them; they would all in a few years be as if they had never been, and
she herself grassed down and forgotten. Meanwhile the trees were just
as green as before; the birds sang and the sun shone as clearly now as
ever. The familiar surroundings had not darkened because of her grief,
nor sickened because of her pain.

She might have seen that what had bowed her head so profoundly—the
thought of the world's concern at her situation—was founded on an
illusion. She was not an existence, an experience, a passion, a
structure of sensations, to anybody but herself. To all humankind
besides, Tess was only a passing thought. Even to friends she was no
more than a frequently passing thought. If she made herself miserable
the livelong night and day it was only this much to them—"Ah, she makes
herself unhappy." If she tried to be cheerful, to dismiss all care, to
take pleasure in the daylight, the flowers, the baby, she could only be
this idea to them—"Ah, she bears it very well." Moreover, alone in a
desert island would she have been wretched at what had happened to
her? Not greatly. If she could have been but just created, to discover
herself as a spouseless mother, with no experience of life except as
the parent of a nameless child, would the position have caused her to
despair? No, she would have taken it calmly, and found pleasure
therein. Most of the misery had been generated by her conventional
aspect, and not by her innate sensations.

Whatever Tess's reasoning, some spirit had induced her to dress herself
up neatly as she had formerly done, and come out into the fields,
harvest-hands being greatly in demand just then. This was why she had
borne herself with dignity, and had looked people calmly in the face at
times, even when holding the baby in her arms.

The harvest-men rose from the shock of corn, and stretched their limbs,
and extinguished their pipes. The horses, which had been unharnessed
and fed, were again attached to the scarlet machine. Tess, having
quickly eaten her own meal, beckoned to her eldest sister to come and
take away the baby, fastened her dress, put on the buff gloves again,
and stooped anew to draw a bond from the last completed sheaf for the
tying of the next.

In the afternoon and evening the proceedings of the morning were
continued, Tess staying on till dusk with the body of harvesters. Then
they all rode home in one of the largest wagons, in the company of a
broad tarnished moon that had risen from the ground to the eastwards,
its face resembling the outworn gold-leaf halo of some worm-eaten
Tuscan saint. Tess's female companions sang songs, and showed
themselves very sympathetic and glad at her reappearance out of doors,
though they could not refrain from mischievously throwing in a few
verses of the ballad about the maid who went to the merry green wood
and came back a changed state. There are counterpoises and
compensations in life; and the event which had made of her a social
warning had also for the moment made her the most interesting personage
in the village to many. Their friendliness won her still farther away
from herself, their lively spirits were contagious, and she became
almost gay.

But now that her moral sorrows were passing away a fresh one arose on
the natural side of her which knew no social law. When she reached home
it was to learn to her grief that the baby had been suddenly taken ill
since the afternoon. Some such collapse had been probable, so tender
and puny was its frame; but the event came as a shock nevertheless.

The baby's offence against society in coming into the world was
forgotten by the girl-mother; her soul's desire was to continue that
offence by preserving the life of the child. However, it soon grew
clear that the hour of emancipation for that little prisoner of the
flesh was to arrive earlier than her worst misgiving had conjectured.
And when she had discovered this she was plunged into a misery which
transcended that of the child's simple loss. Her baby had not been
baptized.

Tess had drifted into a frame of mind which accepted passively the
consideration that if she should have to burn for what she had done,
burn she must, and there was an end of it. Like all village girls, she
was well grounded in the Holy Scriptures, and had dutifully studied the
histories of Aholah and Aholibah, and knew the inferences to be drawn
therefrom. But when the same question arose with regard to the baby, it
had a very different colour. Her darling was about to die, and no
salvation.

It was nearly bedtime, but she rushed downstairs and asked if she might
send for the parson. The moment happened to be one at which her
father's sense of the antique nobility of his family was highest, and
his sensitiveness to the smudge which Tess had set upon that nobility
most pronounced, for he had just returned from his weekly booze at
Rolliver's Inn. No parson should come inside his door, he declared,
prying into his affairs, just then, when, by her shame, it had become
more necessary than ever to hide them. He locked the door and put the
key in his pocket.

The household went to bed, and, distressed beyond measure, Tess retired
also. She was continually waking as she lay, and in the middle of the
night found that the baby was still worse. It was obviously
dying—quietly and painlessly, but none the less surely.

In her misery she rocked herself upon the bed. The clock struck the
solemn hour of one, that hour when fancy stalks outside reason, and
malignant possibilities stand rock-firm as facts. She thought of the
child consigned to the nethermost corner of hell, as its double doom
for lack of baptism and lack of legitimacy; saw the arch-fiend tossing
it with his three-pronged fork, like the one they used for heating the
oven on baking days; to which picture she added many other quaint and
curious details of torment sometimes taught the young in this Christian
country. The lurid presentment so powerfully affected her imagination
in the silence of the sleeping house that her nightgown became damp
with perspiration, and the bedstead shook with each throb of her heart.

The infant's breathing grew more difficult, and the mother's mental
tension increased. It was useless to devour the little thing with
kisses; she could stay in bed no longer, and walked feverishly about
the room.

"O merciful God, have pity; have pity upon my poor baby!" she cried.
"Heap as much anger as you want to upon me, and welcome; but pity the
child!"

She leant against the chest of drawers, and murmured incoherent
supplications for a long while, till she suddenly started up.

"Ah! perhaps baby can be saved! Perhaps it will be just the same!"

She spoke so brightly that it seemed as though her face might have
shone in the gloom surrounding her. She lit a candle, and went to a
second and a third bed under the wall, where she awoke her young
sisters and brothers, all of whom occupied the same room. Pulling out
the washing-stand so that she could get behind it, she poured some
water from a jug, and made them kneel around, putting their hands
together with fingers exactly vertical. While the children, scarcely
awake, awe-stricken at her manner, their eyes growing larger and
larger, remained in this position, she took the baby from her bed—a
child's child—so immature as scarce to seem a sufficient personality to
endow its producer with the maternal title. Tess then stood erect with
the infant on her arm beside the basin; the next sister held the
Prayer-Book open before her, as the clerk at church held it before the
parson; and thus the girl set about baptizing her child.

Her figure looked singularly tall and imposing as she stood in her long
white nightgown, a thick cable of twisted dark hair hanging straight
down her back to her waist. The kindly dimness of the weak candle
abstracted from her form and features the little blemishes which
sunlight might have revealed—the stubble scratches upon her wrists, and
the weariness of her eyes—her high enthusiasm having a transfiguring
effect upon the face which had been her undoing, showing it as a thing
of immaculate beauty, with a touch of dignity which was almost regal.
The little ones kneeling round, their sleepy eyes blinking and red,
awaited her preparations full of a suspended wonder which their
physical heaviness at that hour would not allow to become active.

The most impressed of them said:

"Be you really going to christen him, Tess?"

The girl-mother replied in a grave affirmative.

"What's his name going to be?"

She had not thought of that, but a name suggested by a phrase in the
book of Genesis came into her head as she proceeded with the baptismal
service, and now she pronounced it:

"SORROW, I baptize thee in the name of the Father, and of the Son, and
of the Holy Ghost."

She sprinkled the water, and there was silence.

"Say ‘Amen,' children."

The tiny voices piped in obedient response, "Amen!"

Tess went on:

"We receive this child"—and so forth—"and do sign him with the sign of
the Cross."

Here she dipped her hand into the basin, and fervently drew an immense
cross upon the baby with her forefinger, continuing with the customary
sentences as to his manfully fighting against sin, the world, and the
devil, and being a faithful soldier and servant unto his life's end.
She duly went on with the Lord's Prayer, the children lisping it after
her in a thin gnat-like wail, till, at the conclusion, raising their
voices to clerk's pitch, they again piped into silence, "Amen!"

Then their sister, with much augmented confidence in the efficacy of
the sacrament, poured forth from the bottom of her heart the
thanksgiving that follows, uttering it boldly and triumphantly in the
stopt-diapason note which her voice acquired when her heart was in her
speech, and which will never be forgotten by those who knew her. The
ecstasy of faith almost apotheosized her; it set upon her face a
glowing irradiation, and brought a red spot into the middle of each
cheek; while the miniature candle-flame inverted in her eye-pupils
shone like a diamond. The children gazed up at her with more and more
reverence, and no longer had a will for questioning. She did not look
like Sissy to them now, but as a being large, towering, and awful—a
divine personage with whom they had nothing in common.

Poor Sorrow's campaign against sin, the world, and the devil was doomed
to be of limited brilliancy—luckily perhaps for himself, considering
his beginnings. In the blue of the morning that fragile soldier and
servant breathed his last, and when the other children awoke they cried
bitterly, and begged Sissy to have another pretty baby.

The calmness which had possessed Tess since the christening remained
with her in the infant's loss. In the daylight, indeed, she felt her
terrors about his soul to have been somewhat exaggerated; whether well
founded or not, she had no uneasiness now, reasoning that if Providence
would not ratify such an act of approximation she, for one, did not
value the kind of heaven lost by the irregularity—either for herself or
for her child.

So passed away Sorrow the Undesired—that intrusive creature, that
bastard gift of shameless Nature, who respects not the social law; a
waif to whom eternal Time had been a matter of days merely, who knew
not that such things as years and centuries ever were; to whom the
cottage interior was the universe, the week's weather climate, new-born
babyhood human existence, and the instinct to suck human knowledge.

Tess, who mused on the christening a good deal, wondered if it were
doctrinally sufficient to secure a Christian burial for the child.
Nobody could tell this but the parson of the parish, and he was a
new-comer, and did not know her. She went to his house after dusk, and
stood by the gate, but could not summon courage to go in. The
enterprise would have been abandoned if she had not by accident met him
coming homeward as she turned away. In the gloom she did not mind
speaking freely.

"I should like to ask you something, sir."

He expressed his willingness to listen, and she told the story of the
baby's illness and the extemporized ordinance. "And now, sir," she
added earnestly, "can you tell me this—will it be just the same for him
as if you had baptized him?"

Having the natural feelings of a tradesman at finding that a job he
should have been called in for had been unskilfully botched by his
customers among themselves, he was disposed to say no. Yet the dignity
of the girl, the strange tenderness in her voice, combined to affect
his nobler impulses—or rather those that he had left in him after ten
years of endeavour to graft technical belief on actual scepticism. The
man and the ecclesiastic fought within him, and the victory fell to the
man.

"My dear girl," he said, "it will be just the same."

"Then will you give him a Christian burial?" she asked quickly.

The Vicar felt himself cornered. Hearing of the baby's illness, he had
conscientiously gone to the house after nightfall to perform the rite,
and, unaware that the refusal to admit him had come from Tess's father
and not from Tess, he could not allow the plea of necessity for its
irregular administration.

"Ah—that's another matter," he said.

"Another matter—why?" asked Tess, rather warmly.

"Well—I would willingly do so if only we two were concerned. But I must
not—for certain reasons."

"Just for once, sir!"

"Really I must not."

"O sir!" She seized his hand as she spoke.

He withdrew it, shaking his head.

"Then I don't like you!" she burst out, "and I'll never come to your
church no more!"

"Don't talk so rashly."

"Perhaps it will be just the same to him if you don't?... Will it be
just the same? Don't for God's sake speak as saint to sinner, but as
you yourself to me myself—poor me!"

How the Vicar reconciled his answer with the strict notions he supposed
himself to hold on these subjects it is beyond a layman's power to
tell, though not to excuse. Somewhat moved, he said in this case also—

"It will be just the same."

So the baby was carried in a small deal box, under an ancient woman's
shawl, to the churchyard that night, and buried by lantern-light, at
the cost of a shilling and a pint of beer to the sexton, in that shabby
corner of God's allotment where He lets the nettles grow, and where all
unbaptized infants, notorious drunkards, suicides, and others of the
conjecturally damned are laid. In spite of the untoward surroundings,
however, Tess bravely made a little cross of two laths and a piece of
string, and having bound it with flowers, she stuck it up at the head
of the grave one evening when she could enter the churchyard without
being seen, putting at the foot also a bunch of the same flowers in a
little jar of water to keep them alive. What matter was it that on the
outside of the jar the eye of mere observation noted the words
"Keelwell's Marmalade"? The eye of maternal affection did not see them
in its vision of higher things.

XV



"By experience," says Roger Ascham, "we find out a short way by a
long wandering." Not seldom that long wandering unfits us for fur-
ther travel, and of what use is our experience to us then? Tess
Durbeyfield's experience was of this incapacitating kind. At last she
had learned what to do; but who would now accept her doing?

If before going to the d'Urbervilles' she had vigorously moved under
the guidance of sundry gnomic texts and phrases known to her and to the
world in general, no doubt she would never have been imposed on. But it
had not been in Tess's power—nor is it in anybody's power—to feel the
whole truth of golden opinions while it is possible to profit by them.
She—and how many more—might have ironically said to God with Saint
Augustine: "Thou hast counselled a better course than Thou hast
permitted."

She remained at her father's house during the winter months, plucking
fowls, or cramming turkeys and geese, or making clothes for her sisters
and brothers out of some finery which d'Urberville had given her, and
she had put by with contempt. Apply to him she would not. But she would
often clasp her hands behind her head and muse when she was supposed to
be working hard.

She philosophically noted dates as they came past in the revolution of
the year; the disastrous night of her undoing at Trantridge with its
dark background of The Chase; also the dates of the baby's birth and
death; also her own birthday; and every other day individualized by
incidents in which she had taken some share. She suddenly thought one
afternoon, when looking in the glass at her fairness, that there was
yet another date, of greater importance to her than those; that of her
own death, when all these charms would have disappeared; a day which
lay sly and unseen among all the other days of the year, giving no sign
or sound when she annually passed over it; but not the less surely
there. When was it? Why did she not feel the chill of each yearly
encounter with such a cold relation? She had Jeremy Taylor's thought
that some time in the future those who had known her would say: "It is
the ——th, the day that poor Tess Durbeyfield died"; and there would be
nothing singular to their minds in the statement. Of that day, doomed
to be her terminus in time through all the ages, she did not know the
place in month, week, season or year.

Almost at a leap Tess thus changed from simple girl to complex woman.
Symbols of reflectiveness passed into her face, and a note of tragedy
at times into her voice. Her eyes grew larger and more eloquent. She
became what would have been called a fine creature; her aspect was fair
and arresting; her soul that of a woman whom the turbulent experiences
of the last year or two had quite failed to demoralize. But for the
world's opinion those experiences would have been simply a liberal
education.

She had held so aloof of late that her trouble, never generally known,
was nearly forgotten in Marlott. But it became evident to her that she
could never be really comfortable again in a place which had seen the
collapse of her family's attempt to "claim kin"—and, through her, even
closer union—with the rich d'Urbervilles. At least she could not be
comfortable there till long years should have obliterated her keen
consciousness of it. Yet even now Tess felt the pulse of hopeful life
still warm within her; she might be happy in some nook which had no
memories. To escape the past and all that appertained thereto was to
annihilate it, and to do that she would have to get away.

Was once lost always lost really true of chastity? she would ask
herself. She might prove it false if she could veil bygones. The
recuperative power which pervaded organic nature was surely not denied
to maidenhood alone.

She waited a long time without finding opportunity for a new departure.
A particularly fine spring came round, and the stir of germination was
almost audible in the buds; it moved her, as it moved the wild animals,
and made her passionate to go. At last, one day in early May, a letter
reached her from a former friend of her mother's, to whom she had
addressed inquiries long before—a person whom she had never seen—
that a skilful milkmaid was required at a dairy-house many miles to the
southward, and that the dairyman would be glad to have her for the
summer months.

It was not quite so far off as could have been wished; but it was
probably far enough, her radius of movement and repute having been
so small. To persons of limited spheres, miles are as geographical
degrees, parishes as counties, counties as provinces and kingdoms.

On one point she was resolved: there should be no more d'Urberville
air-castles in the dreams and deeds of her new life. She would be the
dairymaid Tess, and nothing more. Her mother knew Tess's feeling on
this point so well, though no words had passed between them on the
subject, that she never alluded to the knightly ancestry now.

Yet such is human inconsistency that one of the interests of the
new place to her was the accidental virtues of its lying near her
forefathers' country (for they were not Blakemore men, though her
mother was Blakemore to the bone). The dairy called Talbothays, for
which she was bound, stood not remotely from some of the former estates
of the d'Urbervilles, near the great family vaults of her granddames
and their powerful husbands. She would be able to look at them, and
think not only that d'Urberville, like Babylon, had fallen, but that
the individual innocence of a humble descendant could lapse as
silently. All the while she wondered if any strange good thing might
come of her being in her ancestral land; and some spirit within her
rose automatically as the sap in the twigs. It was unexpected youth,
surging up anew after its temporary check, and bringing with it hope,
and the invincible instinct towards self-delight.



　　　　　　　END OF PHASE THE SECOND





Phase the Third: The Rally



XVI



On a thyme-scented, bird-hatching morning in May, between two and three
years after the return from Trantridge—silent, reconstructive years for
Tess Durbeyfield—she left her home for the second time.

Having packed up her luggage so that it could be sent to her later, she
started in a hired trap for the little town of Stourcastle, through
which it was necessary to pass on her journey, now in a direction
almost opposite to that of her first adventuring. On the curve of the
nearest hill she looked back regretfully at Marlott and her father's
house, although she had been so anxious to get away.

Her kindred dwelling there would probably continue their daily lives
as heretofore, with no great diminution of pleasure in their con-
sciousness, although she would be far off, and they deprived of her
smile. In a few days the children would engage in their games as
merrily as ever, without the sense of any gap left by her departure.
This leaving of the younger children she had decided to be for the
best; were she to remain they would probably gain less good by her
precepts than harm by her example.

She went through Stourcastle without pausing and onward to a junct-
ion of highways, where she could await a carrier's van that ran to the
south-west; for the railways which engirdled this interior tract of
country had never yet struck across it. While waiting, however, there
came along a farmer in his spring cart, driving approximately in the
direction that she wished to pursue. Though he was a stranger to her
she accepted his offer of a seat beside him, ignoring that its motive
was a mere tribute to her countenance. He was going to Weatherbury,
and by accompanying him thither she could walk the remainder of the
distance instead of travelling in the van by way of Casterbridge.

Tess did not stop at Weatherbury, after this long drive, further than
to make a slight nondescript meal at noon at a cottage to which the
farmer recommended her. Thence she started on foot, basket in hand,
to reach the wide upland of heath dividing this district from the
low-lying meads of a further valley in which the dairy stood that was
the aim and end of her day's pilgrimage.

Tess had never before visited this part of the country, and yet she
felt akin to the landscape. Not so very far to the left of her she
could discern a dark patch in the scenery, which inquiry confirmed her
in supposing to be trees marking the environs of Kingsbere—in the
church of which parish the bones of her ancestors—her useless
ancestors—lay entombed.

She had no admiration for them now; she almost hated them for the
dance they had led her; not a thing of all that had been theirs did she
retain but the old seal and spoon. "Pooh—I have as much of mother as
father in me!" she said. "All my prettiness comes from her, and she was
only a dairymaid."

The journey over the intervening uplands and lowlands of Egdon, when
she reached them, was a more troublesome walk than she had anticipated,
the distance being actually but a few miles. It was two hours, owing to
sundry wrong turnings, ere she found herself on a summit commanding
the long-sought-for vale, the Valley of the Great Dairies, the valley in
which milk and butter grew to rankness, and were produced more
profusely, if less delicately, than at her home—the verdant plain so
well watered by the river Var or Froom.

It was intrinsically different from the Vale of Little Dairies,
Blackmoor Vale, which, save during her disastrous sojourn at
Trantridge, she had exclusively known till now. The world was drawn to
a larger pattern here. The enclosures numbered fifty acres instead of
ten, the farmsteads were more extended, the groups of cattle formed
tribes hereabout; there only families. These myriads of cows stretching
under her eyes from the far east to the far west outnumbered any she
had ever seen at one glance before. The green lea was speckled as
thickly with them as a canvas by Van Alsloot or Sallaert with burghers.
The ripe hue of the red and dun kine absorbed the evening sunlight,
which the white-coated animals returned to the eye in rays almost
dazzling, even at the distant elevation on which she stood.

The bird's-eye perspective before her was not so luxuriantly beautiful,
perhaps, as that other one which she knew so well; yet it was more
cheering. It lacked the intensely blue atmosphere of the rival vale,
and its heavy soils and scents; the new air was clear, bracing,
ethereal. The river itself, which nourished the grass and cows of these
renowned dairies, flowed not like the streams in Blackmoor. Those were
slow, silent, often turbid; flowing over beds of mud into which the
incautious wader might sink and vanish unawares. The Froom waters were
clear as the pure River of Life shown to the Evangelist, rapid as the
shadow of a cloud, with pebbly shallows that prattled to the sky all
day long. There the water-flower was the lily; the crow-foot here.

Either the change in the quality of the air from heavy to light, or the
sense of being amid new scenes where there were no invidious eyes
upon her, sent up her spirits wonderfully. Her hopes mingled with the
sunshine in an ideal photosphere which surrounded her as she bounded
along against the soft south wind. She heard a pleasant voice in every
breeze, and in every bird's note seemed to lurk a joy.

Her face had latterly changed with changing states of mind, continually
fluctuating between beauty and ordinariness, according as the thoughts
were gay or grave. One day she was pink and flawless; another pale and
tragical. When she was pink she was feeling less than when pale; her
more perfect beauty accorded with her less elevated mood; her more
intense mood with her less perfect beauty. It was her best face
physically that was now set against the south wind.

The irresistible, universal, automatic tendency to find sweet pleasure
somewhere, which pervades all life, from the meanest to the highest,
had at length mastered Tess. Being even now only a young woman of
twenty, one who mentally and sentimentally had not finished growing, it
was impossible that any event should have left upon her an impression
that was not in time capable of transmutation.

And thus her spirits, and her thankfulness, and her hopes, rose higher
and higher. She tried several ballads, but found them inadequate; till,
recollecting the psalter that her eyes had so often wandered over of a
Sunday morning before she had eaten of the tree of knowledge, she
chanted: "O ye Sun and Moon ... O ye Stars ... ye Green Things upon the
Earth ... ye Fowls of the Air ... Beasts and Cattle ... Children of Men
... bless ye the Lord, praise Him and magnify Him forever!"

She suddenly stopped and murmured: "But perhaps I don't quite know the
Lord as yet."

And probably the half-unconscious rhapsody was a Fetishistic utterance
in a Monotheistic setting; women whose chief companions are the forms
and forces of outdoor Nature retain in their souls far more of the
Pagan fantasy of their remote forefathers than of the systematized
religion taught their race at later date. However, Tess found at least
approximate expression for her feelings in the old Benedicite that
she had lisped from infancy; and it was enough. Such high contentment
with such a slight initial performance as that of having started
towards a means of independent living was a part of the Durbeyfield
temperament. Tess really wished to walk uprightly, while her father did
nothing of the kind; but she resembled him in being content with
immediate and small achievements, and in having no mind for laborious
effort towards such petty social advancement as could alone be effected
by a family so heavily handicapped as the once powerful d'Urbervilles
were now.

There was, it might be said, the energy of her mother's unexpended
family, as well as the natural energy of Tess's years, rekindled after
the experience which had so overwhelmed her for the time. Let the truth
be told—women do as a rule live through such humiliations, and regain
their spirits, and again look about them with an interested eye. While
there's life there's hope is a conviction not so entirely unknown to
the "betrayed" as some amiable theorists would have us believe.

Tess Durbeyfield, then, in good heart, and full of zest for life, de-
scended the Egdon slopes lower and lower towards the dairy of her
pilgrimage.

The marked difference, in the final particular, between the rival vales
now showed itself. The secret of Blackmoor was best discovered from
the heights around; to read aright the valley before her it was necessary
to descend into its midst. When Tess had accomplished this feat she
found herself to be standing on a carpeted level, which stretched to
the east and west as far as the eye could reach.

The river had stolen from the higher tracts and brought in particles
to the vale all this horizontal land; and now, exhausted, aged, and
attenuated, lay serpentining along through the midst of its former
spoils.

Not quite sure of her direction, Tess stood still upon the hemmed
expanse of verdant flatness, like a fly on a billiard-table of
indefinite length, and of no more consequence to the surroundings than
that fly. The sole effect of her presence upon the placid valley so far
had been to excite the mind of a solitary heron, which, after
descending to the ground not far from her path, stood with neck erect,
looking at her.

Suddenly there arose from all parts of the lowland a prolonged and
repeated call—"Waow! waow! waow!"

From the furthest east to the furthest west the cries spread as if by
contagion, accompanied in some cases by the barking of a dog. It was
not the expression of the valley's consciousness that beautiful Tess
had arrived, but the ordinary announcement of milking-time—half-past
four o'clock, when the dairymen set about getting in the cows.

The red and white herd nearest at hand, which had been phlegmati-
cally waiting for the call, now trooped towards the steading in the
background, their great bags of milk swinging under them as they
walked. Tess followed slowly in their rear, and entered the barton by
the open gate through which they had entered before her. Long thatched
sheds stretched round the enclosure, their slopes encrusted with vivid
green moss, and their eaves supported by wooden posts rubbed to a
glossy smoothness by the flanks of infinite cows and calves of bygone
years, now passed to an oblivion almost inconceivable in its
profundity. Between the post were ranged the milchers, each exhibiting
herself at the present moment to a whimsical eye in the rear as a
circle on two stalks, down the centre of which a switch moved
pendulum-wise; while the sun, lowering itself behind this patient row,
threw their shadows accurately inwards upon the wall. Thus it threw
shadows of these obscure and homely figures every evening with as much
care over each contour as if it had been the profile of a court beauty
on a palace wall; copied them as diligently as it had copied Olympian
shapes on marble façades long ago, or the outline of Alexander,
Caesar, and the Pharaohs.

They were the less restful cows that were stalled. Those that would
stand still of their own will were milked in the middle of the yard,
where many of such better behaved ones stood waiting now—all prime
milchers, such as were seldom seen out of this valley, and not always
within it; nourished by the succulent feed which the water-meads
supplied at this prime season of the year. Those of them that were
spotted with white reflected the sunshine in dazzling brilliancy, and
the polished brass knobs of their horns glittered with something of
military display. Their large-veined udders hung ponderous as sandbags,
the teats sticking out like the legs of a gipsy's crock; and as each
animal lingered for her turn to arrive the milk oozed forth and fell in
drops to the ground.



XVII



The dairymaids and men had flocked down from their cottages and out of
the dairy-house with the arrival of the cows from the meads; the maids
walking in pattens, not on account of the weather, but to keep their
shoes above the mulch of the barton. Each girl sat down on her
three-legged stool, her face sideways, her right cheek resting against
the cow, and looked musingly along the animal's flank at Tess as she
approached. The male milkers, with hat-brims turned down, resting flat
on their foreheads and gazing on the ground, did not observe her.

One of these was a sturdy middle-aged man—whose long white "pinner"
was somewhat finer and cleaner than the wraps of the others, and
whose jacket underneath had a presentable marketing aspect—the
master-dairyman, of whom she was in quest, his double character as a
working milker and butter maker here during six days, and on the
seventh as a man in shining broad-cloth in his family pew at church,
being so marked as to have inspired a rhyme:

Dairyman Dick
All the week:
On Sundays Mister Richard Crick.

Seeing Tess standing at gaze he went across to her.

The majority of dairymen have a cross manner at milking time, but it
happened that Mr Crick was glad to get a new hand—for the days were
busy ones now—and he received her warmly; inquiring for her mother and
the rest of the family—(though this as a matter of form merely, for in
reality he had not been aware of Mrs Durbeyfield's existence till
apprised of the fact by a brief business-letter about Tess).

"Oh—ay, as a lad I knowed your part o' the country very well," he said
terminatively. "Though I've never been there since. And a aged woman of
ninety that use to live nigh here, but is dead and gone long ago, told
me that a family of some such name as yours in Blackmoor Vale came
originally from these parts, and that 'twere a old ancient race that
had all but perished off the earth—though the new generations didn't
know it. But, Lord, I took no notice of the old woman's ramblings, not
I."

"Oh no—it is nothing," said Tess.

Then the talk was of business only.

"You can milk 'em clean, my maidy? I don't want my cows going azew at
this time o' year."

She reassured him on that point, and he surveyed her up and down. She
had been staying indoors a good deal, and her complexion had grown
delicate.

"Quite sure you can stand it? 'Tis comfortable enough here for rough
folk; but we don't live in a cowcumber frame."

She declared that she could stand it, and her zest and willingness
seemed to win him over.

"Well, I suppose you'll want a dish o' tay, or victuals of some sort,
hey? Not yet? Well, do as ye like about it. But faith, if 'twas I, I
should be as dry as a kex wi' travelling so far."

"I'll begin milking now, to get my hand in," said Tess.

She drank a little milk as temporary refreshment—to the surprise—
indeed, slight contempt—of Dairyman Crick, to whose mind it
had apparently never occurred that milk was good as a beverage.

"Oh, if ye can swaller that, be it so," he said indifferently, while
holding up the pail that she sipped from. "'Tis what I hain't touched
for years—not I. Rot the stuff; it would lie in my innerds like lead.
You can try your hand upon she," he pursued, nodding to the nearest
cow. "Not but what she do milk rather hard. We've hard ones and we've
easy ones, like other folks. However, you'll find out that soon
enough."

When Tess had changed her bonnet for a hood, and was really on her
stool under the cow, and the milk was squirting from her fists into the
pail, she appeared to feel that she really had laid a new foundation
for her future. The conviction bred serenity, her pulse slowed, and she
was able to look about her.

The milkers formed quite a little battalion of men and maids, the men
operating on the hard-teated animals, the maids on the kindlier
natures. It was a large dairy. There were nearly a hundred milchers
under Crick's management, all told; and of the herd the master-dairyman
milked six or eight with his own hands, unless away from home. These
were the cows that milked hardest of all; for his journey-milkmen being
more or less casually hired, he would not entrust this half-dozen to
their treatment, lest, from indifference, they should not milk them
fully; nor to the maids, lest they should fail in the same way for lack
of finger-grip; with the result that in course of time the cows would
"go azew"—that is, dry up. It was not the loss for the moment that made
slack milking so serious, but that with the decline of demand there
came decline, and ultimately cessation, of supply.

After Tess had settled down to her cow there was for a time no talk in
the barton, and not a sound interfered with the purr of the milk-jets
into the numerous pails, except a momentary exclamation to one or other
of the beasts requesting her to turn round or stand still. The only
movements were those of the milkers' hands up and down, and the swing
of the cows' tails. Thus they all worked on, encompassed by the vast
flat mead which extended to either slope of the valley—a level
landscape compounded of old landscapes long forgotten, and, no doubt,
differing in character very greatly from the landscape they composed
now.

"To my thinking," said the dairyman, rising suddenly from a cow he had
just finished off, snatching up his three-legged stool in one hand and
the pail in the other, and moving on to the next hard-yielder in his
vicinity, "to my thinking, the cows don't gie down their milk to-day as
usual. Upon my life, if Winker do begin keeping back like this, she'll
not be worth going under by midsummer."

"'Tis because there's a new hand come among us," said Jonathan Kail.
"I've noticed such things afore."

"To be sure. It may be so. I didn't think o't."

"I've been told that it goes up into their horns at such times," said a
dairymaid.

"Well, as to going up into their horns," replied Dairyman Crick
dubiously, as though even witchcraft might be limited by anatomical
possibilities, "I couldn't say; I certainly could not. But as nott cows
will keep it back as well as the horned ones, I don't quite agree to
it. Do ye know that riddle about the nott cows, Jonathan? Why do nott
cows give less milk in a year than horned?"

"I don't!" interposed the milkmaid, "Why do they?"

"Because there bain't so many of 'em," said the dairyman. "Howsomever,
these gam'sters do certainly keep back their milk to-day. Folks, we
must lift up a stave or two—that's the only cure for't."

Songs were often resorted to in dairies hereabout as an enticement to
the cows when they showed signs of withholding their usual yield; and
the band of milkers at this request burst into melody—in purely
business-like tones, it is true, and with no great spontaneity; the
result, according to their own belief, being a decided improvement
during the song's continuance. When they had gone through fourteen or
fifteen verses of a cheerful ballad about a murderer who was afraid to
go to bed in the dark because he saw certain brimstone flames around
him, one of the male milkers said—

"I wish singing on the stoop didn't use up so much of a man's wind! You
should get your harp, sir; not but what a fiddle is best."

Tess, who had given ear to this, thought the words were addressed to
the dairyman, but she was wrong. A reply, in the shape of "Why?" came
as it were out of the belly of a dun cow in the stalls; it had been
spoken by a milker behind the animal, whom she had not hitherto
perceived.

"Oh yes; there's nothing like a fiddle," said the dairyman. "Though I
do think that bulls are more moved by a tune than cows—at least that's
my experience. Once there was an old aged man over at Mellstock—William
Dewy by name—one of the family that used to do a good deal of business
as tranters over there—Jonathan, do ye mind?—I knowed the man by sight
as well as I know my own brother, in a manner of speaking. Well, this
man was a coming home along from a wedding, where he had been playing
his fiddle, one fine moonlight night, and for shortness' sake he took a
cut across Forty-acres, a field lying that way, where a bull was out to
grass. The bull seed William, and took after him, horns aground, begad;
and though William runned his best, and hadn't much drink in him
(considering 'twas a wedding, and the folks well off), he found he'd
never reach the fence and get over in time to save himself. Well, as a
last thought, he pulled out his fiddle as he runned, and struck up a
jig, turning to the bull, and backing towards the corner. The bull
softened down, and stood still, looking hard at William Dewy, who
fiddled on and on; till a sort of a smile stole over the bull's face.
But no sooner did William stop his playing and turn to get over hedge
than the bull would stop his smiling and lower his horns towards the
seat of William's breeches. Well, William had to turn about and play
on, willy-nilly; and 'twas only three o'clock in the world, and 'a
knowed that nobody would come that way for hours, and he so leery and
tired that 'a didn't know what to do. When he had scraped till about
four o'clock he felt that he verily would have to give over soon, and
he said to himself, ‘There's only this last tune between me and eternal
welfare! Heaven save me, or I'm a done man.' Well, then he called to
mind how he'd seen the cattle kneel o' Christmas Eves in the dead o'
night. It was not Christmas Eve then, but it came into his head to play
a trick upon the bull. So he broke into the 'Tivity Hymm, just as at
Christmas carol-singing; when, lo and behold, down went the bull on his
bended knees, in his ignorance, just as if 'twere the true 'Tivity
night and hour. As soon as his horned friend were down, William turned,
clinked off like a long-dog, and jumped safe over hedge, before the
praying bull had got on his feet again to take after him. William used
to say that he'd seen a man look a fool a good many times, but never
such a fool as that bull looked when he found his pious feelings had
been played upon, and 'twas not Christmas Eve. Yes, William Dewy, that
was the man's name; and I can tell you to a foot where's he a-lying in
Mellstock Churchyard at this very moment—just between the second
yew-tree and the north aisle."

"It's a curious story; it carries us back to medieval times, when faith
was a living thing!"

The remark, singular for a dairy-yard, was murmured by the voice behind
the dun cow; but as nobody understood the reference, no notice was
taken, except that the narrator seemed to think it might imply scepti-
cism as to his tale.

"Well, 'tis quite true, sir, whether or no. I knowed the man well."

"Oh yes; I have no doubt of it," said the person behind the dun cow.

Tess's attention was thus attracted to the dairyman's interlocutor, of
whom she could see but the merest patch, owing to his burying his head
so persistently in the flank of the milcher. She could not understand
why he should be addressed as "sir" even by the dairyman himself. But
no explanation was discernible; he remained under the cow long enough
to have milked three, uttering a private ejaculation now and then, as
if he could not get on.

"Take it gentle, sir; take it gentle," said the dairyman. "'Tis knack,
not strength, that does it."

"So I find," said the other, standing up at last and stretching his
arms. "I think I have finished her, however, though she made my fingers
ache."

Tess could then see him at full length. He wore the ordinary white
pinner and leather leggings of a dairy-farmer when milking, and his
boots were clogged with the mulch of the yard; but this was all his
local livery. Beneath it was something educated, reserved, subtle, sad,
differing.

But the details of his aspect were temporarily thrust aside by the
discovery that he was one whom she had seen before. Such vicissitudes
had Tess passed through since that time that for a moment she could not
remember where she had met him; and then it flashed upon her that he
was the pedestrian who had joined in the club-dance at Marlott—the
passing stranger who had come she knew not whence, had danced with
others but not with her, and slightingly left her, and gone on his way
with his friends.

The flood of memories brought back by this revival of an incident
anterior to her troubles produced a momentary dismay lest, recognizing
her also, he should by some means discover her story. But it passed
away when she found no sign of remembrance in him. She saw by degrees
that since their first and only encounter his mobile face had grown
more thoughtful, and had acquired a young man's shapely moustache and
beard—the latter of the palest straw colour where it began upon his
cheeks, and deepening to a warm brown farther from its root. Under his
linen milking-pinner he wore a dark velveteen jacket, cord breeches and
gaiters, and a starched white shirt. Without the milking-gear nobody
could have guessed what he was. He might with equal probability have
been an eccentric landowner or a gentlemanly ploughman. That he was but
a novice at dairy work she had realized in a moment, from the time he
had spent upon the milking of one cow.

Meanwhile many of the milkmaids had said to one another of the
newcomer, "How pretty she is!" with something of real generosity and
admiration, though with a half hope that the auditors would qualify the
assertion—which, strictly speaking, they might have done, prettiness
being an inexact definition of what struck the eye in Tess. When the
milking was finished for the evening they straggled indoors, where Mrs
Crick, the dairyman's wife—who was too respectable to go out milking
herself, and wore a hot stuff gown in warm weather because the
dairymaids wore prints—was giving an eye to the leads and things.

Only two or three of the maids, Tess learnt, slept in the dairy-house
besides herself, most of the helpers going to their homes. She saw
nothing at supper-time of the superior milker who had commented on
the story, and asked no questions about him, the remainder of the
evening being occupied in arranging her place in the bed-chamber.
It was a large room over the milk-house, some thirty feet long; the
sleeping-cots of the other three indoor milkmaids being in the same
apartment. They were blooming young women, and, except one, rather
older than herself. By bedtime Tess was thoroughly tired, and fell
asleep immediately.

But one of the girls, who occupied an adjoining bed, was more wake-
ful than Tess, and would insist upon relating to the latter various
particulars of the homestead into which she had just entered. The
girl's whispered words mingled with the shades, and, to Tess's drowsy
mind, they seemed to be generated by the darkness in which they
floated.

"Mr Angel Clare—he that is learning milking, and that plays the
harp—never says much to us. He is a pa'son's son, and is too much
taken up wi' his own thoughts to notice girls. He is the dairyman's
pupil—learning farming in all its branches. He has learnt sheep-farming
at another place, and he's now mastering dairy-work.... Yes, he is
quite the gentleman-born. His father is the Reverend Mr Clare at
Emminster—a good many miles from here."

"Oh—I have heard of him," said her companion, now awake. "A very
earnest clergyman, is he not?"

"Yes—that he is—the earnestest man in all Wessex, they say—the last of
the old Low Church sort, they tell me—for all about here be what they
call High. All his sons, except our Mr Clare, be made pa'sons too."

Tess had not at this hour the curiosity to ask why the present Mr Clare
was not made a parson like his brethren, and gradually fell asleep
again, the words of her informant coming to her along with the smell of
the cheeses in the adjoining cheeseloft, and the measured dripping of
the whey from the wrings downstairs.



XVIII



Angel Clare rises out of the past not altogether as a distinct figure,
but as an appreciative voice, a long regard of fixed, abstracted eyes,
and a mobility of mouth somewhat too small and delicately lined for a
man's, though with an unexpectedly firm close of the lower lip now and
then; enough to do away with any inference of indecision. Nevertheless,
something nebulous, preoccupied, vague, in his bearing and regard,
marked him as one who probably had no very definite aim or concern
about his material future. Yet as a lad people had said of him that he
was one who might do anything if he tried.

He was the youngest son of his father, a poor parson at the other end
of the county, and had arrived at Talbothays Dairy as a six months'
pupil, after going the round of some other farms, his object being to
acquire a practical skill in the various processes of farming, with a
view either to the Colonies or the tenure of a home-farm, as
circumstances might decide.

His entry into the ranks of the agriculturists and breeders was a step
in the young man's career which had been anticipated neither by himself
nor by others.

Mr Clare the elder, whose first wife had died and left him a daughter,
married a second late in life. This lady had somewhat unexpectedly
brought him three sons, so that between Angel, the youngest, and his
father the Vicar there seemed to be almost a missing generation. Of
these boys the aforesaid Angel, the child of his old age, was the only
son who had not taken a University degree, though he was the single one
of them whose early promise might have done full justice to an
academical training.

Some two or three years before Angel's appearance at the Marlott dance,
on a day when he had left school and was pursuing his studies at home,
a parcel came to the Vicarage from the local bookseller's, directed to
the Reverend James Clare. The Vicar having opened it and found it to
contain a book, read a few pages; whereupon he jumped up from his seat
and went straight to the shop with the book under his arm.

"Why has this been sent to my house?" he asked peremptorily, holding up
the volume.

"It was ordered, sir."

"Not by me, or any one belonging to me, I am happy to say."

The shopkeeper looked into his order-book.

"Oh, it has been misdirected, sir," he said. "It was ordered by Mr
Angel Clare, and should have been sent to him."

Mr Clare winced as if he had been struck. He went home pale and
dejected, and called Angel into his study.

"Look into this book, my boy," he said. "What do you know about it?"

"I ordered it," said Angel simply.

"What for?"

"To read."

"How can you think of reading it?"

"How can I? Why—it is a system of philosophy. There is no more moral,
or even religious, work published."

"Yes—moral enough; I don't deny that. But religious!—and for you, who
intend to be a minister of the Gospel!"

"Since you have alluded to the matter, father," said the son, with
anxious thought upon his face, "I should like to say, once for all,
that I should prefer not to take Orders. I fear I could not consci-
entiously do so. I love the Church as one loves a parent. I shall
always have the warmest affection for her. There is no institution for
whose history I have a deeper admiration; but I cannot honestly be
ordained her minister, as my brothers are, while she refuses to
liberate her mind from an untenable redemptive theolatry."

It had never occurred to the straightforward and simple-minded Vicar
that one of his own flesh and blood could come to this! He was
stultified, shocked, paralysed. And if Angel were not going to enter
the Church, what was the use of sending him to Cambridge? The
University as a step to anything but ordination seemed, to this man of
fixed ideas, a preface without a volume. He was a man not merely
religious, but devout; a firm believer—not as the phrase is now
elusively construed by theological thimble-riggers in the Church and
out of it, but in the old and ardent sense of the Evangelical school:
one who could

Indeed opine
That the Eternal and Divine
Did, eighteen centuries ago
In very truth...

Angel's father tried argument, persuasion, entreaty.

"No, father; I cannot underwrite Article Four (leave alone the rest),
taking it ‘in the literal and grammatical sense' as required by the
Declaration; and, therefore, I can't be a parson in the present state
of affairs," said Angel. "My whole instinct in matters of religion is
towards reconstruction; to quote your favorite Epistle to the Hebrews,
‘the removing of those things that are shaken, as of things that are
made, that those things which cannot be shaken may remain.'"

His father grieved so deeply that it made Angel quite ill to see him.

"What is the good of your mother and me economizing and stinting
ourselves to give you a University education, if it is not to be used
for the honour and glory of God?" his father repeated.

"Why, that it may be used for the honour and glory of man, father."

Perhaps if Angel had persevered he might have gone to Cambridge like
his brothers. But the Vicar's view of that seat of learning as a
stepping-stone to Orders alone was quite a family tradition; and so
rooted was the idea in his mind that perseverance began to appear to
the sensitive son akin to an intent to misappropriate a trust, and
wrong the pious heads of the household, who had been and were, as his
father had hinted, compelled to exercise much thrift to carry out this
uniform plan of education for the three young men.

"I will do without Cambridge," said Angel at last. "I feel that I have
no right to go there in the circumstances."

The effects of this decisive debate were not long in showing
themselves. He spent years and years in desultory studies,
undertakings, and meditations; he began to evince considerable
indifference to social forms and observances. The material distinctions
of rank and wealth he increasingly despised. Even the "good old family"
(to use a favourite phrase of a late local worthy) had no aroma for him
unless there were good new resolutions in its representatives. As a
balance to these austerities, when he went to live in London to see
what the world was like, and with a view to practising a profession or
business there, he was carried off his head, and nearly entrapped by a
woman much older than himself, though luckily he escaped not greatly
the worse for the experience.

Early association with country solitudes had bred in him an
unconquerable, and almost unreasonable, aversion to modern town life,
and shut him out from such success as he might have aspired to by
following a mundane calling in the impracticability of the spiritual
one. But something had to be done; he had wasted many valuable years;
and having an acquaintance who was starting on a thriving life as a
Colonial farmer, it occurred to Angel that this might be a lead in the
right direction. Farming, either in the Colonies, America, or at
home—farming, at any rate, after becoming well qualified for the
business by a careful apprenticeship—that was a vocation which would
probably afford an independence without the sacrifice of what he valued
even more than a competency—intellectual liberty.

So we find Angel Clare at six-and-twenty here at Talbothays as a
student of kine, and, as there were no houses near at hand in which he
could get a comfortable lodging, a boarder at the dairyman's.

His room was an immense attic which ran the whole length of the
dairy-house. It could only be reached by a ladder from the cheese-loft,
and had been closed up for a long time till he arrived and selected it
as his retreat. Here Clare had plenty of space, and could often be
heard by the dairy-folk pacing up and down when the household had gone
to rest. A portion was divided off at one end by a curtain, behind
which was his bed, the outer part being furnished as a homely
sitting-room.

At first he lived up above entirely, reading a good deal, and strumming
upon an old harp which he had bought at a sale, saying when in a bitter
humour that he might have to get his living by it in the streets some
day. But he soon preferred to read human nature by taking his meals
downstairs in the general dining-kitchen, with the dairyman and his
wife, and the maids and men, who all together formed a lively assembly;
for though but few milking hands slept in the house, several joined the
family at meals. The longer Clare resided here the less objection had
he to his company, and the more did he like to share quarters with them
in common.

Much to his surprise he took, indeed, a real delight in their com-
panionship. The conventional farm-folk of his imagination—personified
in the newspaper-press by the pitiable dummy known as Hodge—were ob-
literated after a few days' residence. At close quarters no Hodge was
to be seen. At first, it is true, when Clare's intelligence was fresh
from a contrasting society, these friends with whom he now hobnobbed
seemed a little strange. Sitting down as a level member of the dairy-
man's household seemed at the outset an undignified proceeding. The
ideas, the modes, the surroundings, appeared retrogressive and unmean-
ing. But with living on there, day after day, the acute sojourner be-
came conscious of a new aspect in the spectacle. Without any objective
change whatever, variety had taken the place of monotonousness. His
host and his host's household, his men and his maids, as they became
intimately known to Clare, began to differentiate themselves as in a
chemical process. The thought of Pascal's was brought home to him:
"A mesure qu'on a plus d'esprit, on trouve qu'ily a plus d'hommes
originaux. Les gens du commun ne trouvent pas de différence entre
les hommes." The typical and unvarying Hodge ceased to exist. He had
been disintegrated into a number of varied fellow-creatures—beings
of many minds, beings infinite in difference; some happy, many serene,
a few depressed, one here and there bright even to genius, some stu-
pid, others wanton, others austere; some mutely Miltonic, some poten-
tially Cromwellian—into men who had private views of each other, as
he had of his friends; who could applaud or condemn each other, amuse
or sadden themselves by the contemplation of each other's foibles or
vices; men every one of whom walked in his own individual way the
road to dusty death.

Unexpectedly he began to like the outdoor life for its own sake, and
for what it brought, apart from its bearing on his own proposed career.
Considering his position he became wonderfully free from the chronic
melancholy which is taking hold of the civilized races with the decline
of belief in a beneficent Power. For the first time of late years he
could read as his musings inclined him, without any eye to cramming for
a profession, since the few farming handbooks which he deemed it
desirable to master occupied him but little time.

He grew away from old associations, and saw something new in life and
humanity. Secondarily, he made close acquaintance with phenomena which
he had before known but darkly—the seasons in their moods, morning and
evening, night and noon, winds in their different tempers, trees,
waters and mists, shades and silences, and the voices of inanimate
things.

The early mornings were still sufficiently cool to render a fire
acceptable in the large room wherein they breakfasted; and, by Mrs
Crick's orders, who held that he was too genteel to mess at their
table, it was Angel Clare's custom to sit in the yawning chimney-corner
during the meal, his cup-and-saucer and plate being placed on a hinged
flap at his elbow. The light from the long, wide, mullioned window
opposite shone in upon his nook, and, assisted by a secondary light of
cold blue quality which shone down the chimney, enabled him to read
there easily whenever disposed to do so. Between Clare and the window
was the table at which his companions sat, their munching profiles
rising sharp against the panes; while to the side was the milk-house
door, through which were visible the rectangular leads in rows, full to
the brim with the morning's milk. At the further end the great churn
could be seen revolving, and its slip-slopping heard—the moving power
being discernible through the window in the form of a spiritless horse
walking in a circle and driven by a boy.

For several days after Tess's arrival Clare, sitting abstractedly
reading from some book, periodical, or piece of music just come by
post, hardly noticed that she was present at table. She talked so
little, and the other maids talked so much, that the babble did not
strike him as possessing a new note, and he was ever in the habit of
neglecting the particulars of an outward scene for the general
impression. One day, however, when he had been conning one of his
music-scores, and by force of imagination was hearing the tune in his
head, he lapsed into listlessness, and the music-sheet rolled to the
hearth. He looked at the fire of logs, with its one flame pirouetting
on the top in a dying dance after the breakfast-cooking and boiling,
and it seemed to jig to his inward tune; also at the two chimney crooks
dangling down from the cotterel, or cross-bar, plumed with soot, which
quivered to the same melody; also at the half-empty kettle whining an
accompaniment. The conversation at the table mixed in with his
phantasmal orchestra till he thought: "What a fluty voice one of those
milkmaids has! I suppose it is the new one."

Clare looked round upon her, seated with the others.

She was not looking towards him. Indeed, owing to his long silence, his
presence in the room was almost forgotten.

"I don't know about ghosts," she was saying; "but I do know that our
souls can be made to go outside our bodies when we are alive."

The dairyman turned to her with his mouth full, his eyes charged with
serious inquiry, and his great knife and fork (breakfasts were
breakfasts here) planted erect on the table, like the beginning of a
gallows.

"What—really now? And is it so, maidy?" he said.

"A very easy way to feel 'em go," continued Tess, "is to lie on the
grass at night and look straight up at some big bright star; and, by
fixing your mind upon it, you will soon find that you are hundreds and
hundreds o' miles away from your body, which you don't seem to want at
all."

The dairyman removed his hard gaze from Tess, and fixed it on his wife.

"Now that's a rum thing, Christianer—hey? To think o' the miles I've
vamped o' starlight nights these last thirty year, courting, or
trading, or for doctor, or for nurse, and yet never had the least
notion o' that till now, or feeled my soul rise so much as an inch
above my shirt-collar."

The general attention being drawn to her, including that of the
dairyman's pupil, Tess flushed, and remarking evasively that it was
only a fancy, resumed her breakfast.

Clare continued to observe her. She soon finished her eating, and
having a consciousness that Clare was regarding her, began to trace
imaginary patterns on the tablecloth with her forefinger with the
constraint of a domestic animal that perceives itself to be watched.

"What a fresh and virginal daughter of Nature that milkmaid is!" he
said to himself.

And then he seemed to discern in her something that was familiar,
something which carried him back into a joyous and unforeseeing past,
before the necessity of taking thought had made the heavens gray. He
concluded that he had beheld her before; where he could not tell. A
casual encounter during some country ramble it certainly had been, and
he was not greatly curious about it. But the circumstance was
sufficient to lead him to select Tess in preference to the other pretty
milkmaids when he wished to contemplate contiguous womankind.



XIX



In general the cows were milked as they presented themselves, without
fancy or choice. But certain cows will show a fondness for a particular
pair of hands, sometimes carrying this predilection so far as to refuse
to stand at all except to their favourite, the pail of a stranger being
unceremoniously kicked over.

It was Dairyman Crick's rule to insist on breaking down these
partialities and aversions by constant interchange, since otherwise, in
the event of a milkman or maid going away from the dairy, he was placed
in a difficulty. The maids' private aims, however, were the reverse of
the dairyman's rule, the daily selection by each damsel of the eight or
ten cows to which she had grown accustomed rendering the operation on
their willing udders surprisingly easy and effortless.

Tess, like her compeers, soon discovered which of the cows had a
preference for her style of manipulation, and her fingers having become
delicate from the long domiciliary imprisonments to which she had
subjected herself at intervals during the last two or three years, she
would have been glad to meet the milchers' views in this respect. Out
of the whole ninety-five there were eight in particular—Dumpling,
Fancy, Lofty, Mist, Old Pretty, Young Pretty, Tidy, and Loud—who,
though the teats of one or two were as hard as carrots, gave down to
her with a readiness that made her work on them a mere touch of the
fingers. Knowing, however, the dairyman's wish, she endeavoured
conscientiously to take the animals just as they came, excepting the
very hard yielders which she could not yet manage.

But she soon found a curious correspondence between the ostensibly
chance position of the cows and her wishes in this matter, till she
felt that their order could not be the result of accident. The
dairyman's pupil had lent a hand in getting the cows together of late,
and at the fifth or sixth time she turned her eyesu, as she rested
against the cow, full of sly inquiry upon him.

"Mr Clare, you have ranged the cows!" she said, blushing; and in making
the accusation, symptoms of a smile gently lifted her upper lip in
spite of her, so as to show the tips of her teeth, the lower lip
remaining severely still.

"Well, it makes no difference," said he. "You will always be here to
milk them."

"Do you think so? I hope I shall! But I don't know."

She was angry with herself afterwards, thinking that he, unaware of her
grave reasons for liking this seclusion, might have mistaken her
meaning. She had spoken so earnestly to him, as if his presence were
somehow a factor in her wish. Her misgiving was such that at dusk, when
the milking was over, she walked in the garden alone, to continue her
regrets that she had disclosed to him her discovery of his
considerateness.

It was a typical summer evening in June, the atmosphere being in such
delicate equilibrium and so transmissive that inanimate objects seemed
endowed with two or three senses, if not five. There was no distinction
between the near and the far, and an auditor felt close to everything
within the horizon. The soundlessness impressed her as a positive
entity rather than as the mere negation of noise. It was broken by the
strumming of strings.

Tess had heard those notes in the attic above her head. Dim, flattened,
constrained by their confinement, they had never appealed to her as
now, when they wandered in the still air with a stark quality like that
of nudity. To speak absolutely, both instrument and execution were
poor; but the relative is all, and as she listened Tess, like a
fascinated bird, could not leave the spot. Far from leaving she drew up
towards the performer, keeping behind the hedge that he might not guess
her presence.

The outskirt of the garden in which Tess found herself had been left
uncultivated for some years, and was now damp and rank with juicy grass
which sent up mists of pollen at a touch; and with tall blooming weeds
emitting offensive smells—weeds whose red and yellow and purple hues
formed a polychrome as dazzling as that of cultivated flowers. She went
stealthily as a cat through this profusion of growth, gathering
cuckoo-spittle on her skirts, cracking snails that were underfoot,
staining her hands with thistle-milk and slug-slime, and rubbing off
upon her naked arms sticky blights which, though snow-white on the
apple-tree trunks, made madder stains on her skin; thus she drew quite
near to Clare, still unobserved of him.

Tess was conscious of neither time nor space. The exaltation which she
had described as being producible at will by gazing at a star came now
without any determination of hers; she undulated upon the thin notes of
the second-hand harp, and their harmonies passed like breezes through
her, bringing tears into her eyes. The floating pollen seemed to be his
notes made visible, and the dampness of the garden the weeping of the
garden's sensibility. Though near nightfall, the rank-smelling
weed-flowers glowed as if they would not close for intentness, and the
waves of colour mixed with the waves of sound.

The light which still shone was derived mainly from a large hole in the
western bank of cloud; it was like a piece of day left behind by
accident, dusk having closed in elsewhere. He concluded his plaintive
melody, a very simple performance, demanding no great skill; and she
waited, thinking another might be begun. But, tired of playing, he had
desultorily come round the fence, and was rambling up behind her. Tess,
her cheeks on fire, moved away furtively, as if hardly moving at all.

Angel, however, saw her light summer gown, and he spoke; his low tones
reaching her, though he was some distance off.

"What makes you draw off in that way, Tess?" said he. "Are you afraid?"

"Oh no, sir—not of outdoor things; especially just now when the
apple-blooth is falling, and everything is so green."

"But you have your indoor fears—eh?"

"Well—yes, sir."

"What of?"

"I couldn't quite say."

"The milk turning sour?"

"No."

"Life in general?"

"Yes, sir."

"Ah—so have I, very often. This hobble of being alive is rather
serious, don't you think so?"

"It is—now you put it that way."

"All the same, I shouldn't have expected a young girl like you to see
it so just yet. How is it you do?"

She maintained a hesitating silence.

"Come, Tess, tell me in confidence."

She thought that he meant what were the aspects of things to her, and
replied shyly—

"The trees have inquisitive eyes, haven't they?—that is, seem as if
they had. And the river says,—‘Why do ye trouble me with your looks?'
And you seem to see numbers of to-morrows just all in a line, the first
of them the biggest and clearest, the others getting smaller and
smaller as they stand farther away; but they all seem very fierce and
cruel and as if they said, ‘I'm coming! Beware of me! Beware of me!'
... But you, sir, can raise up dreams with your music, and drive all
such horrid fancies away!"

He was surprised to find this young woman—who though but a milkmaid
had just that touch of rarity about her which might make her the envied
of her housemates—shaping such sad imaginings. She was expressing
in her own native phrases—assisted a little by her Sixth Standard
training—feelings which might almost have been called those of the
age—the ache of modernism. The perception arrested him less when he
reflected that what are called advanced ideas are really in great part
but the latest fashion in definition—a more accurate expression, by
words in logy and ism, of sensations which men and women have
vaguely grasped for centuries.

Still, it was strange that they should have come to her while yet so
young; more than strange; it was impressive, interesting, pathetic. Not
guessing the cause, there was nothing to remind him that experience is
as to intensity, and not as to duration. Tess's passing corporeal
blight had been her mental harvest.

Tess, on her part, could not understand why a man of clerical family
and good education, and above physical want, should look upon it as a
mishap to be alive. For the unhappy pilgrim herself there was very good
reason. But how could this admirable and poetic man ever have descended
into the Valley of Humiliation, have felt with the man of Uz—as she
herself had felt two or three years ago—"My soul chooseth strangling
and death rather than my life. I loathe it; I would not live alway."

It was true that he was at present out of his class. But she knew that
was only because, like Peter the Great in a shipwright's yard, he was
studying what he wanted to know. He did not milk cows because he was
obliged to milk cows, but because he was learning to be a rich and
prosperous dairyman, landowner, agriculturist, and breeder of cattle.
He would become an American or Australian Abraham, commanding like a
monarch his flocks and his herds, his spotted and his ring-straked, his
men-servants and his maids. At times, nevertheless, it did seem
unaccountable to her that a decidedly bookish, musical, thinking young
man should have chosen deliberately to be a farmer, and not a
clergyman, like his father and brothers.

Thus, neither having the clue to the other's secret, they were res-
pectively puzzled at what each revealed, and awaited new knowledge
of each other's character and mood without attempting to pry into each
other's history.

Every day, every hour, brought to him one more little stroke of her
nature, and to her one more of his. Tess was trying to lead a repressed
life, but she little divined the strength of her own vitality.

At first Tess seemed to regard Angel Clare as an intelligence rather
than as a man. As such she compared him with herself; and at every
discovery of the abundance of his illuminations, of the distance
between her own modest mental standpoint and the unmeasurable, Andean
altitude of his, she became quite dejected, disheartened from all
further effort on her own part whatever.

He observed her dejection one day, when he had casually mentioned
something to her about pastoral life in ancient Greece. She was
gathering the buds called "lords and ladies" from the bank while he
spoke.

"Why do you look so woebegone all of a sudden?" he asked.

"Oh, 'tis only—about my own self," she said, with a frail laugh of
sadness, fitfully beginning to peel "a lady" meanwhile. "Just a sense
of what might have been with me! My life looks as if it had been wasted
for want of chances! When I see what you know, what you have read, and
seen, and thought, I feel what a nothing I am! I'm like the poor Queen
of Sheba who lived in the Bible. There is no more spirit in me."

"Bless my soul, don't go troubling about that! Why," he said with some
enthusiasm, "I should be only too glad, my dear Tess, to help you to
anything in the way of history, or any line of reading you would like
to take up—"

"It is a lady again," interrupted she, holding out the bud she had
peeled.

"What?"

"I meant that there are always more ladies than lords when you come to
peel them."

"Never mind about the lords and ladies. Would you like to take up any
course of study—history, for example?"

"Sometimes I feel I don't want to know anything more about it than I
know already."

"Why not?"

"Because what's the use of learning that I am one of a long row
only—finding out that there is set down in some old book somebody just
like me, and to know that I shall only act her part; making me sad,
that's all. The best is not to remember that your nature and your past
doings have been just like thousands' and thousands', and that your
coming life and doings 'll be like thousands' and thousands'."

"What, really, then, you don't want to learn anything?"

"I shouldn't mind learning why—why the sun do shine on the just and the
unjust alike," she answered, with a slight quaver in her voice. "But
that's what books will not tell me."

"Tess, fie for such bitterness!" Of course he spoke with a conventional
sense of duty only, for that sort of wondering had not been unknown to
himself in bygone days. And as he looked at the unpracticed mouth and
lips, he thought that such a daughter of the soil could only have
caught up the sentiment by rote. She went on peeling the lords and
ladies till Clare, regarding for a moment the wave-like curl of her
lashes as they dropped with her bent gaze on her soft cheek,
lingeringly went away. When he was gone she stood awhile, thoughtfully
peeling the last bud; and then, awakening from her reverie, flung it
and all the crowd of floral nobility impatiently on the ground, in an
ebullition of displeasure with herself for her niaiseries, and with a
quickening warmth in her heart of hearts.

How stupid he must think her! In an access of hunger for his good
opinion she bethought herself of what she had latterly endeavoured to
forget, so unpleasant had been its issues—the identity of her family
with that of the knightly d'Urbervilles. Barren attribute as it was,
disastrous as its discovery had been in many ways to her, perhaps Mr
Clare, as a gentleman and a student of history, would respect her
sufficiently to forget her childish conduct with the lords and ladies
if he knew that those Purbeck-marble and alabaster people in Kingsbere
Church really represented her own lineal forefathers; that she was no
spurious d'Urberville, compounded of money and ambition like those at
Trantridge, but true d'Urberville to the bone.

But, before venturing to make the revelation, dubious Tess indirectly
sounded the dairyman as to its possible effect upon Mr Clare, by asking
the former if Mr Clare had any great respect for old county families
when they had lost all their money and land.

"Mr Clare," said the dairyman emphatically, "is one of the most
rebellest rozums you ever knowed—not a bit like the rest of his family;
and if there's one thing that he do hate more than another 'tis the
notion of what's called a' old family. He says that it stands to reason
that old families have done their spurt of work in past days, and can't
have anything left in 'em now. There's the Billets and the Drenkhards
and the Greys and the St Quintins and the Hardys and the Goulds, who
used to own the lands for miles down this valley; you could buy 'em all
up now for an old song a'most. Why, our little Retty Priddle here, you
know, is one of the Paridelles—the old family that used to own lots o'
the lands out by King's Hintock, now owned by the Earl o' Wessex, afore
even he or his was heard of. Well, Mr Clare found this out, and spoke
quite scornful to the poor girl for days. ‘Ah!' he says to her, ‘you'll
never make a good dairymaid! All your skill was used up ages ago in
Palestine, and you must lie fallow for a thousand years to git strength
for more deeds!' A boy came here t'other day asking for a job, and said
his name was Matt, and when we asked him his surname he said he'd never
heard that 'a had any surname, and when we asked why, he said he
supposed his folks hadn't been 'stablished long enough. ‘Ah! you're the
very boy I want!' says Mr Clare, jumping up and shaking hands wi'en;
‘I've great hopes of you;' and gave him half-a-crown. O no! he can't
stomach old families!"

After hearing this caricature of Clare's opinion poor Tess was glad
that she had not said a word in a weak moment about her family—even
though it was so unusually old almost to have gone round the circle and
become a new one. Besides, another diary-girl was as good as she, it
seemed, in that respect. She held her tongue about the d'Urberville
vault and the Knight of the Conqueror whose name she bore. The insight
afforded into Clare's character suggested to her that it was largely
owing to her supposed untraditional newness that she had won interest
in his eyes.



XX



The season developed and matured. Another year's instalment of flowers,
leaves, nightingales, thrushes, finches, and such ephemeral creatures,
took up their positions where only a year ago others had stood in their
place when these were nothing more than germs and inorganic particles.
Rays from the sunrise drew forth the buds and stretched them into long
stalks, lifted up sap in noiseless streams, opened petals, and sucked
out scents in invisible jets and breathings.

Dairyman Crick's household of maids and men lived on comfortably,
placidly, even merrily. Their position was perhaps the happiest of all
positions in the social scale, being above the line at which neediness
ends, and below the line at which the convenances begin to cramp
natural feelings, and the stress of threadbare modishness makes too
little of enough.

Thus passed the leafy time when arborescence seems to be the one thing
aimed at out of doors. Tess and Clare unconsciously studied each other,
ever balanced on the edge of a passion, yet apparently keeping out of
it. All the while they were converging, under an irresistible law, as
surely as two streams in one vale.

Tess had never in her recent life been so happy as she was now,
possibly never would be so happy again. She was, for one thing,
physically and mentally suited among these new surroundings. The
sapling which had rooted down to a poisonous stratum on the spot of its
sowing had been transplanted to a deeper soil. Moreover she, and Clare
also, stood as yet on the debatable land between predilection and love;
where no profundities have been reached; no reflections have set in,
awkwardly inquiring, "Whither does this new current tend to carry me?
What does it mean to my future? How does it stand towards my past?"

Tess was the merest stray phenomenon to Angel Clare as yet—a rosy,
warming apparition which had only just acquired the attribute of
persistence in his consciousness. So he allowed his mind to be occupied
with her, deeming his preoccupation to be no more than a philosopher's
regard of an exceedingly novel, fresh, and interesting specimen of
womankind.

They met continually; they could not help it. They met daily in that
strange and solemn interval, the twilight of the morning, in the violet
or pink dawn; for it was necessary to rise early, so very early, here.
Milking was done betimes; and before the milking came the skimming,
which began at a little past three. It usually fell to the lot of some
one or other of them to wake the rest, the first being aroused by an
alarm-clock; and, as Tess was the latest arrival, and they soon
discovered that she could be depended upon not to sleep through the
alarm as others did, this task was thrust most frequently upon her. No
sooner had the hour of three struck and whizzed, than she left her room
and ran to the dairyman's door; then up the ladder to Angel's, calling
him in a loud whisper; then woke her fellow-milkmaids. By the time that
Tess was dressed Clare was downstairs and out in the humid air. The
remaining maids and the dairyman usually gave themselves another turn
on the pillow, and did not appear till a quarter of an hour later.

The gray half-tones of daybreak are not the gray half-tones of the
day's close, though the degree of their shade may be the same. In the
twilight of the morning, light seems active, darkness passive; in the
twilight of evening it is the darkness which is active and crescent,
and the light which is the drowsy reverse.

Being so often—possibly not always by chance—the first two persons to
get up at the dairy-house, they seemed to themselves the first persons
up of all the world. In these early days of her residence here Tess did
not skim, but went out of doors at once after rising, where he was
generally awaiting her. The spectral, half-compounded, aqueous light
which pervaded the open mead impressed them with a feeling of
isolation, as if they were Adam and Eve. At this dim inceptive stage of
the day Tess seemed to Clare to exhibit a dignified largeness both of
disposition and physique, an almost regnant power, possibly because he
knew that at that preternatural time hardly any woman so well endowed
in person as she was likely to be walking in the open air within the
boundaries of his horizon; very few in all England. Fair women are
usually asleep at mid-summer dawns. She was close at hand, and the rest
were nowhere.

The mixed, singular, luminous gloom in which they walked along together
to the spot where the cows lay often made him think of the Resurrection
hour. He little thought that the Magdalen might be at his side. Whilst
all the landscape was in neutral shade his companion's face, which was
the focus of his eyes, rising above the mist stratum, seemed to have a
sort of phosphorescence upon it. She looked ghostly, as if she were
merely a soul at large. In reality her face, without appearing to do
so, had caught the cold gleam of day from the north-east; his own face,
though he did not think of it, wore the same aspect to her.

It was then, as has been said, that she impressed him most deeply. She
was no longer the milkmaid, but a visionary essence of woman—a whole
sex condensed into one typical form. He called her Artemis, Demeter,
and other fanciful names half teasingly, which she did not like because
she did not understand them.

"Call me Tess," she would say askance; and he did.

Then it would grow lighter, and her features would become simply
feminine; they had changed from those of a divinity who could confer
bliss to those of a being who craved it.

At these non-human hours they could get quite close to the waterfowl.
Herons came, with a great bold noise as of opening doors and shutters,
out of the boughs of a plantation which they frequented at the side of
the mead; or, if already on the spot, hardily maintained their standing
in the water as the pair walked by, watching them by moving their heads
round in a slow, horizontal, passionless wheel, like the turn of
puppets by clockwork.

They could then see the faint summer fogs in layers, woolly, level, and
apparently no thicker than counterpanes, spread about the meadows in
detached remnants of small extent. On the gray moisture of the grass
were marks where the cows had lain through the night—dark-green islands
of dry herbage the size of their carcasses, in the general sea of dew.
From each island proceeded a serpentine trail, by which the cow had
rambled away to feed after getting up, at the end of which trail they
found her; the snoring puff from her nostrils, when she recognized
them, making an intenser little fog of her own amid the prevailing one.
Then they drove the animals back to the barton, or sat down to milk
them on the spot, as the case might require.

Or perhaps the summer fog was more general, and the meadows lay like a
white sea, out of which the scattered trees rose like dangerous rocks.
Birds would soar through it into the upper radiance, and hang on the
wing sunning themselves, or alight on the wet rails subdividing the
mead, which now shone like glass rods. Minute diamonds of moisture from
the mist hung, too, upon Tess's eyelashes, and drops upon her hair,
like seed pearls. When the day grew quite strong and commonplace these
dried off her; moreover, Tess then lost her strange and ethereal
beauty; her teeth, lips, and eyes scintillated in the sunbeams and she
was again the dazzlingly fair dairymaid only, who had to hold her own
against the other women of the world.

About this time they would hear Dairyman Crick's voice, lecturing the
non-resident milkers for arriving late, and speaking sharply to old
Deborah Fyander for not washing her hands.

"For Heaven's sake, pop thy hands under the pump, Deb! Upon my soul, if
the London folk only knowed of thee and thy slovenly ways, they'd
swaller their milk and butter more mincing than they do a'ready; and
that's saying a good deal."

The milking progressed, till towards the end Tess and Clare, in common
with the rest, could hear the heavy breakfast table dragged out from
the wall in the kitchen by Mrs Crick, this being the invariable
preliminary to each meal; the same horrible scrape accompanying its
return journey when the table had been cleared.



XXI



There was a great stir in the milk-house just after breakfast. The
churn revolved as usual, but the butter would not come. Whenever this
happened the dairy was paralyzed. Squish, squash echoed the milk in the
great cylinder, but never arose the sound they waited for.

Dairyman Crick and his wife, the milkmaids Tess, Marian, Retty Priddle,
Izz Huett, and the married ones from the cottages; also Mr Clare,
Jonathan Kail, old Deborah, and the rest, stood gazing hopelessly at
the churn; and the boy who kept the horse going outside put on
moon-like eyes to show his sense of the situation. Even the melancholy
horse himself seemed to look in at the window in inquiring despair at
each walk round.

"'Tis years since I went to Conjuror Trendle's son in Egdon—years!"
said the dairyman bitterly. "And he was nothing to what his father had
been. I have said fifty times, if I have said once, that I don't
believe in en; though 'a do cast folks' waters very true. But I shall
have to go to 'n if he's alive. O yes, I shall have to go to 'n, if
this sort of thing continnys!"

Even Mr Clare began to feel tragical at the dairyman's desperation.

"Conjuror Fall, t'other side of Casterbridge, that they used to call
‘Wide-O', was a very good man when I was a boy," said Jonathan Kail.
"But he's rotten as touchwood by now."

"My grandfather used to go to Conjuror Mynterne, out at Owlscombe, and
a clever man a' were, so I've heard grandf'er say," continued Mr Crick.
"But there's no such genuine folk about nowadays!"

Mrs Crick's mind kept nearer to the matter in hand.

"Perhaps somebody in the house is in love," she said tentatively. "I've
heard tell in my younger days that that will cause it. Why, Crick—that
maid we had years ago, do ye mind, and how the butter didn't come
then—"

"Ah yes, yes!—but that isn't the rights o't. It had nothing to do with
the love-making. I can mind all about it—'twas the damage to the
churn."

He turned to Clare.

"Jack Dollop, a 'hore's-bird of a fellow we had here as milker at one
time, sir, courted a young woman over at Mellstock, and deceived her as
he had deceived many afore. But he had another sort o' woman to reckon
wi' this time, and it was not the girl herself. One Holy Thursday of
all days in the almanack, we was here as we mid be now, only there was
no churning in hand, when we zid the girl's mother coming up to the
door, wi' a great brass-mounted umbrella in her hand that would ha'
felled an ox, and saying ‘Do Jack Dollop work here?—because I want him!
I have a big bone to pick with he, I can assure 'n!' And some way
behind her mother walked Jack's young woman, crying bitterly into her
handkercher. ‘O Lard, here's a time!' said Jack, looking out o' winder
at 'em. ‘She'll murder me! Where shall I get—where shall I—? Don't tell
her where I be!' And with that he scrambled into the churn through the
trap-door, and shut himself inside, just as the young woman's mother
busted into the milk-house. ‘The villain—where is he?' says she. ‘I'll
claw his face for'n, let me only catch him!' Well, she hunted about
everywhere, ballyragging Jack by side and by seam, Jack lying a'most
stifled inside the churn, and the poor maid—or young woman
rather—standing at the door crying her eyes out. I shall never forget
it, never! 'Twould have melted a marble stone! But she couldn't find
him nowhere at all."

The dairyman paused, and one or two words of comment came from the
listeners.

Dairyman Crick's stories often seemed to be ended when they were not
really so, and strangers were betrayed into premature interjections of
finality; though old friends knew better. The narrator went on—

"Well, how the old woman should have had the wit to guess it I could
never tell, but she found out that he was inside that there churn.
Without saying a word she took hold of the winch (it was turned by
handpower then), and round she swung him, and Jack began to flop about
inside. ‘O Lard! stop the churn! let me out!' says he, popping out his
head. ‘I shall be churned into a pummy!' (He was a cowardly chap in his
heart, as such men mostly be). ‘Not till ye make amends for ravaging
her virgin innocence!' says the old woman. ‘Stop the churn you old
witch!' screams he. ‘You call me old witch, do ye, you deceiver!' says
she, ‘when ye ought to ha' been calling me mother-law these last five
months!' And on went the churn, and Jack's bones rattled round again.
Well, none of us ventured to interfere; and at last 'a promised to make
it right wi' her. ‘Yes—I'll be as good as my word!' he said. And so it
ended that day."

While the listeners were smiling their comments there was a quick
movement behind their backs, and they looked round. Tess, pale-faced,
had gone to the door.

"How warm 'tis to-day!" she said, almost inaudibly.

It was warm, and none of them connected her withdrawal with the
reminiscences of the dairyman. He went forward and opened the door for
her, saying with tender raillery—

"Why, maidy" (he frequently, with unconscious irony, gave her this pet
name), "the prettiest milker I've got in my dairy; you mustn't get so
fagged as this at the first breath of summer weather, or we shall be
finely put to for want of 'ee by dog-days, shan't we, Mr Clare?"

"I was faint—and—I think I am better out o' doors," she said
mechanically; and disappeared outside.

Fortunately for her the milk in the revolving churn at that moment
changed its squashing for a decided flick-flack.

"'Tis coming!" cried Mrs Crick, and the attention of all was called off
from Tess.

That fair sufferer soon recovered herself externally; but she remained
much depressed all the afternoon. When the evening milking was done she
did not care to be with the rest of them, and went out of doors, wander-
ing along she knew not whither. She was wretched—O so wretched—at
the perception that to her companions the dairyman's story had been
rather a humorous narration than otherwise; none of them but herself
seemed to see the sorrow of it; to a certainty, not one knew how
cruelly it touched the tender place in her experience. The evening sun
was now ugly to her, like a great inflamed wound in the sky. Only a
solitary cracked-voice reed-sparrow greeted her from the bushes by the
river, in a sad, machine-made tone, resembling that of a past friend
whose friendship she had outworn.

In these long June days the milkmaids, and, indeed, most of the
household, went to bed at sunset or sooner, the morning work before
milking being so early and heavy at a time of full pails. Tess usually
accompanied her fellows upstairs. To-night, however, she was the first
to go to their common chamber; and she had dozed when the other girls
came in. She saw them undressing in the orange light of the vanished
sun, which flushed their forms with its colour; she dozed again, but
she was reawakened by their voices, and quietly turned her eyes towards
them.

Neither of her three chamber-companions had got into bed. They were
standing in a group, in their nightgowns, barefooted, at the window,
the last red rays of the west still warming their faces and necks and
the walls around them. All were watching somebody in the garden with
deep interest, their three faces close together: a jovial and round
one, a pale one with dark hair, and a fair one whose tresses were
auburn.

"Don't push! You can see as well as I," said Retty, the auburn-haired
and youngest girl, without removing her eyes from the window.

"'Tis no use for you to be in love with him any more than me, Retty
Priddle," said jolly-faced Marian, the eldest, slily. "His thoughts be
of other cheeks than thine!"

Retty Priddle still looked, and the others looked again.

"There he is again!" cried Izz Huett, the pale girl with dark damp hair
and keenly cut lips.

"You needn't say anything, Izz," answered Retty. "For I zid you kissing
his shade."

"What did you see her doing?" asked Marian.

"Why—he was standing over the whey-tub to let off the whey, and the
shade of his face came upon the wall behind, close to Izz, who was
standing there filling a vat. She put her mouth against the wall and
kissed the shade of his mouth; I zid her, though he didn't."

"O Izz Huett!" said Marian.

A rosy spot came into the middle of Izz Huett's cheek.

"Well, there was no harm in it," she declared, with attempted coolness.
"And if I be in love wi'en, so is Retty, too; and so be you, Marian,
come to that."

Marian's full face could not blush past its chronic pinkness.

"I!" she said. "What a tale! Ah, there he is again! Dear eyes—dear
face—dear Mr Clare!"

"There—you've owned it!"

"So have you—so have we all," said Marian, with the dry frankness of
complete indifference to opinion. "It is silly to pretend otherwise
amongst ourselves, though we need not own it to other folks. I would
just marry 'n to-morrow!"

"So would I—and more," murmured Izz Huett.

"And I too," whispered the more timid Retty.

The listener grew warm.

"We can't all marry him," said Izz.

"We shan't, either of us; which is worse still," said the eldest.
"There he is again!"

They all three blew him a silent kiss.

"Why?" asked Retty quickly.

"Because he likes Tess Durbeyfield best," said Marian, lowering her
voice. "I have watched him every day, and have found it out."

There was a reflective silence.

"But she don't care anything for 'n?" at length breathed Retty.

"Well—I sometimes think that too."

"But how silly all this is!" said Izz Huett impatiently. "Of course he
won't marry any one of us, or Tess either—a gentleman's son, who's
going to be a great landowner and farmer abroad! More likely to ask us
to come wi'en as farm-hands at so much a year!"

One sighed, and another sighed, and Marian's plump figure sighed
biggest of all. Somebody in bed hard by sighed too. Tears came into the
eyes of Retty Priddle, the pretty red-haired youngest—the last bud of
the Paridelles, so important in the county annals. They watched
silently a little longer, their three faces still close together as
before, and the triple hues of their hair mingling. But the unconscious
Mr Clare had gone indoors, and they saw him no more; and, the shades
beginning to deepen, they crept into their beds. In a few minutes they
heard him ascend the ladder to his own room. Marian was soon snoring,
but Izz did not drop into forgetfulness for a long time. Retty Priddle
cried herself to sleep.

The deeper-passioned Tess was very far from sleeping even then. This
conversation was another of the bitter pills she had been obliged to
swallow that day. Scarce the least feeling of jealousy arose in her
breast. For that matter she knew herself to have the preference. Being
more finely formed, better educated, and, though the youngest except
Retty, more woman than either, she perceived that only the slightest
ordinary care was necessary for holding her own in Angel Clare's heart
against these her candid friends. But the grave question was, ought she
to do this? There was, to be sure, hardly a ghost of a chance for
either of them, in a serious sense; but there was, or had been, a
chance of one or the other inspiring him with a passing fancy for her,
and enjoying the pleasure of his attentions while he stayed here. Such
unequal attachments had led to marriage; and she had heard from Mrs
Crick that Mr Clare had one day asked, in a laughing way, what would be
the use of his marrying a fine lady, and all the while ten thousand
acres of Colonial pasture to feed, and cattle to rear, and corn to
reap. A farm-woman would be the only sensible kind of wife for him. But
whether Mr Clare had spoken seriously or not, why should she, who could
never conscientiously allow any man to marry her now, and who had
religiously determined that she never would be tempted to do so, draw
off Mr Clare's attention from other women, for the brief happiness of
sunning herself in his eyes while he remained at Talbothays?



XXII



They came downstairs yawning next morning; but skimming and milking
were proceeded with as usual, and they went indoors to breakfast.
Dairyman Crick was discovered stamping about the house. He had received
a letter, in which a customer had complained that the butter had a
twang.

"And begad, so 't have!" said the dairyman, who held in his left hand a
wooden slice on which a lump of butter was stuck. "Yes—taste for
yourself!"

Several of them gathered round him; and Mr Clare tasted, Tess tasted,
also the other indoor milkmaids, one or two of the milking-men, and
last of all Mrs Crick, who came out from the waiting breakfast-table.
There certainly was a twang.

The dairyman, who had thrown himself into abstraction to better realize
the taste, and so divine the particular species of noxious weed to
which it appertained, suddenly exclaimed—

"'Tis garlic! and I thought there wasn't a blade left in that mead!"

Then all the old hands remembered that a certain dry mead, into which a
few of the cows had been admitted of late, had, in years gone by,
spoilt the butter in the same way. The dairyman had not recognized the
taste at that time, and thought the butter bewitched.

"We must overhaul that mead," he resumed; "this mustn't continny!"

All having armed themselves with old pointed knives, they went out
together. As the inimical plant could only be present in very
microscopic dimensions to have escaped ordinary observation, to find it
seemed rather a hopeless attempt in the stretch of rich grass before
them. However, they formed themselves into line, all assisting, owing
to the importance of the search; the dairyman at the upper end with Mr
Clare, who had volunteered to help; then Tess, Marian, Izz Huett, and
Retty; then Bill Lewell, Jonathan, and the married dairywomen—Beck
Knibbs, with her wooly black hair and rolling eyes; and flaxen Frances,
consumptive from the winter damps of the water-meads—who lived in their
respective cottages.

With eyes fixed upon the ground they crept slowly across a strip of the
field, returning a little further down in such a manner that, when they
should have finished, not a single inch of the pasture but would have
fallen under the eye of some one of them. It was a most tedious
business, not more than half a dozen shoots of garlic being
discoverable in the whole field; yet such was the herb's pungency that
probably one bite of it by one cow had been sufficient to season the
whole dairy's produce for the day.

Differing one from another in natures and moods so greatly as they did,
they yet formed, bending, a curiously uniform row—automatic, noiseless;
and an alien observer passing down the neighbouring lane might well
have been excused for massing them as "Hodge". As they crept along,
stooping low to discern the plant, a soft yellow gleam was reflected
from the buttercups into their shaded faces, giving them an elfish,
moonlit aspect, though the sun was pouring upon their backs in all the
strength of noon.

Angel Clare, who communistically stuck to his rule of taking part with
the rest in everything, glanced up now and then. It was not, of course,
by accident that he walked next to Tess.

"Well, how are you?" he murmured.

"Very well, thank you, sir," she replied demurely.

As they had been discussing a score of personal matters only
half-an-hour before, the introductory style seemed a little
superfluous. But they got no further in speech just then. They crept
and crept, the hem of her petticoat just touching his gaiter, and his
elbow sometimes brushing hers. At last the dairyman, who came next,
could stand it no longer.

"Upon my soul and body, this here stooping do fairly make my back open
and shut!" he exclaimed, straightening himself slowly with an
excruciated look till quite upright. "And you, maidy Tess, you wasn't
well a day or two ago—this will make your head ache finely! Don't do
any more, if you feel fainty; leave the rest to finish it."

Dairyman Crick withdrew, and Tess dropped behind. Mr Clare also stepped
out of line, and began privateering about for the weed. When she found
him near her, her very tension at what she had heard the night before
made her the first to speak.

"Don't they look pretty?" she said.

"Who?"

"Izzy Huett and Retty."

Tess had moodily decided that either of these maidens would make a good
farmer's wife, and that she ought to recommend them, and obscure her
own wretched charms.

"Pretty? Well, yes—they are pretty girls—fresh looking. I have often
thought so."

"Though, poor dears, prettiness won't last long!"

"O no, unfortunately."

"They are excellent dairywomen."

"Yes: though not better than you."

"They skim better than I."

"Do they?"

Clare remained observing them—not without their observing him.

"She is colouring up," continued Tess heroically.

"Who?"

"Retty Priddle."

"Oh! Why is that?"

"Because you are looking at her."

Self-sacrificing as her mood might be, Tess could not well go further
and cry, "Marry one of them, if you really do want a dairywoman and not
a lady; and don't think of marrying me!" She followed Dairyman Crick,
and had the mournful satisfaction of seeing that Clare remained behind.

From this day she forced herself to take pains to avoid him—never
allowing herself, as formerly, to remain long in his company, even if
their juxtaposition were purely accidental. She gave the other three
every chance.

Tess was woman enough to realize from their avowals to herself that
Angel Clare had the honour of all the dairymaids in his keeping, and
her perception of his care to avoid compromising the happiness of
either in the least degree bred a tender respect in Tess for what she
deemed, rightly or wrongly, the self-controlling sense of duty shown by
him, a quality which she had never expected to find in one of the
opposite sex, and in the absence of which more than one of the simple
hearts who were his house-mates might have gone weeping on her
pilgrimage.



XXIII



The hot weather of July had crept upon them unawares, and the
atmosphere of the flat vale hung heavy as an opiate over the
dairy-folk, the cows, and the trees. Hot steaming rains fell
frequently, making the grass where the cows fed yet more rank, and
hindering the late hay-making in the other meads.

It was Sunday morning; the milking was done; the outdoor milkers had
gone home. Tess and the other three were dressing themselves rapidly,
the whole bevy having agreed to go together to Mellstock Church, which
lay some three or four miles distant from the dairy-house. She had now
been two months at Talbothays, and this was her first excursion.

All the preceding afternoon and night heavy thunderstorms had hissed
down upon the meads, and washed some of the hay into the river; but
this morning the sun shone out all the more brilliantly for the deluge,
and the air was balmy and clear.

The crooked lane leading from their own parish to Mellstock ran along
the lowest levels in a portion of its length, and when the girls
reached the most depressed spot they found that the result of the rain
had been to flood the lane over-shoe to a distance of some fifty yards.
This would have been no serious hindrance on a week-day; they would
have clicked through it in their high pattens and boots quite
unconcerned; but on this day of vanity, this Sun's-day, when flesh went
forth to coquet with flesh while hypocritically affecting business with
spiritual things; on this occasion for wearing their white stockings
and thin shoes, and their pink, white, and lilac gowns, on which every
mud spot would be visible, the pool was an awkward impediment. They
could hear the church-bell calling—as yet nearly a mile off.

"Who would have expected such a rise in the river in summer-time!" said
Marian, from the top of the roadside bank on which they had climbed,
and were maintaining a precarious footing in the hope of creeping along
its slope till they were past the pool.

"We can't get there anyhow, without walking right through it, or else
going round the Turnpike way; and that would make us so very late!"
said Retty, pausing hopelessly.

"And I do colour up so hot, walking into church late, and all the
people staring round," said Marian, "that I hardly cool down again till
we get into the That-it-may-please-Thees."

While they stood clinging to the bank they heard a splashing round the
bend of the road, and presently appeared Angel Clare, advancing along
the lane towards them through the water.

Four hearts gave a big throb simultaneously.

His aspect was probably as un-Sabbatarian a one as a dogmatic parson's
son often presented; his attire being his dairy clothes, long wading
boots, a cabbage-leaf inside his hat to keep his head cool, with a
thistle-spud to finish him off. "He's not going to church," said
Marian.

"No—I wish he was!" murmured Tess.

Angel, in fact, rightly or wrongly (to adopt the safe phrase of evasive
controversialists), preferred sermons in stones to sermons in churches
and chapels on fine summer days. This morning, moreover, he had gone
out to see if the damage to the hay by the flood was considerable or
not. On his walk he observed the girls from a long distance, though
they had been so occupied with their difficulties of passage as not to
notice him. He knew that the water had risen at that spot, and that it
would quite check their progress. So he had hastened on, with a dim
idea of how he could help them—one of them in particular.

The rosy-cheeked, bright-eyed quartet looked so charming in their
light summer attire, clinging to the roadside bank like pigeons on a
roof-slope, that he stopped a moment to regard them before coming
close. Their gauzy skirts had brushed up from the grass innumerable
flies and butterflies which, unable to escape, remained caged in the
transparent tissue as in an aviary. Angel's eye at last fell upon Tess,
the hindmost of the four; she, being full of suppressed laughter at
their dilemma, could not help meeting his glance radiantly.

He came beneath them in the water, which did not rise over his long
boots; and stood looking at the entrapped flies and butterflies.

"Are you trying to get to church?" he said to Marian, who was in front,
including the next two in his remark, but avoiding Tess.

"Yes, sir; and 'tis getting late; and my colour do come up so—"

"I'll carry you through the pool—every Jill of you."

The whole four flushed as if one heart beat through them.

"I think you can't, sir," said Marian.

"It is the only way for you to get past. Stand still. Nonsense—you are
not too heavy! I'd carry you all four together. Now, Marian, attend,"
he continued, "and put your arms round my shoulders, so. Now! Hold on.
That's well done."

Marian had lowered herself upon his arm and shoulder as directed, and
Angel strode off with her, his slim figure, as viewed from behind,
looking like the mere stem to the great nosegay suggested by hers. They
disappeared round the curve of the road, and only his sousing footsteps
and the top ribbon of Marian's bonnet told where they were. In a few
minutes he reappeared. Izz Huett was the next in order upon the bank.

"Here he comes," she murmured, and they could hear that her lips were
dry with emotion. "And I have to put my arms round his neck and look
into his face as Marian did."

"There's nothing in that," said Tess quickly.

"There's a time for everything," continued Izz, unheeding. "A time to
embrace, and a time to refrain from embracing; the first is now going
to be mine."

"Fie—it is Scripture, Izz!"

"Yes," said Izz, "I've always a' ear at church for pretty verses."

Angel Clare, to whom three-quarters of this performance was a
commonplace act of kindness, now approached Izz. She quietly and
dreamily lowered herself into his arms, and Angel methodically marched
off with her. When he was heard returning for the third time Retty's
throbbing heart could be almost seen to shake her. He went up to the
red-haired girl, and while he was seizing her he glanced at Tess. His
lips could not have pronounced more plainly, "It will soon be you and
I." Her comprehension appeared in her face; she could not help it.
There was an understanding between them.

Poor little Retty, though by far the lightest weight, was the most
troublesome of Clare's burdens. Marian had been like a sack of meal, a
dead weight of plumpness under which he has literally staggered. Izz
had ridden sensibly and calmly. Retty was a bunch of hysterics.

However, he got through with the disquieted creature, deposited her,
and returned. Tess could see over the hedge the distant three in a
group, standing as he had placed them on the next rising ground. It was
now her turn. She was embarrassed to discover that excitement at the
proximity of Mr Clare's breath and eyes, which she had contemned in her
companions, was intensified in herself; and as if fearful of betraying
her secret, she paltered with him at the last moment.

"I may be able to clim' along the bank perhaps—I can clim' better than
they. You must be so tired, Mr Clare!"

"No, no, Tess," said he quickly. And almost before she was aware, she
was seated in his arms and resting against his shoulder.

"Three Leahs to get one Rachel," he whispered.

"They are better women than I," she replied, magnanimously sticking to
her resolve.

"Not to me," said Angel.

He saw her grow warm at this; and they went some steps in silence.

"I hope I am not too heavy?" she said timidly.

"O no. You should lift Marian! Such a lump. You are like an undulating
billow warmed by the sun. And all this fluff of muslin about you is the
froth."

"It is very pretty—if I seem like that to you."

"Do you know that I have undergone three-quarters of this labour
entirely for the sake of the fourth quarter?"

"No."

"I did not expect such an event to-day."

"Nor I... The water came up so sudden."

That the rise in the water was what she understood him to refer to,
the state of breathing belied. Clare stood still and inclined his face
towards hers.

"O Tessy!" he exclaimed.

The girl's cheeks burned to the breeze, and she could not look into his
eyes for her emotion. It reminded Angel that he was somewhat unfairly
taking advantage of an accidental position; and he went no further with
it. No definite words of love had crossed their lips as yet, and sus-
pension at this point was desirable now. However, he walked slowly,
to make the remainder of the distance as long as possible; but at last
they came to the bend, and the rest of their progress was in full view
of the other three. The dry land was reached, and he set her down.

Her friends were looking with round thoughtful eyes at her and him, and
she could see that they had been talking of her. He hastily bade them
farewell, and splashed back along the stretch of submerged road.

The four moved on together as before, till Marian broke the silence by
saying—

"No—in all truth; we have no chance against her!" She looked joylessly
at Tess.

"What do you mean?" asked the latter.

"He likes 'ee best—the very best! We could see it as he brought 'ee. He
would have kissed 'ee, if you had encouraged him to do it, ever so
little."

"No, no," said she.

The gaiety with which they had set out had somehow vanished; and yet
there was no enmity or malice between them. They were generous young
souls; they had been reared in the lonely country nooks where fatalism
is a strong sentiment, and they did not blame her. Such supplanting was
to be.

Tess's heart ached. There was no concealing from herself the fact that
she loved Angel Clare, perhaps all the more passionately from knowing
that the others had also lost their hearts to him. There is contagion
in this sentiment, especially among women. And yet that same hungry
heart of hers compassioned her friends, Tess's honest nature had fought
against this, but too feebly, and the natural result had followed.

"I will never stand in your way, nor in the way of either of you!" she
declared to Retty that night in the bedroom (her tears running down).
"I can't help this, my dear! I don't think marrying is in his mind at
all; but if he were ever to ask me I should refuse him, as I should
refuse any man."

"Oh! would you? Why?" said wondering Retty.

"It cannot be! But I will be plain. Putting myself quite on one side, I
don't think he will choose either of you."

"I have never expected it—thought of it!" moaned Retty. "But O! I wish
I was dead!"

The poor child, torn by a feeling which she hardly understood, turned
to the other two girls who came upstairs just then.

"We be friends with her again," she said to them. "She thinks no more
of his choosing her than we do."

So the reserve went off, and they were confiding and warm.

"I don't seem to care what I do now," said Marian, whose mood was
turned to its lowest bass. "I was going to marry a dairyman at
Stickleford, who's asked me twice; but—my soul—I would put an end to
myself rather'n be his wife now! Why don't ye speak, Izz?"

"To confess, then," murmured Izz, "I made sure to-day that he was going
to kiss me as he held me; and I lay still against his breast, hoping
and hoping, and never moved at all. But he did not. I don't like biding
here at Talbothays any longer! I shall go hwome."

The air of the sleeping-chamber seemed to palpitate with the hopeless
passion of the girls. They writhed feverishly under the oppressiveness
of an emotion thrust on them by cruel Nature's law—an emotion which
they had neither expected nor desired. The incident of the day had
fanned the flame that was burning the inside of their hearts out, and
the torture was almost more than they could endure. The differences
which distinguished them as individuals were abstracted by this
passion, and each was but portion of one organism called sex. There was
so much frankness and so little jealousy because there was no hope.
Each one was a girl of fair common sense, and she did not delude
herself with any vain conceits, or deny her love, or give herself airs,
in the idea of outshining the others. The full recognition of the
futility of their infatuation, from a social point of view; its
purposeless beginning; its self-bounded outlook; its lack of everything
to justify its existence in the eye of civilization (while lacking
nothing in the eye of Nature); the one fact that it did exist,
ecstasizing them to a killing joy—all this imparted to them a
resignation, a dignity, which a practical and sordid expectation of
winning him as a husband would have destroyed.

They tossed and turned on their little beds, and the cheese-wring
dripped monotonously downstairs.

"B' you awake, Tess?" whispered one, half-an-hour later.

It was Izz Huett's voice.

Tess replied in the affirmative, whereupon also Retty and Marian
suddenly flung the bedclothes off them, and sighed—

"So be we!"

"I wonder what she is like—the lady they say his family have looked out
for him!"

"I wonder," said Izz.

"Some lady looked out for him?" gasped Tess, starting. "I have never
heard o' that!"

"O yes—'tis whispered; a young lady of his own rank, chosen by his
family; a Doctor of Divinity's daughter near his father's parish of
Emminster; he don't much care for her, they say. But he is sure to
marry her."

They had heard so very little of this; yet it was enough to build up
wretched dolorous dreams upon, there in the shade of the night. They
pictured all the details of his being won round to consent, of the
wedding preparations, of the bride's happiness, of her dress and veil,
of her blissful home with him, when oblivion would have fallen upon
themselves as far as he and their love were concerned. Thus they
talked, and ached, and wept till sleep charmed their sorrow away.

After this disclosure Tess nourished no further foolish thought that
there lurked any grave and deliberate import in Clare's attentions to
her. It was a passing summer love of her face, for love's own temporary
sake—nothing more. And the thorny crown of this sad conception was that
she whom he really did prefer in a cursory way to the rest, she who
knew herself to be more impassioned in nature, cleverer, more beautiful
than they, was in the eyes of propriety far less worthy of him than the
homelier ones whom he ignored.



XXIV



Amid the oozing fatness and warm ferments of the Froom Vale, at a
season when the rush of juices could almost be heard below the hiss of
fertilization, it was impossible that the most fanciful love should not
grow passionate. The ready bosoms existing there were impregnated by
their surroundings.

July passed over their heads, and the Thermidorean weather which came
in its wake seemed an effort on the part of Nature to match the state
of hearts at Talbothays Dairy. The air of the place, so fresh in the
spring and early summer, was stagnant and enervating now. Its heavy
scents weighed upon them, and at mid-day the landscape seemed lying in
a swoon. Ethiopic scorchings browned the upper slopes of the pastures,
but there was still bright green herbage here where the watercourses
purled. And as Clare was oppressed by the outward heats, so was he
burdened inwardly by waxing fervour of passion for the soft and silent
Tess.

The rains having passed, the uplands were dry. The wheels of the
dairyman's spring-cart, as he sped home from market, licked up the
pulverized surface of the highway, and were followed by white ribands
of dust, as if they had set a thin powder-train on fire. The cows
jumped wildly over the five-barred barton-gate, maddened by the
gad-fly; Dairyman Crick kept his shirt-sleeves permanently rolled up
from Monday to Saturday; open windows had no effect in ventilation
without open doors, and in the dairy-garden the blackbirds and thrushes
crept about under the currant-bushes, rather in the manner of
quadrupeds than of winged creatures. The flies in the kitchen were
lazy, teasing, and familiar, crawling about in the unwonted places, on
the floors, into drawers, and over the backs of the milkmaids' hands.
Conversations were concerning sunstroke; while butter-making, and still
more butter-keeping, was a despair.

They milked entirely in the meads for coolness and convenience, without
driving in the cows. During the day the animals obsequiously followed
the shadow of the smallest tree as it moved round the stem with the
diurnal roll; and when the milkers came they could hardly stand still
for the flies.

On one of these afternoons four or five unmilked cows chanced to stand
apart from the general herd, behind the corner of a hedge, among them
being Dumpling and Old Pretty, who loved Tess's hands above those of
any other maid. When she rose from her stool under a finished cow,
Angel Clare, who had been observing her for some time, asked her if she
would take the aforesaid creatures next. She silently assented, and
with her stool at arm's length, and the pail against her knee, went
round to where they stood. Soon the sound of Old Pretty's milk fizzing
into the pail came through the hedge, and then Angel felt inclined to
go round the corner also, to finish off a hard-yielding milcher who had
strayed there, he being now as capable of this as the dairyman himself.

All the men, and some of the women, when milking, dug their foreheads
into the cows and gazed into the pail. But a few—mainly the younger
ones—rested their heads sideways. This was Tess Durbeyfield's habit,
her temple pressing the milcher's flank, her eyes fixed on the far end
of the meadow with the quiet of one lost in meditation. She was milking
Old Pretty thus, and the sun chancing to be on the milking-side, it
shone flat upon her pink-gowned form and her white curtain-bonnet, and
upon her profile, rendering it keen as a cameo cut from the dun
background of the cow.

She did not know that Clare had followed her round, and that he sat
under his cow watching her. The stillness of her head and features was
remarkable: she might have been in a trance, her eyes open, yet
unseeing. Nothing in the picture moved but Old Pretty's tail and Tess's
pink hands, the latter so gently as to be a rhythmic pulsation only, as
if they were obeying a reflex stimulus, like a beating heart.

How very lovable her face was to him. Yet there was nothing ethereal
about it; all was real vitality, real warmth, real incarnation. And it
was in her mouth that this culminated. Eyes almost as deep and speaking
he had seen before, and cheeks perhaps as fair; brows as arched, a chin
and throat almost as shapely; her mouth he had seen nothing to equal on
the face of the earth. To a young man with the least fire in him that
little upward lift in the middle of her red top lip was distracting,
infatuating, maddening. He had never before seen a woman's lips and
teeth which forced upon his mind with such persistent iteration the old
Elizabethan simile of roses filled with snow. Perfect, he, as a lover,
might have called them off-hand. But no—they were not perfect. And it
was the touch of the imperfect upon the would-be perfect that gave the
sweetness, because it was that which gave the humanity.

Clare had studied the curves of those lips so many times that he could
reproduce them mentally with ease: and now, as they again confronted
him, clothed with colour and life, they sent an aura over his flesh,
a breeze through his nerves, which well nigh produced a qualm; and
actually produced, by some mysterious physiological process, a prosaic
sneeze.

She then became conscious that he was observing her; but she would not
show it by any change of position, though the curious dream-like fixity
disappeared, and a close eye might easily have discerned that the
rosiness of her face deepened, and then faded till only a tinge of it
was left.

The influence that had passed into Clare like an excitation from the
sky did not die down. Resolutions, reticences, prudences, fears, fell
back like a defeated battalion. He jumped up from his seat, and,
leaving his pail to be kicked over if the milcher had such a mind, went
quickly towards the desire of his eyes, and, kneeling down beside her,
clasped her in his arms.

Tess was taken completely by surprise, and she yielded to his embrace
with unreflecting inevitableness. Having seen that it was really her
lover who had advanced, and no one else, her lips parted, and she sank
upon him in her momentary joy, with something very like an ecstatic
cry.

He had been on the point of kissing that too tempting mouth, but he
checked himself, for tender conscience' sake.

"Forgive me, Tess dear!" he whispered. "I ought to have asked. I—did
not know what I was doing. I do not mean it as a liberty. I am devoted
to you, Tessy, dearest, in all sincerity!"

Old Pretty by this time had looked round, puzzled; and seeing two
people crouching under her where, by immemorial custom, there should
have been only one, lifted her hind leg crossly.

"She is angry—she doesn't know what we mean—she'll kick over the milk!"
exclaimed Tess, gently striving to free herself, her eyes concerned
with the quadruped's actions, her heart more deeply concerned with
herself and Clare.

She slipped up from her seat, and they stood together, his arm still
encircling her. Tess's eyes, fixed on distance, began to fill.

"Why do you cry, my darling?" he said.

"O—I don't know!" she murmured.

As she saw and felt more clearly the position she was in she became
agitated and tried to withdraw.

"Well, I have betrayed my feeling, Tess, at last," said he, with a
curious sigh of desperation, signifying unconsciously that his heart
had outrun his judgement. "That I—love you dearly and truly I need not
say. But I—it shall go no further now—it distresses you—I am as
surprised as you are. You will not think I have presumed upon your
defencelessness—been too quick and unreflecting, will you?"

"N'—I can't tell."

He had allowed her to free herself; and in a minute or two the milking
of each was resumed. Nobody had beheld the gravitation of the two into
one; and when the dairyman came round by that screened nook a few
minutes later, there was not a sign to reveal that the markedly
sundered pair were more to each other than mere acquaintance. Yet in
the interval since Crick's last view of them something had occurred
which changed the pivot of the universe for their two natures;
something which, had he known its quality, the dairyman would have
despised, as a practical man; yet which was based upon a more stubborn
and resistless tendency than a whole heap of so-called practicalities.
A veil had been whisked aside; the tract of each one's outlook was to
have a new horizon thenceforward—for a short time or for a long.



　　　　　　　END OF PHASE THE THIRD




Phase the Fourth: The Consequence



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 re-
luctance 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.



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